TechCast Live: The MySQL Community Lives-Can We Believe Oracle
Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker

TechCast Live: The MySQL Community Lives-Can We Believe Oracle

This Oracle TechCast which comes to us from an "undisclosed location" in Silcon Valley, offers us assurance that Oracle is committed to maintaining the free, open source, GPL'd community edition of MySQL. They have recently released version 5.5 and state that they are hiring within Oracle and will surpass Sun's investment into the MySQL project. Jono Bacon, the Ubutu community manager and author of the book, The Art of Community, offers his insight into how Oracle can foster and support the already vibrant MySQL community.

Read More
When you should open-source your internal apps | Open Source - InfoWorld
Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker

When you should open-source your internal apps | Open Source - InfoWorld

During my twenty-five or so years of technology consulting, I've witnessed many in-house software development projects. Large or small, too often companies tend to believe their needs are too special for any sort of off-the-shelf solution. The true stumbling block tends to fall into the category of "we've always done it this way". Outdated processes and an unwillingness to change force overworked IT staff to build an in-house solution where feature creep is rampant and the project never meets expectations. At the same time, development costs skyrocket far beyond the cost of even the most expensive off-the-shelf alternative. If a close open source alternative exists, those same developers could work within the community to enhance the project and submit code back to the project for inclusion and benefit both the company and the community.

Read More
Agile Development Lessons from Zynga Farmville
Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Agile Development Lessons from Zynga Farmville

He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.

Read More
Techcrunch:  Linus Torvalds:  Google's Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don't Hate

Techcrunch: Linus Torvalds: Google's Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don't Hate

I haven't seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I've listened to and read reviews.  From what I've heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose.  Jeff Jarvis on a recent This Week in Google, however, pointed out that the Google app for the iPhone provides a better user experience than does accessing Google on the Nexus One.

Read More
Citrix vs WMWare:  Citrix Storagelink tips the scales

Citrix vs WMWare: Citrix Storagelink tips the scales

Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.

Read More
Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Kevin Rose Presents at the FOWA London 2009 Event - Taking Your Site from One to One Million Users

This presentation by Kevin Rose of Digg.com provides us with fantastic and timely information for how to grow a site and cultivate the community of followers you gain. I have outlined the highlights of his presentation here for easy reference. For further discussion, visit the Tech Cast Talk Discussion Forum Post for this topic.

Read More
Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Should Pandora use a subscription based business model?

On TWist Episode 16 Jason talked about an idea to have fans of an artist pay a subscription fee to receive news and bonus mp3s from the artist. I am a big fan of Pandora.com. Jason's idea inspired me to start thinking about the possibilities for Pandora and a subscription model. On Pandora, a user creates a custom "radio station" that the user seeds with artists and songs and then trains by giving selections a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In addition, users are offered the ability to bookmark a song or even purchase a song.

Read More
Apple Goodies, Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker Apple Goodies, Featured, Linux Goodies Darla Baker

Make Free Calls On Your iPhone with Asterisk and Fring

You enter the extension you set up earlier in the "User ID" field. You enter the password you assigned to the extension in the "Password" field. And you enter the DNS name for your Asterisk server in the "Proxy" field. Tap on "Login" and Fring will register the extension with your Asterisk server and you're ready to begin making calls and enjoying your new WiFi SIP phone.

Read More