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Virtualization specialist VMware is sticking its head in the clouds, and hoping for sunshine.

Cloud computing has become one of the dominant drives in the IT sector in recent months. It’s a loose term, but generally it refers to hosting applications away from local desktops and in an Internet-based computing resource, accessible by browser.

It remains to be seen, however, just how quickly the concept might catch on in business settings. To counter worries about such setups, VMware on Monday also announced its VCloud Initiative, which is intended to deliver a three-tiered set of offerings for “enterprise-class” cloud computing. In this effort, it has enlisted partners ranging from BT and Rackspace to Verizon Business.

To foster the development of applications for cloud computing setups, VMware unveiled several “virtual appliance” offerings, including VMware Studio for authoring and packaging, and VMware Ready, for appliance validation.

VMware’s moves come as the virtualization leader is facing increased competition from Microsoft. Microsoft made a series of virtualization moves last week, including making free a version of its Hyper-V server virtualization software.

The company on Monday opened up its VMworld 2008 conference with a flurry of announcements. Most notably it is aiming to turn its infrastructure products and technologies into what it’s calling a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS). Using the data center system, VMware says, businesses will be able to unite servers, storage gear, and other networking resources together into an “on-premise cloud.”

Practitioners and proponents of cloud computing range from Dell, Amazon.com, and Google to VMware’s virtualization rival, Xen.

At the time of the selection, they evaluated Openbravo POS against some the most popular commercial POS solutions and our beloved open source application came out on top. The deciding factors were its simplicity, rich functionality and the quality of its code.
The implementation project was very rapid and within a very short period, TriMet had integrated Openbravo with its existing payment service, selected the hardware for the terminals, and was up and running serving its customers.

Why Openbravo?

Portland is one of my favorite cities on the planet, and today I learned to love it even more. Portland’s transportation agency, TriMet, has been using open-source Openbravo POS since 2007 in its automated system to sell tickets and passes to the public. $4.5 million in transactions later, Openbravo POS continues to deliver.

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Every time I’ve been in Portland I’ve used TriMet’s MAX light rail service, and bought my tickets using this system. I never knew that open source was powering the transaction until today, and even as an advisor to Openbravo, I had never heard of this success story.

I’m guessing that much of what we do is powered by open source, but we don’t know it. That Google search you do. That Orbitz service you use. And so on. It’s all open source.

Social network Facebook also has a display ad contract with Microsoft (in addition to a $240 million investment) but has been putting more emphasis on the experimental “Engagement Ads” product that it packages and markets in-house. The News Corp.-owned MySpace, meanwhile, relies more heavily on traditional display ads.

“It’s not unusual for someone in the social media space to have a lot of custom units, because they’re forging new territory,” said Debra Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “A lot of people say that by the time the IAB comes out with a standard, the ad format is, (while) not necessarily passe, certainly not the cutting edge.”

By most accounts, MySpace is ahead of Facebook in the monetization game. It has a bigger foothold in the United States, where ad dollars are easier to come by than overseas, and it’s willing to make advertising significantly more pervasive with full-page “wrap” campaigns–not to mention the fact that it has News Corp.’s media connections.

The revised contract is a blow to Microsoft, which touted the Digg deal as a big victory at its debut. But it also is yet another signal that advertising on the Web is changing significantly.

According to a ClickZ report, Digg’s internal sales team will focus on “custom, non-IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) inventory combined with standardized banner ads.” This strategic decision–to move away from a reliance on the traditional IAB display units that have defined digital advertising for years–comes at a time when the best way to advertise on a social-media site is a matter of debate and uncertainty.

Williamson noted that not only is Digg changing its ad focus, it’s looking to make new hires to expand its team. “That does put a stake in the ground, and it does say that a company like Digg is serious about looking beyond the banner, so as to speak, that they’re really looking to develop new ways of advertising and that they’re looking to bring on new people to help them do that.”

Social-news site Digg has ended its advertising partnership with Microsoft more than a year before the deal was set to expire. Instead of relying on Microsoft as its exclusive ad partner, Digg will now primarily use the internal sales force it recently began building; Microsoft will handle remnant inventory.

But with Digg choosing to go the Facebook route (sort of), especially given the bleak advertising climate, this could be a sign that more players in the tech industry have started to regard the next generation of digital ads as a more profitable route.

This post was expanded at 1:15 p.m. PT.

“Starting July 1, Microsoft will sell network inventory for Digg through the Microsoft Media Network, which it has been doing successfully for the last year and a half,” a statement from Microsoft read. “Digg has created its own internal sales executive team, and we respect their decision to sell their owned-and-operated site inventory directly to help further accelerate their growth as a company.”

Digg’s contract with Microsoft, intended to be a three-year deal, started in mid-2007, when the company chose it over Google. At the time, founder Kevin Rose applauded the decision because it would let Digg’s employees focus on feature development while leaving ad sales to a more experienced team.

Whether or not Madison Avenue will agree is a different story.

Here we go again. A new company, Reframe It, is launching its Web markup product on Wednesday. Like ThirdVoice and Stickis before it, Reframe It lets you highlight a piece of a Web page, comment on it, and discuss those comments with other visitors to the site.

I found using the service a good community experience, although I believe the concept is dated. For one, nearly all sites now have their own communities and discussion threads, and adding another discussion system could actually splinter a community instead of drawing it together. Furthermore, Reframe It currently works primarily through a browser plug-in (on
Firefox and Internet Explorer). Betting on software to carry community is a long shot.

On this New Yorker article, the user highlighted text (in yellow, left) and then commented on that clip in the Reframe It sidebar at right.

The company, though, is actually oriented around making that software dependency into a strength. CEO Bobby Fishkin wrote to me, “Within mass communities we can let members discuss the news as a community, filter for only comments by members, improve fund-raising by helping improve engagement, and drive traffic for these nonprofits with free branded groups.” By which I think he means that he envisions Reframe It being used sort of like a tour bus for the Web, in which groups can see everything out there, but stick together nonetheless.

The service also integrates with other social networks, Fishkin says, so when you’re trolling the Web with Reframe It active you can easily filter out comments from people outside your circle.

All well and good, but I stand by my assertion that the technology has no hope for widespread adoption as a standalone browser extension. To be fair, the company has a widgetized version of the product that publishers can add to their sites. This lets visitors to the site flag items on pages and chat about them. They can’t, though, just go to any site on the Web and have the same experience, as they can if they have the extension. But the tool for publishers is Reframe It’s best avenue for success, even though it competes with other native comment systems (the ones you get on any blogging platform) as well as third-party comment products like Disqus. Alternatively, I could see this concept getting necessary traction, even as an extension, if it was very closely married to an existing social-network platform like Facebook. Reframe It needs a viral distribution push that I don’t think it will get otherwise.

See also: GooseGrade lets readers copyedit your blog.

The assistant to Motorola’s former chief marketing officer has accused former CEO Ed Zander of working his boss to death–literally–and declared that current CEO Greg Brown is “actively killing the company.”

Engadget obtained a letter written by Numair Faraz, who was a personal adviser to former Motorola Chief Marketing Officer Geoffrey Frost, sent to Motorola’s top executives earlier this year.

In the letter, released the same day Motorola announced plans to separate into two companies, Faraz outlines Motorola’s downfall from the heights it reached during the success of the Razr.

“I’ve always considered it Motorola’s dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company’s CMO–not the rest of the company’s executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been,” Faraz wrote. Frost was widely credited as the force behind the development of the Razr, the superslim phone that became one of the hottest-selling phones ever to emerge from Motorola.

“Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands,” Faraz wrote. Frost died suddenly in 2005, and with him died Motorola’s Razr strategy.

The company was never able to come up with a successor to the product and flogged it mightily around the world, even after its trademark thin design had been copied and bested by other mobile-phone makers. As a result, Zander no longer runs Motorola.

The letter is quite scathing, going on to accuse current CEO Greg Brown of giving into to the demands of activist investor Carl Icahn without good reason.

“Your lack of understanding of the consumer side of Motorola doesn’t give you a valid reason for selling the handset business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence,” Faraz wrote.

It’s hard to say how much of this is true and how much of this is the emotional release of a disgruntled Motorola employee who also suffered the loss of someone close. Clearly, though, by any measure, Motorola has completely and totally screwed up its mobile-phone business in the years since Frost’s death by failing to move past the Razr.

Accusing Zander of overworking Frost is hard to prove, from where I sit. Life at the top of a huge technology company is not for the squeamish; pressure, travel, and long hours are mandatory. But Zander obviously depended heavily on others to run the consumer side of Motorola’s business; this is a guy who dismissed the iPod Nano by saying “Who listens to 1,000 songs?” Well, apparently tens of millions of people do.

A Motorola representative declined to comment on the letter to Engadget and did not immediately return a call and an e-mail seeking comment on the letter, though it’s been quite a busy day over there.

Microsoft now says the server version of
Windows 7 will not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2. The move is surprising, given that in the past, Microsoft has used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as opposed to major changes to a product. CNET News’ Ina Fried explains.

The first handset with Google’s Android software, the HTC Dream, is now expected to arrive in November after passing FCC certification.

Also, a hearing in Boston is likely to resolve the question of whether or not students who found fare card vulnerabilities must turn over unpublished material to the Massachusetts transit agency.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

MIT students fight to keep card hacking material confidential

Dell refused ‘cloud computing’ trademark

EA revises Take-Two acquisition offer, again

Torvalds to kernel hopefuls: Think ‘trivial

Report: Fees may sink Pandora soon

What recession? Gartner predicts IT spending growth

Windows 7 Server to be ‘minor release’

LocalReuse lets you browse free things up for grabs in your area.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

You might remember Gigoit, a service we covered early last year. Much like Freecycle it’s set up to let you get rid of, and browse through other people’s, junk. The site is littered with things like old lawn mowers, television sets, and anything else that was once useful and is now taking up space.

Up until now the only way to get the directory was to go through the site or use the service’s Facebook app; however, there’s a new
iPhone app called LocalReuse that lets you see which of these items is nearby based on where you are.

To get started you just plug in your ZIP code and how far you’re willing to schlep to pick things up. There wasn’t anything within 10 miles of my house, so I had to expand my coverage area. Half the fun is just perusing what other people have laying around, which is made even better with small photo previews. (See the photo to the right.)

Once you’ve found something you like you can call “dibs” which kicks you off to the item’s page on Gigoit.org. It’s not the ideal way to do things, but it’s a much simpler affair than trying to navigate Gigoit’s site in
Safari.

A few improvements would really make this application shine. In future versions I’d like to see it make more use of the device’s hardware to include things like posting new items using the camera, or using the geo-positioning to figure out where you are instead of requiring you to enter in ZIP codes. Likewise, there’s currently no tie-in with Gigoit accounts, which would help facilitate messaging other people without having to leave the application. In the meantime, it’s still a handy app to hold onto, if only to check a city’s junk scene while traveling.

I’m personally not too keen on a touch-screen keyboard but this new Blackberry Thunder looks to be a potential real competitor to the
iPhone, at least for business users. And yet, somehow this new BB makes me like the iPhone even more.

I’m not convinced music apps matter as much to BB users and so far the iPhone still stomps every other device in terms of multimedia. It would be good if RIM would pick a focus area for BB to compete with iPhone.

Blackberry Thunder

(Credit: BlackberrySync)

Via BlackberrySync.com

Zappos.com's new user interface

(Credit:
Zappos.com)

Sometime in the next few weeks, shoe e-tailer Zappos.com will launch a new interface that lets consumers buy lipstick and MP3 players along with Birkenstocks and Nikes.

The company is preparing to do a soft launch of the new, cleaner look to around 1,000 customers before deciding on a formal plan, CEO Tony Hsieh said. “Frankly I’m kind of surprised that what we put on sells, how our customers find it. The new site is built for easier navigation and searching, with multiple categories in mind,” he said.

The site design changes, along with the expansion into categories including small electronics and cookware, highlight the core of the company’s mind-set: find out what the customer wants, and find the best way to deliver it.

(Find out if the strategy is working in a full report on News.com.)

SD Times just published a well defined list of their choices for top 100 companies of the moment. An interesting point they make is that 2007 was a difficult year for developers while 2008 is much shinier and happier.

Check out how the influencers list show the power of open source:
- Apache Software Foundation

- Apple
- Eclipse Foundation
- Free Software Foundation
- Google
- IBM
- Intel
- Linux Foundation
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- Red Hat
- Software Freedom Law Center
- Sun
- VMware

Link: SD Times Top 100 2008

Disclosure: the company I work for is on the list.