management

The back-to-work blues

One Sunday night, when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, my dad noticed I was acting a little moody. "What's the matter, sonny boy?" That's what he called me sometimes. I think it's from an Al Jolson song.

"Ah, you know, I've got school tomorrow." I whined. "Weekends are great, but they're too short."

"You know what?" he replied, "I still feel that way about work."… Read more

Notely: Neatly organizing student life

University students face a certain challenge keeping their homework, class schedules, and research developments organized among paper documents and computers in their room, home, and the lab. When epiphany strikes, it's just as likely to be recorded on the back of a crumpled sandwich receipt as it is on a Word document or online briefcase--or was that just me?

That's exactly why Tom Whitson wrote Notely.

Developed in the Netvibes Ecosystem and translated into a number of languages, Notely is positioned to meet students' organizational needs by storing notes, important links, a calendar, a class schedule, grades, and … Read more

Mozilla promotes Lilly from COO to CEO

Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has promoted Chief Operating Officer John Lilly to chief executive, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software said Monday.

Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman, the organization said, where she'll focus on high-level issues such as standards, interoperability, and issues around people's data.

"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly … Read more

PicMarker watermarks, keeps your photos safe from evildoers

The correct attribution for online photos is a touchy subject. People like to snazz up all sorts of things with photos they find on the Internet, and hunting down who owns the picture isn't always the easiest thing if it's been passed around without the proper credit. In December of last year, the video "Here Comes Another Bubble" caused a stir when video creators The Richter Scales were found using other people's photos without any kind of attribution whatsoever. The snafu sparked an online debate about digital media rights, and the fallout was substantial. The … Read more

Q&A: Red Hat CEO believes Delta past isn't a liability

Some folks paused when they heard an airline executive was taking over as Red Hat's new chief executive. But Jim Whitehurst thinks his job as Delta Air Lines' chief operating officer will serve him in good stead.

In an interview Friday, the 40-year-old said he believes his experience running much of a 50,000-person company and focusing on top priorities will serve the Linux seller well as it tries to increase revenue.

Whitehurst also has at least a touch of the open-source zeal of his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, who left the CEO job January 1 because of family medical … Read more

Net users are becoming their own reputation managers

With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity.

Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to 5 seconds of microfame, and in the contained public arena of social networks, amateur paparazzi--thanks to the viral nature of social media--have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."

As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your … Read more

Red Hat exec: New CEO has open-source cred

Michael Tiemann, a Red Hat executive with close to two decades of open-source business experience under his belt, has come to the defense of the company's new chief executive.

Red Hat said last week that Jim Whitehurst, 40, will take over as Red Hat CEO and president on January 1, replacing Matthew Szulik, who's stepping down, though remaining chairman, because of family medical issues. Whitehurst worked at Delta Airlines from 2002 to 2007, rising to the position of chief operating officer.

Tiemann, who's Red Hat's vice president of open-source affairs and who helps to run the … Read more

Cisco's second-in-command steps down

The man thought to be next in line for the CEO job at Cisco Systems has resigned, the company announced Thursday.

Charles Giancarlo, executive vice president and chief development officer, will be stepping down from his post as of December 31 after 14 years with Cisco. Giancarlo, 50, has taken a job as managing director and partner at Silver Lake, an investment firm focused on large-scale investments in technology. His first day at the new job will be January 2, 2008.

Cisco's CEO John Chambers said he had tried over the past six months to persuade Giancarlo to stay. … Read more

An exceptional year for Alfresco

It's hard to talk about the rising success of open source without at least mentioning Alfresco, given the successes of this past year. Given that I work for Alfresco, I try to keep references to Alfresco isolated and only part of larger discussions of open source. But there has been so much momentum and traction lately that today I can't help myself. Indeed, CMSwire went so far as to write:

Every week, it seems, there's a big announcement from Alfresco....The [company] has...some kind of magical app-building framework which enables them to rattle off integrated products at lightning speed.

The latest of these [Red Hat + Alfresco collaboration] is not quite as sexy, on the face of it, as the Facebook hookup. But in terms of its implications for the collaboration portal industry, i.e. for Microsoft, it could prove to be the killer app which takes Alfresco into the big time.

In the last quarter alone, Alfresco racked up the following:

Alfresco registered 400% sales growth over an already very robust fiscal year 2006;… Read more