RFID chips in passports are dangerous, agrees Gosling

I like RFID. I don't like that the new passports issued by the United States, the European Union and other countries have radio-frequency identification chips.

I first wrote about this in November 2006, and in "Passports in lead foil" recommended shielding such important documents in an RFID-blocking enclosure.

During the opening general session at this year's JavaOne, James Gosling alluded to the problem very clearly. While praising how JavaOne uses RFID chips to count the attendees in crowded classrooms, he decried their use in passports: "Hi, I'm an American. Can you detonate the closest device?"

Thanks, James, for raising the visibility of this issue. Not that it's going to do any good. RFID is undoubtedly here to stay.

Fortunately, RFID-shielded passport holders are now readily available. For example, here's one on Amazon.com for only $19.99.

Opus 500

This is the 500th posting on the ZTrek blog.

The first posting was on September 22, 2006, which according to my calculations was 595 days ago. That means:

1. The posting rate is about 0.84 blog items per day.
2. If the rate remains constant, the 1000th posting should be next Christmas: December 25, 2009.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Beauty sells, whether it's medicine or magazines

If you've been to the doctor recently, you've probably shared the waiting room with one or more pharmaceutical sales representatives. Almost without exception, they're beautiful young women and men, immaculately groomed and expensively dressed.

I read in the NY Times that Big Pharm likes to recruit from college cheerleaders (see "Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales"). Certainly the girls and boys hanging out in waiting rooms look both perky and athletically trim enough to be cheerleaders.

Why would the drug companies focus on people like that as sales representatives? One would surmise it's because that strategy pays off.

Thus, see this article in Folio, which asks, "Are you good-looking enough to sell magazine ads?" According to Josh Gordon's story, 17 percent of a pharm site's survey respondents say that looks matter more than anything else.

I wonder if it applies to the media business too. If so... it's a good thing I'm not in ad sales!

Feeling sick of Java... or maybe it's just JavaOne

I've been sick as a dog since Wednesday night, and I think I know why. This disturbing message came in today from the JavaOne conference folks:

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Read the public health notice for people at Moscone Center, from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, dated May 8.

What's the difference: Application Development and Strategic Development?

I'm scratching my head over this one. For the past few years, InfoWorld has put out a weekly newsletter called Application Development Report, filled with a mixture of development and general IT news. While the newsletter wanders a bit around the topic (they do a lot of coverage of e-mail management and network security, for example), it's not bad.

But then a few weeks ago, the newsletter's editors announced:

This is the final week for the Application Development Report. Starting next week, you'll get the Strategic Developer newsletter on Thursdays, with the same great emphasis on news and how-tos in the app dev space.

So... since the content for Strategic Developer is going to be the same as for Application Development Report, presumably the audience is the same: programmers.

The question is: Is there a difference between "application development" and "strategic development"?

Does a strategic developer seem to be more like a business analyst, rather than a software developer? What do you think?

Do you have a Chief Blogging Officer? Do you need one?

A lot of companies see the value of blogs to communicate with customers, with partners, with investors, with the media and with the world at large. At BZ Media, Ted Bahr and I both have blogs — his is on Folio, and of course, this is mine.

The most famous IT company with an executive blog is Sun Microsystems, where Jonathan Schwartz writes regularly. It's fair to say that he's breaking new ground in this area.

According to a story in Workforce Management's May 2008 issue, about 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs. By contrast, that was about 4 percent at the end of 2005.

How are companies handling blogs? The name of Workforce Management's article makes it plain: "Chief Blogging Officer Title Catching On With Corporations."

To quote from the story, it's not about the title, it's about what the blog says. And how it says it.

While the title of chief blogger is seductive, analysts and industry insiders said the title shouldn’t be the focus. What’s essential is the brand voice, whether it comes from one chief blogger (such as vice chairman Bob Lutz on General Motors’ FastLane Blog or CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan’s Blog) or a group working together, such as those on Southwest and Wal-Mart’s blogs.

No one is saying that a chief blogger or blog voice is right for all brands. Bloggers and analysts said companies that want to blog should identify a specific reason to do so, such as to humanize the company (like Microsoft), make the company more open (like Dell) or advance the fun-and-happy company image (like Southwest).

Transparency and open communications are good things. A customer-facing corporate blog can be wonderful, as long as it's not just a way to distribute corporate speeches, canned marketing messages and press releases in a different format.

Embarcadero and CodeGear: Such a bargain!

The surprising aspect of Embarcadero's purchase of CodeGear from Borland is the low, low price tag: US$23 million. As Borland put it yesterday:

Borland announced today a definitive agreement to sell the assets of its individual developer tools unit, CodeGear, to Embarcadero Technologies. The purchase price for CodeGear is expected to be approximately $23 million. Borland will also retain CodeGear’s accounts receivables with an approximate value of an additional $7 million.

That's an incredible price, given the large number of users for products like JBuilder and Delphi, and the powerful brand equity in those products (though admittedly, not in the CodeGear name).

From this, one may draw several possible conclusions:

1. The CodeGear business wasn't doing very well.

2. Borland was desperate to sell, and took the first offer.

3. Embarcadero has some world-class negotiators.

Amazing corporate candor from Adobe regarding Photoshop Express

Adobe's Photoshop Express service has been in beta for some time. I was surprised and delighted to see this email come in from Adobe yesterday afternoon, via its public relations agency, AR-Edelman. This type of candor is far too rare in our industry, and deserves to be praised:

I would like to provide you with the following statement from the Adobe Photoshop Express Team:

"As you know, we were preparing updates to the Photoshop Express beta on May 7th that added significant new functionality to the product. However, prior to going live, we discovered a bug that requires a fix. We're committed to delivering a quality experience with Photoshop Express and don't want to send out an update that isn't ready for prime time. We're working on a quick resolution. Stay tuned — we'll have an exact time frame on when you can expect these new Photoshop Express features soon."

— Adobe Photoshop Express Team

Thank you, Adobe, for being honest! Most companies would have just glossed over it.

>> Update 5/9: Adobe now reports: "We're happy to report we have successfully fixed the bug that slightly delayed our newest feature update for the Photoshop Express beta. New updates are now publicly available."

Embarcadero gobbles up CodeGear

Didn't see this one coming! To excerpt from the official release:

Embarcadero Technologies® to Acquire CodeGear™ from Borland® Software

SAN FRANCISCO – May 7, 2008 – Embarcadero Technologies, a privately-held company of Thoma Cressey Bravo, today announced that they signed a definitive asset purchase agreement with Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL) to purchase its CodeGear division. The transaction is expected to close in 30 to 60 days. By combining the market leaders in development tools and database tools, Embarcadero will be able to address the growing productivity and resource challenges companies face as a result of different applications and diverse database platforms. With more than $100 million in annual revenue and over 500 employees worldwide, the combined companies will operate under the Embarcadero Technologies name.

“The application and database development worlds are colliding and the synergies between these two companies make this union timely and logical,” said Orlando Bravo, managing partner of Thoma Cressey Bravo. “This acquisition will yield Embarcadero the financial strength, people and product innovation to aggressively address the demands of this evolving market,” said Holden Spaht, Principal of Thoma Cressey Bravo.

The acquisition of the CodeGear business is expected to make Embarcadero the world’s largest, independent software provider offering an integrated portfolio to design, develop, manage and optimize heterogeneous applications and their databases. Customers and partners will benefit from Embarcadero’s ability to help fully integrate their application development lifecycle, automate error-prone tasks and dramatically increase their productivity.

In addition, Embarcadero gains a significantly larger sales footprint to serve millions of software developers, architects, independent software vendors (ISVs) and database professionals worldwide. The combined market opportunity for Embarcadero and CodeGear products will represent more than 15 million users worldwide and is expected to grow by up to 10 percent annually, according to industry reports.

JavaFX, for all the screens of your life

Over the past half-dozen years, the JavaOne conference has been slowly morphing into the Mobile Java Development conference, with an increased emphasis on writing Java ME apps for cell phones.

This year, JavaOne is branching out to a broader vision, encompassing not only desktops and mobile phones, but also televisions and consumer electronics devices.

Sun’s new catchphrase – which I’m already tired of – is that Java applications are for “all the screens of your life.” Whether it’s a business dashboard or a Facebook plug-in or software distributed on a Blu-ray disc, the same software should run on everything. More importantly, the user experience should be consistent across every possible device – without developers having to write custom versions of their software for particular deployment targets.

That catchphrase is a key part of Sun’s messaging about Java: “Today, Java technology is the most widely adopted runtime in the world and is now powering compelling content and rich end-user experiences across all the ‘screens of your life’ on billions of devices – from desktop browsers and computers (800,000) and mobile phones (more than 2 billion) to TVs, Blu-ray Disc players and other connected consumer devices.”

The foundation for this cross-platform user experience – dare we call it, “write once, experience everywhere?” is JavaFX. That’s a new GUI layer for rich client applications that will integrate 2D, 3D, animation and sound into Java ME and Java SE VMs – hardware-assisted, when possible. Yes, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, but the difference is that unlike WPF, JavaFX is not tied to a particular operating system

JavaFX looks good, but we’ve been hearing about it since JavaOne 2007, and Sun has yet to deliver even beta code. (The demos during the JavaOne keynote kept crashing.) The latest word is that we’ll have “early access” code in July, and a Java SE version for desktops later this year. Java ME versions of JavaFX won’t be until early 2009. Maybe then we’ll see what Sun means by having software running on all the screens of our life.

Is Sun toast? The finances aren't good

While Sun talks about its technology future here at the busy, bustling JavaOne, I'm thinking about its financial results.

As reported in the San Jose Mercury News last week, Sun is planning to cut up to 2,500 jobs. Why? Because the company, which had been expected to make a profit, had a big loss instead. In its fiscal third quarter, running from January-March 2008, the company lost $34 million. By contrast, in the same quarter of 2007, it made a profit of $67 million.

Quoting from the May 1 earnings release:

Revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.266 billion, a decrease of 0.5 percent as compared with $3.283 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 44.9, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2007.

Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis was $34 million, or ($0.04) per share, as compared with net income of $67 million, or $0.07 per share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. In the third quarter of fiscal 2008, the company recorded a $52 million dollar tax provision, as compared to a tax benefit of $3 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net loss for the third quarter included charges related to the acquisition of MySQL, which reduced earnings per share by approximately $0.04.

However, cash does remain strong:

Cash generated from operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 was $329 million, and the cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $3.801 billion. During the third quarter, Sun continued to leverage its cash position, spending $300 million to repurchase 17.5 million shares of its common stock. There is currently $500 million remaining of the $3 billion share repurchase program announced in the company's fiscal fourth quarter of 2007.

Sun paid about $1 billion for MySQL. The deal closed in February.

What does Sun's executive team think about all this? CEO Jonathan Schwartz was characteristically direct in his blog (you should read the whole post, which I'm excerpting):

We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.

As you can read in the press release, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) — on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.

The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US — which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year — and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%.

We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies in which we sell, but a shortfall in the world's largest economy (and the largest in Sun's portfolio), is tough to make up elsewhere. So we showed no growth at the corporate level.

Despite a weak US economy, we still see growth and opportunity across the world. We are going to be making some changes as a result of the quarter, certainly, but not in our core vision or strategic direction — network infrastructure is being built out across the world, developers will continue to define its architecture and shape demand, and we will continue to position ourselves to drive and capture that market.

The early renewal catches the worm, believes Network Solutions

Yes, yes, I'm sure that we're overpaying for domain registrations and DNS, but we have many of ours through Network Solutions.

One of the downsides of Network Solutions is the price. An upside is that they have good online tools for managing the name servers. Frankly, it's too much work to bother researching alternatives and moving the stuff, particularly as the service has been reliable.

Another downside is that they're always trying to sell us something, often in the guise of a continuous stream of bogus service renewals. Today, they sent me a "Gold VIP Renewal Service" alert, warning me that one of my services was running out of time. "Act now. Don't let your service(s) expire" cautions the urgent message.

That particular service is a domain registration that expires in ... wait for it ... March 2009.

Sheesh. It reminds me of the great steamroller chase scene from Austin Powers.

I saw Neil Young at JavaOne, but he didn't sing

The headliner of the JavaOne keynote was legendary rocker Neil Young. His connection with JavaOne is that his forthcoming Neil Young Archive will be released on Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray uses an embedded Java virtual machine to drive dynamic content.

But Neil Young didn't sing! There was even a setup line, where one of the Sun folks — can't remember if it was Rich Green or Jonathan Schwartz — said after the Archive demo that his favorite Young song is "Rockin' in the Free World."

What a clear setup! I expected someone to throw Young a guitar or something. But no, Young just shuffled off the stage. What a letdown. But at least I got a photo of Young with Green and Schwartz.

Sun describes the Archive product as:

More than 15 years in the making, the Neil Young Archive will be a complete biography of the artist's career in a timeline format including a chronology of songs released and unreleased. Through Blu-ray and Java technology, for the first time viewers will be able to navigate through Young's music, movies, videos, personal archives, memorabilia, photographs, letters, handwritten manuscripts and more while the high resolution 192/24 audio is playing, giving a chronological insight into the creative process and an opportunity to bear witness to the evolution of Neil Young's musical soul over the course of his life and work.

The Blu-ray format delivers both unsurpassed 192/24 audio quality and high definition video, capturing the quality of the original analog master recordings in the best digital format available today. The first Neil Young Archive release will be a 10 Blu-ray Disc set available this fall from Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, covering Young's career from 1963-1972.

Write-up in Media Business about Systems Management News

The May 2, 2008, edition of Media Business had a detailed story about our launch of Systems Management News, featuring quotes from Ted Bahr (the "B" of BZ Media).

To excerpt from Matthew Schwartz, "New print titles key in on changing markets, needs":

Bahr is facing one of the hardest-hit ad sectors, with computing, software, telecommunications advertising down 17.8% in revenue and 11.7% in pages last year compared with 2006, according to Business Information Network.

Nevertheless, Bahr is confident Systems Management News is well-positioned for when the economy starts to bounce back. “Any b-to-b print publication is 'how-to' in nature. But if you continue to do that, you're going to be beaten by the Web,” he said. “With print, you want to stop the world twice a month and allow readers to step back and get some perspective, as opposed to the daily firehose from the Web.”

Robert Williams, VP-sales and marketing at Software FX, a data visualization components vendor, has bought ad space in the first two issues of Systems Management News. “The doom and gloom about print is overblown,” he said. “I still like to see things in print, and you're going to get the news presented a little differently in a biweekly.”

Read the whole story online.

Microsoft Google Yahoo irony

In SD Times' coverage of the latest in the Microsoft-Yahoo attempted takeover, David Worthington filed a story today about how Microsoft has withdrawn its $33/share offer.

To help illustrate the story, "Microsoft walks away from Yahoo buyout," our Web team embedded some financial graphs onto the page. Interestingly, the easiest ones to embed came from a Google Gadget.

But what happens when you click on that Google Gadget? It takes you to Yahoo Finance!

It's really all just one interconnected Web.