Sean Michael Kerner

UPDATED: Ethernet  may be widespread, but it doesn’t actually plaster the earth as a networking standard. At least, not yet. A new study from Frost and Sullivan notes that synchronous optical network (SONET) technology , at least in the short term, remains the leader in the metro private line networking space. Metro Ethernet, however, may […]

Business integration software has long been the exclusive playground of proprietary closed source vendors. But a new open source startup called Jitterbit is hoping to change the landscape a bit with its newly released Jitterbit 1.0 platform. Jitterbit’s self-named business integration software enables users, on either Windows or Linux, to integrate and connect data from […]

Last summer, Google sponsored 410 open source projects spanning 41 different organizations in a development initiative known as the Summer of Code. How successful were those projects and how many of those Summer of Code 2005 projects still survive? The number may well be less than half. Chris DiBona, open source program manager at Google, […]

A California Superior Court judge has given the green light to a class action suite against VeriSign regarding the registrar’s SSL security certificates. More than 400,000 plaintiff are seeking $500 each in restitution, bringing the company’s potential liability to $200 million. The class action suit revolves around an allegation that VeriSign mislead buyers of its […]

Microsoft is taking the wraps off a new community development site for its shared and open source code initiatives. The CodePlex development site (http://codeplex.com), currently in Beta, may well supplant Microsoft’s projects on the open source software repository SourceForge.net site and its own GotDotnet site. Nothing is official about moving current projects to the new […]

AOL is expanding its broadband video advertising empire with the acquisition of privately held Lightningcast. The Washington D.C.-based Lightningcast is a developer of a broadband video advertising platform as well as audio ad insertion and campaign management technologies. Lightningcast and AOL are hardly strangers. AOL has been using Lightningcast’s platform since 2002, first for AOL […]

Jack Ma , founder, chairman and CEO of the Chinese Web site Alibaba.com, took the stage yesterday at Yahoo’s analyst day and boldly proclaimed that his company will take on all comers in the Chinese marketplace. These comers include eBay, Google and Baidu, and Alibaba may well emerge as one of the top Internet companies […]

Most people have lots of different contact methods or telephone numbers. The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to make them easier to handle with the approval of a new top-level domain (TLD). According to minutes from last week’s ICANN board of directors’ meeting, the group approved the .tel, which will provide […]

TORONTO — If Paul Kedrosky’s inbox is an accurate barometer, then the Internet bubble is back. The venture capitalist blogger told a capacity crowd at the Mesh conference in Toronto this week that all the signs show a bubble is back. Kedrosky is with Ventures West, Canada’s largest institutional venture capital firm, and is the […]

TORONTO — How do you measure the blogging ROI? That’s not an easy question to answer, according to Steve Rubel, one of the world’s most influential bloggers. At the inaugural Mesh Conference here today, the Edelman PR senior vice president discussed the impact of blogging on corporate PR activities. Rubel’s blog, Micropersuasion, is currently the […]

Mozilla developers continue to make progress on the highly anticipated Firefox 2.0 browser. A second development milestone release is now available for testing, boasting a raft of new features, as the next-generation open source browser races to a final release and late-year showdown with its arch-nemesis Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. Whereas previously IE may well […]

With over 200,000 downloads to date, the open source FindBugs project is already a reasonably popular Java bug-hunting tool, but it hasn’t found its way into large enterprise deployments. Not yet anyway. Thanks to a new sponsorship and bundling effort with Fortify Software, that may well be about to change. The FindBugs project is run […]