Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Ruby-On-Rails Startup FiveRuns Acquired By WorkThink

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] Ruby-on-Rails startup FiveRuns has been acquired by WorkThink, according to FiveRuns' site. FiveRuns provides a variety of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails and related open source and commercial systems. Built on Rails and delivered as a hosted service, FiveRuns’ products manage the complete Rails application lifecycle â€" from installation to production. Products include Install, a free Ruby on Rails stack powered by BitRock; Manage, which was an application that monitors your Rails applications in production (Manage was discontinued this summer); TuneUp (a debugging tool which we wrote about here); and Dash, which was a metrics, storage, reporting, and communication hub for applications connected to the web. According to FiveRuns, Dash's services will be discontinued by the middle of October. It's unclear if the other products will survive the transition.

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Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos Joins Benchmark As Entrepreneur In Residence

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.3]MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital's newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR). Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Driving My Car

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brbThe Beatles Rock Band game is now in its third day here at Abbey Road West, and so far it’s getting better all the time. As social media, it’s the off the charts monetization winner Wall Street is beginning to think Twitter and Facebook are becoming. As my wife keeps saying, it’s got real Beatles songs, not some cover band. How cool is that?

BRB is an extension of the Beatles Love mashup, where producers George and son Giles Martin went back to the basic tracks and transferred them to digital for remix. This is as distinguished from the new remastered mono and stereo catalog, where only the final mixdowns were brought up to date with modern analog-to-digital techniques. The Beatles recorded on two and then four tracks up until the White Album, bouncing down preliminary mixes and overdubbing additional parts as they went.

The Love mixes built on a technique explored during the production of the Anthology series and fleshed out with the remixing of the Yellow Submarine record. Laying all the original pieces onto a digital checkerboard, the Abbey Road engineers could recreate the original mixes with individual control over many more elements of the recordings. Love expanded on that by literally deconstructing the various elements and intermingling them with other tracks, as in the layering of the Tomorrow Never Knows drum track under Within You Without You’s Indian percussion.

With this digital map already assembled, Giles Martin could turn his attention to the Rock Band game, compositing guitars and harmonies while adding live effects and studio chatter to create yet another mashup, this one a fascinating illusion of being in the studio or in concert with some degree of input in the mix. Of course, the game opts for scoring the closeness to the actual reality you come with vocals, guitar, and most powerfully, drums. The actual music remains Beatles, but you have the feeling of getting inside the music.

Ringo comes through in the way his bandmates saw him, the actual spark of the thing that became Beatles only when he joined the group. The recordings have always reflected the alchemy of the four members and George Martin, who handled many of the keyboard parts as the group’s palette expanded in the studio. But Ringo’s parts, as reflected by the dumbed down notes you sync with, underline how much the drummer shaped the variety of feels of the group’s enormously productive output.

What emerges is a kind of dynamic blueprint that threads through the band’s history, regardless of the period (touring, studio, early, splintering, the end) and almost in spite of the differences in song writing and production. The Beatles throughout their career benefited from this kind of stylized fundamentals, fitting their “real” personalities into their film and studio images and creating a new hybrid that expanded both identities into a newer one.

So too do Twitter and Facebook and other social media experiences, fusing the twin streams of public and private persona. Much is made of the falseness of the online you, but the reality is that the combination of digital gestures and individual desires, thoughts, ideas, and emotions is something we’ve only perceived indirectly through artists in novels, paintings, and music. Social media may be an imperfect label, but the synthesis is as real as the elements pre-aggregation.

The mono remasters are bundled in a separate collection, running from the beginning through the White Album. After that, only a Yellow Submarine soundtrack with several “throwaways”, the Let It Be “live” recordings massacred by Phil Spector as the band fell apart, and the final Abbey Road were left to be mixed in stereo. But for most of its life, the group and producer recorded and mixed in mono, an earlier predictor of the power of 140 characters.

The Beatles Rock Band remixes suggest the rest of the catalog will be rendered in new versions that take advantage of technology to get inside the music, not subverting the original mono intent but allowing us to explore the brilliance of these collaborations. Musical anthropologists will be able to take apart the harmonies and build new ones, discover our great treasures in new ways, and share them with our children here and across the net. Calling this a game is misleading only because it is so much fun.

Of course, there will always be those who posture about the authenticity of these experiences. McCartney has the most authority here, saying the game is fun but actually making the records was more so. But playing along with Ringo in even this most elemental and simulated way reminded me of similar moments in my past playing drums with the “real” Richard Manuel on a snowy night in the Catskills. Beatles Rock Band is not the same as being there, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Beep beep yeah!

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer On “Moving The Needle”

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.3]Last week we showed the highlights and 10+ minutes of video footage of an exclusive hour-long TechCrunch interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Now for the rest of that interview. The video was just a teaser. I spoke with Ballmer for another 50 minutes on the record, doing a deeper dive into five key areas of Microsoft's product strategy: Big Opportunities, Operating Systems/Browsers, Mobile, Search and Developers. This post is about big opportunities at Microsoft beyond their dual cash cows of Windows and Office. Microsoft generates around $20 billion a year in pre-tax profit, and spends nearly $10 billion on research and development. When Microsoft thinks about increasing (or sustaining) those profits, they have to think big. And they have to think long term.

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TransFS Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Credit Card Processing Fees

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.3] Accepting credit cards is crucial for any merchant but the obvious downside of this are the associated credit card processing fees which can amount to significant chunks of change. Usually fees range anywhere between 2 percent and 4 percent. Startup TransFS is hoping to help businesses sort through this issue by offering a comparison shopping website for credit card processing fees. On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant's current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.

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Xerox Playing Catch-Up: Buys ACS

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xeroxlogoXerox, “the data company,” announced today it plans to acquire Affiliated Computer Services; a move which will firmly place them in the $150 billion business process outsourcing market. This cash and stock transaction was originally valued at $6.4 billion based on Friday’s closing Xerox stock prices, but has since dwindled to $5.5 billion due to a 14% decrease.

The steep decrease in stock stems not from a lack of faith in Xerox and their current capabilities, but rather from concerns regarding the strategic overlap of the two companies. Deals such as the recent Dell acquisition of Perot Systems and last years purchase of EDS by HP were much less radical as the initial products had far more overlap.

Xerox however, thinks otherwise. “By combining Xerox’s strengths in document technology with ACS’s expertise in managing and automating work processes, we’re creating a new class of solution provider,” says Xerox CEO Ursula Burns. “Xerox becomes a $22 billion global company, of which $17 billion is recurring revenue – a significant boost to our profitable annuity stream. The revenue we generate from services will triple from $3.5 billion in 2008 to an estimated $10 billion next year.”

Given the aforementioned deals by competitors HP and Dell, it makes sense why Xerox felt the need to make a move. However, with the lack of apparent overlap in the two companies products, it remains to be seen if this was in fact a wise move by Xerox.

The deal between the two companies is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

Driving My Car

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brbThe Beatles Rock Band game is now in its third day here at Abbey Road West, and so far it’s getting better all the time. As social media, it’s the off the charts monetization winner Wall Street is beginning to think Twitter and Facebook are becoming. As my wife keeps saying, it’s got real Beatles songs, not some cover band. How cool is that?

BRB is an extension of the Beatles Love mashup, where producers George and son Giles Martin went back to the basic tracks and transferred them to digital for remix. This is as distinguished from the new remastered mono and stereo catalog, where only the final mixdowns were brought up to date with modern analog-to-digital techniques. The Beatles recorded on two and then four tracks up until the White Album, bouncing down preliminary mixes and overdubbing additional parts as they went.

The Love mixes built on a technique explored during the production of the Anthology series and fleshed out with the remixing of the Yellow Submarine record. Laying all the original pieces onto a digital checkerboard, the Abbey Road engineers could recreate the original mixes with individual control over many more elements of the recordings. Love expanded on that by literally deconstructing the various elements and intermingling them with other tracks, as in the layering of the Tomorrow Never Knows drum track under Within You Without You’s Indian percussion.

With this digital map already assembled, Giles Martin could turn his attention to the Rock Band game, compositing guitars and harmonies while adding live effects and studio chatter to create yet another mashup, this one a fascinating illusion of being in the studio or in concert with some degree of input in the mix. Of course, the game opts for scoring the closeness to the actual reality you come with vocals, guitar, and most powerfully, drums. The actual music remains Beatles, but you have the feeling of getting inside the music.

Ringo comes through in the way his bandmates saw him, the actual spark of the thing that became Beatles only when he joined the group. The recordings have always reflected the alchemy of the four members and George Martin, who handled many of the keyboard parts as the group’s palette expanded in the studio. But Ringo’s parts, as reflected by the dumbed down notes you sync with, underline how much the drummer shaped the variety of feels of the group’s enormously productive output.

What emerges is a kind of dynamic blueprint that threads through the band’s history, regardless of the period (touring, studio, early, splintering, the end) and almost in spite of the differences in song writing and production. The Beatles throughout their career benefited from this kind of stylized fundamentals, fitting their “real” personalities into their film and studio images and creating a new hybrid that expanded both identities into a newer one.

So too do Twitter and Facebook and other social media experiences, fusing the twin streams of public and private persona. Much is made of the falseness of the online you, but the reality is that the combination of digital gestures and individual desires, thoughts, ideas, and emotions is something we’ve only perceived indirectly through artists in novels, paintings, and music. Social media may be an imperfect label, but the synthesis is as real as the elements pre-aggregation.

The mono remasters are bundled in a separate collection, running from the beginning through the White Album. After that, only a Yellow Submarine soundtrack with several “throwaways”, the Let It Be “live” recordings massacred by Phil Spector as the band fell apart, and the final Abbey Road were left to be mixed in stereo. But for most of its life, the group and producer recorded and mixed in mono, an earlier predictor of the power of 140 characters.

The Beatles Rock Band remixes suggest the rest of the catalog will be rendered in new versions that take advantage of technology to get inside the music, not subverting the original mono intent but allowing us to explore the brilliance of these collaborations. Musical anthropologists will be able to take apart the harmonies and build new ones, discover our great treasures in new ways, and share them with our children here and across the net. Calling this a game is misleading only because it is so much fun.

Of course, there will always be those who posture about the authenticity of these experiences. McCartney has the most authority here, saying the game is fun but actually making the records was more so. But playing along with Ringo in even this most elemental and simulated way reminded me of similar moments in my past playing drums with the “real” Richard Manuel on a snowy night in the Catskills. Beatles Rock Band is not the same as being there, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Beep beep yeah!

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

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TransFS Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Credit Card Processing Fees

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] Accepting credit cards is crucial for any merchant but the obvious downside of this are the associated credit card processing fees which can amount to significant chunks of change. Usually fees range anywhere between 2 percent and 4 percent. Startup TransFS is hoping to help businesses sort through this issue by offering a comparison shopping website for credit card processing fees. On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant's current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.

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Sunday, September 27, 2009

TransFS Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Credit Card Processing Fees

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.2] Accepting credit cards is crucial for any merchant but the obvious downside of this are the associated credit card processing fees which can amount to significant chunks of change. Usually fees range anywhere between 2 percent and 4 percent. Startup TransFS is hoping to help businesses sort through this issue by offering a comparison shopping website for credit card processing fees. On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant's current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.

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Saturday, September 26, 2009

TransFS Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Credit Card Processing Fees

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.1] Accepting credit cards is crucial for any merchant but the obvious downside of this are the associated credit card processing fees which can amount to significant chunks of change. Usually fees range anywhere between 2 percent and 4 percent. Startup TransFS is hoping to help businesses sort through this issue by offering a comparison shopping website for credit card processing fees. On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant's current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.

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Friday, September 25, 2009

NetSuite Launches iPhone App To Access Business Software On The Go

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.3] NetSuite, a company that provides cloud-based business management software suites, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching a free iPhone app to compliment its web-based products. The iPhone app gives NetSuite users on-the-go access to the company's on-demand SaaS offerings, which include real-time dashboards with financial and customer data from CRMs and other applications. A competitor to Salesforce.com, NetSuite offers four main types of cloud computing software: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, accounting, and ecommerce software. In any business, mobile access makes business processes speedier, so NetSuite has tried to make the crossover between the web and the iPhone (or iPod touch) seamless.

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Microsoft’s Looking Glass Will Let Marketers Peer Into A Real-Time Social Stream

Custom HTML Code at Top [Sample No.3] Microsoft is going to let marketers and advertisers dip their toes into the social stream. The tech giant is planning to launch a new social media product, dubbed "Looking Glass," which will let marketers aggregate and monitor social media platforms for brands and companies. According to a report by Ad Age today, the product is still in "proof of concept" stage and will be privately distributed to testers in the coming month. Microsoft's advertising blog also mentions the new product. Looking Glass will aggregate feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites and will also be able connect with CRMs, databases, service centers and more. In terms of analysis, the product will track sentiment of content but it's unclear what other data analysis and features the application will have. Looking Glass will be browser-based and powered by Microsoft's Silverlight technology. And unsurprisingly, all data collected by Looking Glass will be integrated with Microsoft's Sharepoint and Outlook products. In fact, the product's functionality may be limited for a business that isn't using Microsoft's enterprise suite.

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Skype For SIP Now Interops With Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series

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GigaOm last night already predicted an announcement was forthcoming, but now it’s official: Skype has announced that the beta version of Skype for SIP has been certified as interoperable with Cisco’s Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business.

This will enable SMBs who manage their networking and communications needs with the Cisco solution to communicate more efficiently by directing their outbound calls to mobiles and landlines over Skype’s VoIP service.

The integrated solution will also allow employees to receive inbound calls from Skype users (now over 480 million strong according to the release). Earlier this year, similar arrangements were struck by the eBay company with Shoretel and SIPfoundry’s sipXecs platform.

Interoperability with Skype for SIP, which was first announced last March, means that small businesses can take advantage of the Skype’s generally low-cost global calling rates when their employees call landlines and/or mobiles across the globe. In addition, if a company buys and associates online Skype numbers with their Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series system, it can then receive inbound calls via Skype from business contacts and customers calling from landline and mobile phones, from anywhere in the world.

Om Malik says Skype is also about to announce a similar agreement with Avaya, a large enterprise telephony equipment provider.

Suddenly, Skype looks a lot more attractive than it already was.

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

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