Short overview on the 4 Internet big-players. Impressive…..

Amazon

– founder: Jeff Bezos
– created in: 1994
– presented in 7 countries
– number of employees: 9’000
– profitable since: 2003
– IPO: spring 1997
– revenues 2004: $5 billion, net income: $430 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $12.6 billion
– available cash: $1.15 billion
– some record figures: during last Chritsmas, in one day ==> 2.8 million orders, i.e. 32 orders per second!

Yahoo!

– founders: Jerry Yang, David Filo
– created in: 1994
– number of full-time employees: 7’600
– profitable since: 2002
– IPO: April 1996
– revenues 2004: $3.5 billion, net income: $839 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $49 billion
– available cash: $3.8 billion
– some record figures: 165 million users

eBay

– founder: Pierre Omidyar
– created in: 1995
– presented in 33 countries
– number of employees: 5’700
– profitable since: 1996
– IPO: September 1998
– revenues 2004: $3.3 billion, net income: $778 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $42.2 billion
– available cash: $1.2 billion
– some record figures: 430 million products available on eBay, 147 million users

Google

– founders: Larry Page, Sergey Brin
– created in: 1998
– number of employees: 3’000
– profitable since: 2001
– IPO: September August 2004
– revenues 2004: $3.2 billion, net income: $400 million
– market capitalization (March 2005): $61 billion
– available cash: $2.5 billion
– some record figures: 200 million search requests per day

I like really very much this gadget from Nextway, with a incredible geek-name, the “D Cube NMP-612T“, a kind of quite impressive all-in-one device:

• MP3/WMA player, ID3Tag support

• MP3 decoding : MPEG1 layer3 (32-320Kbps), MPEG2 layer3 (8-160Kbps)
• WMA decoding : (32-192Kbps)
• MP3 encoding : (8-256Kbps)

Some reviews:

• TechCentral
• mp3-player (in German)

[via BetaNews]

In the absence of an offering from Sun, the Apache Foundation will begin a project to create open source Java for desktop computers called “Project Harmony.” Citing broad community interest, the project will create a version of the Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) runtime platform that is compatible with Sun’s Java.

The project is possible because Sun changed the licensing rules for J2SE 5.0 and liberalized the Java Community Process.

Project leads stressed that the project is not poised to compete with Sun, which has opposed efforts to open source Java due to legal considerations. Project Harmony will be compatible with Sun’s standard specifications and compatibility will be ensured by licensing and testing with Sun’s TCK, which is available free of cost to non-profits.

Apache’s efforts will be monitored by a code auditing process that will make certain that legal problems do not occur. Developers from Kaffe and Classpath, makers of open source virtual machines, will contribute to Harmony.

Commenting on the project, Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice president, wrote in his Web blog, that “Apache have always been a strong supporter of the Java compatibility program and I’m glad to see that they are emphasizing that commitment to compatibility as part of the Harmony project. Compatibility is one of the bedrock values of the Java community.”

“The licensing rules for J2SE 5.0 were carefully designed to allow independent, compatible open-source implementations of the J2SE specification,” added Hamilton. “Personally, I am not entirely sure if the world really needs a second J2SE implementation, but at the same time I am also glad to see that all the effort we put into getting the rules and the licensing issues straightened out is actually proving useful!”

Sun has said that it will participate in the project in some way. The Apache Foundation welcomes the involvement of any interested parties and has encouraged dialog within the Java community.

Thomas should be proud of that study, Denmark is Number one. A good argument for one of his last post :-)

Interesting free study (pdf, 281kb) from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

A country’s e-readiness is essentially a measure of its e-business environment, a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities.

[…] The e-readiness rankings are a weighted collection of nearly 100 quantitative and qualitative criteria, organised into six distinct categories measuring the various components of a country’s social, political, economic and of course technological development.

[…] E-readiness is not simply a matter of the number of computer servers, websites and mobile phones in the country (although these naturally form a core component of the rankings), but also such things as its citizens’ ability to utilise technology skillfully, the transparency of its business and legal systems, and the extent to which governments encourage the use of digital technologies.

The 25 first countries:

[via vowe]

Interesting.

IBM has scared customers by making too much noise about unproven technology. And though they are now trying to paint Notes as a part of Workplace, it may be too late. I know that IBM can come up with numbers of how successful they are doing but I am unphased. BPs I talk to are not seeing interest in Workplace in the SMB space. The enterprise sources I have do not paint a different picture. Smaller ISVs are asking whether it makes sense to release a WP product as there is no customer demand.

Synop finally released a new major release (v2.0) of its free feed reader, called SauceReader. The last version 1.9 was launched in October 2004 (cf. my post here).

So, why did the Synop’s guys need so much time? It seems they had some issues with .NET.

Sauce Reader 2.0 is a complete rewrite and no longer requires the .NET framework. Using .NET for Sauce Reader v1 we were never able to achieve the level of performance we considered appropriate for a heavily used productivity application. .NET is a compelling and powerful platform, but currently unsuitable for widely adopted client side applications.

Oups.

What are the new features?
– Office 2003 style user interface.
– Integrated weblog posting with drafts and offline authoring.
– Comment feed subscriptions, archiving, posting and search.
– One-click subscription to RSS and Atom feeds using IE toolbar.
– Search archived items using Sauce Reader or desktop search tools.
– Feeds tree and newspaper style views.
– Fast, small and scalable to your reading requirements.
– Automatic migration from oldder versions.
This version is clearly *MUCH* faster than the v1.9. Also the memory requested by SauceReader is now reasonable (about 14MB). I like the new interface. Great job!

I know, I am a bit late, but anyway, I forgot to talk about a study (pdf, 261KB) from the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored and published by Dimension Data. This study includes the findings of a global survey of 500 Senior Executives, which identifies the most important management challenges facing the world’s leaders.

CEO briefing at a glance

Conclusions about the future

1. Companies strive for growth in an uncertain environment.
2. Competition for offshoring intensifies.
3. China as opportunity, risk and competitive threat.
4. Technology: disrupting industries, organising business: for the first time since the dotcom crash, advances in technology are seen as the single most important driver of change.
5. Managing scarcity: specially oil and talents.
6. Governance goes global: Companies will continue to march towards their compliance deadlines, but there is also a greater emphasis on the broader aspects of governance.
7. Corporate agility as pre-requisite for survival: shifting from fixed cost-structures to the variable cost-structures associated with outsourcing

Strategic importance of technologies

Strategies for growth

Outsourcing strategies

Expected benefits from technology

Critical forces for change

After having studied a bit the concerts programme 2005 of the Montreux Jazz Festival, we decided ourselves for the evening of the July 11 2005 at the Casino Barrière with:

• Dianne Reeves Trio
• George Duke & Band

Sexy, jazzy and groovy evening in perspective!

Wow, again, a great increase in my traffic. More and more readers, thanx a lot! I think I have to be a little more careful with what I am posting. Nooo, I am kidding, no pressure :-)

Technical statistics April 2005

• number of hits: 298’115 (daily average: 9’937)
• number of pageviews: 62’986 (daily average: 2’100)
• number of sessions: 36’424 (daily average: 1’214)
• bytes transferred: 8.22 GB (daily average: 0.27GB)

Traffic development – April 2005

Some highlights – April 2005

• Increase April / March 2005:

• Hits: +63%
• Pageviews: +42%
• Sessions: +55%
• bytes transferred: +43%

• 13’206 hits
• 2’827 pageviews
• 1’482 sessions
• 385 MB transferred

Requested pages April 2005

• weblog: 87% (thereof atom.xml: 23%)
• website: 11%
• robots.txt: 2%

Browsers April 2005

Top 15 – Identified countries – April 2005

(excepted .com, .net, .edu, .org)

73 different countries accessed my blog during the last month (Andorra to Yugoslavia).

Last months

February 2005
March 2005