A poster child of the dot-com boom, LinuxCare has rebranded itself “Levanta,” raised another round of capital. BusinessWeek profiles the company though it’s rise and fall and attempt to rise again and I found the details rather amusing. Levanta sounds a lot like erectile disfunction drug Levitra but it’s possible the company may be able to get their finances up again. Renaming the company seems like an attempt to hide from its past, which BusinessWeek covers in detail. Some highlights from the company’s history. Raised over $70 million in venture capital, including big names such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield &…
Category Archives: Software
You down with A.P.P.?
Lately when talking about the Atom Publishing Protocol I can’t help but think of O.P.P. from Naughty By Nature. I don’t remember how it first got in my head, but now that it’s there I feel the need to share this brain worm. You down with A.P.P.? Yeah, you know me. A.P.P. how can I explain it I’ll take you frame by frame it To have y’all jumpin’ shall we singin’ it A is for Atom P is for Publishing scratchin’ letters The last P…well…that’s not that simple Geeky protocols meet early 90s rap music. Army with harmony….
Yahoo Messenger adds plugins, Y!360 alerts
Yahoo! Messenger now supports plugins, allowing developers to reach a potential audience of 60 million users inside their IM client with HTML and JavaScript. The new plugins can be integrated directly into a chat window or inside a user’s contact list view. Messenger plugins provide easy access to a user’s favorite content but they can also interact with a contact and his or her actions. If your baseball-loving friend logs in the scoreboard plugin could be activated so you have something current to talk about. You can even pre-format a message with the latest statistic from the game. The…
Windows Live Messenger adds new ways to share
Windows Live just released its first official product, taking the beta tag off Messenger and opening it up to the other 90% of its users. Windows Live Messenger adds a new UI for 240 million users of the application formerly known as MSN Messenger. The new IM client allows you to place a call from your PC to any phone, connecting PSTN networks to the soft client through a relationship with Verizon. All Messenger contacts are synchronized using the Windows Live Contacts across Mail, Spaces, and soon other services such as Mobile. Offline messaging is in there too. My favorite…
Bill Gates leaving Microsoft in 2008
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is stepping down from his full-time role at Microsoft to spend more time on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft announced the two year transition plan for Gates shortly after the close of U.S. financial markets. Ray Ozzie will assume Bill Gates’ job title of Chief Software Architect after recently completing his team’s integration of Groove Networks into Office 2007. Bill Gates will be 52 years-old when he steps down from Microsoft and he is currently worth about $50 billion according to Forbes. The current life expectancy for a male in the United States…
Movable Type code repository
Six Apart opened up Subversion access for its Movable Type blogging tool. The new code repository provides a real-time mirror of the team’s internal code base. Movable Type is an enterprise product with enterprise release schedules of about one update per year. The new code repository allows Six Apart to more actively engage its bleeding edge users while still maintaining a QA process, internationalization, and the same license/business model. Open source competitors such as WordPress have of course had open code repositories for years and Movable Type might now be more attractive to developers it is losing to WordPress and…
Windows Live Product Reader
Many people like to keep up with new product announcements and launches across Microsoft but wish they had an aggregated way to keep track of it all. Meet MSReadr! MSReadr is an information aggregator for all of the product team blogs across Microsoft’s Windows Live division. Search, Messenger, Mail, they’re all in there. You can view the latest news right in your browser, subscribe to one feed for updates from all of the blogs, or add the site’s OPML file as a reading list. The site is powered by Python and Sam Ruby’s branch of Planet Planet. The domain…
Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup
Reports are coming in from the Vloggercon conference about Robert Scoble’s latest career move. According to Beet.TV and a few other verbal sources who were at the conference Scoble will publicly announce he is leaving Microsoft within the next few days and joining Silicon Valley startup PodTech.net as a videoblogger. Scoble has been at Microsoft for about three years and plans to move back to the Bay Area. Robert Scoble was employed as a videoblogger at Microsoft’s Channel 9 developer center, interviewing teams across Microsoft on their latest releases and features. Later in his Microsoft career Scoble’s popular blog became…
Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard
I’ll be looking at World Cup schedules every day for the next month, but a few people at Microsoft put together a small application named Soccer Scoreboard to track your favorite team, group, and results from your Windows desktop. It even has a RSS aggregator built-in so you can follow along with the latest news about Rooney’s foot or whatever you’re into. Game times are displayed in your local time and the application is localized to close to 20 languages. Here’s a short list of soccer feeds from around the world if you’d like to add them to Soccer Scoreboard…
URL shortcuts for feed syndication specs
Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you’re looking for. atom.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Atom Syndication Format IETF spec. rdf.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 1.0 spec. rss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 2.0 spec. gdata.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Google’s gData spec. itunes.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Apple podcasting spec mediarss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Yahoo’s Media RSS spec….