MAVEN

NASA wants to send your best haiku... to Mars

For its trip to Mars, NASA wants haikus like this, Why? Because it's cool.

That's pretty much the gist of this whole story, actually. Maybe I should start composing all stories in the form of a haiku to save us all time.

It's no joke, though, that NASA really is collecting submissions of three-line poems from the public to send into space aboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which will launch later this year for a mission to study the Red Planet's atmosphere.… Read more

Yahoo exec rips Google for overpaying for YouTube

Someone from Yahoo has accused Google of overpaying for YouTube.

Oh, the irony.

Steven Mitzenmacher, a Yahoo senior director of corporate development, is skeptical that Google has recouped the $1.65 billion the search company paid in October 2006 to acquire YouTube, the Web's top video-sharing site. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, Mitzenmacher was speaking on a panel at the Global Technology Symposium in Menlo Park, Calif., on Friday. Also on the panel were execs from LinkedIn, Adobe, and Google.

The paper reported Mitzenmacher was ballyhooing Yahoo's plans for "a very big year&… Read more

Commercial open source had very good 2009

2009 was very good for open-source businesses. Sure, there was the very public news of Red Hat's gravity-defying year, along with Novell's SUSE Linux business climbing each quarter, but what of the still-private open-source companies?

It turns out they had much to celebrate, too.

Not every open-source company publicized its progress, but several did:

SugarCRM announced a "record year in terms of revenue, subscriptions and users, adding over 2,000 commercial customers" to bring its total customer base to over 6,000 organizations scattered across 75 different countries. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to the company.) … Read more

Yahoo winding down Maven Networks

Yahoo has decided to shut down a video start-up it acquired last year for $160 million, as part of a wider strategy to pare down its empire.

Maven Networks was brought into Yahoo in February 2008 to help improve the quality of Yahoo's own video technology, as well as build video-serving technology for external companies. But TechCrunch reported Monday that Yahoo is shutting down the project, a move Yahoo has since confirmed.

Yahoo has been in the midst of a house-cleaning effort, to a certain extent, as it attempts to take stock of its famously disparate assets and determine … Read more

What happened to Mars?

BOULDER, Colo.--As anyone who spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching cartoons knows, Martians are for real, and they're green. But for scientists, things aren't quite as certain. So now, a group is setting out to find out whether the Red Planet could in fact have supported life.

In September, NASA awarded the University of Colorado the biggest research grant in the school's history for a project led by professor Bruce Jakosky to investigate the history of the climate on Mars. The idea behind the $486 million project--known as Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or … Read more

Q&A: Mark de Visser, CEO of Sonatype

I had the chance to do a question-and-answer session with Mark de Visser, new CEO of Sonatype. Sonatype was founded in 2007 and bills itself as "The Maven Company." Maven is build and release software for Java. Sonatype boasts all the main Maven developers including the project's founder, Jason van Zyl.

De Visser, for his part, is well-known in open-source business circles as former chief marketing officer at PHP tools maker Zend Technologies and former VP of Marketing at both Red Hat and Agitar. I noted a few months back when De Visser first moved to Sonatype, and I've been wanting to get an update on what's happening in open-source business and why he picked Sonatype.

I think very highly of De Visser. If he chooses Sonatype, there's a good reason behind it. I wanted to hear more.

Asay: Sun's market cap has dropped precipitously, and it's currently around $3 billion. Is this having an effect on Java?

De Visser: Java is a core development language for the enterprise and its portability, flexibility, and scalability continue to be strong points. It's out in the wild. Sun may have problems, both self-inflicted and otherwise, but they're not the only ones having a tough time. Each day brings news of more layoffs in high-tech companies.

Java, the language, however, is growing very quickly based on its strengths. Improving and extending Java will continue to be important.

Asay: So, why now? Why would you choose to start a new company at this point in time? Are you a glutton for punishment?

De Visser: Well, first of all, you give me a little more credit than I deserve for having control over when and how. But I will tell you, now is a great time to be building an open-source company. Software continues to have to be built and companies will be even more motivated to look for efficiency and cost savings during this downturn.

Maven delivers that and Sonatype helps companies adopt Maven with products and expertise. There is no better place in the world to come for support and training for Maven.

It also helps that the product is popular. Incredibly so. The Maven Central Repository has over 70,000 Java artifacts in it, including widely used open-source projects like Apache Commons, JUnit, Lucene, Hibernate, and Spring. The Maven database was linked to 200 million times in November alone. 200 million times!… Read more

Sonatype helps make Maven repository tool a pleasure to use

If you're a Java developer and use Ant or Maven to build your software, there's news coming out this morning that should catch your attention. Sonatype, the company built around supporting Maven, is announcing its Nexus 1.0 release, a repository manager that allows developers and teams to quickly and easily manage internal and external repositories, including the Maven Central Repository.

Behind a build and release framework, managing big repositories of artifacts and tools adds a level of complexity to software development that can slow or kill a build. Great idea, having a big bucket of stuff to … Read more

Yahoo launches new video ads

Yahoo has announced new video ad formats, following the growing number of eyeballs watching video online.

They include clickable ads, which allow viewers to click on them to see a semi-transparent message over the video. Viewers can click on the message to go to the advertiser's site.

Another ad type that is interactive displays a three-second "bumper" that turns into a banner ad above the video window. When the ad is clicked, the video is paused to display the interactive ad.

Yahoo also has integrated overlay ad formats from its Maven Networks purchase into its video products. … Read more

Yahoo acquires Maven Networks

Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has snapped up online video platform provider Maven Networks, in a $160 million deal.

What makes the transaction particularly interesting is that it comes as Yahoo is butting heads with Microsoft, which not so very long ago launched a $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo. As the companies fight over Yahoo's proper valuation, add to the mix the Maven acquisition.

Yahoo and Maven were apparently in merger talks before the Microsoft bid surfaced, with the deal reportedly on the verge of getting inked on Jan. 31 or Feb. 1, according to reports. Microsoft … Read more