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The second generation of the Asus Eee PC, which we first wrote about earlier this month, will apparently include a few more features unseen on its predecessor. DigiTimes is reporting that the laptop’s 9-inch display will be a touch-screen panel, and the new models may include GPS support. The presumed launch date for the next-generation Eee PCs remains May or June of this year.

While I welcome the larger screen size (it’s better for Web browsing), I’ve never found a touch screen to be that much of a bonus outside of a tablet form factor. The possible GPS support seems more helpful; paired with some decent software you can potentially eliminate the need for a separate navigation unit.

But I can’t help wondering if these developments are pulling the Eee PC from its primary selling point: low price. Reports have priced the second-generation model anywhere from $500 to $600. Granted, that’s not much more than the current Eee PC, and it does include such welcome improvements as increased RAM and a larger drive. But it also teeters dangerously close to the cost of more full-featured budget laptops from the major manufacturers. In a field that seems to grow more crowded every day, will consumers accept a slightly higher price point? Will you?

Via Laptoping

John M. Willis has put together a matrix of the major players in the cloud right now including some of the companies that enable and others that are just offerings.

It’s an interesting exercise to figure out how all these parts fit together and considering that the SaaS providers don’t have a reason to disclose what’s going on behind the scenes I bet there is a ton of other software that is not represented here.

Just knowing what I know about Mule’s adoption in SaaS companies I can tell you that we are enabling several businesses already. It would also be interesting to know how many of these cloud companies are using open source–especially MySQL and Spring as part of their environments

Disclosure: I work for MuleSource, an open source software vendor.

By joining the Linux Foundation, CME Group will be able to collaborate with key Linux developer and vendors. CME Group’s Vinod Kutty, associate director and head of distributed computing R&D, will become chair of the Linux Foundation’s End User Council. The Council is a group of the largest Linux end users who use the forum to collaborate and educate themselves on technical, legal and community efforts.

I’ve been pining lately for greater enterprise participation in open source, following the lead set by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, and so was excited to see the recent news that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has joined the Linux Foundation. For CME, time is money, with a record 2.2 billion contracts in 2007 worth more than $1.2 quadrillion, all running on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in this case).

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In other words, CME wants to be both a producer and a consumer of open-source software, and specifically Linux in this case. CME has been a longstanding user of Linux, deriving considerable value from Red Hat Enterprise Linux since at least 2004. Now it’s time to start giving something back.

But what does CME get from joining the Linux Foundation?

This calls to mind Ian Murdock’s comments this morning at Sun’s CommunityOne conference. Ian suggested that the cloud platforms may be taking us back in time, back to the days when a few proprietary platform vendors locked us into their ecosystems. We eventually settled on Windows as the proprietary platform, and seem to be replacing it with a slightly larger number of proprietary cloud platforms.

I don’t know how credible Morph Labs is as a company, but the idea is spot on. It’s also a fascinating example of how Amazon is doing “cloud software” right: Letting its EC2 community determine what to run and how to run it in the Amazon cloud.

[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google’s Microsoft-like vendor lock-in….

The downside? Your applications effectively become Google’s applications because there’s no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google’s authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google’s.

Google’s AppEngine looks great. It’s a way to build web applications and run them on Google’s “cloud” infrastructure.

Morph promises to deliver the same SaaS effect as App Engine using open source software like PostgreSQL on Amazon. No proprietary database, no proprietary APIs, no proprietary framework.

This is progress?

Enter Morph Labs.

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I’m optimistic that things like Morph Labs on Amazon’s cloud service will become the norm, rather than a closed ecosystem like Google’s AppEngine. We can hope.

“Today, we learned that certain photos could be viewed by unauthorized users who employed a complicated hack,” a spokesman wrote in an e-mail. “Once we were notified of the issue, it was resolved within hours. These photos are no longer available to unauthorized users. We encourage security researchers examining Facebook to practice responsible disclosure.”

Basically, someone who knew the serial number of a Facebook user, which is easy to get, and knew a trick for rejiggering the URL, could see private photos of that user. Small photos could also be changed to display in a larger size. The vulnerability only could be exploited with
Firefox browsers.

Facebook has filled a hole that allowed strangers to view members’ photos through the mobile version of the site, a spokesman said Tuesday after being alerted to the problem by CNET News Monday night.

Facebook had a similar problem with photos being exposed to strangers in March, and has suspended third-party apps that violated the privacy of users who downloaded them. To minimize the risk, the company will soon be launching a program to verify the security of the outside apps.

“This week’s hole is as good as the March 2008 thing, but easier to do,” said Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada-based computer technician who notified CNET News of the problem. “And it allows you to target anyone.”

CNET News verified the hole before it was fixed and was able to see a private photo of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, among others.

A few years ago, RSA Security (the company not the
conference) CEO Art Coviello said that he didn’t believe there would be a standalone security market by the end of the decade. I wouldn’t go this far, but it is clear to me from this year’s conference that security is slowly blending into IT and the business.

Hmm. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year’s conference is called the RSA Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance Conference–a bit cumbersome, but an increasingly more accurate description of the proceedings.

• I noticed a much bigger presence from the VC community this year. I can only imagine that there was some back-room wheeling and dealing at fire-sale prices. Look for some deals soon.

• Everyone said that they are feeling the economic pinch in their businesses with deals getting smaller and often delayed.

• Ironically, with all of the industry cost-cutting, trade shows are an absolute rip-off and this one takes the cake. Want bottled water in your booth? How about $100 for a case (i.e. 24) of 8-ounce bottles? Want a table and chairs? OK, $500 per day. How do these show organizers get away with this type of extortion?

Jon Oltsik is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

• After a bit of a security hiatus, Microsoft is back and talking about its next generation of security products and strategies. I found Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s keynote on security and privacy especially compelling and will blog about it later.

After four days of endless meetings, cocktail parties, and security discussions, I had a rainy weekend in Boston to reflect on last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco. Here are some of my general impressions:

• The security market is certainly tipping toward big vendors. IBM and Hewlett-Packard presented very compelling security stories that highlight process and IT service management–not products. Bad news for security widget vendors–and there are still a lot of them around.

More tellingly, we’re seeing experimentation in novel areas of software. Matthew didn’t mention Acquia and OpenX, both of which recently raised rounds, but they (along with Ringside and the others mentioned) take open source into new territory. This is the key takeaway. Open-source venture investment has proved that classic enterprise software plays make sense for open source, but most areas have been covered.

I’m not sure I share the caution, though I, too, would love to see more open-source deals getting funded. Most venture funds simply aren’t going to overextend themselves in any given investment area. Given that they have already placed their open-source bets, they’re likely to continue to nurture these toward an exit, and then invest in subsequent opportunities once their existing investments pan out.

Just when you thought venture interest in open source was quieting down, along comes the biggest quarter in open source’s (still young) history: $203.75 million raised, as reported by The 451 Group. This trumped the previous record of $193.6 million from Q4 2006. There’s something about the end of the year that bodes well for open source…

The exception to this “rule” is Benchmark, which seems intent on investing in every open-source venture on the planet. But it is the exception.

Great news, no? Well, yes and no. as The 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett goes on to note, the quarter saw far more later-stage deals than early (seed and Series A) deals:

The new opportunities are in new markets, where open source is innovating, not following. “Only three” is a glass half-empty way of looking at it. Given the nature of the companies being funded, it’s definitely glass half-full, even for Savio.

commentary (Credit:
The 451 Group)

In fact, so many of the old names raised funding in the first quarter, it’s difficult to see where significant further funding will be raised in the coming months unless a few more start-ups emerge.

Although the likes of Ringside Networks, Bluenog, and Engine Yard did prove there is more to come in the future, the vast majority of the funding raised in the quarter went to more familiar names, such as Automattic, Greenplum, SugarCRM, and Pentaho.

PacketTrap believes that the commercialization of open source by the POSS vendors such as Hyperic and GroundWork Open, however, skillfully undermines the original goal of open source projects to develop strong software solutions without the negative effects of commercial vendor profit motive.

He also notes how his company is part of the community, yet doesn’t state what projects the staff contributes to, nor could I find anything that they had open-sourced themselves.

It’s interesting that he thinks that these companies are undermining the spirit of OSS when his company takes a bunch of OSS components, aggregates them and pretends like they did something new and exciting.

After looking at the blog’s header image of a guy with a plunger, an anonymous friend noted:
“If Hyperic is the cash register of open source, I guess that makes these guys the toilet.”

I’m sure these geniuses at PacketTrap posted this manifesto about why commercial open source is no good as part a misguided marketing attempt, but I feel it necessary to comment on just how stupid this is and why this kind of thing leads to a company’s failure.

The CEO’s argument essentially says commercial open source isn’t fair because he can’t take all the code (he highlights GPL products) and recast it as his own.

The PDF “Integrating Open Source in Commercial Solutions: Does PacketTrap Have the Right Model?” is a great example of why you need PR help when you are a young company. Most people aren’t smart enough to edit their own stupidity.

Personally, I think “La La Love You” by the Pixies (2:43) is closer to the ideal song, but my own collection does reveal a remarkable number of good songs at 2:42. Without further ado, my 2:42 Muxtape.

The Beatles–”Back in the U.S.S.R.”, The White Album

Animal Collective–”Leaf House”, Sung Tongs

Pavement–”Gold Soundz”, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Jack Logan–”Just Go Away”, Bulk

Frank Black–”Big Red”, Teenager of the Year

Magnetic Fields–”A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”, 69 Love Songs

Neko Case–”Fox Confessor Brings the Flood”, Fox Confessor…

Johnny Cash–”Folsom Prison Blues”, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison

X–”Motel Room In My Bed”, Beyond & Back

The Pretenders–”Stop Your Sobbing”, The Pretenders

Otis Redding–”Ole Man Trouble”, The Best Of Otis Redding

Elmer Bernstein–”The Street (Main Theme)”, Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree

I like long songs, but As Eliot Van Buskirk over on Listening Post reports, at least two separate writers have come to the conclusion that the perfect song is short. Two minutes and 42 seconds, to be exact–the length of “There She Goes” by The La’s.

(Note: some of these songs were recorded from an LP, so while their “official” length on the CD may not be 2:42, and they may not have registered as 2:42 on Muxtape, they all showed up as 2:42 in my library.)

My Zune library has 23 songs clocking in at 2:42.

(Credit:
Screenshot)

The LifeCam Show is a tiny, 2-megapixel Webcam that offers three magnetized ways to root it in place.

While I liked the flexible yet sturdy Gumby stand on the previous model, the VX-5500’s stand provides a solid base whether sitting on a desk or resting on the of a laptop or LCD. And for what it’s worth, you can choose among three included faceplate–red, white, and blue.

My early tests with the VX-5500 reveal the same great performance as the VX-5000 that I reviewed earlier this year. Video at 640×480 looks smooth, and the image quality holds up well under low-light scenarios. Fast movement does cause some stuttering and blur, though the same can be said for all Webcams. Aside from the addition of the new 3D video effects, the LifeCam software remains largely unchanged and in need of an overhaul.

The LifeCam Show offers improved image quality over the last laptop LifeCam that I reviewed, the LifeCam VX-7000. Particularly, the low light performance is improved, though I found that the video is not always smooth at 800×600.

The pricier and smaller Microsoft LifeCam Show will cost $100 and go on sale starting October 9. It features a higher resolution sensor than the VX-5500. The 2-megapixel sensor can capture 800×600 video, 2-megapixel still shots, and–through software interpolation–8-megapixel stills.

(Credit:
Matthew Elliott/CBS Interactive)

The VX-5500 will cost $60 when it starts shipping on September 25.

Update: Read the review of the LifeCam VX-5500.

The new 3D video effects include face tracking technology, so you can conduct video chats with a distorted head or while wearing a funny hat. You can also share video messages via a Vista Gadget, but you’ll need to have a Vista PC and a LifeCam on both ends of the exchange. Maybe Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates exchange video messages this manner, but I doubt many others will find this feature all that useful.

If blue isn't your thing, the Microsoft LifeCam VX-5500 can do a quick change to red or white.

Take the LifeCam VX-5000, replace its Gumby-like rubber tail with a square plastic base, throw in some new 3D video effects and interchangeable faceplates, and you’ve got the LifeCam VX-5500. The camera body and optics remain the same as the previous model, which means the video quality remains very good, particularly for such an inexpensive Webcam.

Microsoft announced two new additions to its Webcam lineup on Tuesday, the LifeCam VX-5500 and the LifeCam Show.

(Credit:
Matthew Elliott/CBS Interactive)

The LifeCam Show ships with three attachment options. Most useful is the laptop clip, which has a round, magnetized button to hold the camera. If you want to make the LifeCam Show a regular part of your life, you can affix a sticker to the back of your laptop; the sticker has the same magnetized button to hold the camera. Finally, a desktop stand is included that lets you connect the LifeCam Show, via a magnet once again, to the top of a plastic pole.

It ships with the same LifeCam app as the VX-5500, which includes the new 3D video effects and video message feature.