A new startup is set to spin from the ranks of JBoss. I’d give you the URL but then you could track down the host and spoil their plans. I’ll post it later, closer to the official launch.

Red Hat and Novell have built great Linux businesses, but they haven’t really spawned many new businesses in the way that PayPal and other Valley companies often do.

For now I’ll just say that the JBoss crew is truly entrepreneurial. We need more open sourcerors building great companies…and then more great companies. Marc Fleury clearly hired the right sort of people, as they’ve been very fecund (starting or joining Loopfuse, Buni, Appcelerator, Alfresco, SpringSource, MuleSource, Xaware, and others).

commentary

Will it fly? Who knows, but in the midst of this miserable economic depression, there probably are lots of people out there who feel as if they don’t have a clue anymore.

Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, announced on her blog Friday afternoon that her new start-up, Hunch, is sending out invitations to try the service, now in beta test.

Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result–a hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn’t give other people.

What is it? I’ll hand the reins over to Fake and let her explain:

It’s dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision–and yet we think there’s room for one more: Hunch.

Currently, the Inspiron 530 desktop and Inspiron 1420 laptop are the only two Dell computers to come preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10. While those looking to put Linux on a higher-end XPS model can always go the self-install route, purchasing a preloaded Ubuntu config saves you the cost of having to purchase Windows.

Dell is expanding its open-source offerings. The XPS M1330 laptop is now available with Ubuntu in Germany, the U.K., France, and Spain. On its Direct2Dell blog, Dell instructs would-be U.S. purchasers to “hold on a week or so.”

[Via Engadget]

Ubuntu on the XPS M1330: Give it about a week, denizens of the U.S.

Before you ask, yes I tried to force-quit. I also went to the command-line in an attempt to recall my Unix days and kill-9 the process. Sadly, nothing works and I actually have to reboot and uninstall FF3. I am guessing the fact that (firefox-bin) appears in parentheses is a bad thing.

This is my own fault for not paying attention on a conference call.

A few days ago, Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron put his Twitter account up for sale on eBay, offering access to his 1,500-plus followers. (It’s now at 1,757 followers.) Within a few days, the bidding had gone over $1,500 and appeared headed for much more.

At the same time, Baron went on Craigslist and was also offering to sell a two-day guest-hosting slot on his Twitter account for $150.

Bidding for Andrew Baron’s Twitter account eventually went over $1,500 before he pulled the plug on it.

(Credit:
eBay)

“I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to,” wrote Baron in the eBay auction description. “Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.

“It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be….The winner of this auction gets my account with all of my followers.”

But now, both the auction and the Craigslist ad have been deleted.

In a series of Twitter posts over the last couple days, Baron indicated that he had already been planning to delete the auction when eBay contacted him and told him he needed to move it to a different category than the one it had originally been posted under.

But rather than doing that, he Twittered, he removed the auction himself. He also said Craigslist maintains that his attempt to sell a guest-hosting spot on the Twitter account violated terms of service.

In an interview Thursday morning, Baron explained his rationale behind the decision to take down the auction.

Essentially, he said, a fellow Twitterer wrote him suggesting that the people who were bidding the eBay auction well into four figures were “all spam marketers, people who will do anything just to get their name out there, people who don’t understand Web 2.0 and blogging.”

“I already knew,” Baron said, “there would be a great range of different types of (possible) outcomes. But I believed that I would be able to manage the outcome by trying to make a positive outcome for the buyer, for my friends and followers. Even if it wasn’t a good fit, I (believed) I could work with them. But after I heard that they were all just spam marketers, that just kind of killed it for me and I didn’t want to risk that.”

Baron told me that he was concerned that many people who have been following the saga of his trying to sell his Twitter account on eBay would assume that, because there had been a fair amount of backlash against him for the planned sale, he was just trying to save face by pulling the plug on the auction.

Instead, he insisted to me, he just felt very uneasy about having the account–and his many followers–fall into the hands of people who didn’t necessarily have any idea how to use the account in a way that benefits all concerned.

Some may say that even that rationale is just a way to try to save face, and it may well be. After all, we don’t really know for a fact that the auction bidders were really spam marketers. And it’s likely there’s no way to ever know what is really going on in Baron’s mind.

Regardless, Baron said that he had already been cooking up an entirely different plan for his Twitter account when eBay called him.

Unfortunately–for me, at least–he wouldn’t say what this plan is.

“When I first put the auction up, I got a Twitter from somebody,” he said, “who had another idea I liked much better….There were several ways to keep the auction going and have an end result, and that still would have worked better, but the plan would work (even) better by deleting it.”

To me, this is all rather unfortunate. I was, and I think many others were too, very curious to see the value of identity in a case like this demonstrated in such a visceral way. After all, this is a market economy and if someone is willing to pay $1,500 for Andrew Baron’s Twitter identity, then we begin to get a sense of what such a thing is really worth.

Then again, does $1,500 of a spammer’s money equate to the same amount for someone who is actually active in the Web 2.0 world? Perhaps not.

To Baron, the auction spawned discussions online and off about many other fascinating issues: that of intellectual property law, what friends are, the difference among friends on Facebook, friends on Twitter, and real-world friends, and even angles of technology, marketing, and advertising.

“That’s been the most exciting” element of this whole thing, Baron said. “And if I had mentioned what (my new) plan was, that would have killed the conversations.”

The plant ended up going to that big greenhouse in the sky. The experience made me realize there’s a pretty basic need for sites, such as PicAnswers, which lets anyone upload a picture and ask a question about it. Interestingly, the amount of high profile Q&A services that don’t let users do this is surprising. One of the few to allow it is the AOL-owned Yedda, while sites such as Yahoo Answers, Microsoft’s QnA Live, and Amazon.com’s Askville are limited to text.

This looks like a toy gun but it's actually cable tie gun, which was correctly ID'd by the Q&A community at PicAnswers.com

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, PicAnswers is driven by humans. People upload their photos, and other users chime in if they can answer the query. A lot of the questions posed on the site range from simple identification issues like “what the heck is this?” to advice about what to do about a problem posted in the picture.

Here are a couple of my favorites so far:

Toothpick or food skewer?

My chili is yellow

Is there any Chinese poison in this toy?

Despite its simplicity, PicAnswers is missing two very helpful components: a way to vote on other user’s answers to help filter down the best responses, and a karma system that makes it worthwhile to answer other people’s questions. As it stands, you’re left to sort through the answers yourself and answer out of the goodness of your heart. I’m hoping the site’s creators add these soon. In the meantime, it’s definitely worth bookmarking for the next time you unearth something that needs photo identification.

On Wednesday, Qualcomm delayed its second-quarter earnings statement, citing advanced settlement discussions with Broadcom.

Qualcomm made this statement Sunday: “Qualcomm and Broadcom today announced that they have entered into a settlement and multi-year patent agreement. The agreement will result in the dismissal with prejudice of all litigation between the companies, including all patent infringement claims in the International Trade Commission and U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, as well as the withdrawal by Broadcom of its complaints to the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission.”

Qualcomm will pay Broadcom $891 million over a four-year period, according to the San Diego-based company. The terms of the agreement will not result in any change to Qualcomm’s 3G (CDMA2000, WCDMA, and TD-SCDMA technologies) and 4G (LTE and WiMAX technologies) licensing revenue model, Qualcomm said.

The agreement stipulates, among other things, that Broadcom and Qualcomm agree not to assert patents against each other for their respective integrated circuit products and certain other products and services and Broadcom agrees not to assert its patents against Qualcomm’s customers for Qualcomm’s integrated circuit products incorporated into cellular products.

“We believe that this resolution is positive for both Qualcomm and Broadcom, our customers, our partners and the overall industry,” Paul E. Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, and Scott A. McGregor, president and CEO of Broadcom, said in a joint statement.

“The settlement will allow us to direct our full attention and resources to continuing to innovate, improving our competitive position in this economic downturn, and growing demand for wireless products and services,” Jacobs said.

The agreement ends longstanding litigation between the companies. For its part, Broadcom had argued in one case that Qualcomm was unfairly limiting competition by putting onerous conditions in its patent licensing agreements. Qualcomm licensed its chipset patents to other chip suppliers with the stipulation that they must limit sales of their products to mobile handset makers that also have Qualcomm patent licenses.

Broadcom had also asserted that the cloud of litigation hanging over it was a sticking point for prospective customers–and did win a judgment against Qualcomm in 2007. Qualcomm, however, had won court rulings of its own, having suits against it dismissed.

This will allow subscribers to click directly into the MySpace Mobile Web site from the menu, eliminating the need for customers to type in a URL in order to access the site. Verizon subscribers will also be able to edit MySpace profiles, view and add friends, post comments and blogs, and send and receive MySpace messages from their mobile phones.

So far, friend-finding services have had modest success. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, the service needs to be offered on more phones and on more carrier networks. SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging was a novelty when people could only send messages to people who subscribed to the same carrier. But once they were able to text people on other carrier networks, the service exploded. The same could be true for friend-finding. The deal between Loopt and Verizon, the second-largest operator in the U.S., is a step in that direction. Loopt customers on Sprint’s network will be able to track and be tracked by friends on Verizon’s network and vice versa.

Loopt says it has the privacy issues licked. Only people who have given permission to have their location broadcast will be tracked. And these users only share location information with their known friends via a private network. The company also says that the location-sharing feature can be turned on and off at any time on a friend-by-friend basis or for all friends.

Friend-finding cell phone service Loopt is now available on some Verizon Wireless phones.

Starting in April, Verizon will offer the Loopt service for $3.99 a month. Verizon is offering the service on 20 popular data-enabled phones including the Chocolate by LG, the MotoRizr Z6tv, and the G’zOne Type-S. Customers will be able to get the application through Verizon’s Get It Now virtual store.

That said, Loopt and other friend-finding services still must overcome privacy concerns. A lot of people simply aren’t comfortable with the idea of their location being broadcast to others.

Loopt is a service that uses GPS (Global Positioning System) chips in phones to pinpoint a subscriber’s location; then users can broadcast that location information to friends or family, who can track them on a tiny map. Subscribers can sign up for alerts to find out when other Loopt friends are near. They’re also able to tag photos and send them to friends with location information attached.

(Credit:
Loopt)

The company has been offering the service on some Sprint and Boost Mobile phones for more than a year. The service on Sprint costs $2.99 a month.

But location services are also expected to be a big component of mobile social networking. In February, Yahoo announced that people could sign up for “proximity alerts” on its OneConnect service to let them know when friends using the service come within a certain distance of one another. And Loopt has been working with Facebook and MySpace.com to integrate its technology into those mobile Web sites.

Location-based services are expected to generate a lot of money for carriers in the future. Already, most major mobile operators are offering some kind of location-based service, such as GPS-enabled navigation or tracking. Helio, a mobile virtual-network operator, offers a tracking service that’s similar to the one offered by Loopt. Other carriers, such as Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Alltel, offer tracking services for parents who want to keep tabs on their kids.

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won’t likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they’re still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that’s not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish’s public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I’d still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I’ve written about.

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge’s coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell “develop” while saying “men from the east” aren’t that smart.

They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent’s traffic.
They have advertising solutions that can be tailored–as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you’d only take less than 8% of their market share…
They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don’t have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me….
They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases….

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China’s leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

This wouldn’t bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: “Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what’s the deal guys?

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge’s name on Rick’s Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an “upstart” engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu’s music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

In Reviews, we saw two laptops from Fujitsu: the LifeBook A6210 and the LifeBook T1010 tablet. We also looked at the Dell XPS M1330-126B and the Logitech V550 Nano notebook mouse.

Finally, if you’re wondering what that smell is, it’s my new Asus laptop.

Have a safe and happy holiday weekend!

At CNET HQ this week, we celebrated the best of the back-to-school laptops and took a closer look at Dell’s new Latitude design. We got the skinny on an open-source approach to tracking stolen laptops, some low-cost Dell Vostros designed for emerging markets, and how the Intel Classmate PC is being used in one Brazilian school.

This week also saw rumors of two laptops in a new Dell Studio XPS line, and an Apple patent filing reignited rumors of a
Mac tablet. Also, several sites pointed to an upscale Netbook from Asus that would ditch the Eee PC name, but there’s no final word on pricing, specs, or availability.

Also worth reading over the long weekend: Intel has acquired a London-based company and tasked it with developing a Linux software stack for Intel’s Atom processors; Iogear has two new laptop accessories out: a laptop KVM switch that lets you transfer files between computers and a Wireless USB to VGA Kit for streaming PC content to an alternate display; and PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff wishes manufacturers would stop the trend toward 16:9 laptop screens.

Samsung threw down a challenge to the MacBook Air by announcing the 13-inch, 2.8-pound Samsung X360. MSI came out with three new laptop models, the 14-inch VR440 and GX400, and the 17-inch GX720. Asus announced the G50V and G71V, gaming systems built on Core 2 Extreme processors and Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT graphics. And Fujitsu promised a 2.2-pound M1010 Netbook with an 8.9-inch wide-screen display, though it might be available only in the Asia Pacific region.