• Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side
• Why I care about RedMonk
• Sun Microsystems Kills Social Programming Project Zembly
  No more Zembly.
• Announcing the new Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform
  Looking forward to seeing some Facebook Silverlight apps.
• Rackspace Cloud – Cloud Servers for Windows Beta coming in Early 2010!
• (Lack of) Sustainability in the Mobile industry — GreenMonk: the blog
• Klaus Heimann espouses SAP’s smart utility of 2020 at International SAP for Utilities conference — GreenMonk: the blog
  The intersection of Big Data, green, enterprise software, and a whole bunch of "more to come."
• The new face of conference Wi-Fi
  The joke is, providing hardwired connections is the best idea.
• Lessons from Leaders: How JBoss did it – For Entrepreneurs
• HTML5 vs. Silverlight: Which Will Win?
  Check out the action in the comments, it captures the anti-Microsoft developer sentiment pretty well.
• Adobe laying off 9 percent of workers

Starting last Fall, I’ve been asked innumerable times about the big time conference circuit: how has it been doing in these “tough economic times.” Those inquires continued to come in through-out the year, and one that came in this week reminded me that I’d been typing up a little document on the topic. With some finishing touches – and weaving in some contributions from Sara Dornsife and Mark Hinkle – I’ve finally got it dusted off.

The RedMonk note goes over what we’ve been seeing and then covers mini-events, unconferences/barcamps, small and medium sized conferences, and virtual events. There’s a short section on the risks of each conference, and then some suggestions on how to measure (vendor) success at these new types of conferences. Much thanks goes to Sara and Mark for their input here – two folks who are experts at these kinds of events.

Being a RedMonk Note, it’s in the form of a PDF instead of a blog entry, but it’s available for free. Feel free to send it around or ask us about it if it’s helpful.

Disclosure: Zenoss, where Mark works is a client. Many of the RedMonk clients put on events.

Dude! I’m in Austin (home) this week! While we don’t do numbers at RedMonk, I come across many interesting ones. Here are some:

Five Years of Firefox

With more than 330 million users around the world, Firefox currently holds the No. 2 spot in browser market share, accounting for just over 24 percent, according to researcher Net Applications.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, currently the market leader, holds 64.64 percent, while Safari, Chrome and Opera hold the next three spots with 4.42, 3.58 and 2.17 percent, respectively, according to Net Applications’ October data.

Indeed, Firefox’s market share is a testament to the magnitude of its achievements over the past five years.

On the other hand, it seems some folks like diversity:

“I have three browsers, and I don’t think I’m alone,” John Barrett, director of research with Parks Associates, told LinuxInsider. “I suspect there’s a lot of people who have multiple browsers.”

Eating the Elephant at $3 a Piece

just confirmed: Lotus Connections closed 1m licences in 2 weeks- and that was just six enterprise customers. –James Governor

More from this longer piece by Jennifer Kavur:

The latest addition to LotusLive is iNotes, a Web-based e-mail service hosted by IBM. A lighter, Web-based version of the LotusLive Notes e-mail application, iNotes works with Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Pricing starts at USD $3 per month per user.

The scalable service is targeted to SMEs as well as large enterprises. IBM is seeing a lot of interest from clients that want a more reliable, secure and private e-mail service instead of relying on one of the consumer options, said Lobo.

Pre Release

There are only about 300 apps in the Palm store to date, dwarfed by the iPhone’s 100,000 and Android’s 12,000. However, Palm stresses that Application Catalog is still currently in trial mode, and the firm wants to ensure the software platform is mature, and has all the tools in place, before it goes on full release next month.

This via Mobile Dredge, which is a pretty good source for developer and low-level business related news.

Too Many Brains

When the global financial crisis hit last year – diminishing trade flows and reducing manufacturing orders for China’s factories to a dribble – some 20 million migrants were estimated to have lost their jobs and returned home.

The pressure of resolving unemployment tension in the countryside this year has been made even more difficult for Beijing by its difficulties in finding jobs for the country’s surging numbers of university graduates.
Some 6.1 million graduates entered the job market this summer, 540,000 more than last year. In 2008 the employment rate for graduates was less than 70%. This year nearly two million of graduates, many of them postgraduate diploma holders, are expected to be left without job placements.

Clearly, they won’t be buying an iPhone anytime soon.

“First companywide layoffs”

Microsoft let 1,400 people go Thursday, 872 of them in the Puget Sound area. It will cut up to 3,600 additional jobs between now and June 2010 but also plans to continue hiring in strategically important areas, including Internet search. Net job losses are pegged at 2,000 to 3,000.
…It still had net profit of $4.17 billion during the quarter ended Dec. 31, though that was down 11 percent from the same quarter a year ago….[I]t has more than $20.7 billion in cash and investments on its books.

C# via Mono on the iPhone

At the Monospace conference in Austin, Texas last week, Miguel de Icaza said there were 350 games on in the Apple AppStore, 5 on top sales based on Mono (probably with Unity framework and a handful with newly released MonoTouch).

Spam doesn’t deliver itself

Acquired with Yahoo!’s purchase of Inktomi, Traffic Server has been in active use at the two companies for the past eight years. According to Yahoo!, it now handles 30,000 requests per second, serving 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data a day.
“It is a very mature, very reliable piece of technology,” says Shelton Shugar, Yahoo!’s senior vp of cloud computing. “In some form, it supports more than half of Yahoo!’s traffic.”

…

Those 400 terabytes are served up from between 100 and 150 “commodity” machines.

“And they say, a computer can do the job better than I can!”

Covering the so-called myth that private clouds have no benefits over virtualization, Marcello said Unisys has deployed a private cloud internally and cut provisioning times from 10 days of manual provisioning time down to five minutes.

“We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization,” Marcello said.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is Microsoft.

Excessive traveling means I neglected the links for a few days. Here they are!

• Definition of Cloud Computing
  Collected analyst definitions of "cloud computing."
• The returns to entrepreneurship
• Observer profile: Mikhail Gorbachev – the forgotten hero of history
  "The market came with the dawn of civilisation and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people, there is no contradiction with socialism."
• Thirty-five years of women in charge | Jonathan Romain
  "They have not just imitated male colleagues but have brought a different work ethic to the rabbinate: as a generalisation, they have proved more collegial and less competitive, and better at listening rather that propounding."
• Landmark health bill passes House on close vote
  Yeah. They had it coming: "Insurance industry practices such as denying coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions would be banned, and insurers would no longer be able to charge higher premiums on the basis of gender or medical history. The industry would also lose its exemption from federal antitrust restrictions on price fixing and market allocation." ("We've all got it coming, kid.")
• Californian Ideology
  It's that whole hacker-anarchist glossy magazine dot.com cash fueled utopia thing: "The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 as well as the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and many others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete."
• Sweetened Yellow Plantains
• Plantains and Plantain Recipes
• Noam Chomsky: 'US foreign policy is straight out of the mafia'
  But he is surprised so many people abroad, especially in the third world, are disappointed at how little Obama has changed. "His campaign rhetoric, hope and change, was entirely vacuous. There was no principled criticism of the Iraq war: he called it a strategic blunder. And Condoleezza Rice was black – does that mean she was sympathetic to third world problems?"
• 'Civil disobedience has a role to play' | Al Gore
  Pretty long piece on Al Gore: not too glowing and with some pointers to critics. As I recall he has 3 giant Apple monitors, which seems like pudding to me.
• The many gods of Ilford | Abhinav Ramnarayan
  When urban sprawl forces faith to be easier: "Some of the deities are so lined up so choc-a-bloc that you could pray to one god, and then shift your bum slightly and pray to a second."
• Spime Watch: are you ready for the Internet of Things?
  IBM Smart Planet people should be all over this kind of thing.
• RiverMuse – Your IT Infrastructure…… Under New Management
  From an email on the topic: "The RiverMuse ES product is available as of today and breaks away from all current market offerings with a novel approach. With an enterprise-experienced, pure pedigree event management team, we have rewritten the next chapter of IT infrastructure management"
• What I like about the NoSQL crowd
  'And this is what I like about the NoSQL crowd (== implementers, advocates and integrators) . They do not care about established standards. They are not afraid to experiment in a “real environment”. Some of them may focus on a single problem and solve it well. Others may aim at a wider range of problems. But no system is stopped from being developed and deployed because it not “SQL compliant” or not relational.' I've been trying to figure out if the NoSQL crowd represented the tip of a new type of software development – that is, a subtle shift in the way "makers" perceive the job and tasks of developing software and what that means for the rest of the software world – like open source or project management tools. The gut-check to feel out is, "these guys are making weird assumptions and doing strange things that make no sense to me as far as something 'you'd want to do."
• Microsoft feels the pain, announces first companywide layoffs | Seattle Times Newspaper
• Subversion Submitted to Become a Project at The Apache Software Foundation
• Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment
  Hot damn!
• Dear Dustin Curtis | Dustin Curtis
  "But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like." As one of my old co-workers used to say, "you wanna come down here and chum this shit?"

• 1st SpiceCorps of Austin Meeting – 12/14/09, 6:30pm – Spiceworks Community
• Three Screens and a Cloud
• Google praises Microsoft's HTML 5 thoughts
• IBM, Microsoft Back Zend Open Cloud API
• What the Cisco/EMC/VMware Trinity Means For Cloud Computing
• Unity Technologies Launches Version 2.6 of Its Platform and Makes Unity Freely Available
  "Since 2005, Unity Technologies has provided the most powerful and easiest to use multi-platform game development suite of products used by more than 10,000 developers worldwide. The Unity platform is currently used in world class games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online by Electronic Arts, the Quest for R2D2 by LEGO® and FusionFall by Cartoon Networks. Earlier this year, Unity for iPhone was released and to date, more than 325 games are using the Unity engine to power their iPhone games, including Zombieville USA, one of the top 10 iPhone games measured by units sold."
• Open source Mono framework brings C# to iPhone and Wii
• Mono swings .NET development into iPhone
  "MonoTouch avoids this with a static compiler that turns .NET executables and libraries directly into native applications. The apps pop out without an interpreter and using only native code."
• CodePlex Foundation – Interview with Sam Ramji, 10/20/2009
  "Actually, in the case of Source Code, what we are all hoping for is to expand the distribution and use of these Open Source projects through consistent collaboration between corporate sponsors and community developers."
• Dead Media Beat: Dead Media Art Equipment
  When technolgy becomes a well looked after zombie.
• (Updated) Downtime At Rackspace Cloud
• Jackdaw
  'Like magpies, jackdaws are known to steal shiny objects such as jewellery to hoard in nests. John Gay in his Beggar's Opera notes that "A covetous fellow, like a jackdaw, steals what he was never made to enjoy, for the sake of hiding it" and in Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker a scathing character assassination by Mr. Bramble runs "He is ungracious as a hog, greedy as a vulture, and thievish as a jackdaw."Al Stewart's song, "Midas Shadow," contains the line, "Conquistador in search of gold for all the jackdaw reasons."'
• 6 Apps To Help You Focus & Be Productive [Mac]
  Productivity porno!
• When will Microsoft's Live Mesh matter?
  "Given the champion of Live Mesh is none other than Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie himself, you’d think product teams at Microsoft would be falling all over themselves to Mesh-ify their products and services." Yeah, man, what's up with all those Ozzie projects?
• Skype open source – Skype for Linux
• Sprint 4G coming to Austin
  Does this work with Palm pres?
• Studies in Atemporality – a set on Flickr
• 2009 TWS Event Program
  Looks like it'd be interesting if you're into that whole mobile space.
• The Meta Cloud gets more meta
  So, like, VMWare is going to buy these guys, right?
• Yahoo! open sources uber web server
  "Acquired with Yahoo!'s purchase of Inktomi, Traffic Server has been in active use at the two companies for the past eight years. According to Yahoo!, it now handles 30,000 requests per second, serving 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data a day."
• Unisys official says cloud computing can save money by eliminating U.S. jobs
• Microsoft lowers online suite price, suggests Google is inflating adoption figures

While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:

Scaling Languages

Fun facts I learned about Scala today: FourSquare was moved from PHP to Lift in 90 days.

Snorkle

Today, Oracle supports more than 345,000 customers in more than 145 countries as a leader in delivering database, middleware, applications, and infrastructure software. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle plans to transform to a systems company by engineering and delivering integrated systems – from applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together, so customers do not have to do it themselves.

The PDF this excerpt comes from is good reading if you’re into the whole Oracle buying Sun scene. It has some notes on Oracles intentions with Java, MySQL (see Stephen’s recent opus), Glassfish, Netbeans, Solaris, and so on.

10 years later

#ApacheCon by the numbers: 2 days of training, 10 conf tracks, 74 sessions, 3 keynotes, 1 Hackathon, 12 meetups + 1 Big Birthday Bash!

I’m at ApacheCon the first part of this week, in lovely Oak-land. It’s worth considering what’s been going on over those 10 years and what’s to come. In a video interview I just did here in the 10 year film series they’re putting together I said I was looking forward to the ASF and others figuring out how to handle open source as it goes mainstream (or is “dead” or “boring” as you might snark it). Greg Stein mentions the idea of managing a 10, 20 year old project in the video above, and I think that’s spot on.

More important is to always adapt and change to what the community wants instead of getting stuck in the original ways of doing things – being reactionary. The Shackles of Success don’t only apply to commercial companies, bro’.

Recession Telemetry

Our latest Intuit Payroll survey findings are out, and the results give me hope. While unemployment figures have reached a 26-year high, 44 percent of the 1,000 Intuit Payroll customers we surveyed said they plan to hire new employees within the next 12 months. Now, don’t get me wrong — we here at Intuit are not uncorking the champagne bottles quite yet. But we do think this is at least one sign that the clouds are beginning to part.

Via Alex Barrnett.

Where are the mainframe kids when you need ‘em?

Forty percent of the datacenters surveyed said they still operate mainframes today, and the median number of mainframes at those facilities is two. Of those using mainframes, 46 percent, or almost half, said they’re considering replacing one or more of them in the next two years.

Back in 2006, after the latest IBM System z analyst conference I wrote:

From that comes our emphasis on lowering the barriers to entry: the micro and small buyers in the long tail don’t have the time or money to spend on learning or purchasing traditional enterprise software and hardware. While mainframe sales account for “about half” of IBM’s profit, that base is steadily shrinking. More importantly, IBM has effectively maxed out the current mainframe market: there’s not many more sales in the current customer base.

Those two things mean one thing: it’s time to get new customers, new types of customers.

Since then, I’ve been half-jokingly saying that IBM should just start shipping mainframes around to round-corner, cool kids conferences for a sort of “come and meet the mainframe!” or “have your picture taken with the mainframe!” events. Most people have never been right next to a mainframe, touched one, let alone knowing worked on one.

I still think it’d be a good idea: they’re impressive beasts and even the most unibodied-out hipster-nerd would be fascinated to actually see one.

Packets, man, packets

Cisco, which is based in San Jose, Calif., has also forecast that by 2013, video will account for about 60 percent of the data traveling across mobile networks.

iCash

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application. Ok, the shopping part of eBay’s business brought in $1.4 billion in revenue just last quarter, but who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store?

Disclosure: Intuit is a client, as is IBM.