Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts

Friday, October 12, 2012

Larry Ellison's Remarkable Hardware Journey



Hardware software integration was Steve Jobs' unique mantra. Larry Ellison seems to have successfully emulated that. Remarkable.

Larry Ellison Says Oracle's Hardware Business Will Grow This Year
This Will Be Larry Ellison's Proving Year
Billionaire Ellison Increases Credit Line to $4.5 Billion
At 68, Oracle's flamboyant, multibillionaire CEO Larry Ellison still going strong
Apple vs. Google is the Most Important Battle in Tech
A Few Interesting Details About What Marissa Mayer And Yahoo Are Up To
Why smartphones point to smarter cameras
Chocolate: Sweet Path to Nobel Prize?
With Turkey-Syria escalation, worries grow about a tip into war
Marissa Mayer's New Yahoo.com Homepage
Chip Design Luminary Leaves Samsung for Apple
Enhanced by Zemanta

Monday, July 30, 2012

Open Source Victory

Image representing MySQL as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
There was a time when open source felt like a crusade. It was considered rebellious. Microsoft talked it down. Now the biggest corporations depend on open source to do cutting edge work. Open source is like this big ocean you fish in.

Open source won
open source is now mainstream and a new norm .... After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation. ..... large organizations are actively adopting many of the open source technologies we track, e.g., web development frameworks, programming languages, content management, data management and analysis tools .... MySQL appears as popular as ever and remains open source after three years of Oracle control and Microsoft is pushing open source JavaScript as a key part of its web development environment and more explicit support for other open source languages. Oracle and Microsoft are not likely to radically change their business models, but their recent efforts show that open source can work in many business contexts. ..... open source permeates most interactions on the web. ..... the collaborative, sharing culture that permeates the open source community spreads to the enterprise and government with the same impact on innovation and productivity.
You have to ask, what drives and sustains the open source contributors? A lot of people toil on open source projects with no monetary return in sight or mind. I think they are responding to a basic creative urge.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Larry Insane

OAKLAND, CA - NOVEMBER 08:  Oracle CEO Larry E...OAKLAND, CA - NOVEMBER 08: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison passes through security as he arrives at U.S. District court on November 8, 2010 in Oakland, California. Ellison is in court to testify in a trial against arch-rival software maker SAP AG who allegedly stole customer support documents from password protected Oracle websites. Oracle is seeking $2 billion in damages. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison Cracks Me Up
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision
Larry Ellison's Personal Life
Putting My Money On Larry Ellison

"I don’t know if you can copyright a language."
- Larry Ellison

"Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code. Alas.... I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over."
- Java creator James Gosling



The only acceptable price tag on Android is free.

World War III Time: Let's Go To War
Android Has To Be Kept Free

Microsoft is wrong in milking the Android handset manufacturers. And Google is even more in the wrong in not defending those manufacturers. And now here comes Larry Ellison. You can't patent APIs, Larry.

Nothing prevents Larry Ellison from modifying Android - Kindle, anyone? - to put out a smartphone product that would be yet another interaction point to the many databases he sells. But that would be innovation.

Larry Ellison is so in the wrong here, it's not even funny. I get the impression the guy is clowning around Steve Jobs' grave. There has got to be better ways to express sentiments than to try and snatch from the peoples of the Global South their number one pathway to the Internet. And to think Android is older than the iOS.

The PC could not have been patented. The tablet can not be patented. The smartphone can not be patented.

The PC Was A Category And Could Not Have Been Patented

And so Larry Ellison is going to unleash "thermonuclear war" on his best friend's behalf. If he wins, he gets 20 million dollars, right? Is that "thermonuclear war?"

This is like Yahoo going after Facebook.

Yahoo Has Patents?

Friday, July 15, 2011

Microsoft And Oracle Misbehaving On Android

Image representing Sun Microsystems as depicte...Image via CrunchBaseI have not dug into the details, but what I know is Android was supposed to be free. And I get the impression both Microsoft and Oracle are after Android. This is sad.

But Sun's Java went open source a long time ago, no? What seems to be the problem?

Larry Ellison going after SAP is fun, but this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Android has to be kept free. It is to do with humanity. The leftover swathes of humanity, if they ever will come online, Android will be it. And it makes no sense to jack up the prices. You do that and less people get to come online.

For the first time I am wishing retirement upon Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison.

Leave Android alone.

The gist of the story is this: the PC guys - Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison - are going after the Internet guy - Larry Page.

The story should end thus: software patents should be disallowed. The patent trolls have been creating mayhem. Takes energy away from innovation.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Paradigm Shifts And Challenged Assumptions

Larry Elllison on stage.Image via WikipediaMy personal hero in tech Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison's Personal Life) often talks in terms of paradigm shifts. When entire industries collapse that is a tectonic paradigm shift. When banks collapsed in New York and freed up tech talent for tech startups, that was a paradigm shift.

Larry's own life is full of paradigm shifts. My favorite detail probably is when one of his wives left him for a Harvard MBA. Wait, there is another. One of his wives had the option to take the family pickup or Oracle stocks. She picked the pickup truck.

Larry Ellison's Personal Life

The very best entrepreneurs cascade from paradigm shift to paradigm shift. Ordinary mortals don't even see the tsunami coming. When you ride the wave - you could also call it the tiger - a lot of your assumptions get challenged. What was just true is no longer true. And that is a hard thing to navigate. The ordinary person feels tremendously unsafe when that happens.

I look at the details of Larry's personal life, one failed marriage after another, and the many paradigm shifts Oracle has navigated, and no wonder I think his biography reads like fascinating.

Freshly divorced yet one more time Larry shot this email to a friend: "Congrats on getting and staying married!"

Saturday, December 04, 2010

Larry Eyeing HP Now

Image representing Hewlett-Packard as depicted...Image via CrunchBase
Larry Ellison unveils the XImage by plαdys via Flickr
Wall Street Journal: Ellison Says Oracle Will 'Go After' H-P: Mr. Ellison said the new hardware—a "supercluster" of Sparc-based servers—set a record for online transaction processing, a measure of performance for running database software, "for any database running on any computer at any time." ..... "We think the H-P machines are vulnerable. We think they're slow," Mr. Ellison said. "We're going to go after them in the marketplace with better software, better hardware and better people, and we're going to win market share." ..... "I like IBM, and I don't want to tease them very much." ....... Oracle and H-P were once close partners. In 2008, Oracle announced an exclusive partnership with H-P to offer a system bundled with Oracle database software—dubbed Exadata—only to drop that arrangement and substitute Sun hardware as a result of the acquisition.
Larry Ellison thinks in terms of enemies. And in Apothepo he has found one. Getting rid of Apothepo is not going to get Larry to take his eyes off of HP, but that might help a little, just a little. But HP is going to exhibit self destructive behavior by sticking to Apothepo for as long as possible.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A Victory For Larry

Larry Ellison, Welcome Keynote, Oracle OpenWor...Image by yuichi.sakuraba via Flickr
Bloomberg: SAP Must Pay Oracle $1.3 Billion Over Unit's Downloads: the largest jury award of 2010 ..... s the largest ever for copyright infringement and the 23rd-largest of all time for any jury award

Larry asked for two billion. SAP offered 20 million. So Larry upped the ante. He asked for four billion. Looks like he has been awarded close to what he asked for. Asking for two billion and getting 1.3 billion is close.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Larry Ellison Cracks Me Up

Image representing Hewlett-Packard as depicted...Image via CrunchBaseReuters: Oracle enlists private eyes to find HP CEO
Oracle Corp has hired private investigators to track down Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, believing testimony by the former SAP chief will help its efforts to claim about $4 billion in damages for software theft .... Oracle has subpoenaed Apotheker -- who began his job only last Monday -- but HP has refused to accept the subpoena, saying the U.S. software corporation is trying to harass him. .... their new chief, whose appointment surprised Wall Street and Silicon Valley ..... Oracle and Europe's top software maker are engaged in a legal battle that has transfixed Silicon Valley ...... Apotheker's lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher also 
Image representing SAP as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBaserefused to accept the subpoena. If he is overseas, Oracle will be unable to serve him and have to await his arrival in California
I can see the point behind the lawsuit. SAP admitted guilt a long time ago. And I can see why Apothepo needs to be deposed. I guess I even see the point in hiring detectives. But it does get quite dramatic at that point. That hiring detectives part is signature Larry Ellison.

Saturday, October 09, 2010

HP Keeps Making News

Larry EllisonImage by plαdys via Flickr
Ben's Blog: Ben Horowitz: In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business. Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. ....... HP employs over 300,000 people. ..... Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications. ...... It is not an easy thing to fire a popular, highly successful CEO.
Something tells me this drama is far from over. The Oracle-HP alliance is now a full blown rivalry. This is about money. Like they say, follow the money. Oracle is now firmly in the hardware business as well, and HP feels eaten up. Oracle can do hardware, but could HP do Oracle-like software?

This is not about people getting along, or not getting along. This is about the money. And Larry Ellison might be dramatic, but he is first and foremost a businessman. His flare ups are market signals. Watch them and you are watching an industry churning.

This fight has quite a few rounds to it.

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama
New York Times: A Double Standard at H.P.: Oracle and H.P. had once been the closest of partners, with the latter selling the industrial-strength hardware that ran Oracle’s industrial-strength software. But that partnership appears to be dissolving. ..... Larry Ellison, Oracle’s flamboyant founder ..... “Hiring him had nothing to do with fighting Oracle,” said Ray Lane, the former Oracle (!) president who is set to become H.P.’s chairman next month. “The board chose Léo because he was the best available athlete.” .... Apotheker was likely to further traumatize the already demoralized H.P. staff. ..... “If you wanted to find someone who represented the diametrical opposite of the H.P. way, it is Léo,” said Jason Maynard, a veteran technology analyst with Wells Fargo Securities. “He is tough as nails and chews glass for breakfast.” ...... the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. ..... the chance to embarrass H.P. and its new C.E.O. is likely to be irresistible to Oracle and Mr. Ellison. Which will mean yet more egg on the faces of the H.P. directors.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Saturday, October 02, 2010

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama

Image representing Sarah Lacy as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBaseMy favorite TechCrunch writer - Sarah Lacy - has a piece on my favorite character in tech: Larry Ellison. Coincidence?

This Leo Apotheker - (please do not ask me to pronounce the dude's last name) - move by HP is all human drama, and n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with technology.

It is like after Bush 2004 burnt into John Kerry's forearm that he was a Mr. Flip Flop, Kerry duly delivered the line afterwards: "I actually voted for the Iraq War before I voted against it."

Losers have a way of falling into the mousetrap neatly laid out for them.

I mean, duh. What was the HP Board thinking? They are like, okay Larry, hit me baby one more time. HP has been primarily a hardware company. Name one HP software product, quick. You can't. Name one HP enterprise software product. I don't think such a thing exists. And they got Thepo. HP's days as an independent company might be numbered.



This Apothepo guy used to run SAP when SAP was actually competing with Oracle. SAP to this day prides itself in being an all software company. They think Larry going into hardware is a mistake. To Larry's credit he thinks SAP's very existence is a mistake. That is not a fight between equals. Ring the bells, end the fight.



(Video via A Slice Of Grice)

Larry's Antics
Larry Ellison's Personal Life
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision
Hurd: From HP To Oracle
Larry Ellison
Rich People's Kids
Wall Street Journal: Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of H-P: Larry Ellison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, said he is having trouble finding words to describe his reaction to H-P naming former SAP chief Leo Apotheker as its new top man–and then found plenty of them. .... SAP, where Apotheker worked for more than 20 years, is Oracle’s largest competitor for business-application programs, and Ellison seldom misses an opportunity to take pot shots at the company. ..... When Oracle and H-P settled the lawsuit regarding Hurd’s hiring, both companies put out statements lauding the other as a valuable partner.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Larry's Antics


My reading of the situation is and has been for a few years now that Larry Ellison believes his industry - data software - is going through what he calls a consolidation phase, and hence his relentless buying spree. His promise to the customer has been you will get simpler, integrated software. And now, after buying Sun, he is doing what his best friend Steve Jobs has been doing for a long time now: software hardware integration.

Bill Gates left the scene, but Larry never stopped competing. Larry want to do what Jobs did. He wants to surpass Microsoft in market value, and he is on his way.
New York Times: Oracle Growth Plans Worry Rivals and Customers: its larger ambitions — to supply just about all the technology, software and hardware, that businesses might need .... sales of $26.8 billion last year and hints of an annual revenue goal of $100 billion ... acquired a staggering 66 companies .... They bought every company we deal with. ...... Oracle’s sales representatives have earned a fearsome reputation as hard-line negotiators determined to squeeze customers. ...... complete systems rather than requiring customers to cobble together the parts. ...... Fusion ..... data center conquest plans clear ..... 60 percent of the food coming from within 100 miles of the city. .... paid $1,800 to attend the conference and runs her own software consulting business in Portland, Ore ..... a signal that Oracle intends to get aggressive and pursue growth
In The News

eWeek: Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle: “For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut,” Gosling said. .... “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. ..... All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.” ..... “My job seemed to be to get up on stage and be a public presence for Java for Oracle. I’m from the wrong Myers-Briggs quadrant for that,” he said. .... Gosling already had the sense that Oracle was “ethically challenged” .... they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.” .... Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java ..... Gosling paints the picture of Ellison being like a sports magnate from his sister city, Al “Just Win Baby” Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who continually hires coaches and drafts talent only to run the show himself. ...... although Gosling said he never had direct dealings with Ellison, “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” ....... Java is bigger than any single vendor.”

ArsTechnica: Oracle surprises with new Sparc chip launch: Now christened the Sparc T3, the new processor will power a collection of Solaris-based T-series servers for Oracle, and will ship in 30 days.

The Washington Post: Huffington Snags NY Times Star

Wired: Writer for iPad Aims For Focus, Beauty, Simplicity:When you put the application in “Focus Mode,” it doesn’t even have spellcheck or cut-and-paste. Instead, it’s all about textual production — writing this phrase, this sentence, this word at this moment. As the creators note, “the idea is to activate it when you get stuck, blinding out everything else.”

New York Times: Google Campaign to Build Up Its Display Ads:More than 90 percent of Google’s revenue comes from text ads, and analysts say that Google’s stock is down about 17 percent this year because investors are waiting for the company’s second act.

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again: Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older .... more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995. .... “That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.” ..... was let go from her $80,000-a-year job. ..... Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. ..... “A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.” .... how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified. ..... For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.

Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs: a hypomanic episode..... symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.... He can work 96 hours in a row. .... a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. ..... just crazy enough .... “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.” ..... Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell. ..... Next Zuckerberg Syndrome — the urge to find another Mark Zuckerberg before he starts another Facebook. ...... He does not socialize. He no longer reads books, nor does he watch TV or movies. He works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., seven days a week. ....... Jobs is also routinely described as a despot and control freak with a terrifying temper .... He is a gifted software engineer but a terrible driver. (“I hit things,” he says.) He’s perfectly at ease negotiating with V.C.’s, but has had just one girlfriend .... “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

The Long View of China’s Currency: The renminbi itself rose 21 percent against the dollar from 2005 to 2008, and the trade deficit continued to widen. .... A stronger renminbi will help China’s people — many of whom are hungry for better living standards, to judge by the recent labor strikes — buy more goods and services, and it will also help the rest of world produce more...... economies, like battleships, tend to turn slowly ..... But exports probably matter more for American jobs anyway, given that low-end toy manufacturing in Guangdong Province isn’t moving to Alabama or Michigan. ...... $10 billion of gross domestic product equals about 80,000 jobs on average. So every extra $10 billion of goods sold to China is like its own little stimulus program. ...... not all the items on the United States’ forbidden list are truly matters of national security.

TechCrunch: Zynga Moves 1 Petabyte Of Data Daily; Adds 1,000 Servers A Week:social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time .... 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game. .... more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.

CNet: Google News turns 8 amid news industry in flux:the site is currently driving 1 billion page views to news publishers' Web sites per month and Google currently operates 72 separate editions of Google News in 30 different languages....Google, raised in the church of data ..... the rise in "news spam," SEO-bait articles often written by low-paid freelancers that are designed mostly to surface within Google, rather than inform, educate, or entertain readers with coherent writing..... "content mills" like Associated Content and Demand Media are churning out short news-related pieces of content by the thousands in hopes of driving traffic to their sites

Google Blog: Google News turns eight
TechCrunch: Now that the Recession Officially Ended….Whatever Happened to that Other Shoe?
Business Insider: The Next Shoe Drops At The New York Times: Now Circulation Revenue Is Starting To Decline

Enhanced by Zemanta

Friday, September 17, 2010

IBM's Africa

New York Times: I.B.M.: Africa Is the Next Growth Frontier: I.B.M. will supply the computing technology and services for an upgraded cellphone network across 16 nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Its customer is India’s largest cellphone operator, Bharti Airtel, which paid $9 billion a few months ago for most of the African assets of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, or Zain..... The deal takes the broad partnership between Bharti and I.B.M., begun in 2004, beyond India. ..... in the last five years I.B.M. has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices and foster technology training programs — and it plans to expand aggressively in the region..... the next major emerging growth market — Africa .... I.B.M. is targeting the linchpin industries of economies including telecommunications, banking, transportation, health care and energy...... only 23 percent of Africans have access to banking services, but already 8 million Africans use their cellphones for payments.


The for profit route is the route to go. The for profit route is the best way to do good for about 90% of the people out there, be it Africa, China or India. Or America. Most Americans take care of their families with jobs they hold with privately held companies.

In The News

New York Times: Oracle Profit Rises 20%, Higher Than Forecast: for a quarter that closed at the end of August, traditionally one of the slowest selling periods..... Safra A. Catz, a president of Oracle .... “I don’t believe there is any other company in the industry better positioned than Oracle,” Mr. Hurd said. ..... The legal squabble underscores the changing relationships taking place as the world’s largest technology companies begin to step on each other’s toes. .... Never one to back down from a confrontation, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, threatened that H.P.’s lawsuit against Mr. Hurd could wreck the companies’ relationship. ..... Oracle continues to follow a multiyear strategy of acquiring business software makers large and small. The company hopes to become a one-stop shop of sorts .... tends to purchase companies with loyal customers who pay regular maintenance fees for upgrades and other services ... Oracle posted about $1 billion in hardware sales as well ..... Ellison vowed to unveil a host of new products at Oracle’s event next week, including systems that create tight links between hardware and software.
Google Ventures Hires an Entrepreneur-in-Residence: the man behind Google Voice ..... Google bought GrandCentral for a reported $45 million in 2007 and since then, Mr. Walker has been the product manager for real-time communications at Google. ..... Entrepreneur-in-residence is one of those only-in-Silicon-Valley jobs. Smart people get paid to sit around and think about new ideas, and investors get the chance to join an entrepreneur early in a new project, betting that lightning will strike twice. ..... “This business that we’re in as V.C.s is a social business, more about people than companies or products.” ..... the idea is that Google will eventually fund Mr. Walker’s next start-up..... there are still lot of industries like that out there.”

TechCrunch: Yahoo’s Internal Three Year Plan: 1 Billion Users And $10 Billion In Revenue: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.... short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen ... what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision
How Small Countries Out-perform: A Guide (Spoiler: It’s a lot like Startups): By 2050 the United States will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the seven largest economies in the world. Our new peers... will be China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. .... Israel and Singapore. These are two countries that had little in terms of natural resources and have far out-performed their larger neighbors ..... tiny Singapore has just 2% of the population of its giant neighbor Indonesia but its GDP is 35% of Indonesia’s ..... a culture of entrepreneurship ..... Israel .. indirectly benefited from its instability, in that most of the innovation in the late 1990s spun out of the army. ...... The President of Iceland Olafur Regnar Grimsson, who was on the panel, said his size has been an advantage in doing deals with the global giants because it’s not a threat and there are no political dustups. ...... One huge international giant, like Nokia in Finland, can have a disproportionate effect on the economy as it swings up and down with the market ..... What works best isn’t erecting some incubator but favorable tax policy, labor laws that allow for rapid company formation and failure and incentives for foreign investors. ..... Singapore’s GDP was down 8% last year but is up 18% in the most recent quarter.
Music Lovers, Be Prepared To Fall In Love Instantly – Meet The New Shuffler:Shuffler is excellent for music discovery
Social Payment Startup Venmo Raised $1.2 Million And Has A New iPhone App (TCTV): closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz, (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO)...... Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. ..... if it grows, businesses could start accepting Venmo payments simply by opening an account. .... If it can start collecting enough public data about what people are buying, that data could be very valuable to brands and businesses.

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released: All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).... will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability. .... It is by no means bug free or feature complete
Facebook Expands Instant Personalization Program, Adds Rotten Tomatoes As Partner: The feature gives sites that have received Facebook’s blessing the ability to access any information you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook as soon as you arrive at the third-party site, with no authentication required. ... Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora .... a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive.....it was initially frustratingly difficult to opt-out of ..... people will totally freak out when they arrive at a site and it already knows who their friends are ..... “No revenue is ever exchanged as part of this program and user data cannot be transferred by partners to third-party ad networks.” .... reviews, food, travel, music, movies

Alex Payne: The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter: My unintentionally infamous tweet from months ago about a Twitter web experience that would compete with the best third-party clients ..... The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it..... the Twitter developer community needs to adapt to the post-#newtwitter reality. .... decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email

Google Latlong: View Near Real-time Flights Over The U.S. In Google Earth: a snapshot of all the airplanes in the air at any given time over the U.S., all placed at the appropriate coordinates and altitude.

BusinessWeek: Dell Plans More Than $100 Billion Spending In China:over 10 years ..... Steve Ballmer projects the country may replace the U.S. as the largest PC market next year. ..... The company spent about $23 billion in China in 2009 .... Dell China President Amit Midha
China Touts ‘Complete Package’ for California Railway: including financing .... linking Los Angeles and San Francisco .... trains that travel 350 kph (217 mph) and experience from building a 6,920 kilometer high-speed rail network, the world’s longest...... China will have twice as much high-speed rail track as the rest of the world combined by 2014 under a 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion) nationwide construction project ..... California’s planned high-speed rail network would haul passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 38 minutes. The journey takes six to eight hours by car or about one hour by plane. ..... will eventually link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Hurd: From HP To Oracle

Steven Paul Jobs, called Steve Jobs, co-founde...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: Former H.P. Chief May Move To Oracle: In an e-mail to The New York Times, Mr. Ellison called the H.P. board’s action “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.” .... Oracle, which Mr. Ellison founded 30 years ago, is the world’s largest database software maker; Mr. Ellison has been its only chief executive. For years, the company has been a close partner with H.P., which sells computing systems and services to corporations. But since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, in a deal that closed early this year, Oracle and H.P. have become competitors in the market for computer hardware..... Ellison remains heavily involved in Oracle, but the day-to-day operations are largely overseen by two presidents .... During his tenure, H.P. surpassed I.B.M. as the No. 1 technology company, as revenue increased to $115 billion a year, from $80 billion.

I have not read up much on this Hurd story, and I am reading now only because Larry Ellison seems to have become personally involved.

What happened?

Mark Hurd was the top guy at HP. He was never accused of having sexual relations with a marketing consultant to the company. Looks like the two had dinner together.

It is like finally the FBI said, Martha Stewart has not been proven guilty of what she was originally accused of, but since we went after her, we have decided she lied to us on one small detail of when were investigating, so Martha went to jail for a few months because she was not found guilty of what they thought she was guilty of. That was mediocre, sexist men going after a rare woman entrepreneur, a billionaire.

Mark Hurd did not have a relationship with this woman. He had dinner. Originally the HP Board thought maybe some form of impropriety took place. But by the time they found out that was not the case they realized they had already been going after him. So they had to get him for something.

And so they found some small detail.

I have not read much up on Hurd. Actually for the longest time I was angry they kicked Carly Fiorina out and got someone else.

Larry's language is pretty strong. I agree with the Apple idiots part. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are best friends. This perhaps gives Larry an opportunity to express again his anger at Steve Jobs' ouster from Apple back in the 1980s. That might be motivation enough. Otherwise Hurd is no Steve Jobs. Even Larry would agree. But the point is taken. They should never have fired Steve Jobs.

At the end of the day what has happened is Oracle has made a smart human resource move.

Enhanced by Zemanta