OLPC Having Bad Start to 2008

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The calendar has switched over to 2008 and so far it has been anything but a happy new year for the One Laptop Per Child Project. First, OLPC Chief Technology Officer (and the first employee of the OLPC) Mary Lou Jepsen announced that she was stepping down as CTO in order to start a new company. Then we found out that a Nigerian company was suing the OLPC over a claimed patent violation. And then at the end of the week it was announced that Intel was stepping down from the board of the OLPC.
If you're the OLPC, you have to be hoping that the old adage of bad news comes in threes holds up and that they've seen the end of this string of mishaps. And if that is the case, just how damaging are each of these announcements separately?
The Intel news is probably the least unexpected. It was always a strange marriage, and one that in my opinion mainly happened because Intel didn't like the bad publicity it was receiving for fighting with the OLPC. Since this marriage was mainly about PR, it was inevitable that it would break up once issues of commitment, integration and cooperation came up.
Right now I'm not sure how bad this is for OLPC. Intel never stopped promoting its rival Classmate PC system even while part of the OLPC, so right now nothing much has changed. What remains to be seen is if Intel will return to aggressively competing and marketing its laptop against the XO in the developing world. After testing both, I found the Classmate PC to be technically inferior to the OLPC's innovative XO laptop, but of course when money and influence enter the equation quality doesn't always win out.
So on the Intel split the verdict is probably not much right now but could have a big effect in the future. But what about Jepsen's departure?
Well, it's never good when someone talented and creative leaves your organization. But Jepsen has said that she will continue to consult and contribute to the OLPC, which basically puts her on the same footing as many other industry talents who have contributed to the project. Most promising is the fact that Jepsen is starting a new company to commercialize many of the innovations of the XO laptop.
Since I first tested an XO, it has been clear to me that the biggest impact of the XO will be its influence on future generations of mobile systems. Its breakthroughs in display, power and wireless technologies provide capabilities superior to those in expensive commercial laptops. With Jepsen's new company, we could start to see many of these innovations make their way into other products in the very near future.
So it does hurt to lose someone like Jepsen, but I don't see her cutting ties with the OLPC. The XO is in many ways her baby and she will want to see it succeed.
Of course, the toughest thing to evaluate is the patent claim case. In general, I'm suspicious of most patent claims especially those that target groups with humanitarian goals.
But as history has shown, anything can happen once patent cases enter the technologically challenged court systems. So this development does bear watching

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Safari 3.1 is Top Choice for Fast and Lean Browsing

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For most people the current browser wars consist of two combatants, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. Looking in from the outside are alternative browsers that might be interesting but aren't seen as much of a threat to take up lots of market share, such as Opera, which is innovative but unknown to many users, and Safari, which is generally seen as a browser for Mac users (even though there has been a Windows version for almost a year now).
But with the release this week of Safari 3.1, Apple just may have laid claim to being top dog for a key segment of Web surfers. That's because if you're looking for a clean, simplified, and fast Web browser, right now Safari 3.1 is the best choice, whether one is a Windows or Mac user.
And clean is the key attribute of Safari now. As other browsers have continued to become more feature rich but also a bit bloated, Safari has kept to a basic and fairly simple interface and feature set.
Most of the new interface features in Version 3.1 are pretty basic and have been found in competing browsers for a while now. Safari 3.1 now has better tab management, making it easier to move tabbed windows by dragging them.
A new find in page feature has a nice twist by darkening everything on the Web page except for the term entered in the Find field. And like other browsers Safari 3.1 now has a private browsing feature that removes all traces of a browsing session.
In fact, one of the only really unique (and actually pretty cool) new features in Safari 3.1 was for resizing form fields. With this feature it was possible to select any form field in a Web page and drag it to a much larger size, especially useful for those extra long blog comments.
In the previous version Safari on Windows was clearly inferior to its Mac sibling and while the Mac version still has some features that won't be found on Windows (mainly those such as Web Clips that use Mac OS X features), it is now much improved. I especially liked that it now works more like a real Windows application, unlike the previous version which felt like a Mac program vacationing in Windows land.
Much of the attention of this release has focused on the speed of the browser and while I find comparisons of speed in modern browsers to be over-rated (in most cases meaning something loads in half a second as opposed to one second) Safari 3.1 does seem to be a fairly quick browser.
On the standards side Safari 3.1 also does very well, both in support of currently common standards and in cutting edge standards, with some support for new HTML 5 specifications including the new embedded video element. For now Safari also has the distinction of the best score on the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, scoring a 75 in my tests which puts it ahead of all shipping and beta browsers out right now, falling behind only the nightly builds of WebKit.
Of course most of the speed and standards support capabilities in Safari come from the open-source WebKit framework on which it is based. WebKit is also used by other Web applications including Adobe's AIR.
But while Safari 3.1 does very well when the focus is on speed and simplicity, this does come at the cost of extended capabilities. Browsers such as Firefox offer much more in the way of extended functionality, especially if the added features of the many extensions are considered.
But right now, for users who don't need those features and who just want a simple and fast Web browser, Safari 3.1 might just be the best choice.
To download the free Safari 3.1 go to http://www.apple.com/safari/
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WordPress 2.5 Is Top Choice for Blogging

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With the recent release of WordPress 2.5, the popular open-source blogging application has greatly improved its already good administration and blogging management interface and has made it much easier for bloggers to add widgets and do extensive customizations of their blogs. That's right, the best blogging platform just got better.
WordPress 2.5 represents the first major overhaul of the administration interface in a long time and while I never hated the old interface, I have to admit that this new one is a major improvement. Based on the improvements in this release, on top of the already very strong capabilities of WordPress, it's become even clearer that for anyone planning to start a new blog or looking to change platforms, WordPress should be the first choice.
To test WordPress 2.5 I launched brand new blogs and also upgraded existing WordPress installations to the new version. For clean installations everything went very smoothly and the blogging platform continued to live up to the promise of its 5-minute installation process.
While the upgrade process was just as fast, many current WordPress users will probably run into a few bumps after moving to the new WordPress version. For example, I had to change a few security settings to get a new image uploading feature to work and had to make some customizations to my blog themes in order to make a new sidebar widgets feature work.
Of course both of these workarounds were well-documented on the WordPress site and were also accompanied by good tips and experiences from the giant WordPress user community.
The first thing bloggers see when they launch the WordPress administration interface is the dashboard and in 2.5 this has seen some of the biggest changes. The dashboard is now fully widgitized, providing a quick, portal-like interface where users can quickly see stats and information about their blog. And since plug-ins can tie into this interface, the potential customization of the dashboard seems pretty endless.
Writing blog posts has also been greatly improved in this release. The WYSIWYG post editor is now based on TinyMCE 3.0, and I found it to be a very good and simple-to-use rich interface for building attractive blog posts.
Image uploading and management has been boosted with nice features (based on Adobe Flash) for uploading multiple images for use in posts and blog pages. When uploading multiple images we could instantly create an image gallery or slide show for showcasing photos on a subject. Image management in general is much improved, with nice features for sorting and searching for images based on different criteria.
For blogs that have multiple authors and editors, WordPress 2.5 now has post-locking features so that when one author is working on a post another can not jump in and make changes. Tagging has also been baked in throughout WordPress 2.5, making it very easy to add or change tags for content within a blog. Also, the built-in search now searches across both blog posts and static pages.
Just as in past major WordPress upgrades, some plug-ins won't work with the new version, but for some the new version offers much improved management and upgrading for plug-ins, making it possible to automatically install new versions of plug-ins.
The free open-source version of WordPress 2.5 can be downloaded at wordpress.org and users can also get a free hosted version at wordpress.com. Businesses looking for a fully supported installation and support option for WordPress can look to a large community of consultants, including Automattic, a company started by a number of top-level WordPress developers


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Zoho CRM Goes Enterprise

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The recent release of Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a step toward making the software-as-a-service application a good choice for handling sales and customers for a business.
A few of the key features added in this release include SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) security, the ability to manage access and security based on customized user roles, and integration with the Zoho Sheet spreadsheet application.
I was able to take a quick first look at the Enterprise Edition of Zoho CRM and came away impressed with its usability and core feature set. While it may not compete with Salesforce.com and other applications in high-end requirements or the ability to run very large companies, Zoho

CRM Enterprise Edition looks to be a valid option for many small and midsize businesses


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Lenovo, VMware Ink Virtualization Deal

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The agreement looks to bring VMware’s VI3 suite deeper into the Chinese market.
VMware is looking to expand the reach of its virtualization technology deeper into the Chinese IT market, and the virtualization giant has turned to Lenovo to make that happen.
The two companies announced an agreement April 23 that calls for Lenovo to support VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3 software suite across its line of servers that the company sells in China. In addition to distribution, Lenovo also will sell the VI3 platform preinstalled in its servers.
The agreement is similar to one Lenovo signed with Citrix in March to integrate and distribute that company’s XenServer suite with its servers. Citrix entered the virtualization market in 2007 with its acquisition of XenSource.
For VMware, the deal allows the company, which detailed its quarterly earnings this week, to bring its virtualization products deeper into emerging markets. The company, which is mostly owned by storage giant EMC, announced earlier this year that it will invest $100 million in India, and the deal with Lenovo will guarantee that its virtualization technology can compete against both Citrix and Microsoft’s upcoming Hyper-V technology within these developing economies.
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The move also allows VMware to move its product line outside the United States, where the economy continues to slow, especially in the financial sector.
In a statement, VMware President Diane Greene said many Chinese firms are looking at virtualization to help run data centers more efficiently while cutting costs and improving continuity of services.
“Virtualized architectures are gaining momentum in China as a better way to run datacenters,” Greene said.
The deals with Citrix and VMware also places both virtualization companies in good positions when Lenovo begins developing and selling one- and two-socket servers outside of China in 2009. Earlier this year, Lenovo announced a licensing agreement with IBM that will give it access to IBM technology to develop these new systems, which will be initially aimed at small businesses and midmarket companies.
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