See EMC’s press release on the deal here .  First, some takeaways from the press release and related coverage: All cash transaction, valuation undisclosed.  See below for some fun and math, trying to guestimate it from standard ratios. Greenplum had raised $61M in venture capital. EMC intends to create a new “data computing” product division and to have Greenplum CEO Bill Cook run it, reporting to Pat Gelsinger .

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EMC Acquires Data Warehouse Vendor Greenplum; Creates New “Data Computing” Product Division

This video will show how to remove the navigation bar in the blogger’s blogspot. It is possible to remove the navigation bar (some call it as Navigation strip) …

Originally posted here:
How to remove the BLOGGER’s Navigation Bar

This is a post on marketing as much as sports.  Here’s my logic: If you want to maximize the audience for your sport, and ergo maximize potential revenues, then outcomes need to be fair.  Professional wrestling excepted (which Wikipedia refers to as “a form of sporting theater”), who wants to watch a sport where the outcome is either random, predetermined, or meaningless? Cycling has been ruined as a sport by doping .  Who wants to invest twenty-something days watching the Tour de France , see Floyd Landis win it, and then get stripped of his title a few days later for doping?  It ruins the fun when people are cheating, and as long as people are cheating the results are meaningless.  Who wants to watch sports where the outcomes are meaningless?  Some people, but not me — I haven’t really followed the Tour since 2006 — and not lots of others.  Ergo, the potential audience is not maximized

Originally posted here:
Doping is to Cycling as Poor Officiating is to Soccer

We are in the middle of one of our periodic analyst tours at MarkLogic , where we meet about 50 top software industry analysts focused in areas like enterprise search, enterprise content management, and database management systems.  The NoSQL movement was one of four key topics we are covering, and while I’d expected some lively discussions about it, most of the time we have found ourselves educating people about NoSQL. In this post, I’ll share the six key points we’re making about NoSQL on the tour. Our first point is that NoSQL systems come in many flavors and it’s not just about key/value stores.  These flavors include: Key/value stores (e.g., Hadoop) Document databases (e.g., MarkLogic, CouchDB) Graph databases (e.g., AllegroGraph) Distributed caching systems (e.g., Memcached) Our second point is that NoSQL is part of a broader trend in database systems :  specialization.  The jack-of-all-trades relational database (e.g., Oracle, DB2) works reasonably well for a broad range of applications — but it is a master of none.  For any specific application, you can design a specialized DBMS that will outperform Oracle by 10 to 1000 times.  Specialization represents, in aggregate, the biggest threat to the big-three DBMS oligopolists.  Examples of specialized DBMSs include: Streambase, Skyler:  real-time stream processing MarkLogic:  semi-structured data Vertica, Greenplum:  mid-range data warehousing Aster:  large-scale (aka “big data”) analytic data warehousing VoltDB:  high volume transaction processing MATLAB:  scientific data management Our third point is that NoSQL is largely orthogonal to specializatio n.  There are specialized NoSQL databases (e.g., MarkLogic) and there are specialized SQL databases (e.g., Aster, Volt).  The only case where I think there are zero examples is general-purpose NoSQL systems.  While I’m sure many of the NoSQL crowd would argue that their systems can do everything, is anyone *really* going to run general ledger or opportunity management on Hadoop?   I don’t think so

See the article here:
Six Thoughts on The NoSQL Movement

Organizers of the Balisage Markup Conference 2010 have published a complete program listing, as well as details about the Pre-conference Symposium: http://www.balisage.net/2010/Program.html http://www.balisage.net/longhaul/LHProgram.html Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.

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[ANN] XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML and Balisage 2010 Details

One of the things that irritates me about Silicon Valley culture is its blatant ageism.  I dislike it for several reasons: Let’s start with the easy one:  it’s illegal .  As an employer you should be looking for someone qualified to do the job, not someone of a specific age.  While certain job requirements may end up setting a de facto lower bound on age (e.g., it’s hard to have a top MBA and 5 years of second-line management experience before you’re 30), age is not something you should talk about in the recruiting or management process.  People who would never say “let’s go find a Baptist to do this job” or “let’s go find a woman” will say things like “let’s go find a 32-year-old,” seemingly unaware it’s the exact same kind of discrimination. The media, probably for the simple reason that it sells more newspapers, drives a distorted perception of age and entrepreneurship.  They love the oneupsmanship of “you found a 17-year-old entrepreneur , well we found a 13-year-old one ” (who, by the way, is also a social media consultant).  They love to write stories like How This Kid Made $60M in 18 Months , despite the fact they aren’t true .  They continue to both directly and indirectly promote the age-entrepreneurship myth despite the fact that the average of technology company founders is 39. In addition to over-promoting the whiz kids, the media almost never does any follow-up, telling us what became of the wunderkinds ten or twenty years later.  That’s why I was surprised to see this story in today’s New York Times, For A Mogul Money and Magic Have Limits , which details the dog’s breakfast whiz kid Halsey Minor has made of things since making a fortune off CNet during the Web 1.0 era.  Find the lessons in this quote:  “he thought he was a billionaire, spending far more than he had … but he really was a multi-millionaire always thinking I’m going to make the big score.” The asymmetric media coverage gives people a distorted sense of reality:  (1) that they must start a company before they’re 30 or they never will, (2) that after 30 they are washed up, (3) that the odds of succeeding in a venture are way higher than they are, (4) that skills are more the determinants of success than luck, and (5) that youth/energy are more important than experience.

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Questioning the Tech Wunderkind Image

Today, in what I consider a surprising move, French PLM and CAD vendor Dassault Systèmes announced the acquisition of French enterprise search vendor Exalead for €135M or, according to my calculator, $161M.  Here is my quick take on the deal: While I don’t have precise revenue figures, my guess is that Exalead was aiming at around $25M in 2010 revenues, putting the price/sales multiple at 6.4x current-year sales, which strikes me as pretty good given what I’m guessing is around a 25% growth rate.  ( This source says $21M in software revenue, though the year is unclear and it’s not clear if software means software-license or software-related.  This source , which I view as quite reliable, says $22.7M in total revenue in 2009 and implies around 25% growth.  Wikipedia says €15.5M in 2008 revenues, which equals exactly $22.7M at the average exchange rate.  This French site says €12.5M in 2008 revenues.  The Qualis press release — presumably an excellent source — says €14M ($19.5M) in 2009 revenues.  Such is the nature of detective work.) I am surprised that Dassault would be interested in search-based applications, Exalead’s latest focus.  While PLM vendors have always had an interest in content delivery and life-cycle documentation (e.g., a repair person entering feedback on documentation that directly feeds into future product requirements) , I’d think they want to buy a more enterprise techpubs / DITA vendor than a search vendor to do so as in the PTC / Arbortext deal of 2005.  Nevertheless, Dassault President and CEO Bernard Charlès said that with Exalead they could build “a new class of search-based applications for collaborative communities.”  There is more information, including a fairly cryptic video which purports to explain the deal, on a Dassault micro-site devoted to the Exalead acquisition , which ends with the phrase:  search-based applications for lifelike experience.  Your guess as to what that means is as good as mine. I think those who position Exalead as “ France’s Google ” are misguided.  Exalead was very clearly an enterprise software company that used its Internet search site as a demo of its capabilities, much as DEC long ago used AltaVista as a demo of the Alpha chip or Vivisimo (until the recent sale to Yippy) used Clusty as a demo of its clustering technology, or for that matter, as MarkLogic uses MarkMail as a demo of our XML server .  In there ever was a European attempt at Google, it was Quaero , which I always viewed as the Airbus of search

Link:
Quick Take on the Dassault Systèmes Acquisition of Exalead

“Balisage: The Markup Conference” (http://www.balisage.net ) is an annual peer-reviewed XML conference: how to create markup; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space). Come to lovely Montreal, Canada from August 3rd to 6th for four action-packed days of angle brackets! Here’s a baker dozen (or so) sampling from the much larger list of Balisage 2010 presentations: * gXML, a new approach to cultivating XML trees in Java * Java integration of XQuery – an information unit oriented approach * Reverse modeling for domain-driven engineering of publishing technology * Managing semantics in XML vocabularies * XML pipeline processing in the browser * Where XForms meets the glass: Bridging between data and interaction design * Schema component paths for schema analysis * A streaming XSLT processor * Multi-structured documents and the emergence of annotations vocabularies * Processing arbitrarily large XML using a persistent DOM * Automatic upconversion using XProc * Scripting documents with XQuery * XQuery design patterns * Parallel processing and your XML data Want to travel on the weekend so you can talk about angle brackets for an extra day? Then register for the pre-conference symposium on August 2nd, “XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML”

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[ANN] Balisage 2010 – XML Conference – Schedule
Posted!

Scott Fillmer portfolio and resume review.

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The Portfolio Project

Today at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting, we discussed the document license for HTML 5. We discussed use cases from the HTML Working Group that call for a more open license than the current W3C Document License . The result of discussion among the Membership is that there is strong support for: a license that allows the reuse of excerpts in software, software documentation, test suites, and other scenarios; a license (or licenses) that are familiar to the open source community; processes that encourage innovation and experimentation about Web technology, so that work can be easily brought to W3C for standardization; making the HTML Working Group a forum that is conducive to participation by the community at large; ensuring that the HTML 5 specification remains valuable to the entire Web community (see an update from Philippe Le Hégaret on HTML that he presented to the Membership)

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Update on HTML 5 Document License