gangxinfc.com

But then, perhaps it’s not surprising since Google, ranked second on the list, largely does the same.

That’s amazing.

While the list is predominately comprised of proprietary-software companies, CIOZone points out that these vendors are succeeding precisely because they, too, are changing the game from a proprietary license model to a subscription model:

For smaller companies (more than $50 million in sales and less than $150 million), Omniture (Utah-based - hurray!) leads the pack with a 79.5 percent growth rate on a $143 million base. Not too shabby.

While it was a good year for many software vendors, it was particularly good for companies that have discarded the older paradigm of install-and-maintain and are making their products available as online subscriptions.

Here is the first third of CIOZone.com’s list of the top 60 fastest-growing, public software companies with revenue of at least $150 million.

commentary

Software that increases the efficiency of corporate data centers, or that runs as an Internet-delivered service, is on a roll. Most of the fastest-growing software companies are doing one or the other….

What’s most impressive in the list, however, is the growth rate being sustained by Oracle and Microsoft, because they’re growing from a much larger base. It’s fantastic that Red Hat is growing at 33 percent on a ~$500 million base. But Microsoft is growing by 25.7 percent on a $57 billion base, and Oracle is rising 24.9 percent on a $20 billion base.

This bodes well for open-source companies, for two reasons. One, many SaaS companies depend on open source (and will pay for it) to run their businesses.especially as an increasing number operate with a dual-mode model wherein they make their software available as an open-source download, with a pay-for-SaaS model to complement that. Kaltura, Loopfuse, and others are adopting this model, and I think it promises to be a highly profitable model for those that can pull it off.

(Credit:
CIOZone.com)

CIOZone.com has ranked the top-60 fastest-growing (public) software companies of at least $150 million in revenue, with VMware leading the pack and Red Hat claiming 12th place with a 33.6 percent growth rate. Not bad for a company that gives away its software for free.

Barring a real nuclear winter, I expect they’ll still be around for quite some time.

The knock against Web 2.0 is that it’s chockablock with me-two, doodad makers, companies fated to blow away like prairie grass at the first sign of a storm. Some of that is true. But when you walk the floor at Web 2.0, you see that this year’s conference is dominated by serious companies with serious products: Disney, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Cisco-Webex, Oracle, Juniper, Google, EMC–well, you get the idea. (You can find the full list in the program guide.)

SAN FRANCISCO–So there was Marc Andreessen, scaring the bejeesuz out of the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo here with talk of a “nuclear winter” descending upon techdom. Maybe it was the Lex Luthor resemblance that made it seem extra sinister.

For the record, this line is becoming old hat for Andreesen–in a blog post he wrote after Ning raised $60 million net in a private round of funding, Andreesen said the money would “enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (more than 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash-flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”

(Credit:
Seth Rosenblatt/CNET Networks)

So why the lingering insecurity?

That’s true. It’s also true that many of the smaller companies are ready to grab the first good offer that comes their way.

“You look at CPMs for a lot of the social-media platforms we work with and you wonder about the CPMs,” said an executive who asked to remain unidentified. This guy was one of the smart ones: he took the money last year and decided to hang around the mother ship–at least for the foreseeable future–and run the division. “Unless they run a very small shop, it’s going to be really hard for them to make serious money. But that’s the dream that drives everybody so, why not?”

Marc Andreessen: Watch out or…kaboom!

Why not, indeed? After all, it worked for Andreessen.

Nothing controversial about being conservative in uncertain times. Still, a nuclear winter? Author and Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain followed Andreessen onstage–via a recorded transmission –by pondering grim Internet scenarios lurking just over the horizon. The odd thing is that I’ve heard similar hedge-your-bet comments all week. This is a crew that survived the last bubble and they know from firsthand experience that a lucky rabbit’s foot won’t be enough to get by in case lightning strikes twice.

“I think it depends on your perspective–that is, where in the market you are in terms of the growth curve and users,” said Kaku Srivastava, general manager at Flickr. “From where we’re sitting, we’re bullish.”

Organize your followers in groups like family, friends or contacts

Use your mobile device to stay in touch with your followers, to take and share images, to shout out where you are

Discover what’s going on around you

Here are some of the other planned features (via the mass e-mail):

You will be informed if a follower is close to your location

Threaded discussions

Create different kind of ’spreads’ like message, poll, link, review, event

We’ll have a hands-on when Blummi launches later this year. In the meantime, I think it’s safe to use the beta sign-up form, as the creators have issued a smart apology–with bcc on.

The service is reminiscent of Brightkite, a location-based social network that we checked out back in April. Where it’s got potential is for both providing a way to sort out Twitter contacts by group, and help you discover people nearby who share your interests. If Tapulous’ Twinkle has proven anything, this can make discovery both creepy and engaging at the same time .

Control if your followers have read your tweet

Blummi, a service that’s due to open up its public beta in “the next few months” did just that Friday morning. Now I’ve got more than a hundred strangers able to send me, and everyone else on the list an e-mail with just a click of a button–a few already have.

Meet new friends with same interests (Blummi will bring you together)

Share your ’spreads’/tweets

Here’s a tip to fledgling start-ups: If you’ve got a huge list of e-mail addresses from people who are interested in trying out your service, don’t forget to send out your pre-announcement as a blind carbon copy (bcc).

Add privileges (e.g. can see my exact location or can see only my city) to your followers groups

Discover how far away your followers are or what they are interested in

Comment images, links, polls and see who will join your events and what your followers are planning to do these days

Russians may soon get their chance to queue up to buy the Apple iPhone. Legally, that is.

When Apple announced the latest
iPhone, the 3G, in June, CEO Steve Jobs set a goal of getting the device into 70 countries “over the next several months.” But in the big map of the world on display during his keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Russia was a large and conspicuous void–as was its sizable neighbor, China.

Official sales of the iPhone are likely to start in October, with a deal having been reached between Apple and Mobile TeleSystems, Russia’s largest carrier, according to the Reuters news agency, citing market sources. A second, carrier has also signed a framework agreement, and a third deal is in the offing, Reuters reported.

The iPhone 3G.

Also at WWDC in June, Jobs said he expected Apple to sell 10 million phones this year.

(Credit:
Apple)

There are reportedly 600,000 unauthorized iPhones already in Russian hands.

The price to Russian consumers is expected to be 24,000 rubles, or about $990. That’s far higher than the price in the U.S., but much less, Reuters said, than the price of unauthorized iPhones already being scooped up in Russia.

A mobile telecommunications analyst told Reuters that MTS aims to sell 1 million iPhones within two years, and that total sales by the top three carriers over that two-year period are expected to hit 3.5 million units.

I will be discussing travel sites like this one in the weekly Real Deal podcast I’m recording this afternoon with Tom Merritt. Tune in to the live video and chat at 3 p.m. PDT or check on the podcast page shortly after 4 p.m. for the recorded audio-only version.

Travel fare and deal finder site Mobissimo has added a social feature, called MobiFriends, that lets you tell your pals where you’re going and when, what you’re paying for your trips, and your favorite restaurants at your destinations. It optionally updates your Twitter feed, too, so now anyone tracking you can know the optimal time to burgle your house.

There seems to be a minor bubble growing right now of travel update sites. Like Dopplr, Tripit, and BrightKite, MobiFriends does a good job of reaching out to your network and telling them what you’re up to, so your pals can presumably join you at your destination and make the virtual social network real. MobiFriends’ unique value is its integration into Mobissimo, a strong fare finder. If you use MobiFriends on top of Mobissimo, you can easily push your travel discoveries (good fares, for example) out to your friends. Or see the deals and locations your friends are interested in.

I’m not one to blast my travel or location info out to the world at large, but the younger demographic may not be so sensitive to privacy as I am. And Mobissimo’s move to add a social element to its fare-finder service is a good way to differentiate the product from a sea of travel sites.

The MobiFriends widget will blast your travel details out to your social network, if you want it to.

While the data doesn’t point to Firefox’s imminent world domination, it does beg an equally intriguing question: why are so many of the technical elite still using Internet Explorer at all?

Not that I consider myself among the “technical elite,” but I can’t remember the last time I used IE (though I use
Microsoft Office on a daily basis, so it’s not due to a determined desire to not use Microsoft technology). Of course, the “technical elite” in question here includes web designers and developers, a group that can’t easily abandon use of the industry’s market-leading web browser.

In sum, if the web designers stick with IE because they have to, why are so many dumping their duty and using Firefox instead? I use Firefox because it’s better. Is “better” swaying web designers and developers away from IE, where 73 percent of the market still resides, according to Hitslink?

commentary

Data provided by w3schools.com

Unfortunately, the data is gathered from a sampling of techies, not mainstream users. As such, it’s not time to uncork the champagne and dance on Microsoft’s corporate grave just yet.

(Credit:
Webmonkey)

Webmonkey flatters to deceive with numbers that suggest that Mozilla’s
Firefox could exceed Internet Explorer’s market share by the middle of 2009.

But if this is the case, why are so many flocking to Firefox?

But the debate
over subscriptions misses the point. The deal involves only one of the big four record labels. Music listeners don’t know and don’t care about record labels. They know their favorite songs and artists. If the songs aren’t available on one service, they’ll turn to another service–like iTunes or Amazon.com MP3–where they are available.

Today’s example: the Universal Music Group, the largest of the big four record labels, is teaming up with BSkyB, a U.K. satellite TV network owned by News Corp., to offer a subscription-based music service by the end of this year. I don’t have anything against subscription services: although none of them have been as successful as Apple’s iTunes, which is a pure download service, Rhapsody has some devoted fans. Plus, it sounds like the service will be more akin to eMusic’s subscription-plus-download plan, offering a set number of MP3 downloads for each subscription level. (Pricing and other details have not yet been announced.)

Meanwhile, over at iTunes, more than 5 billion downloads have been sold.

One more time, just because it's so funny….

If the major labels want to create a viable alternative to iTunes, they’ll have to team up first, ideally bringing indies in on the game, then find a distribution channel. Not the other way around.

BSkyB says it’s going to try and sign other labels up for the service. But this is what Nokia said last year when it announced its Comes With Music plan–essentially a pre-paid subscription for unlimited downloads to certain Nokia phones (the subscription’s added to the price of the phone). And how’s that working out? The service is delayed, EMI’s still holding out (although it might come on board before launch), and there’s nothing about the indie labels and unsigned bands that have helped make MySpace and eMusic and CDBaby.

(Credit: @2007 Joel Watson)

It’s so cute when the major labels do this digital thing–they’re sort of like your doddering old uncle who once got a patent for a new kind of horse-and-buggy harness and now sits in the basement tinkering with bridles all day.

Click here for more stories on Amazon’s Kindle.

An earlier Internet-publishing foray by King, Riding the Bullet, was a case study in Internet piracy.

When Amazon.com hosts its anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.

This wouldn’t be King’s first tech-related effort. During the dot-com boom, the best-selling author posted chapters of a serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet in a bid to see if readers would pay voluntarily for what they were reading. He suspended the work in late 2000 after the sixth installment.

The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.

The Journal says a Kindle-like device is a factor in the story. The work by King might later be published in physical book form by Scribner, King’s current publisher. (Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, whose CBS Interactive unit is the publisher of CNET News.)

Based on comments by Chairman Bill Gates and CTO Craig Mundie in the last few days, you might think Microsoft has not lost its lust for Yahoo. With no alternatives in sight, Yahoo may be rethinking its terms and conditions for becoming part of Microsoft. In this video, I outline the latest moves and nuances of the Microhoo affair.

2008 is the year of the solid state drive. That’s what Sun Microsystems believes as reliability finally measures up to the rigorous requirements of server storage and the cost per gigabyte plunges.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is expected to deliver Flash-based products to market in the second half of 2008. Sun did not cite price or capacities. Today, typical large-capacity enterprise SSD capacities start at 32GB but can range up to 512GB.

(Credit:
Sun Microsystems)

Solid-state drive suppliers Intel and Samsung have both discussed the huge potential for servers. Samsung said previously that companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS, or input/output operations per second. Hard disk drives typically achieve 120 to 150 IOPS, while SSDs are in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS, according to Samsung.

Intel also sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a “performance accelerator.” The chipmaker cited a streaming video example where 10 SSDs could essentially handle the same workload as 62 high-performance hard disk drives.

Sun sees SSDs as a watershed technology. “Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun Systems Group.

On Wednesday, Sun announced that it is preparing to introduce solid-state drive (SSD) technology that “will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers.” Sun said it is already shipping Solaris ZFS software “optimized” for SSDs.

Sun follows storage vendor EMC, which announced integration of solid-state drives into its product portfolio in January.

Though Sun is not specifying suppliers, Intel confirms that it has collaborated with Sun on SSD development for servers. Intel is slated to bring out high-capacity SSDs in the second half of the year.

(Credit:
Intel)

Plunging cost is another factor. “Enterprise-class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually,” Sun said.

Solid-state drives give “customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning (hard disk drive) disk offerings,” according to a prepared statement by Sun.

Sun StorageTek server array

In addition to performance benefits, SSDs “save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives (and) decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers,” Sun said. “SSDs consume around one-fifth of the power of both memory…and disk drives, have no rotating media and consume very little power when not in use.”

Intel is targeting SSDs for consumer and server storage