opensprings.org

The 34-year-olds are tied for fifth place, behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is worth $59 million; investment mogul Warren Buffett at $52 billion; casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson at $28 billion; and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison at $26 billion.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each worth an estimated $18.5 billion, have joined the ranks of the top 10 richest people in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 most wealthy Americans.

Google co-founder Larry Page is worth $18.5 billion.

Watch out Bill!

(Credit:
Google)

(Credit:
Google)

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is worth $18.5 billion.

A few weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, about business models on Facebook. The panelists couldn’t agree on which models will actually work long-term. So I’m modifying the question and asking it another conference, the SNAP (Social Network Application Platform) confab, this Friday.

I’ll be talking with Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures, Darryl Eaton of SocialMedia, Murtaza Hussain of PeanutLabs, and Todd Sawicki of Lookery. My panel starts at 1:30 pm Pacific time.We’ll dive into business model topic again, focusing on advertising on social networks. If you’re in town and would like to see and hear the discussion, go to this Eventbrite page to get a 10% discount on admission.

(Credit:
technogym)

It looks like a wall with a sleek looking pulley system protruding from it. Tucked behind the wall is the technology that enables you to take this pulley system from a piece of art to a fully functional gym.

The cable resistance and computerized pulley system enables exercises to be done with a complete range of motion and you can vary the resistance by simply turning the digital dial in the middle of the wall. If space is an issue and price is not, the Kinesis Personal is the product for you.

This is one of the most radical and stylish looking pieces of fitness equipment I have ever seen. If you have limited space and want something that looks like a piece of furniture, you need to take a look at the Kinesis Personal Gym.

The left-right alliance is helmed by Stanford law professor and copyright reform advocate Larry Lessig, and it counts a host of new-media luminaries among its ranks: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, MoveOn founder Eli Pariser, and Redstate co-founders Mike Krempasky and Erick Erickson. In April, shortly after forming, the group issued letters to the Democratic and Republican national headquarters, “calling for presidentia- debate video to be liberated–so that footage could be freely excerpted, shared, blogged, and YouTubed,” according to a statement.

“Already, Fox is viewed as a partisan network by the Democrats, who will not use that forum for debates,” said Redstate’s Erickson. “It would be a shame if the Republicans now shut out Fox altogether from the debate process. Every other news organization has liberated their debate footage, and Fox should either be no different or no longer have the privilege of airing debates.”

“John McCain deserves praise for taking on Fox and opposing corporations (that) want to be gatekeepers of political speech,” MoveOn.org representative Adam Green said in a statement that had been issued by the online leftist hub on behalf of the group.

The McCain camp, meanwhile, has continued to air the ads, claiming that using 19 seconds of a 90-minute debate constitutes fair use.

Fox has not yet responded to the organization’s criticism.

Eventually, CNN, ABC, and NBC/MSNBC responded to the initiative, announcing varying degrees of “openness” for debate footage. Fox News and other Fox broadcasting stations have not participated, and some right-leaning members of the open-debate alliance have indicated that they may encourage Republicans to follow the Democrats’ lead in shunning the News Corp. division.

On Thursday, the nameless group announced that it has called on Fox to rescind the letter, as well as related missives to other Republican presidential candidates.

The nonpartisan alliance that formed this spring to advocate the open use of presidential-debate footage isn’t very happy about Fox News’ cease-and-desist letter to Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign over a McCain ad that used footage from a Fox-sponsored debate.

Here’s the teaser:

For this webinar we will have an open panel discussion featuring Zimbra customers Western Illinois University, Georgia Tech and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

You can register here. It should be enlightening to hear how these universities made the decision to go with Zimbra.

Zimbra graciously asked me to moderate a panel/webinar with a few of its university customers. Entitled “Campus IT Leaders Share Their Experiences Selecting and Deploying Next-Generation Messaging,” we’ll be walking through the anatomy of an open-source IT decision and figuring out the costs and benefits of moving from Exchange (and other proprietary systems, as well as from open-source messaging systems) to Zimbra.

Wed November 7 @ 1:00 pm EST (10 am PST)

Often the best data points about which messaging and collaboration system to choose for a campus upgrade comes after the initial deployment. Thus, finding peers who can provide real world feedback is critical to the decision making process.

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(Credit:
George Washington University)

FTC Commissioner William Kovacic

Which is probably why William Kovacic, one of the Federal Trade Commission’s five members, spent nearly an hour on Monday defending the American approach as reasoned and no less thorough than that of its cross-Atlantic counterparts. There is a “tendency on the part of our European colleagues to dismiss the U.S. experience,” he said.

Kovacic, who was speaking over lunch at this year’s Aspen Summit organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, noted the FTC was more active now in antitrust cases than at any point since the 1970s.

I wonder, though, if some of his former colleagues at George Mason University and elsewhere in academia would be as complimentary about the efforts of even well-meaning bureaucrats.

Kovacic agreed, saying “a sensible comeptition policy involves both tools.” He added that, when it comes to the courts, “our views resonate when we can point to a base of knowledge…that we thought through the issue in question.”

U.S. antitrust thinking has been inspired, Kovacic said, not only by the so-called Chicago School of law and economics but also the Harvard school of thought led by luminaries like the late professor Phil Areeda. “To really understand the DNA of modern competition law you have to look at the mutually reinforcing strands of both schools,” Kovacic said.

Kovacic seemed noticeably more enthusiastic about antitrust enforcement than he was a decade ago when I audited his antitrust law class at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. nearly a decade ago. (He’s on leave from his teaching gig.)

ASPEN, Colo.–It must be a bit irksome being an antitrust regulator in the United States when your European counterparts are (a) more likely to interfere with the private sector and (b) look disdainfully at federal agencies as wishy-washy.

(It should be noted at this point that the FTC is in the midst of deciding whether or not to approve Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick. The FTC tried unsuccessfully to obtain an injunction blocking the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger, which a federal judge denied this week. And the Federal Communications Commission is currently reviewing the XM-Sirius merger.)

For instance, Ed Black, the head of the Computer and Communications Industry Association and an undeniable fan of aggressive antitrust enforcement, asked whether it’s a good idea for federal agencies to have a “little more involvement upfront in a regulatory approach because remedial antitrust action later on is too late.”

Jottit is also part wiki. The review page I just linked to is closed to edits, but it’s easy to create a page that anyone can tweak. Here’s one, for example (if you try it out, please keep the edits clean). You can also lock a site so that visitors need your password to view it.

Here’s a cool tool that’s kicked off a bit of a Twitterstorm this evening: Jottit. It’s a very simple, Web-based text editor and publishing service. It can create a brand new Web page or wiki in about 10 seconds flat. For an example, you can see a draft of this story, which I composed in Jottit, as a Jottit page.

All pages have a wikilike revision history. Also, wikilike, you can create subpages by just entering wiki codes for new pages.

You can also use HTML as the Jottit formatting language, to create links with HREFs, include images with IMG SRC, and make lists with “<li>” tags. That’s a small thing for most people, but if you’re a blogger accustomed to hard-coding your posts, it means you don’t have to learn yet another formatting scheme for this platform. What I like even more is that there’s a live preview window for Jottit’s editor: As you type, your text and formatting results appear in real time in a window to the right of the editor. So it’s a great playground for experimenting with HTML, as well as being a pretty cool insta-wiki.

This Web page…

For publishing a small site really quickly, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I’m not sure Jottit is a programmer’s experiment or an actual business, but it’s very slick, either way. Check it out.

…was created very quickly, with this simple editor/preview tool.

Security vendor Trend Micro’s Web site was hacked earlier this week in an attack that spread to hundreds of other sites, according to an InfoWorld report.

Trend Micro discovered the attack on Wednesday and took steps to shut it down. It affected about 20,000 Web pages written with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages Web development software. According to Trend Micro:

The malicious code tries to embed software that steals passwords from users as they visit Web sites, according to the report.

(A similar previous) attack seems to have started more than a week ago, and nearly 200,000 Web pages have been found to be compromised, most of which are running phpBB. This contrasts (Wednesday’s) attack in that the vast majority of those were active server pages (.ASP). The ASP attacks are different than the phpBB ones in that the payload and method are quite different. Various exploits are used in the ASP attacks, where the phpBB ones rely on social engineering. phpBB mass hacks have occurred in the past, including those done by the Perl/Santy.worm back in 2004.

Trend Micro also provided a video demonstration of what the attack looks like from the end user’s perspective.

One possible reason, Farmer wrote, is the fact that Facebook isn’t the only hub for social-network application developers anymore. Google kickstarted the OpenSocial standard last year, and Bebo, newly acquired by AOL, is currently the only social network that supports both Facebook and OpenSocial applications.

“Networks like Zynga and Social Gaming Network have cropped up in the last few months and have made it their business to consolidate the game space on Facebook, probably the only real vertical that has found success on the platform,” Farmer wrote. “Bigger companies like Slide and RockYou have been actively recruiting from the Facebook developer pool all along, too.”

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: “Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community,” Farmer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.”

Farmer’s research confirmed his speculation: activity in the Facebook developer forum, from posts per day to highly active users, had fallen notably from January to April. In other words, that likely means there’s less activity on the part of independent developers hoping to tap into Facebook’s massive audience.

Is the Facebook platform doomed? Hardly. But if Farmer’s research is accurate, it’s a sign that the initial frenzy is finally quieting–it’s been a year, after all.

Or perhaps, he suggests, small-time developers might be disillusioned. Facebook, in an effort to curb spam, has instituted new regulations that some developers find controversial. Then there’s the presence of big application companies like Slide and RockYou, which dominate the rankings of the most popular Facebook applications and have valuations in the hundreds of millions. Not only do they dwarf smaller developers, but they also snap up programmer talent that might otherwise be independent.

All gold rushes must come to an end, and according to one new report, Facebook’s developer platform is no exception.

It could also mean, as Farmer pointed out, less chatter taking place in an open forum as application creators grow more concerned about the effect of competition in the packed developer space.

Incidentally, this is why there is some cause for concern in Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss. It doesn’t appear that Red Hat has done a good job of driving ancillary value from the JBoss team, many of whom have left for other opportunities. Red Hat may well end up making JBoss pay (in terms of revenue), but if it doesn’t get the JBoss personnel benefit then it has overpaid.

Indeed, that acquisition offers an interesting commentary on the value derived from open-source acquisitions. Here’s why Red Hat bought Cygnus:

I do mean, however, that it would be hard to single out Cygnus’ product revenue from the revenue-related and other contributions that the Cygnus team brought to Red Hat. Ditto for MySQL within Sun. MySQL database revenue will be one metric, but what Marten and team do to the overall culture and product revenue of Sun is something else entirely, and hard to measure in advance.

Royal Pingdom has compiled a list of the seven largest acquisitions in open source’s history. Sun’s acquisition of MySQL is the biggest ($1 billion), but it’s not nearly the outsized acquisition that it originally appeared to be considering that Red Hat paid $674 million for Cygnus Solutions back in 1999.

Anyone ever seen Red Hat’s market share in the embedded market? Not so great. The purported reason for the acquisition (or one of them) was a bust.

Today’s acquisition [of Cygnus] gives Red Hat an entree into “embedded” devices, machines whose inner workings such as operating systems and hardware usually are hidden from the person using it, Young said here in a keynote address. Until now, Red Hat has been focused chiefly on the server market. Now Red Hat will be able to take advantage of Cygnus’ strong relationships with embedded systems programmers, with the companies such as Sony and Fujitsu that build embedded devices and with chip manufacturers such as Intel that build chips for those devices….

Sun’s acquisition of MySQL will be judged on the product revenue that comes from MySQL, just as Red Hat has been judged on JBoss’ revenue post-acquisition. But it’s not so clear cut in an open-source company. I don’t mean that open-source companies shouldn’t be judged by financial metrics - of course they should.

But was the acquisition a bust? I don’t think so. Red Hat acquired significant development expertise and, frankly, Michael Tiemann. In an open-source company or community, people matter most. Remember Novell’s acquisition of Ximian? Mostly a waste of money in regard to the technology acquired. (Not much Evolution or Mono being sold by Novell.) But the people like Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, etc.? That DNA was worth the money.

But this is another topic, one that I will address shortly in a separate post.

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