www.active2006.com

“This strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and to serve our new customers as enterprises migrate over to open-source databases.”

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, talked up MySQL’s customer list: Facebook, Google, Digg, etc., but also Toyota, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Nokia.

1. Linux (by far the most popular platform among MySQL customers). 2. Windows (High number of Windows downloads but most deployments are on Linux). 3. Solaris.

What percentage of implementations are on Linux?

Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL [For some reason in Orlando, Florida - was he swimming with dolphins?]:

[Jonathan] We have been one of the earliest backers of PostgreSQL and today we reaffirm that commitment.

Will this be a standalone software business?

“We are perfectly aligned in our business models and cultures. We each have a business model that revolves around free and open access to all of our technology.”

What does this mean for Sun’s support for PosgreSQL?

Tony of Sanford Bernstein: Can you comment on the current financials of MySQL? (Estimates of $60-80 million in 12 months trailing revenues.)

Rich Green, EVP, Software, Sun:

Our software business is really untethered and decoupled from our systems business….As with Java, Glassfish, etc. we’re building a business as broadly as the Internet reaches….If we can sell to new customers…we’ll be thrilled to do so. This is good for our margins [as MySQL will help push storage, identity management, and other solutions from Sun]….This is really all about reaffirming Sun’s position at the center of the web.

Around 20% of MySQL’s deployments are on Solaris. About 75% of the Solaris deployments aren’t on Sun’s hardware. Not only can we bring a breadth of service to MySQL, but we can also help take MySQL into mission-critical environments. We can help move MySQL onto new platforms.

From the Q&A:

Jonathan asked him to wait until the financial analyst call later today.

“The single biggest impediment to MySQLs growth is their ability to give peace of mind to global companies that want to put MySQL into mission-critical deployments.”

[Rich] We will continue to invest and drive opportunities for other databases like PostgreSQL…. We have hundreds of developers who work on interoperability with Oracle, too, and will keep doing that. But we will also use that expertise to make MySQL run well on Sun’s platforms to drive excellence. [Paraphrasing on that one.]

“Wonderful industry logic underlying this transaction.”

“We have overlap in our technologies and underlap in our customers….All of [Sun's] customers are deploying MySQL. [But then stressed that Sun’s scale could bring comfort to enterprise customers not yet ready to put MySQL into mission-critical deployments.”

How do you deal with this? If your deployments are on Linux, how does this help Solaris?

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The final version of Silverlight 3 has been released to the Web, a day ahead of the product’s launch event in San Francisco.

The release, noted by enthusiast site Neowin, marks Microsoft’s latest effort to take on Adobe’s Flash.

NBC has said it will use Silverlight to broadcast the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver. The technology will allow the Games to be broadcast in 720p HD quality as well as provide a TiVo-like ability to pause and rewind a live stream.

Microsoft detailed Silverlight 3 at the Mix09 event in March, releasing a beta version of the software.

Among the product’s new features is technology that allows the software to utilize a PC’s hardware to accelerate graphics processing. It also allows for programs that run outside a browser on both the PC and
Mac.

(Credit: Sega)

And perhaps that’s why few people are getting excited about the latest and greatest Sonic game. The people that once cared are too old to get excited about Sonic anymore and the younger people who should be getting excited barely care he exists. They would be much happier playing the latest Mario title or checking out any of the other major franchises in the industry.

Other surveys feature Sonic in the Top 10 — usually around the middle area — and the vast majority of people I surveyed on my Twitter page agreed with the public: Sonic isn’t the best video game character of all-time, but he’s certainly up there.

Thanks for the good times, Sonic. We loved every minute of them.

Sure, it wasn’t long ago that Sega dropped out of the hardware business, but it really has been a long time since Sonic was on-par with Mario. In fact, I’d say that Sonic hasn’t been considered an equal to Mario for at least a decade. During that time, all the kids that stayed true to Sonic have moved on, grown up, and found gaming love in titles like Halo and Gears of War. And all the younger kids who don’t remember the days of Nintendo-Sega fighting only know and love one major player in the space: Mario. Sonic games are relegated to the bargain bin for these children.

As soon as the Nintendo 64 hit store shelves and Mario become the centerpiece of the 3D platforming world, Sonic’s decline started. Sega couldn’t muster a real competitor and its own desire for speed trumped its necessity for fun and exciting platforming gameplay.

In the next week, a new Sonic game, called Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood will hit store shelves for the Nintendo DS. Some are anxiously waiting for the title to be released, while many don’t care all that much. Why is that? Probably because Silent Hill: Homecoming will be released during the same week and, well, Sonic has lost his stride over the past decade.

During the heyday of the Sega Genesis, I can still remember the fights that would break out over whether Sonic or Mario was better. The Sega fanboys would support their mascot until the end and the Nintendo fanboys would do the same for their plumber. Little did we know that that really was the beginning of the end.

In the meantime, Sega itself was declining at a rapid rate and its blunders is ostracizing developers and retailers turned the company into pariah. And as Nintendo continued its charge as the de facto leader in innovative gameplay, Sega and Sonic were left out in the cold.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

Practically any poll you search for on the Web about the most popular video game characters will say that Mario is tops. In fact, a recent survey in Japan [Google translation warning] returned similar results showing Mario as the popular game character in the country, followed closely by other big names like Cloud from the Final Fantasy series and Yoshi.

And unfortunately, it’s becoming clearer by the day that Sonic, a stalwart of that time, is dying of old age with each sub-par title from Sega trying to revive the old hedgehog.

So what happened to Sonic? A decade ago, the blue hedgehog was at the top of his game and battling it out with Mario for the top-spot as the world’s most popular video game character. Since then, even though he has been featured in a number of titles, his popularity has dropped significantly and his money-making potential has fallen with it.

I still look back at the old days when Sonic was at the top as some of the greatest days in gaming. It was a time when derivative gameplay was the exception, not the rule. And it was a time when gaming didn’t have to be about sexy women or killing prostitutes to be fun. It was a time when gaming was real and it was unique.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Finally, with the release of the Sega Dreamcast, Sega made an effort in the platforming space and released Sonic Adventure, which, to this day, is still one of my favorite games to play when I’m bored. But alas, it was too late and the once-proud Sonic was forced to endure as his creators bailed out of the hardware business in favor of software.

All the while, stalwarts like Mario and Link have clung to the top spots with nary a drop in popularity.

No, it actually makes the most sense for manufacturers that are looking to embed Web conferencing into other solutions. The same is true for Ringside Networks. Arguably, we didn’t need another Web conferencing solution (Dimdim) or social-networking platform (Ringside).

It’s good to see TechCrunch picking up on Dimdim’s launch of its hosted Web-conferencing solution. But I think it misses the main driver of Dimdim’s opportunity:

In short, Dimdim isn’t cool because it’s open-source Web conferencing. It’s cool because of what open-source Web conferencing allows technology providers to do with Web conferencing that price and proprietary licensing hitherto precluded.

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What we do need are such platforms that can be expanded and integrated into other solutions. Open-source solutions that remain islands, developed and deployed by one company, are much less interesting than open-source solutions that are developed and deployed by a community. Community provides the opportunity for Dimdim.

The open-source strategy followed by Dimdim makes most sense when customers want to manage the software on-premise, and it’s not so important when everything’s hosted in the cloud. But it’s good to see competition nipping at the heals of giant WebEx.

New CNET Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber raises a different point in a post today–that there is still time for an internet land-grab and Microsoft should take this opportunity to nab Yahoo before it’s too late.

There is another argument that says that internet is really not Microsoft’s ball of wax, and instead the company should try to acquire SAP in more of an Oracle-style of leveraging assets across the same customer base. Unfortunately, that argument doesn’t fly as it seems that Microsoft has finally realized there is a very real danger of losing the corporate desktop as it moves online.

This weekend’s NY Times article “Maybe Microsoft Should Stalk Different Prey” raises the point that perhaps Microsoft should reconsider the Yahoo acquisition to focus on what it knows, which is enterprise software.

Overall, I don’t see the Yahoo acquisition paying immediate dividends. In fact, it’s hard to see when it would pay off. Microsoft doesn’t have the machine in place that would allow for a smooth transition with quick gains. There are a few companies, Oracle and Cisco, notably who are fantastic at acquisitions, but Microsoft hasn’t yet built an effective acquisition engine.

What’s really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.

Much like Google’s recent Blog Search page efforts, Live Labs’ Political Streams also keeps track of a very important number–how long a story has continued to get play. This number stems from the first time it began getting tracked through the service’s crawling engine, which doesn’t necessarily dictate where it sits on the list of top stories.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open-database project.

Political Streams is the first site of its kind from the Live Labs team. I expect that we’ll see additional “streams” pages for tech, world, sports, and celebrity news after the presidential election.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the top stories on the blog side were less than half the age of those on the traditional-news side. That, of course, is bound to change, depending on the day’s news.

See also: Memeorandum and Blogrunner.

Microsoft’s Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.

Political Streams tracks popular political headlines and tracks their mentions in both traditional media and blog sources.