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As the race to establish a presence in emerging markets gets more urgent, many companies are looking for ways to win customers early on in hopes of keeping them as customers later. Jooce, a Paris startup, is one that appears to be having some success.
Free E-Mail News Alerts from ECT News Network Keep up with the latest breaking business and technology news from ECT News Network. Receive real-time alerts as stories break -- or a daily version dispatched once each day. Easily add or eliminate keywords and modify service right from your inbox. Target your news today! It's a conundrum that the best and brightest of the tech industry haven't yet solved: how to get computers to the "next billion" customers in developing countries. The highest-profile effort to date, One Laptop Per Child, has run into a series of setbacks. Spearheaded by digital guru Nicholas Negroponte, the U.N.-supported program envisions equipping millions of children in Africa, Asia and Latin America with innovative US$100 laptops. But demand for the devices has been lower than expected, in part because they still cost nearly twice their intended price. Some people suggest perhaps the solution isn't to put hardware into the hands of every person, but rather to maximize the number of people who have access to a PC. That's the idea behind Paris startup Get your ecommerce site to the top of all major search engines with Aplus.Net. Jooce (the name is a play on "juice," as in electricity), which has devised a novel software system that lets many people use a single machine as though it were theirs alone. While the economy crumbles, jobs are plentiful for graduates of business information technology programs. They are seen as good employment prospects because they have IT skills as well as business knowledge. Meanwhile, BIT program enrollment is down sharply.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. For job-searching college seniors, the weeks before graduation are sometimes spent retouching resumes, suiting up for interviews and nervously awaiting offers. Brian Tajo, however, is sitting pretty. The Virginia Beach native, one of 105 seniors graduating with a degree in business information technology, has already scored a job with IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM Global Services. Come mid-July, he'll be based out of New York working as a consultant. He'll be earning an enviably high salary: US$68,000, plus a $5,000 signing bonus. Economic Bright Spot Apparently, in this time of economic uncertainty, it's good to be a BIT major. In "one of our senior seminars, over 90 percent of students in that class already have jobs," said Terry Rakes, a BIT professor in Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business. "The remainder are interviewing or are going to graduate school." The statistics, while beneficial for individual students, shed light on a trend some within the department find worrying: While employer demand for BIT-trained students is high, the number of students enrolled in the major is on the decline. Asa Dotzler has been there from the beginning. As Mozilla's director of community development, he's had a hand in birthing some of the web's most successful open-source software projects, most notably the Mozilla and Firefox web browsers.
Asa (pronounced A-suh) first got involved with Mozilla in 1998, when he was still an architecture student at Auburn University. He was interested in free software, but like many, he found the Linux distributions of the day too abstract. But when he heard Netscape had released its browser code under a free software license on March 31, 1998, he felt the urge to get involved. He knew web browsers -- and the problems with them -- so he eagerly offered his services. Dotzler quickly found his niche, becoming a non-technical volunteer within the Mozilla community -- gathering news, distributing executable code to casual users and filing bug reports on behalf of people who didn't know what bug reports were. He could interact with Mozilla's technical staff yet keep his layman's perspective, a skill Dotzler was able to parlay into a real, paying job. He's been with Mozilla since 2000. Now, with Mozilla getting ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Monday and with the June release of Firefox 3 fast approaching, Dotzler agreed to sit down with Wired.com and share how his outsider's eye has helped shape Mozilla's path. He tells us not only why Netscape failed, but why Mozilla's first crack at a browser didn't do much better. He also offers insight into how the Firefox team makes decisions ("We've never been a democracy," he insists) and why he thinks Firefox 3 will improve the health of the web. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired Wired: Talk me through the birth of Firefox, how the browser came to be what it is today. Internet search is the biggest battleground for Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., but the fight is quickly spreading to a new front where the stakes may be just as big.
Last year, Google introduced a package of online products that includes word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail software as an alternative to Microsoft Office, the longtime market dominator. Google's goal is to become the go-to source for an array of basic technology products. Going up against Microsoft and its lucrative software business is audacious, even for Mountain View's Google. Already the leader in Web searches and online advertising, it is looking for ways to expand beyond its roots. Google's plan hinges on convincing computer users that its product, Apps, available in both free and paid versions, is cheaper and more convenient than what Microsoft offers. Google has made some inroads, with more than 2,000 companies signing up daily, according to David Girouard, the vice president who oversees Google's business with corporate customers. "A lot of the market has been lulled into thinking that Microsoft was the only product for most anything," Girouard said. "In reality, I think our products make a lot more sense, especially when you're working in a team environment." The third and final day of the PWN to OWN contest at the CanSecWest security conference begins today, March 28th at 12:30pm local time (PST) in Vancouver. Yesterday, on day two of the contest, the MacBook Air was successfully compromised first and won by a team from Independent Security Evaluators, also winning $10,000 from us (the Zero Day Initiative).
As of today, since the Vista and Ubuntu laptops are still standing unscathed, we are now opening up the scope beyond just default installed applications on those laptops; any popular 3rd party application (as deemed "popular" by the judges) can now be installed on the laptops for a prize of $5,000 upon a successful compromise. For a refresher on the full rules and cash prizes, check out the PWN to OWN contest guidelines. 2:30pm PST Update: Its been two hours so far, and both Vista and Ubuntu laptops are still standing. Stay tuned... 7:30pm PST Update - Vista Laptop was Won!: Congratulations to Shane Macaulay from Security Objectives - he has just won the Fujitsu U810 laptop running Vista Ultimate SP1 after it was installed with the latest version of Adobe Flash. Not only is he the official winner of the Fujitsu laptop, but also $5,000 from us. Shane received some assistance from his friends Derek Callaway (also from Security Objectives) and Alexander Sotirov. If you'll also remember, Shane Macaulay was Dino Dai Zovi's on-site team member at last year's PWN to OWN event in which they ultimately took the top prize. |
This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job. What is apparent is that in the open source software Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to respectable elder statesman of open source. The action is among the new batch of up-and-coming open source software companies who are not yet venture backed but are developing interesting technologies and services. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.
AppceleratorOpen Source Project: Appcelerator, rich internet application platform
In this episode: Comcast, BitTorrent bury the hatchet; Vista SP1 leaves users disappointed; Microsoft opens Windows Live Contacts API; flaw makes Word vulnerable; Mozilla chief takes a dig at Apple; Motorola calls it splits.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. Mozilla's Latest News about Mozilla Foundation Firefox has a loyal following of people who say it's a lot better than the leading browser, Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Webroot AntiSpyware 30-Day Free Trial. Click here. Latest News about Microsoft Internet Explorer. But Mozilla CEO John Lilly looks like he also has a close eye on Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple Safari browser, which commands a mere fraction of Firefox's market share even though it's available on both Windows and Mac. Last year, Lilly used his official blog to call out Steve Jobs over some pie charts he didn't like. Now, he's called attention to Apple's way of pushing out the latest edition of Safari. Here's how it happened: Very few Windows users have Safari installed, but a whole lot of them do have iTunes. Every now and then, Apple pushes out incremental improvements to iTunes through its Software Update application. This time, though, Software Update included the option to install Safari 3.1 onto the user's computer. So far so good, but the installation option was presented with the check box already filled, which really frosted Lilly. That's an opt-out installation of new software through a system called "Software Update," not "Put New Stuff on My Computer." Lilly said, "Apple has made it incredibly easy -- the default, even -- for users to install ride-along software that they didn't ask for, and maybe didn't want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices." Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. So here it is… the one week results from our previous poll on software piracy. In that short time, we’ve had nearly 500 photographers cast their votes and the outcome is quite interesting. It looks like Adobe’s high-end photo editing software packages (like Photoshop and Lightroom) are hot items in the pirated software market. I’m not here to make judgments or anything — I’m just presenting the results from our little study. I’d also like to mention that my computer is 100% free of pirated or “borrowed” software and that the poll results are no indication of my own habits. Each of the results below have two graphs. The first is a measure of how many of us use a particular piece of software: users versus non-users. The second graph takes the users and splits them into pirates and non-pirates. Also, I’m going to leave the polls running for a while to see how things progress over time. PHOTOSHOP USERS
Wow… I expected the number of Photoshop pirates to be high, but not quite that high! 58%?!? So for every legal copy of Photoshop, there’s a pirated counterpart… and then some! An equally interesting observation from the poll is that 87% of the people who read this blog are Photoshop users of some sort. I’m sure we represent a higher density population of Photoshoppers, but my guess is that well over 50% of digital photographers have access to Photoshop. LIGHTROOM USERS
Although Lightroom isn’t quite as popular as Photoshop with the general public (with only 58% of the voters), the users of Lightroom are just as willing to pirate the software. I assumed that Lightroom would be less pirated because it’s newer software and because the price is slightly lower than that of Photoshop. I assumed wrong. Then again, if you’re going to pirate a copy of Photoshop, why not Lightroom too? CanSecWest A laptop running a fully patched version of Microsoft's Vista operating system was the second and final machine to fall in a hacking contest that pitted the security of Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. With both a Windows and Mac machine felled, only the Linux box remained standing following the three-day competition.
Shane Macaulay, who played a hand bringing down a Mac during last year's Pwn2Own contest, defeated the Vista machine using a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe Flash. On final day of the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Macaulay spent the better part of four hours trying to get the exploit to work. (The delay prompted one spectator to playfully dub the difficulty "hacktile dysfunction.") A MacBook Pro running a fully patched version of Leopard was the first to drop out during day two of the race, when researchers from Independent Security Evaluators demonstrated a previously unknown vulnerability in Apple's Safari browser. With brand new boxes running both Ubuntu and Vista remaining, Macaulay spent day three switching back and forth between the two machines, trying to get his Flash exploit to execute properly. He was assisted by Alex Sotirov, a security researcher at VMware. Initially thwarting Macaulay's efforts was the recently released Service Pack 1 for Vista, which he had neglected to install when testing the Flash exploit in the days leading up to the contest. Per the contest rules, each target machine had to be fully patched, and when the researcher first ran the code during the competition, new page protections added by Microsoft's security team prevented the exploit from properly executing. Updated (3:30 PM EDT 3/29): Unless thus-far unannounced votes that were formerly "approve" or "abstain" switch to "disapprove," it appears that OOXML will be approved. See details in the cumulative "updates" section below
Like many I'm sure, I'm trying to keep track of the votes on OOXML as they become known. I've set up a spreadsheet where I'm recording votes as they become known, whether they are formal and confirmed, or coming to light from other sources, and therefore to a greater or lesser extent possibly not accurate, what the sources are, and any associated comments (mostly from Pamela's articles at Groklaw, the most recent of which is being updated with new votes as news comes in to her). You'll find the most information about specific country voting there, and at several of her prior blog posts, including this one, this one, this one, and this one. For the benefit of those that want to get a quick look throughout the weekend, I'll post the running tally here of which votes have switched, what the net change has been, now many votes have come to light, and how many remain to be announced. It is likely that it will not be possible to know the final vote until all votes are in, due to the complicated, double test way in which the vote is counted, which is complicated by the fact that the final number of abstentions, and whether they move from "yes" or "no" votes, can decrease the number of votes that need to switch to "yes" votes. For that reason, I also include an explanation of how the omplicated two-part test for approval will be calculated. If Microsoft gets this OOXML format "approved", it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here's more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia.
If you can read German, here's the story on what happened there. For those who can't, when they went to vote, they were not allowed to vote disapprove, so the choice was to approve or to abstain. It was a tie, 6:6, which means no consensus. So under the rules I've read, that would have meant that they should send a vote of Abstain. But surprise, surprise!! A solution helpful to Microsoft: the representative from DIN decided to cast a vote, which isn't the process. DIN isn't supposed to vote, because it's supposed to advise. But this, they rationalized, was a vote not about whether to accept OOXML on the basis of *technical* issues, but whether to accept the approval suggestion of the technical committee. So DIN voted to accept DIN's suggestion. Hence Germany ends up in the Approve column. I know. No doubt there will be objections filed. Norway's at least as bad. Here's an article from Norway, and the translation of the title of the article is, "Scandal in Standards Norway. I didn't write that headline. They did. And here's why. The article says there should be an investigation of the irregularities there, because while there were only two votes to approve, from Microsoft and a business partner, Statoilhydro, and all the others voted no, 21 votes, they approved anyway. Here's how they shuffled the deck in Norway. So they put everyone out of the room, and Standards Norway, three people were left in the room, and they usurped the decision and made it their business to decide to approve anyway. |
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Jooce: Subtly Seeking a Billion Customers
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