You know that Europe-only Palm Pre update we mentioned just a little while ago? Turns out there’s an undocumented, hidden feature tucked inside. That’s our favorite kind of feature!
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Author: Serkadis
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WrapAgain: Save the world one boxed tie and cologne combo gift at a time
This hit our radar a little late for Kwanzaa but it’s an interesting idea: reusable cloth wrapping paper. The company, called WrapAgain, offers multiple sizes and styles. The stuff is completely reusable and includes ribbons for tying.
Here’s how to use them:All Wrapagains are roughly square. Each has two corners with ribbon permanently attached.
Lay Wrapagain out flat with the side you ultimately want facing out face down (just like you would a conventional package) and ribbon corners positioned at “Noon” and “six.” Wrapagain should be laying at a 45-degree angle to your table edge.
Position item to be wrapped in the center of the wrapagain with the long side (if there is one) pointing to the ribbon corners.
Fold in the non-ribbon corners first, adjusting your centering, if needed. Fold in the ribbon corners. Flip package over and tie the ribbons together in a bow.
Before you say I can do this at home with a dishtowel and some twist ties, remember: you didn’t think of this and the colors are pretty.
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Project ExciteBike: excercycle accelerator for racing games
Putting on a few inches from playing games all day? Maybe you should invent yourself an exercise machine that controls in-game acceleration so you don’t just sit there all day, lazy one. Man, I think I need one of these that controls tab changing in Firefox.
The creator says at Reddit that he only used about $70 worth of parts in addition to the exercycle itself. Basically a magnet on the wheel triggers a series of sensors, and the frequency with which the sensors are hit determines the “pressure” on the analog stick. I’m thinking it must be pretty hard to use the controller at the same time. I’d fall off right away.
More info and schematics at the project’s site.
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12 Facts About Pizza
Pizza originated in Naples, Italy.
The first pizzas were just dough and tomato sauce – no cheese.
Antica Pizzeria was the world’s first pizzeria. It opened in Naples, Italy in 1738.
It wasn’t until 1889 that cheese was first added to pizza in Italy, when famous pizza chef Raffaele Esposito made a pizza for Queen Margherita using tomato, basil, and cheese to represent the colors of the Italian flag. Today, the simple margherita pizza remains one of the most popular pizzas in the world.
The first American pizzeria was opened in New York City in 1905.
The largest pizza ever made was at Norwood Hypermarket in South Africa. It was 122 feet 8 inches across, weighed 26,883 pounds, contained 3,968 pounds of cheese, and 1,984 pounds of sauce.
It is estimated that about three billion pizzas are sold in the United States every year.
Pepperoni is the most popular pizza topping in the United States.
The three dots in the Domino’s Pizza logo represent the first three Domino’s Pizza stores.
The most pizzas are delivered (and eaten) on New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, Thanksgiving Eve, and Super Bowl Sunday.
About 350 slices of pizza are consumed every second in the United States.
About 93% of Americans eat at least one pizza every month.
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Valerie Bertinelli To Run Boston Marathon
The Boston Marathon is getting a bit of star power — sitcom vet Valerie Bertinelli will run in the 26.2 mile race to raise money for cancer research.
The actress shed more than 40 pounds with the help of Jenny Craig two years ago. The 5-foot-2-in. star currently weighs in at under 130 lbs. Valerie hopes running the famed Boston race will give her a chance to test her endurance.
Joined by her personal trainer Valerie — who starred on the ’70s series One Day at a Time — is expected to join more than 500 runners who hope to raise nearly $4.5 million for research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
“I’m really going to do it,” Bertinelli revealed to The TODAY Show’s Meredith Vieira on Monday. “I’m training right now, and come April 19, four days before my 50th birthday, I’ll be running 26.2 miles.”
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Tobacco bans
I saw at many places such as Woolworths, Coles, petrol stations and that have also banned selling ciggers on their stockings.Whats happening?
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Mais fotos mostrando uma cidade linda e outras pelo caminho de volta ao Rio!
Passei o fim de ano em Kastelo e voltei a fotografar bastante, mas para não ficar repetitivo, vou mostrar outros ângulos de mesmos lugares já postado.
Notei que estão construindo novos prédios de até 10 pisos por toda a cidade e não, somente no centro da cidade.
Aliás cada vez mais Castelo vem se firmando como a segunda maior cidade do sul do estado.1
O centro da cidade escondido entre as montanhas, visto de um bairro mais afastado.
2
Bairro Santa Barbara.
3
Av. Getúlio vargas.
4
Me incomoda esse prédio comercial embargado a anos, na Av. Min. Araripe a pricipal rua comercial da cidade.
5
Mais um trecho da Min. Araripe.
6
7
POr causa das duas enchentes que varreram a cidade em menos de um ano, não teve as decorações de natal nas ruas da cidade.
8
9
Belezas naturais de Castelo!
10
11
Cachoeira da Prata.
12
Entrada para a área de lazer da Cachoeira do Furlan, com o calor qua faz em Castelo, as inúmeras cachoeiras do município ficam lotadas.
13
Havia muitas pessoas praticando rapel na cachoeira.
14
A agua dessa cachoeira é bem fria, pois a nascente fica no parque Estadual do Forno Grande a mais de 1700 metros de altitude.
15
A família que administra o restaurante desse parque atende a todos com uma simpatia incrível, sem falar no aipim(mandioca) frito maravilhoso:lol:
16
No Caminho de volta resolví vir "por dentro" e passar por belas cidades como Alegre-ES…
17
Alegre possui somente um predio alto e é impossível não notá-lo.
18
Guaçuí ao contrário não possui ainda algum edifício alto.
19
Esse é o Cristo da cidade, um dos mais antigos.
20
Essa igreja em Guaçuí achei muito linda!
21
Chegando em São José do Calçado-ES…
22
A igreja…
23
Esse predio me chamou a atenção, mas não sei o que é, me parece ser algum colégio…
24
Logo depois cheguei em Bom Jesus do Norte, última cidade ainda no Espirito Santo.
25
Essa cidade está completamente geminada a Bom Jesus do Itabapoana do outro lado do rio, já no estado do Rio de Janeiro.
26
Atravessando a ponte sobre o Rio Itabapoana e me despedindo do meu estado lindo e entrando na cidade de B. J. do Itabapoana -RJ.
27
No caminho passei por várias outras cidades, mas não fotografei.
Essa já na Ponte Rio-Niterói, descendo o vão central.
28
Me chamou muita a atenção cinco enormes transatlanticos no pier mauá, se bem que na foto só aparecem quatro.
29
Porto do Rio com o skyline mais famoso do Brasil.
Todas as fotos são minhas
Valeu gente, espero que curtem e comentem! -
Silverpac Thermostat’s 7-Inch Touchscreen Measures Electricity Usage [Thermostat]
Most thermostats let you make your house warmer or cooler. The fancier ones let you program it for various times during the day. But the Silverpac takes things to a whole new level.The touchscreen thermostat not only lets you program a 7-day cycle of temperatures, but it also manages all of the electricity use in your home. If a certain appliance is being an energy hog, it’ll tell you. It also does fancy stuff like show you the weather, but the real goodies are the energy conservation tools. [SilverPac via DesignBoom]
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Florida company pursues 100 megawatt wind farm near Malta – Great Falls Tribune
Montana officials said they will solicit bids beginning Wednesday to lease about 7,300 acres of state land near Malta at the request of Tampa, Fla.-based Sansur Renewable Energy. Sansur Chairman Suren Ajjarapu said wind turbines could go up at the …
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Second patch update of NBA 2K10 now available
Heads up, NBA 2K fans! As promised, 2K Sports has released the second patch for NBA 2K10. The patch, now available for all PS3 ballers with the Xbox 360 version to follow soon, will attempt to address
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School District Considers ‘Anti-Piracy’ Education Campaign Based On Anti-Drug Education Campaigns
Forget “just say no,” and say hello to “just say buy.” Copycense points out that some Scottish schools seem to think that unauthorized sharing of music and movies is analogous to using drugs, and deserves a similar sort of education plan. Of course, the entertainment industry would be more than happy to provide any one of its numerous
propagandaeducational curricula for the task. The problem, of course, is that if you are at all familiar with the subject, you would realize that unauthorized file sharing is not a societal problem like “drug use,” but is a business model issue. Of course, given how (un)successful the “war on drugs” has been, perhaps it’s silly to worry about an equally ridiculous “war on piracy.”Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
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Google’s Top Enterprise Executive: Do Not Be Alarmed by Chinese Cyber Attack
In an unusual display of concern, the president of Google Enterprise has made a public statement saying there should be no cause for alarm about Google Apps and its cloud computing infrastructure following a major data breach by a China-based attack on Google and 20 other large enterprise companies.David Girouard, Google’s president of Google Enterprise, said in a personally written blog post that Google suffered a massive cyber attack last month. According to the corporate Google blog, the attackers came away from Google with stolen intellectual property.
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Girouard downplayed the impact of the attack. He said Google “believes” the breach did not affect Google Apps customers.
Girouard, obviously concerned about the backlash, said the incident may raise some questions about Google security. He said that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of customer’s data.
There are consistent questions about cloud computing’s potential security flaws. Girouard is well aware of this. He tries to make it clear that this incident was not an assault on cloud computing.
“It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.”
Girouard comes close to making a sales pitch in his statement, saying, in fact, that Google customers benefit from the Internet giant’s investment in data security.
“While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.”
This is an incredible incident that will lead to some major issues for Google Enterprise over the next several months. As the battle heats up for cloud computing supremacy, competitors will pick at this incident as an example of why a company that’s more security conscious should be trusted with customer data, not a search engine giant.
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Joey Fatone A Dad For The Second Time
Former boy bander Joey Fatone is a dad again.
The Dancing With The Stars alum and TV Guide red carpet correspondent welcomed a second daughter with his wife Kelly on Monday.
Kloey Alexandra Fatone was born on Monday in Orlando, Fla., weighing in at 5 lbs., 8 oz. Kloey is a combination of Joey and Kelly’s names, Joey says explaining how the family decided what to call the tot. The couple also has an 8-year-old daughter, Briahna, who picked out the middle name Alexandra.
“Kloey’s so small,” the former *NSYNC singer told PEOPLE. “She looks like a little doll. But she’s healthy and doing just fine.”
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Brasília (DF) | Samambaia | Felicitá Clube Residência
Felicitá Clube Residência
Quem conhece a região sabe: não há melhor
endereço para se morar em Samambaia.
– O Felicitá Clube Residência tem mesmo uma
localização privilegiada, a 5 minutos
do Centro de Taguatinga, com acesso fácil,
próximo à futura sede do GDF, na QN 614,
conjunto B, na via que liga Taguatinga
a Samambaia.
– 2 quartos sendo uma suíte.
– Coberturas duplex com 2 quartos.
(Sala com pé direito duplo.)
– 4 apartamentos por andar todos semi-vazados com ventilação cuzada e vista livre.
– Condominio fechado e garagem privativa.
-Área de lazer super completa com piscina, quadra, salão de festas, fitness e muito mais. -
How reducing hyperinsulemia can improve lipids
This comes from Michael Eades’s blog for this week:Quote:
At the time I started treating patients with the low-carb diet, cholesterol was just starting to be demonized. For the first time, people were concerned about their cholesterol levels (and at that time, the upper level for normal for total cholesterol was 220 mg/dl, 20 units higher than it is now) It was the era Taubes discusses in his great paper The Soft Science of Dietary Fat and that Tom Naughton shows in his movie Fat Head. Low-fat diets were the rage. The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure, a book about eating giant oat bran muffins daily and taking sustained-release niacin was in the writing and destined to be a mega bestseller. The fear of fat was settling in on America.
And here I was starting to put patients on low-carb, high-fat diets to help them lose weight.
Back then I had bought into the lipid hypothesis and truly believed excess cholesterol did indeed lead to heart disease. As a consequence, I was a little squeamish about putting people who might actually be at risk for heart disease on the diet. I had read the biochemistry texts, and I knew that insulin stimulated HMG Co-A reductase, the rate limiting enzyme in the cholesterol synthesis pathway; and I also knew that glucagon (insulin’s counter regulatory hormone) inhibited that same enzyme. So, in theory, lowering insulin and increasing glucagon with diet should work to treat elevated cholesterol. But, knowing those things theoretically didn’t really give me a whole lot of solace when it came to taking care of real flesh and blood patients who were entrusting their well being to me. . . .
. . . The patients that I did put on the diet were typically women who were premenopausal (a group who rarely develop heart disease), so I didn’t worry about them. I checked everyone’s labwork, but no one’s was really out of whack lipid-wise at the start of the diet, so I didn’t have a lot to go on data-wise. The few who did have minimally elevated cholesterol tended to lower it over the first six weeks (I rechecked everyone at six weeks), so I figured the theoretical underpinnings of the diet were okay. But I was still uneasy.
I had visions of myself in the witness box with a sneering plaintiff’s attorney saying to me: So, Dr. Eades, are you telling the members of this jury that you put the deceased – whom you knew to have high cholesterol – on a diet filled with RED MEAT! IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE TELLING THIS JURY, SIR? YOU, SIR, CAUSED THIS MAN’S FATAL HEART ATTACK, DID YOU NOT?
But more than being worried about this scenario, I didn’t want to do anything harmful to anyone. I knew it would be difficult to live with myself if I thought I had killed someone or caused a heart attack out of pure negligence.
You’ve got to remember that at this time there was no one in his/her right mind recommending a low-carb diet. There was Atkins, of course, but he had been totally discredited in the eyes of the medical profession by that time. It wasn’t until over 20 years later in 2004 that he and the low-carb diet got even minimally rehabilitated. I was very uneasy to say the least.
Then four patients came into my clinic, one almost right after the other, who changed my life. . . .
The first of the four patients we’ll call Angie. . . . Her total cholesterol was over 300 and her triglycerides were about 1900. MD called me and said “Have I ever got the patient for you.” This was what I had been waiting for. A patient who was female and pre-menopausal with terrible lipids. I figured I could treat such a patient without any risk of her developing heart disease over the short term, and I planned to recheck lipids way sooner than the normal six weeks. Since her lipids were so out of the ordinary for one so young, I asked MD to repeat them, fasting, have the results sent to me and to send Angie to see me after her repeat labs had come back.
When I got her labs, I knew the first reading wasn’t an error. In fact, they were a little worse than when MD checked them the first time.
Total cholesterol: 374 mg/dl (all values in mg/dl)
LDL: ?
HDL: 28
Triglycerides (TG) 2080(There was no value for LDL because LDL is a calculated number and can’t be calculated when the triglycerides are over 400 mg/dl.)
. . .I gave her a fairly rigid version of what became the Protein Power diet. I explained exactly what she should eat and what she shouldn’t and sent her on her way with my home phone number and my beeper number (this was before the days of cell phones). I told her to call me if she had even the slightest problem and to return to the office in three weeks for a recheck no matter what. And I gnawed my nails. I had the staff call her after a few days to see if she was doing okay. She reported that she was fine.
I got no emergency calls from her and in three weeks she returned. Her right upper quadrant pain had vanished as had her nausea. She reported that she had never felt better. She had even lost nine pounds (which was a fair amount for her since she wasn’t that overweight to begin with). I rechecked her labs and waited anxiously for them to come back from the lab the next day. When they did, I was stunned.
Total cholesterol: 292
LDL: 192
HDL 70
TG: 149I had hoped for a change for the better, but I hadn’t in my wildest dreams expected this kind of change. I kind of figured that her triglycerides and cholesterol would come down slowly over several months, not that they would drop like rocks in only three weeks.
The second of my life-changing patients was a casual friend of mine who came to see me about a week after my experience with Angie. He was a 55 year old guy we’ll call Lynn who worked in advertising. I had gotten to know him when his company created some brochures for our clinic. He came to see me for an insurance physical.
He arrived, we chatted, and then I looked him over. I poked and prodded and listened at all the appropriate places. He seemed fine. He was a thinnish white male who was just starting to develop a little (and I mean little) paunch. I would never have even noticed it had he not been sitting there with his shirt off.
Talk turned to my own weight loss, and he asked me if I could put him on a diet to help him lose his little pot belly. I said ‘Sure,’ and told him about my meat, cheese, salad and green vegetable diet. I told him that I had lost my weight eating a ton of steak and had continued to do so. He was thrilled because he loved steak and had been avoiding it because of everything he had been reading about red meat and heart disease. I had our nurse draw his blood for the lab part of his physical and sent him on his way.
The next day I was going through all the results from the bloodwork that had been drawn the day before when I came upon his. I nearly dropped my teeth.
Total cholesterol: 312
LDL: ?
HDL: ?
TG: 1515(There was a note on the lab sheet that said they were unable to determine the HDL because the serum was too lipemic (cloudy with fat)?!?!)
I thought, Whoa!, a 32 year old premenopausal woman is one thing, but a 55 year old male right in the middle of major-heart-disease-risk age is something else. And here I had put this guy with totally disrupted lipids on a red-meat diet, which, according to current medical thinking, would almost guarantee to make the situation worse. I put in an immediate call to his office and was told he had left that morning for vacation for two weeks. (Why he had neglected to even mention this trip when we talked for 30 minutes the day before baffled me completely.) I asked for the number wherever he was. His secretary told me that he was on a Caribbean Island and couldn’t be contacted. I told her that if he called in to have him call me immediately.
My fears were somewhat assuaged because I figured, hey, the guy is on vacation, he’s not going to diet anyway. Why should I worry?
He called me the day he got back and before I could get a word in told me “Hey, your diet works great. I lost five pounds while I was on vacation.” As it turned out, he was on a Caribbean Island, but it was a resort of some sort. As part of his deal, all the food was provided. He had chowed down on steak just about every day.
. . . Here are his labs taken 15 days after his first ones.
Total cholesterol: 195
LDL: 124
HDL: 26
TG: 201I was really stunned this time. How could these values change this much in just 15 days?
He wanted to stay on the diet, so I told him to go for it. But I kept an eye on him.
. . . [Two more, similar, histories follow.]
After my experiences with these four patients, all of whom came to see me over about a three month period, I became convinced that my theorizing about the potent effects of reducing insulin was based in reality. Over the ensuing years, I saw many, many more patients with disturbed lipid metabolism whom I successfully treated with low-carb, high-fat diets, but these four, coming as close together as they did in the early days of my feeling my way along in my low-carb career, gave me the conviction to press on.
I am eternally grateful to them.
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Movies on your iPhone embedded in an app
Filed under: Multimedia, Video, Odds and ends, iPhone, iPod touch, App Review
I like a good movie as much as the next person, so it was with some interest I took a look at a movie app a reader suggested to us. It is a movie called ‘The Invaders’ and you purchase the app for U.S. $0.99 [iTunes link] and then play it all you want. For a minute I thought it might be the sixties TV series with Roy Thinnes, but no such luck.
In fact, ‘The Invaders’ is a 1912 public domain silent western about Indians attacking an Army fort. You buy the app, download the 150 MB file to your iPhone or iPod touch, and watch the movie. Then I guess you throw it away, because it is not material that stands up to repeat viewings.
The developers have a bunch of other public domain titles in their Cinema Classics series, like ‘Night of The Living Dead’, but you can download or view most of these titles for free from the web anytime you want. You can also access them from the Internet Archive and watch them on your iPhone or iPod touch with Safari. At last count Night of The Living Dead was available on DVD from 23 firms, and you could view it for free on Google Video or YouTube. It’s one of those films that inadvertently slipped into the public domain, leaving the creators with a lot of remorse and no money.
The same firm, LOL Software has dozens of iPhone apps, many that just collect news feeds from other sources and put them into an iPhone framework. LOL indeed. Yawn.
TUAWMovies on your iPhone embedded in an app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Rumor: New iPhone by April
Filed under: Hardware, Rumors, Apple, iPhone
You TUAW readers came up with a long list of features for a possible iPhone 4.0, and now it turns out you might not even have to wait too long for a new revision. A few overseas providers of the iPhone have hinted that a brand new version of the handset could be coming out as soon as April of this year. Possible features this time include a video chat function, a removable battery, dual-core processors, and a better screen and camera (possibly with a flash feature, as we’ve heard before). That sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to us (I doubt we’ll ever see an iPhone with a removable battery — if Apple wanted to do so, they’d have already done it), but if not, that would be a pretty darn popular smartphone, and it would definitely answer the recent challenge of Google’s Nexus One.But of course as always, rumors are rumors, so we won’t believe it until we see Steve Jobs holding it on stage, and you shouldn’t either. But sources have long said that 2010 will be a year in which we’ll see a new iPhone, and while April (or early May) seems earlier than we thought, you never know.
TUAWRumor: New iPhone by April originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google to Shut Down in China?
According to information just released from Google, its Chinese web portal, Google.cn, may be biting the dust shortly.In the wake of a string of cyberattacks, certain surveillance activities and long-standing censorship policies, Google SVP David Drummond writes, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn… We should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”
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Last month, Google noticed a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their infrastructure that allowed for the theft of Google IP. The attack came from China and targeted at least twenty other major corporations involved in technology, finance, media and chemicals.
Google believes the main reason for the attacks was to access Gmail accounts of advocates of human rights for Chinese people. Dozens of accounts with users based in the U.S., Europe and China have been accessed to varying degrees; Google denies any security breach on their part, stating that malware or phishing might have caused the accounts to be compromised.
Although Google would not normally share information of this nature with a global audience, their team has decided to do so now because the attacks and account surveillance that have been uncovered speak to issues of security, human rights and free speech.
“We launched Google.cn in January 2006,” wrote Drummond, “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that ‘we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.’”
Drummond also references China’s attempts in 2009 to curtail and censor free expression on the Web, which we have covered in depth and which we listed as one of last year’s greatest failures.
Google execs, who have decided that serving censored search results is no longer an option, will spend several weeks talking with the Chinese government about whether or not they could run an unfiltered search engine in that country. If the two entities are unable to reach an agreement, it is likely that Google.cn will shut down, as will Google’s offices in China.
What Took So Long?
We’ve long been critical of major tech companies that, through acts of omission or under the auspices of compliance with foreign governments, do harm to human rights, privacy and free speech.
In a post from October 2008, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick questioned whether Google, Yahoo!, YouTube or any of the larger web companies operating internationally were equipped to handle the moral and ethical responsibilities of their expansion overseas into troubled territories. He reminded us of several affronts to human rights for which these companies were responsible, then noted, ” It’s hard, because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets.”
Curt Hopkins, founder of the Commmittee to Protect Bloggers, responded with an appropriately cynical point of view, saying, “Given that not just Google but every single other American tech company has shat themselves to get at the mythological Chinese market, this is way too long in coming.
“What took so long? Did they finally realize that they are never going to make any money as things currently are so they thought they’d get some PR? This is great news, but you still have to ask: Who benefits from this? And how do they benefit? I hate to be cyncial, but the best we can hope for is that Google says, ‘This isn’t going anywhere for us, and it’s so unpleasant.’… If I was in Google’s shoes, I would never stop talking about how wonderful we were for doing this.”
Hopkins’s cohort Andrew Ford Lyons has posted a statement that Google ought to immediately remove filters from search results on Google.cn and promote uncensored, unmonitored web access “by channeling some of their incredibly smart staff’s efforts toward projects that protect privacy in China and help more Web surfers there quickly and safely bypass firewalls.”
We will continue to update you on the situation as we receive more information. In the meantime, please let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Google May Back Out of China Because of Cyberattacks [Voices]
By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Google Inc. (GOOG) said it is “reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China” and may back out of China entirely, as it disclosed it had been hit with major cyberattacks it believes to have originated from the country.
Google disclosed its thinking in a blog post Tuesday. In the post, Google said it detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China” in mid-December and that the attack resulted in “the theft of intellectual property from Google.”
The post said that Google believed the attackers were aiming to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists but that only two Gmail accounts appeared to have been accessed.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
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As BoomTown Said: VMware Buys Zimbra From Yahoo (Plus the Full Press Release) [BoomTown]
As BoomTown previously reported, VMware officially confirmed today that it is buying Yahoo’s Zimbra open-source email unit.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but sources said the price was well below the $350 million Yahoo (YHOO) paid for the start-up in late 2007.
Sources also said there is a large employee-retention element to the sale to encourage Zimbra’s 110 employees to make the move to VMware (VMW).
Under terms of the deal, which has been brewing between the two Silicon Valley companies for some weeks, VMware said it will “purchase all Zimbra technology and intellectual property. Yahoo! will have the right to continue to utilize the Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.”
“We’ve been simplifying the data center,” said Brian Byun, vice president and general manager, cloud services, at VMware, in an interview with me this afternoon. “With this move, we are expanding to another area…which is part of a larger strategy.”
Said Jim Morrisroe, who has been running Zimbra for Yahoo: “This is another step in a mission we’ve been on at Zimbra and we are very excited about what’s next at VMware.”
A week ago, BoomTown reported that the sale of Zimbra was likely.
BoomTown had reported in late September that Zimbra was for sale by Yahoo, which has been targeting for “de-acquisition” assets that are not central to the strategies of the company’s new management.
Zimbra and Yahoo’s small business and jobs sites have been on the block.
One source I spoke to last week noted that the reason VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra is that its execs want to expand “up the stack” from the software company’s position in virtualization.
And Yahoo is no longer interested in running Zimbra’s white-label, open-source email commercial product, which serves the university and ISP markets. There, its main rival has been Google (GOOG).
VMware said the acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010.
VMware to Acquire Zimbra
Company Expands vCloud Portfolio with Next Generation Email and Collaboration Software
PALO ALTO, Calif., January 12, 2010–VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc.
This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.
Zimbra is a leading open source email and collaboration solution with over 55 million mailboxes. As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small and medium business customers.
Based on a modern, flexible architecture designed for virtualization and cloud-scale infrastructure, the Zimbra technology provides substantially lower total cost of ownership than traditional solutions. Zimbra products offer a full enterprise feature set, excellent interoperability with legacy email environments and have been deployed across small and large environments; as on-premise software at thousands of small and medium businesses, distributed enterprises, and as a hosted service at major service providers such as Comcast and NTT Communications.
“Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience,” said Brian Byun, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, VMware. “Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider. We are excited to welcome the Zimbra team and community to the VMware family.”
VMware plans to support existing Zimbra products and open source efforts while further optimizing Zimbra products for vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, alongside Microsoft, IBM and other messaging and collaboration solutions.
Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will purchase all Zimbra technology and intellectual property. Yahoo! will have the right to continue to utilize the Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.
“The Zimbra technology has played and will continue to play an important role in our communications services products. The technology is core to Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar and a key differentiator for these leading products,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Yahoo! “The customers and partners of Zimbra’s industry-leading product and successful enterprise business will be well served with VMware.”
The acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
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