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Stories about animals are a staple for the nightly news and frequently make their way to the front page of news sites such as Digg and CNN. Not to be left out, Purina, purveyors of food for dogs and cats has its own social news site devoted to all things domestic pet with Pet Charts, a self-proclaimed “definitive guide to the best pet stuff online.” It features news stories, videos, and photos for dogs and cats.

[via Digg]

Pet Charts is no icanhascheezburger, but it’s certainly worth a look. In comparison with other social news sites, Digg has its own pets and animals section in the offbeat news category. Much of the content on Digg is relegated to videos and photographs, while Pet Charts splits it up into three different sections. Social news network Mixx also has its own pets category that’s got an eclectic mix of its own.

Users can swap between either species or view both at once. Content is ranked numerically and can be voted on by clicking the green paw buttons next to each story. Voting requires no user registration, and the stories are aggregated automatically from several different sources. Not included is a way for users to add their own content, or tools to place the paw buttons on external sites to encourage users to add additional votes.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Can dog and cat food makers topple Digg's pet news section? More importantly, how cute is that dog? Awwwwwwe. (Click to enlarge)

It’s an exciting day for open source. Congratulations to Marten and team for avoiding the glare and bother of an IPO at a price that reflects the amazing contributions they’ve made to open source.

Sun hasn’t traditionally done well with acquisitions, so it will be important that this accelerate Sun’s recovery and growth and not slow it. I’m confident that the executive ambition to do so exists. It’s just a question of whether or not Sun’s rank and file will follow suit. With the stakes so high - reestablishing Sun as the center of the web is worth billions - Sun employees have every reason to do so.

Bingo. Perhaps most importantly for MySQL and its employees, an acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source.

There are only two companies that could have done an acquisition like that: Red Hat and Sun. But only Sun could have made an acquisition with roughly $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options. This is exceptional for a company (MySQL) that was edging toward $100 million in sales in 2007 (My unstudied guess is $80 million or so.) The two expect to close the deal in late Q3 or early Q4 of Sun’s fiscal 2008.

Oracle will say this isn’t a threat and IBM will laugh it off, but this is an intelligent move by Sun. I’m not aware of any of the other major enterprise vendors building so specifically to suit the web economy. Sun has a full arsenal of storage, operating systems, hardware, and now database to attack the market.

Sun Microsystems announced today that it will be acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. Sometimes the good guys get exactly what they deserve.

commentary

At first blush, it seems an odd acquisition for Sun. Sun, after all, is not (or was not) in the database market. But Sun’s historical strength in the web economy, and MySQL’s current role as the heart of the web, makes it an interesting, important step for Sun to make. Said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz:

Today’s acquisition reaffirms Sun’s position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world’s largest traditional enterprises. MySQL’s employees and culture, along with its near ubiquity across the Web, make it an ideal fit with Sun’s open approach to network innovation. And most importantly, this announcement boosts our investments into the communities at the heart of innovation on the Internet and of enterprises that rely on technology as a competitive weapon.

For an industry that has been decimated by digital technology, this is an example of how at least one of the four largest music labels is putting it to work.

EMI says it has already seen positive results.

Last year, the label brought Utada Hikaru, Japan’s top recording artist, to the United States. EMI helped the singer find an audience in the U.S. without pressing any CDs initially. But the U.S. digital-only campaign was at best an effort to put otherwise hard-to-find product in front of her U.S. fans. Before digital music, those fans might wait months before an expensive import CD hit our shores.

Sweet faced and playful, French electro-pop star Yelle seems an unlikely figure to stick a dagger into the heart of a much-loved but quickly disappearing staple of the music industry.

For decades, music labels trying to break in an act pressed thousands of vinyl records or CDs to distribute to disc jockeys, record stores, journalists, and fans. Those types of promotions have grown too expensive in an era of shrinking music sales, says Jeff Rougvie, general manager of EMI’s Caroline Records, who is leading Yelle’s U.S. campaign.

Naturally, EMI is trying it again.

While Yelle is a fan of digital music and technology, she says there is still a place for plastic.

Beyond the cost savings that digital music offers, Rougvie says there is growing need for an act to obtain a “groundswell of digital support” from music blogs, download stores, and MySpace to prove to a label that it can attract fans and is worthy of a larger investment. For that reason, focusing on digital at the beginning of a promotion makes sense.

French singer Yelle is helping to usher out era of disc promos

Instead, executives took to MySpace, music widgets, and powerful music blogs like Pitchfork. The label started digital and stayed digital until it reached a critical mass. On April 1, EMI finally released a CD version of Yelle’s album, Pop Up.

“I don’t know when my first EP on vinyl will come out,” said Yelle, whose real name is Julie Budet. “I don’t know whether it will come out. I think it’s a bonus if it does. It’s a plus. I think now you can download music, buy CDs, and that’s what people really want. But I would be really proud if my album will be out in vinyl.”

The movement to phase out discs as promotional devices has been around for some time. Last year, EMI drastically scaled back the numbers of CDs it sent out as promos. Just a few years ago, the label may have sent out CDs as complete albums. Now it distributes secure online access where retailers or reviewers can hear songs.

“We’re definitely spending less than on a traditional campaign,” Rougvie said. “It doesn’t make sense when you’re going out the door to spend a lot of money putting out a physical product and taking in costs before you know what (the demand is).”

Caroline Records specializes in introducing international music stars to U.S. audiences. Naturally, this means executives are often less sure of whether a foreign performer can find a niche audience here. Spending big on untested and unknown acts doesn’t make sense. As part of the digital-only promotion, EMI didn’t seek radio airplay for Yelle’s music and didn’t buy banner or print ads in traditional music magazines like Rolling Stone or Blender.

Yelle, pronounced Yeah-elle, was discovered by EMI’s unit in France one week after she posted “Short Dick Cuizi,” a song that took swipes at a member of a rival band. She renamed the song “Je veux te voir” and then released Pop Up, which features three songs, “Je veux te voir,” “Parle a ma main,” and “A cause des garcons” attracting big audiences at YouTube.

A version of “A cause des garcons” has been viewed 3.5 million times since August. Her songs have also been heard on such TV shows as “The Hills” and “Entourage.”

Digital allows EMI to get product to niche audiences affordably as well as generate incremental income for the company. Hikaru would later go on to sell 7.2 million downloads worldwide.

The label couldn’t have asked for a better test case than Yelle. The 25-year-old from St. Brieuc, France, told CNET News.com on Wednesday that she grew up with the Internet and fully understands its power to promote and distribute music.

(Credit:
EMI Music)

She is unwittingly helping The EMI Group, one of the four largest music companies, to push CDs further into the shadows. Already a star in her own country and a growing nightclub favorite in the U.S., Yelle was being promoted until recently in this country exclusively through digital means.

Updated at 3:12 p.m. PDT with further detail.

Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram publicly debuted his company’s forthcoming online “computational knowledge engine” Tuesday–but search Goliath Google launched a service of its own that bears significant resemblance.

Wolfram Research CEO Stephen Wolfram

(Credit:
Stephen Wolfram)

The Wolfram Alpha engine is a Web service designed to process data from controlled, vetted sources of data–many not on the Web–then present the results in a way that lets people dig deeper into the subject. It’s something of a cross between a graphing calculator, repositories of scientific data, and a system to interpret questions posed in human terms.

“Like interacting with an expert, it’ll understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and present the results in such a way you’ll be able to understand what the consequences are,” Wolfram said in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society Tuesday.

For example, people can ask about the molecular weight of caffeine, about the location of a gene in the human genome, the number of people named Andrew born in a particular year, the amount of fish produced in France, the life expectancy of 40-year-olds, and the performance of Microsoft stock–and then dig into the results. The height of Mt. Everest can be expressed in terms of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Wolfram has deep technical chops. He’s a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 20, founded Wolfram Research to commercialize mathematics software called Mathematica that can perform a wide variety of computational and graphing chores. He also spent a good portion of the 1990s writing “A New Kind of Science,” a 1,200-page tome (also available online) that seeks to transform science by presenting a computational view of physics.

The Alpha site will be publicly available “in a few weeks,” with free access to all users supported by sponsors and subscriptions for heavy-duty users who want the system to process their own data, Wolfram said.

Gatecrashing Google
But another similar service is available today: a Google feature that can search public data and present the results graphically.

“We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data,” Ola Rosling said of the service in a blog post. “The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on.”

The service is based on Google’s 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer, Rosling said.

Google now lets people search public data sets.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

One example: “When comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara’s peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate,” he said.

Thus far, Google’s service includes data only from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division.

“We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it’s used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations,” he said.

Google didn’t immediately comment about whether the timing of its launch was coincidental, and Wolfram Research didn’t immediately comment on the Google product.

Alpha’s underpinnings
Alpha has four main components, Wolfram said.

• Data curation. Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. “At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it,” Wolfram said.

• Algorithms. Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. “Inside Wolfram Alpah are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models,” he said.

• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed. “I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would (have) huge amounts of ambiguity,” for example figuring out whether “50 cent” had to do with musical artists or money. “That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected.”

• Presentation. “There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?” Wolfram asked.

Wolfram hopes the tool will help researchers perform scientific chores that before were possible but not necessarily worth their time.

“What’s the angle of sun at particular moment? Given 20 minutes, I could compute it and get it right, but I probably wouldn’t bother,” Wolfram said. “What Wolfram Alpha does is take that piece of scientific knowledge and make it immediately accessible to everybody.”

Seven NATO allies signed an agreement Wednesday to open a cyberdefense center in Estonia, according to the Associated Press.

The center, which is scheduled to become operational in August, is designed to offer training and research on cyberterrorism and simulate cyberwar games, the report states. The NATO allies will kick in funding and a staff of 30 cyberexperts to operate the center.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Slovakia signed the agreement, while the United States signed aboard as an observer of the effort.

Last spring, Estonia’s public and private institutions were hit with a major denial of service attack over a two-month period. That, in turn, prompted NATO to re-evaluate its cyberdefense strategy.

That evaluation led to the Allied Defense Ministers report in October, which recommended the establishment of a NATO cyberdefense policy and a number of new measures to improve the countries’ cyberattack defense. The allied nations agreed to the policy earlier this year.

Today, Sony announced the immediate retail and online availability of its Sony NV-U73T and Sony NV-U83T portable navigation systems. Announced back at CES 2008, both models focus on safety and have text-to-speech technology, nearly 5 million points of interest with branded icons and preloaded maps of the United States and Canada. They’re equipped with SiRF StarIII GPS chips, but the units also have a feature called Position Plus that includes pressure, gyro, and acceleration sensors, which should provide for more accurate positioning even when driving through tunnels and in between tall buildings. In addition, you can perform certain functions with just the swipe of your finger, and there’s a dual-view mode that will show a 3D rendition of complicated intersections.

As the flagship model, the Sony NV-U83T also has integrated Bluetooth for
hands-free calling and a 4.8-inch, 16:9 ratio touch screen, while the NV-U73T has a 4.3-inch screen. They can be had for $400 and $300, respectively.

I sat down with Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, to discuss what his open-source business intelligence software company announced Tuesday with regards to the evil empire. Here’s what I found out:

• JasperSoft BI Suite has achieved “Works with Windows” certification, which means that Jasper has passed the Windows Server 2008 test suite. This is an important step because a meaningful percentage of Jasper users are running Windows server.

• JasperSoft ODBO Connect, which connects Microsoft Excel with Jasper Analysis multidimensional data sources, is immediately available. Connect is available for no extra charge with Jasper Analysis subscriptions. By contrast, other open-source business-intelligence companies charge for this functionality.

Why does any of this matter?

Microsoft’s overtones of love toward open source are perhaps more realistic than many of us (myself included) have previously thought. JasperSoft has recognized the market opportunity associated with Excel-oriented business intelligence. JasperSoft has re-affirmed its commitment to SQL Server.

This all makes sense to me as JasperSoft is solidifying its market position and recognizing the importance of the Microsoft ecosystem as it refines product and market strategy.

When a lot of us hear the name Carlos Santana, we instinctively begin humming the bars to “Oye Como Va,” or any one of a number of his well known songs. Associating the man with his music is natural, but as I’ve learned recently, he’s involved in so many more projects that range from food to shoe design to international philanthropy. After my interview with him on Thursday, add one more interest to the long list: technology.

A longtime San Francisco Bay Area resident, Santana made a public appearance Thursday at a middle school in Marin county to accept a $100,000 check from Samsung and Best Buy for his Milagro Foundation, an organization that promotes the health, education, and pursuit of the arts for needy children around the world. After a handful of student performances, the presentation of the big, cardboard check and a lengthy speech by Santana, select members of the media got a chance for one-on-one interviews with him.

Dressed in white, from his woven shoes (not from his own line since as of now, he only designs styles for women) to his white suit, Santana was outgoing, warm, and open to questions of any kind. When I finally got my five minutes with him, he made great eye contact, was engaged in the conversation and stayed primarily on topic. I’m sure that makes it sound like I set a low bar for my interviews, but after you’ve talked to enough celebrities, you come to appreciate the candor, focus, and sincerity of a true media professional.

I was first curious to hear how technology has changed the way he makes music. After all, the man is 61 years old and a lot has changed over the five decades that he’s been recording music! In answering, he drew some comparisons between the equipment he used in the 1960s when he first got started to the way his musician son Salvador records tracks now. Without completely dumping on the modern music industry, he seemed to imply that technology has sucked the creativity from some artists, giving them ways to cheat through lip-syncing or by artificially creating sounds.

We then went on to discuss the ways the Internet has changed the methods of distributing music and whether or not an artist can afford to put it online for free. Santana said he agreed with the way Metallica has handled the copyright controversy and argued that until basic commodities like milk and eggs are free, music shouldn’t be either.

Before my time ran out, I was dying to hear what kind of gadget this self-described “computer geek” can’t live without. All I’m going to tell you is that it’s a phone; you have to watch my video to find out what kind and why he loves it so dearly. It’s too bad the media coordinator was rushing us along because I sure would have loved to hear his ringtone. Black Magic Woman? Smooth?

The spring quarter was not a good one for Sony.

The consumer electronics giant on Tuesday reported that for the three months ended June 30, its net income was 35 billion yen ($330 million), or just more than half of the 66.5 billion recorded in the same period a year earlier.

The mood was much more upbeat for Sony at the E3 show two weeks ago, where, among other things, Sony Computer Entertainment of America CEO Jack Tretton announced an 80GB PS3 for $400.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Revenue for this year’s second calendar quarter (the first quarter of Sony’s April-to-March fiscal year) was 1.979 trillion yen, a slight gain from last year’s 1.977 trillion yen.

There was at least one bright spot amid the gloom. Sony said its game unit recorded positive operating income, compared with a loss in the year-ago period. That shift was largely the result of higher sales of PlayStation 3 software, lower costs for PS3 hardware, and strong sales of
PlayStation Portable hardware.

But in Sony’s overall electronics segment, operating income took a tumble, pushed down by increased price competition and a year-on-year decrease in equity in net income–a whopping drop to 600 million yen ($5 million) from 17.7 billion yen–for Sony Ericsson, its mobile-phone joint venture.

Even as profitability and unit sales improved for Sony’s Bravia LCD televisions, Electronics segment profits took a hit from sales of mainstay consumer products, including Cyber-shot cameras, Handycam video cameras, and Vaio PCs.

The company also took a hit in its Sony BMG operations, due in part to a sagging physical-music market and high restructuring costs.

And matters don’t seem any brighter as Sony heads forward. The company on Tuesday reduced its net income forecast for the full fiscal year. It now expects to report full-year net income of 240 billion yen, down 17 percent from its May forecast and down 35 percent from the actual results for the year that ended March 31.

I was poring through a university research paper Tuesday afternoon on the connection between the use of corn-based ethanol in the U.S. and greenhouse gas levels. That was just a grim appetizer for the big eco-news du jour later in the afternoon.

Turns out that Riau, Sumatra, a province in Indonesia, has the dubious honor of producing more average annual greenhouse gas emissions “from deforestation, forest degradation, peat decomposition, and peat fires between 1990 and 2007″ than does the Netherlands. That’s due to the local practice of supplying global paper giants and palm oil plantation with raw materials processed from forests and peat swamps.

Because of the ongoing forest clearance projects in areas with deep peat soils, experts warn that the region’s carbon emissions will likely climb. (In the last quarter century, companies working in the province have cleared about 10.5 million acres of tropical forests and peat swamp.)

The report was jointly published under the auspices of Hokkaido University, the World Wildlife Fund, and Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH.

The researchers painted a sober picture of the changes wrought by deforestation. Here’s the link to the full report (PDF).

WWF