Daily news

You can find below daily news from other sources about Business 2.0 :

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VentureBeat

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Q&A with Will Wright on the launch of Spore - Sat, 06 Sep 2008
Will Wright is the rock star of the video game industry. His games are almost always hits and have generated billions of dollars in sales for Electronic Arts, his employer. SimCity, the early game that let you build cities, was big enough with tens of millions sold. It spawned Sims, which has sold more than 100 [...]

Office 2.0: VCs say the future looks good - Fri, 05 Sep 2008
A panel of venture capitalists sounded cautiously optimistic about about the future of “enterprise 2.0″ this morning at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Some of the big themes were pretty familiar (hey, did you hear that the online subscription business model, a.k.a. software-as-a-service, still needs time to mature?), but it’s important to understand [...]

Sponsored Post: PartnerUp’s Weekly Opportunities - Fri, 05 Sep 2008
Below you’ll find this week’s PartnerUp Opportunities of the week. PartnerUp, a Deluxe Company, is an online community for entrepreneurs and startups that helps them find people for their businesses, such as co-founders, business partners, advisors, board members, and skilled technical people. In addition, PartnerUp helps entrepreneurs ask for and offer up advice, find commercial [...]

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Zdnet Saas Blog

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Zuora gets PayPal president on board - Thu, 04 Sep 2008
Zuora, the SaaS billing startup that was pitching itself as 'the PayPal of online business services' when it launched, has snagged PayPal's president as a board member. Here's an exclusive interview.

Google adds video to the virtual workplace - Tue, 02 Sep 2008
Google has combined its existing YouTube infrastructure with the authorization and permissions infrastructure of Google Apps to create a video sharing option for paying users.

Mashing up the client to the cloud - Fri, 29 Aug 2008
The conventional wisdom of Office 2.0 says applications must be browser-only. But does that miss opportunities to use the cloud more efficiently and give users a more functional and satisfying experience?

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Webware

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At the TechCrunch50, an unfair advantage? - Sat, 06 Sep 2008

It stands to reason that TechCrunch the blog will have an unfair advantage in covering the TechCrunch50 event. The same team produces both products, and the company has put a gag order on companies accepted to present on stage. Only the TechCrunch team knows who's going to be pitching at the event. So it will be easy for them to organize their coverage and even prepare stories on the presenting companies ahead of time.

This kvetch may smack of inside baseball to many readers, but it's been bugging me. Do I really want to spend three days covering an event where I am at such a decided disadvantage, where I'm competing with the event itself? DemoFall, for comparison's sake, doesn't compete with other journalists or blogs; It has its own site but it doesn't have the readership, stature, or aspirations of TechCrunch.

But I believe TechCrunch's unfair advantage in covering its own event will be mitigated by policies that TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis relayed after talking with CNET News Editor in Chief Dan Farber. Quoting an e-mail from Calacanis:

Mike [Arrington, TechCrunch founder] has agreed that:

a) he will not allow TechCrunch editors to bank stories [write them ahead of time].

b) TechCrunch will not cover the live demos until after each session--giving other press outlets first shot at the stories (like an HOUR advantage!)

c) TechCrunch will link to other publications in TC's coverage.

Good for you, Jason and Michael. I still have issues with the way the event is set up, but if your team holds true to these policies, at least I'm not going into this event with the deck completely stacked against me.

This move is also a sound business decision. It makes sense to keep the press happy at TechCrunch50, since press coverage is one of the key drivers for events like this, and since the TechCrunch50 event is such a big moneymaker for the TechCrunch company. Even a blog of TechCrunch's size can make only so much money from advertising. The real money for a business of TechCrunch's scale is events, and TechCrunch50, with its 800 to 1,000 (my estimate) paid attendees at $2,995 each, and its roster of five-figure sponsors, is this operation's big revenue producer.

For other coverage of TechCrunch50 and the competing DemoFall conference, see CNET's Launch Week page, our special Twitter feed, and the other major Web 2.0 blogs like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, and CenterNetworks. If you like the inside-the-beltway skinny, ValleyWag is also sure to have some fun items.

Mozilla releases second Firefox 3.1 alpha - Sat, 06 Sep 2008

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The second alpha of Firefox 3.1 was made available overnight. The software, code-named Shiretoko, is at this stage intended for software developers and testers only, with the stable and recommended version of Firefox being 3.0.1.

In a statement, Mozilla said the testing version of Firefox introduced several new features, including the browser's highly anticipated support for a new video tag element introduced with the HTML 5 standard to provide more functionality around the amount of video that is increasingly being delivered through Web browsers.

In addition, Shiretoko allows users to drag and drop tabs between browser windows, improves performance in some areas and provides better integration with Windows Vista's Aero 'Glass' theme for those wanting to add extra themes on top of Firefox.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mozilla is planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although it could be tested by following a set of instructions posted online.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla's Web site.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Chrome's JavaScript challenge to Silverlight - Sat, 06 Sep 2008

SYDNEY--The biggest rival for Microsoft's next-generation Silverlight Web technology will be JavaScript, not Adobe Systems' ubiquitous Flash, according to experts speaking at Microsoft's Tech.Ed conference here.

"I think that the next 18 months we're going to see a 100- to 1,000-fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered," Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience Friday, days after Google released its Chrome browser, which features faster JavaScript technology.

Jonas Follesø, senior consultant at Cap Gemini, agreed, saying that JavaScript would continue to get speedier and that Chrome will become "massively" faster than it is.

"Now Google has stepped up and released a browser with jittered JavaScript and JavaVM, making this really, really, really fast," he said.

The consultant said that whenever he thought people had reached a limit about what could be done inside a browser using just JavaScript, some "cool JavaScript writer" came up and showed him how to do more.

"It's going to be hard to tell if it's going to be Silverlight or JavaScript we're going to use for our applications," he said. "I think in the end JavaScript is going to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash is."

An audience member questioned the panel of experts later on whether he should "be out buying JavaScript books" now the language had been "put on steroids."

Harry Pierson, Microsoft program manager, answered that he thought "JavaScript is a very odd language for most developers" and that it was more interesting to do higher-level development and if necessary compile it down to JavaScript.

Hanselman had a different opinion, saying that although it was a "freaky, weird language," it was possible to do object-oriented programming. "The JavaScript I used and hated in Netscape 4 is not the same JavaScript we have today," he said. "So yeah, I think you should get some JavaScript books."

Follesø said that even if souped-up JavaScript became dominant, he thought Silverlight was going to be big, especially in the enterprise when "fun" Web 2.0 applications come to roost. "For the intranet, when the users expect the same kind of user experience it's not that easy to really build that stuff in HTML and JavaScript, so Silverlight might be a lot easier alternative," he said.

Suzanne Tindal of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.