I hope fring and skype work this out. It is not good for the users when companies such as Skype don’t play well with others. Think “What Would Google Do?” Google wants users to come to their service through any means. Regardless of how we use Skype, Skype is still benefiting from the use.

TweetShareThis 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 …

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 Outdated processes and an unwillingness to change force overworked IT staff to build an in-house solution where feature creep is rampant and the project never meets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.

I have been a user of Synergy for several years. I first learned about Synergy on an episode of Hak5. It is very simple to set up whether the server or client OS is Linux, Mac or Windows. For the Systems Engineer, it is a godsend. As a Synergy user, I am very excited to read that the project has been picked back up and we will begin seeing new features.

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I once thought of someday seeing an Adroid on the iPhone. Today, it has become a reality. Dev-Team member David Wong (aka Planetbeing) has finally ported the Android Operating System on the iPhone 2G.

There is no question that the h.264 standard is not “free”. A group known as MPEG_LA holds the patent and according to Wikipedia, it is free for end users to use until December 31, 2015.

As the Free Software Foundation states, it may be more widely published and implemented as a standard than flash, but it is no more “free”. I am most curious to know if Apple stands to gain financially from bullying the entire Internet community into using H.264 rather than flash?

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

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.