Peter Galli

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will use the annual Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18 to announce the public beta release of Popfly, a tool built on Microsoft Silverlight that lets people build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications. Users can use Popfly to add games, slide shows, Halo 3 statistics or eBay […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Rupert Murdoch, CEO and chairman of News Corp., said he believes that Silicon Valley is the most exciting place on earth. “We are gong through a period of incredible innovation that is getting faster and faster, and this [Silicon Valley] is at the center of it all,” he told attendees at the opening dinner […]

SAN FRANCISCO—MySpace plans to open up its platform to external developers in the next few months, company CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe said at the opening dinner at the annual Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18. “Once we do that, we will create a sandbox of 2 million users to test those applications to make […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer refused to say whether the software company was looking to buy either Yahoo or Facebook, despite much prodding from John Batelle, the co-host of the Web 2.0 Summit here Oct. 18. But Redmond does expect to acquire about 20 companies—from $50 million to $1 billion—every year for the next five […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft is late to the Unified Communications game and their offering is inadequate, say executives at Siemens Communications, a stalwart and market leader of the UC space. Microsoft unveiled here, on Oct. 16, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, two products core to its UC offering and Microsofts claims of the click-to-communicate […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The vendor-centric PBX era is behind us and the new unified communications era is upon us, bringing innovative phones and devices, interoperable applications, an open communications software platform, and an industry-standard IT infrastructure—all from multiple vendors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the launch event for its unified communications software here Oct. 16. […]

As Microsoft announced the availability of its unified communications software at a launch event in San Francisco on Oct. 16, attended by partners, press and some two thousand customers, Chairman Bill Gates sent customers an executive e-mail detailing not only how far we have come on the communications front, but also how far we still […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—The first beta of Version 8.3 of the open-source PostgreSQL database has been released, with dozens of new and improved features, Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL core team and strategic lead in Suns database technology group, said. Oct.15. The first beta for PostgreSQL 8.3 has more code than any previous version, […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Sun Microsystems delivered in September the second version of GlassFish, its project to build a free, open-source application server to implement the newest features in the Java Enterprise Edition 5 platform, and has more projects on the way. When the second-generation Java Enterprise Edition 5-compliant application server was delivered, customers did not have […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Sun Microsystems wants its OpenJDK project to spawn a vibrant developer community during the next year. There are a number of projects under way within the OpenJDK community, and a multilanguage virtual machine project was proposed this past week, Mark Reinhold, chief engineer of Suns Java platform, told attendees Oct. 15 at Suns […]