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Palm CEO Turned Down Apple No-Poach Proposal - PC Magazine

Availability an issue for Amazon EC2, Google AppLogic and Microsoft Azure.

Stress tests conducted by Sydney-based researchers have revealed that the infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues.

The team of researchers, led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and in collaboration with researchers at NICTA (National ICT Australia) and the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), have spent seven months stress testing Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services.

I’m here at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, where the latest batch of the incubator program’s startups are showing off the fruits of their labor to a room of press and VCs from around Silicon Valley. The turnout today is huge —  VCs representing billions of dollars in managed funds are here, with investors from US Venture Partners, XG Ventures, Founder’s Fund, Greylock Ventures, First Round Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, True Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Venrock, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, FBfund, renowned angel investor Ron Conway and more in attendance. There are also plenty of executives from established companies, including Google exec Bradley Horowitz. Past Demo Days have certainly received their fair share of attention, but it seems like YC’s larger class size, and perhaps the companies themselves, are bigger draws than ever.

Google’s Enterprise Search offerings have steadily grown in both strength and innovation over the past few years. As we reported in June, Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Most recently, Google improved the scalability of its enterprise search appliance (also known as the GSA), allowing businesses to search billions of documents. Today, Google added two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both available in Google’s Enterprise Labs, which is similar to Gmail Labs.

Facebook has submitted v. 3.0 of their iPhone application to Apple, Joe Hewitt Twitter: “Just uploaded Facebook for iPhone 3.0 to the App Store for review. :)”

Hewitt also says he’ll post screen shots and more detais on this Facebook page for the iPhone app next week, and that he’s looking forward to getting started on v. 3.1 tomorrow.

In 2004, KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef had no idea his interest in developing an open source document management product would thrust his South African company into prominence.That's the time a government agency there approached him to help the Medical Research Council retain control of its documents and track shared access.

That South African council is an agency much like the U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health). Being summoned to help such an influential group was an unexpected boost in growing his business. Chalef maximized the opportunity by using the open source model to his company's best advantage -- he developed a community-based free version to get his product known. He then grew its sales potential through a commercial version available as both stand-alone and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.

My first reaction to Microsoft's Thursday announcement that it will release a new version of its Office suite for the Mac in 2010 can be summed up in one word: Why? The very notion of a software suite like Office seems completely out-of-date.

Of course, I know perfectly well the reason Microsoft wants to keep pumping out new versions of Office across all the platforms it serves: The suite accounts for about 30 percent of Microsoft's overall revenue. But as a buyer, I just don't get it.

A Dell executive said that his company's Linux netbook returns are roughly equivalent to those for Windows-based netbooks, says an industry report. The remarks were in response to Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, who gave a speech claiming Linux netbook returns were four or five times higher.

At OpenSource World (formerly LinuxWorld) in San Francisco this week, Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, decided to set the record straight on return rates for Dell's Linux-based Inspiron Mini netbooks, writes Gavin Clarke in The Register. Saying Linux return rates were a "non-issue," Finch is quoted as saying that Microsoft was "making something of nothing."