VentureBeat

These graphics don’t compute: Nvidia stock fell 19 percent in after-hours trading today after the company disclosed some big problems with its second-quarter performance. The company said it will take a charge of $150 million to $200 million for high failure rates in certain models of its graphics-processing units and its chip sets. It blamed heat problems on weak materials used to attach the chips to their packages in notebook computers. The company is also being hurt by poor demand across the globe, a delay in producing a next-generation chip set, and price cuts. Advanced Micro Devices also recently introduced a competitive graphics chip for the first time in more than a year. Analysts had expected Nvidia to report revenue of $1.1 billion, but the company now says its revenue range will be $875 million to $950 million.

Debate on the Long Tail reignites: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has gotten a lot of mileage out of his thesis/book “The Long Tail” that argued there is more money to be made in niches than with big hits thanks to the internet, which gives you the potential to hold gazillions of books, movies etc. in perpetual store shelves. But the Harvard Business Review just published a piece by professor Anita Elberse arguing that the two-year-old book is hogwash and that the Internet is actually doing the opposite of what Anderson says. She says the hits are as big as ever and are thus a better investment than niche plays, just as is the case in the physical world.

Google Maps for Mobile now on BlackBerry: Google’s mapping technology will now be available with voice searching on BlackBerry Pearl phones. If you own the Pearl models 8110, 8120, and 8130 in the U.S., you can use voice search to find locations in Google Maps. It uses the same speech-recognition engine that’s available with GOOG-411.

Google wins a round against Viacom, users and privacy advocates lose: Google came out ahead when a federal judge ruled Wednesday that it doesn’t have to share source code for search functions on Google-owned YouTube with Viacom. Media giant Viacom had asked for the code as part of its $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007. Viacom argues that Google allows users to post pirated videos or content owned by Viacom without doing much to stop them. Google won this particular legal round on the argument that its source code was a trade secret that can’t be disclosed without the risk of losing business. However, users lost out — the judge also granted Viacom’s motion that YouTube has to turn over the login information and IP address of every viewer of YouTube videos.

IBM acquires mainframe rival PSI: One way to make a nasty antitrust problem go away is to acquire the folks who are complaining about you. IBM is doing just that, saying it will acquire Platform Solutions Inc. for an undisclosed price. PSI had been complaining to European Union regulators that IBM was behaving in an anti-competitive manner in the mainframe computing software market. The Computer & Communications Industry Association said that antitrust regulators should review the “extinguishing of competition in the mainframe market.” IBM said PSI’s revenues are too small to require a review.

Antitrust regulators review Yahoo-Google deal: The Justice Department has issued civil investigative demands asking for more information to examine whether the Google-Yahoo alliance on search breaks any antitrust laws. Under the deal, Google will provide some of the search results for users doing searches on Yahoo’s sites. Legal experts say that the demands, which carry subpoena power, show that the investigation has moved beyond a preliminary phase. Yahoo is hoping that the deal with Google will generate $800 million in new revenue, since Google’s search ads are far more valuable than Yahoo’s.

Judge unseals Facebook-ConnectU transcripts: U.S. District Court judge James Ware ruled that reporters will have access to redacted transcripts of hearings in the case between Facebook and ConnectU over whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ripped off ConnectU when he started Facebook. ConnectU sued a while back saying that Facebook owed it money for the purloined ideas and it wanted legal damages from Facebook. They settle the deal, but ConnectU wanted to reopen the case when it said it found more evidence of fraud. Ware ruled earlier that there was no reason to toss out a previously negotiated settlement between the two companies. ConnectU wanted to re-open the settlement because it found new evidence.

Adobe’s PDF format standardized: The Portable Document Format from Adobe is one of the most commonly used formats for electronic documents and it’s now an ISO international standard. That means it meets standards for openness and can be used in a wide array of scenarios such as government contracting.

Big Blue has been on a cleantech tear of late. Starting with a touchy-feely virtual world it released for Earth Day in April, the company has made a succession of announcements: A technology for cooling concentrating solar arrays, a new line of modular, energy-efficient data-centers, and the latest, its entrance into the thin-film solar cell market.

Joining with Japanese semiconductor company Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, IBM will be working on thin-film copper-gallium-selenide (CIGS) cells, the same technology that Nanosolar, Miasole, Heliovolt and several other startups use. However, IBM has come out of the gate claiming its cells will be both cheaper and better than competing offerings that are headed to the market.

IBM told Reuters it plans to make cells with a 15 percent efficiency, about 50 percent higher than most CIGs cells and about even with the dominant silicon-based technologies. However, it says it will produce them for under $1 per watt, a symbolic price barrier that no manufacturer has yet breached. CNET has details on the chemical evaporation manufacturing process the company plans to use.

If IBM can meet its goals, its cells will be superior, in terms of the all-important cost-efficiency metric, to any other cells on the market, able to operate effectively in either municipal power plants or on the roofs of houses and businesses. The company plans on having the technology ready to license out to manufacturers within 2-3 years.

Here’s the grain of salt: IBM happens to be entering the most hyped segment of the cleantech market, with the possible exception of cellulosic ethanol. Over the past couple of years, CIGs technologies captured the lion’s share of VC investment into solar technologies but still account for less than 10 percent of the solar market. It’s hard to tell whether IBM is simply jumping into whichever markets it sees the most excitement in, or whether the technology expertise it has gained from its semiconductor business just happens to be uniquely suited to the same solar technologies that are already getting the most press.

Through no fault of IBM’s, there’s also a boy-who-cried-wolf situation: Thin-film companies have been all too happy to trumpet their own achievements before those achievements have actually been made. Commercializing CIGs hasn’t been easy; as we noted almost exactly a year ago, the most hotly anticipated CIGs companies had all slipped on their delivery dates, and several are still struggling today. IBM, also, will have to prove that it can walk the talk.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of companies that have already started making thin-film cells at scale. Thin-film market leader First Solar is producing CdTe cells for just over $1 per watt, and Nanosolar has intimated that it’s also producing cells fairly cheaply.

But keep an eye on IBM. Along with its most publicized ventures (like this one), Big Blue seems to be making a concerted push into cleantech, including a nanotech effort toward low-power semiconductors, enterprise carbon modeling software, and membership in the Eco-Patent Commons. Given the recent trend, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear more from IBM soon.

For almost two centuries, Central and South America have become synonymous with economic paralysis. Economic growth has been limited by ruling oligarchies and dictators, restrictive policies, and foreign meddling.

But with the new era of globalization, the status quo is under attack.

A report released today by the Latin American Venture Capital Association (LAVCA) suggests that, like much of the rest of the world, Latin America is rapidly opening up to investment and entrepreneurship. LAVCA rates its 13 constituent countries by a “scorecard” that shows their progress relative to investment-friendly countries like the UK and Israel. This year, two countries, Brazil and Chile, have leapt above their peers, while most others are also on their way up.

The LAVCA scorecard is not the end-all measurement for entrepreneurial growth. As a percent of gross domestic product, venture investment throughout Latin America is still low, and challenges like governmental corruption remain. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that at least one economy, Brazil, is large enough to attract the attention of international investment firms, including some in Silicon Valley.

I also recently had a conversation with the managing director of IBM’s venture capital group, Claudia Fan Munce, who had just returned from a venture capital symposium in Brazil. Though IBM has had a corporate presence in the countryl for almost a century, its interest in venture investment there is more recent. Munce says that’s because there has to be a strong investment community in a country before IBM wants to step in.

The local investment scene is indeed growing rapidly, between expanding old-line firms like FIR Capital and Mercado Ventures and small new venture firms. Munce says that when she attended the same symposium two years ago, there were 50 attendees; this year, there were over 400, including delegations from US firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Trident Capital that accompanied her.

Like the markets in China and India, Brazil is growing rapidly to meet the needs of its population — with over 187 million people, it’s the fifth most populous nation in the world. Some segments, like mobile services, are experiencing even faster growth than China. “In the 11 years I lived there I don’t think I had a phone,” Munce recalls of a period of time she spent in Brazil, earlier in her career. Now, she says, every child has a mobile phone.

The new investment atmosphere is reflected in the LAVCA report, which gives Brazil top scores for friendliness to investors and entrepreneurs. However, Brazil has an unusual characteristic in its relative dearth of large corporations (IBM notwithstanding). “The country is dominated by small and medium-sized businesses,” says Munce. “It’s very new for Brazil to start companies with an eye on a larger scale, and a broader market beyond Brazil.”

However, market demand is quickly changing that equation. Although mobile and IT are obvious areas for investment, several others are also booming. One of those is, oddly enough, investment banking software. “It’s some of the most sophisticated in the world, because for decades the monetary fluctuations in Brazil were second to none; you could be rich in the morning and poor in the afternoon. It was almost a survival skill,” comments Munce. Today, that “survival skill” could be turned to managing other markets.

Another area is cleantech, specifically biofuels. Brazil has had a developed biofuel industry for over a decade, built atop its sugar plantations, so the country’s businesses are well experienced in tackling issues, like fuel transportation, that companies in the US and elsewhere are figuring out for the first time. That could give an opportunity for new service and distribution firms, such as already exist for the oil industry, separate from the companies that do production and refining.

Here’s the latest action:

Dell wants greener PCs (now if only their customers did too) — The computer maker says its laptops and desktops should consume 25 percent less energy by 2010. But the Wall Street Journal notes that Dell has an uphill battle in its effort to become the self-proclaimed “greenest IT company”, because many IT departments think environmentally-friendly computers are too expensive.

Atari releases exercise game system to compete with Nintendo’s — The new Wii Fit isn’t the only option for gamers who want to get in shape without leaving the comfort of their living rooms. Atari plans to release Family Trainer, a product for the Wii, this fall. It’s being billed as a simplified Wii Fit; players use an interactive floor mat for outdoor games like river rafting and log jumping.

Mozilla shares a few details about data collection project — As the company tries to expand beyond its Firefox web browser, one of its next projects is a service that could provide a fresh take on web analytics. Mozilla chief executive John Lilly writes that he project’s goal is to collect and share user data in a way that gives users control and protects their privacy, and to enable everyone to analyze and mash-up that data. That’s not a lot of information to go on, but it’ll be exciting to see what Mozilla comes up with.

Ask.com to buy Lexico — Apparently, the most popular query on search engine Ask.com is the word “dictionary”, so it kind of makes sense that IAC/Ask would purchase the Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. Ask says the deal will make it the ninth most visited property online, ahead of Facebook. Acquisition details haven’t been disclosed, but presumably the number is close to Answers.com’s $100 million offer for Lexico last year.

Google creates an encyclopedia for web developers — The site, called Doctype, will include articles on web security, best practices and more, as well as reference materials on HTML, DOM and CSS, and even some unused Google code that was developed for internal use. Taking a page from Wikipedia, Doctype can be edited by anyone with a Google account.

IBM develops technology to let solar cells stand the heat of more than 1,000 suns — That’s an important step, because cooling is a big concern with the photovoltaic cells used in solar panels. IBM’s stated performance is better than some companies like SolFocus and Greenvolts, but not as good as a recent upstart called Sunrgi.

The services sector has proven to be one of the hottest in information technology. You need trained people to manage the ebb and flow of computing in a massive, air-conditioned data center that handles the life blood of a corporation such as its e-commerce transactions or internal business operations.

IBM has been the primary beneficiary of the services boom, but now it will face more determined competition with Hewlett-Packard’s $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems. Together, they can create what one analyst (at IDC) called a “super plumber” for corporate data centers.

The deal is the biggest for HP since it bought Compaq six years ago for $20 billion and it will put HP at a strong No. 2 behind IBM in IT services.

HP will buy Plano, Texas-based EDS for $25 a share, about 32.5 percent higher than the data center outsourcing company’s closing price on Friday. Both boards have approved the deal and the transaction is expected to close in the second half.

HP’s CEO Mark Hurd said that EDS would remain a separate business group in Texas with current CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer as its chief. Rittenmeyer will also join HP’s executive council. The deal is likely to be far less controversial than the Compaq merger, which led to negative employee perceptions of then-CEO Carly Fiorina. The poor execution following the merger led to Fiorina’s ouster and Hurd’s hiring in 2005.

Hurd has been executing well, but you could argue that he is just continuing the strategy that Fiorina spelled out: that size and scale matter in the information technology industry. If the deal goes through, you can expect to see a lot of layoffs.

“It’s another step in the consolidation of the traditional IT infrastructure players and gets HP deeper into the enterprise segment,” said Jason Green, a partner at Emergence Capital. “Good for start-ups as the larger and less nimble the big guys are, the better.”

Jeff Nolan, author of the Venture Chronicles blog, said the deal makes sense because EDS has been under pressure to perform and an acquisition could spur it forward. EDS, meanwhile, could help HP with not only its services revenue but hardware sales as well. Lastly, he said that the deal could give HP the resources to initiate a cloud-computing operation, similar to what IBM is starting to do. Read the rest of this entry »

New business models, the explosion of data, and new uses for technology topped the agenda at last week’s IBM Almaden Institute,  which brought together a group of very smart researchers and industry experts from around the globe. They talked about how to innovate by taking advantage of the rising tide of data; topics included “Life on an Instrumented Planet.” Here are some highlights from a handful of the talks at IBM’s research center in the hills above San Jose, Calif. I think the speakers did a good job of reaching high elevations in their talks.  This is the first of two posts on the conference.

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, opened the conference with a talk about how components, complements and standards have become critical to innovation. Components are things like screws or microprocessors that are the essential ingredients for a more complex system. This was pretty elementary stuff, but Varian had some insights that you only get if you look at things from a high elevation.

Complements are things like DVD disks and DVD players. They both have to arrive in the market at the same time in order for the DVD market to take off. Varian says that coordination isn’t easy because such complements often involve companies in different industries with different business models. One of the fundamental drivers of coordination has been Moore’s Law, which holds that chip capacity doubles every couple of years or so, putting demands on improved performance across the entire technology spectrum.

Often, the value of one product is enhanced by the presence of another, like hamburger and ketchup or microprocessors and hard drives. Sometimes one complement tries to absorb another, like when Sony (consumer electronics maker) bought Columbia (movie studio) but that frequently results in poor results (AOL Time Warner).

Standards are great for the creation of product ecosystems, but it’s dangerous when one or two companies (Wintel) monopolize the supply of a standard component. If one partner in the ecosystem cuts prices, the entire group benefits. Revenue sharing turns out to be one way to get ecosystems to accelerate. For instance, DVD rentals didn’t take off right away because initially, Blockbuster had to buy movies from the DVD makers. They only became a hit when DVD makers gave Blockbuster the disks for free and then, in turn, Blockbuster gave back a share of the revenue every time a disk was rented. Hence, in today’s increasingly complicated world full of complex product ecosystems, innovations in business models may be key to making a product take off.

Kris Pister, founder of Dust Networks, talked about the progress made in the last decade by mesh networks based on a “smart dust” wireless sensors. He admitted that a lot of the early excitement around such networks was overhyped. As a professor at UC Berkeley, he pioneered the research from around 1997 to 2002. The goal was to create mesh networks with thousands or millions of nodes, each around a millimeter cubed in dimensions. Such nodes could be deployed in places such as grape vineyards where they could measure data, such as dryness or temperature, and pass it along to the next node via a short-range wireless signal. Read the rest of this entry »

MindTouch is releasing today a new version of its Deki Wiki open-source Wiki tool software which makes it much easier to manage web content in multiple languages.

The MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05 is a web-based Wiki platform that lets web development teams build web pages that are much easier to create and maintain. One of its interesting new features is “polyglot support.” With it, a developer can use the Deki Wiki tool to post updates in multiple languages.

This means a web developer can integrate multiple languages into a single site, rather than create a separate site for each language. In addition, users visiting the site can search across all languages, with the search results prioritized to that user’s language.

The developer can use the tool to design a web page in English. They can then include a button that switches the user to that same page in another language. The user-interface for the page stays the same, but the words are in a different language.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, plans on using Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Development Center, the site where Mozilla manages its community of developers. That’s important for open-source developers such as Mozilla, which has thousands of developers around the world.

“This is particularly good for Wiki-style collaborations,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of San Diego, Calif.-based MindTouch, in an interview. It’s also good for platform companies who work with a variety of application developers as well as enterprises that are tapping their customers for development support.

Beyond polyglot support, the software also makes it easy for developers to upload images, videos and other files to a web site. It’s also easy to transform content from one kind of format to another, as needed to make the content compatible with a web page’s given design.

The 25-employee company started in 2005, released its first version in 2006 and then another version in 2007. Fulkerson said the company has bootstrapped the financing and is likely to delay raising a round of venture capital because the business growth is strong. He said the company gives away the tool for free but sells enterprise subscriptions for those who need support. The closest competitors are IBM and Oracle’s BEA.

Here’s the latest action:

Mashup companies take over Web 2.0 — InfoWorld profiles three companies making announcements at this week’s conference: Serena, which is launching an online marketplace for business mashups; JackBe, which has a new version of its enterprise mashup platform; and Kapow, which provides a hosted service to build mashups that provide web intelligence. We’ll also be writing more about Rearden Commerce and Zude in the next few days. And we just covered SnapLogic, which provides data integration for, you guessed it, enterprise mashups, and has launched version 2.0 and professional editions of its software.

Linden Lab names Mark Kingdon as new chief executive — Kingdon previously spent five years running digital ad agency Organic. The appointment of someone with a stronger business background than founder Philip Rosedale makes sense, particularly since Linden Lab board member Bill Gurley told me the company needs a chief executive who can help it grapple with rapid growth. Less charitably, the appointment can be seen as an attempt to help Linden get back on track after struggling to live up to the initial promise of its virtual world Second Life. Rosedale announced last month that he plans to step down.

IBM buys storage company Diligent Technologies for $200M — The terms of the deal were not disclosed officially, but Israeli newspaper Globes says it was for $200 million. Diligent is IBM’s third Israeli acquisition this year.

StumbleUpon approaches 5 billion stumbles – The website-discovery and rating service is about to get its 5 millionth user, and is also getting very close to nearly 5 billion “stumbles” (recommendations). Not only is that a number just plain impressive, but since each stumble should improve StumbleUpon’s “discovery” service, it also means the site is getting better and better. StumbleUpon is owned by eBay.

Solar plant builder Stirling Energy Systems gets $100M — The funding comes from NTR plc. Stirling is building solar energy projects in the Imperial Valley and the Mojave Desert.

Walter Bender resigns One Laptop Per Child — Apparently Bender , who served as the organization’s president, is more interested in incorporating open source methods into education.

IBM has been touting virtual worlds like Second Life a lot lately. But it’s also getting into the game. For Earth Day, IBM has designed a virtual world game dubbed “Power Up.” It’s a free 3-D multiplayer virtual world game on a planet called “Helios.”

Players create avatars to ride through rugged mountains and search through junk yards to help rebuild broken wind turbines, solar panels, and dams. They have to avoid floods, sandstorms and SmogGobs. The mission is to save the planet. IBM says the world is targeted at teens who have an interest in fantasy worlds as well as a desire to learning about energy conservation and science.

When both Microsoft and Apple were just young up-and-comers in the industry, one company stood above all others: IBM. The behemoth, which had dominated the tech landscape since the 1930s, was eventually overshadowed by the two in the operating system and then Internet age, and exited the PC business in 2005. Now they are just another big tech company reliant on Microsoft Windows — but that could soon change.

IBM’s Research division has launched a pilot program aimed at moving its workers away from Windows, according to an internal document RoughlyDrafted has obtained. The big benefactor here? Apple, a company which has been doing very well with the personal computer crowd but hasn’t yet been able to significantly penetrate large corporate environments.

Interestingly enough, IBM’s program goes so far as to give employees Apple MacBook Pro laptops instead of their traditional ThinkPads — a brand IBM developed but sold to Levono in 2005. Its stated reasons for doing so:

• Alternative to Microsoft Windows
• Less prone to security issues
• Widely used in the academic world with which Research has close ties
• Many new hires are more comfortable with the Mac and lately asking for it
• Growing Mac community in Research and within IBM that finds the development environment on Mac more convenient
• Growing acceptance of the Mac as a consumer and business oriented client platform
• WPLC strategy includes significant investments in achieving the Mac platform parity

The limited first phase of the program ran from Ocotober 2007 until January 2008. When asked about the experience, 18 of the 22 participants who responded said the Mac offered a better experience than their PC. One rated it the same, and only three thought it was worse. These test subjects included research scientists, software engineers and a couple higher-level employees. Seven of them had little or no Mac experience prior to the test.

Not surprisingly, all of those who responded positively to the Mac experience, asked to keep the MacBook Pro rather than return to a ThinkPad.

IBM plans to expand this program in 2008 and the company has even launched an internal Mac@IBM website. Linux is another Non-Windows OS it is interested in promoting, but was not a part of this study.

If one of the largest corporations in the world is experimenting with using Apple computers, and its employees are preferring it at an 86 percent rate, perhaps it’s not too early for Microsoft to start worrying about their enterprise dominance.

This experiment has all the makings of another “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac” commercials in the future.

update: As commenter epc points out below, one of the IBM employees that participated in the program has a blog post with his thoughts. Interesting stuff.

Google is dominating the search business. New numbers from Hitwise suggest Google controlled over 67 percent of all U.S. searches in March — its highest number yet. That apparently isn’t stopping some big time investments in field.

Search start-up Cuill (yes, as the title suggests, it’s pronounced “cool”) has secured a large second of equity financing. The company is currently in stealth mode and little is known about it. On its bare-boned site, the company does promise to be “pioneering a new approach to search.”

There is also an about page for its web crawler bot, which it has named Twiceler.

The company certainly has the right pedigree. Its founder and chief executive, Tom Costello, formerly worked at IBM where he developed the WebFountain Internet analytics engine to survey unstructured data on the web. Prior to that, he created the late 1990s search engine Xift. The two other founders, Anna Patterson (who also serves as president) and Russell Power, both previously worked at Google where they were instrumental in TeraGoogle, the large search index.

The rest of the team is sprinkled with alumni of Google, IBM, eBay, Alta Vista, Xerox PARC, the Internet Archive and Stanford University.

This latest $25 million round was led by Madrone Capital Partners. The Menlo Park, CA-based company previously secured an $8 million round from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

We previously covered the service here and here.

Inevitably, one day we’ll look at the first mp3 players as relics. But if researchers at IBM have their way, that day will come sooner than you may think.

Researchers at IBM have created what they call “racetrack” memory, reports the Times Online. It’s similar to today’s flash memory (the method of storage on current iPhones, iPod Nanos and iPod Touches), but it lacks the moving parts of traditional hard drives (still in use in the larger iPod Classics and older iPods), which means more reliability, smaller devices and better battery life. However, where flash memory is slow at writing data, racetrack memory is very fast.

The real story, though, are the improvements in storage capacity and battery life racetrack memory promises. It could give devices the ability to hold massive amounts of information — as many at 500,000 songs or 3,500 movies on a single iPod, the Times Online notes. Such a device could also go weeks without needing to recharge.

The iPod is, of course, not the only device that would benefit from such technology. Everything from cellphones to handheld computing devices would see significant leaps forward thanks to racetrack memory.

There’s another upside as well: This memory would cost far less to produce.

The technology is still in the exploratory phase, but IBM believes it will be used in devices within the next decade. So much for Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’ old motto for the original iPod Nano: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Try a half-million.

[photo: flickr/Andrew*]

Plenty of people are skeptical that enterprises will embrace virtual worlds as a venue for doing serious business. IBM, on the other hand, is a total believer that 3-D worlds such as Second Life augur the future of online commerce.

IBM is announcing a partnership with Second Life producer Linden Lab today to create an enterprise-class version of Second Life behind a corporate firewall. IBM and Linden Lab believe that the move will strengthen the security of the virtual world, and thereby make it more attractive to corporations who are considering using it as a business platform, said Jim Spohrer, director of service research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose.

With the added security, businesses can enable employees to login into Second Life for corporate training purposes. (No, they’re not going to use their avatars to have virtual sex or pretend to be the opposite gender.) Spohrer said that businesses can rent areas known as “islands” in Second Life and run dress rehearsals for everything from a fire drill to a hospital emergency.

IBM has more than 5,000 employees using Second Life for purposes such as sales training or collaborating across different geographic regions. The company will also allow the employees to explore Second Life. And whey will be able to cross into IBM’s secure firewalled corporate network, much like users do with a virtual private network, which creates a secure connection from the Internet into a corporation so that users can log into enterprise applications from their homes.

The firewall will also prohibit regular users of Second Life from gaining access to portions of Second Life that are available only to IBM employees. Spohrer said that the companies have to work out exactly what to move behind the firewall to guarantee security.

It will be interesting to see whether the productivity of IBM employees goes down because they’re goofing off in a virtual world, or if it goes up because they’re using training applications in Second Life.

Spohrer said that a group of IBM researchers at Almaden have built an application dubbed “rehearsal studio” that allows professionals to hold online collaboration sessions with each other to talk about real-world problems. They can use the studio to do “what if” analysis or learn how to make presentations to executives. The sessions are recorded to provide feedback to the employees.

updated
IBM has invested in open-source database company EnterpriseDB, part of the giant company’s effort to hold its own in the fast growing Web application services market.

IBM typically does not invest in start-ups, but it has watched on as competing server company Sun acquired the popular open-source database company MySQL. Databases are a key component of the “stack” required to run applications on the Web, basically a place that stores the information that is called upon by servers when people visit the Web site.

IBM participated in a $10 million third round of investment into EnterpriseDB, which also included prior investors Charles River Ventures, Fidelity and Valhalla Partners.

Open-source, cheap tools for Web developing have become very popular, as they are forming the base of some of the fastest growing Web companies, from Facebook to Google.

MySQL has been a hit, because it is so cheap, letting Web developers use a basic version for free, or charging about $599 if it used commercially. EnterpriseDB, which is also open-source, charges closer to $1,000 for its basic version, justifying the higher price by saying it offers more features that make it more like the robust databases offered by Oracle. EnterpriseDB is still much cheaper than Oracle, however.

However, there’s been some criticism of EnterpriseDB’s claim to be open-source. Its products are based on open-source PostgreSQL technology, but EnterpriseDB adds its own improvements on top of PostgreSQL, additions which it does not make open-source, and for the most part hasn’t contributed back to PostgreSQL to make that product better (only very recently did it contribute some improvements).

Notably, Sun Microsystems had been a big supporter of PostgreSQL, offering it with its Solaris 10 server operating system, and partnering with EnterpriseDB. However, with Sun moving to acquire MySQL, the relationship with EnterpriseDB has cooled somewhat. To make things more complicated, IBM also has a relationship with MySQL, bundling it into many of its servers — which is unlikely to change.

The New Jersey-based EnterpriseDB has seen slower growth that MySQL, having 200 customers after raising $37.5 million. MySQL raised about $40 million, before selling to Sun for $1 billion last month (see our coverage ). MySQL says some 100 million copies of its product had been downloaded (see our coverage), though only a small portion of users request support or pay for the product.

Clarification: EnterpriseDB’s CEO Andy Astor got back to me and contested my point that EnterpriseDB hasn’t been contributing back to PostgreSQL. Here are a few lines his company’s PR representative sent me:

EnterpriseDB is the single largest contributor to the PostgreSQL community project, measured by financial contributions, resources, and technology contributions. It has regularly contributed back to PostgreSQL since its launch in May, 2005, so the statement that “only very recently did it contribute some improvements” isn’t quite right. Last week, in addition to the Series C financing, EnterpriseDB announced that it has open sourced its business intelligence/data warehousing technology, GridSQL, which is now available on SourceForge: http://www.enterprisedb.com/about/news_events/press_releases/03_25_08c.do

…Finally, here’s the blog from Matt Asay, one of the open source industry’s most vocal “purists” who applauded EnterpriseDB’s recent announcements: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9902671-16.html. Matt writes: “EnterpriseDB deploys the same hybrid model as Zimbra, SugarCRM, Funambol, and others. While I’m not a big fan of hybrid models, the reality is that it’s an accepted, successful model within commercial open source. If it means that EnterpriseDB and these others also contribute ever growing mountains of open-source code, which it does, then I can accept that.”

Even spooks need their virtual worlds. Where else, after all, could they rehearse their training missions against the bad guys of the world?

Forterra Systems and IBM said today that they’re teaming up to create virtual worlds for U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies. The so-called “Babel Bridge” project will allow spy agencies to use virtual worlds and Web 2.0 technologies to share intelligence information. Last month, Forterra raised a $10 million round (our coverage).

The project will feature a 3-D “unified communications” world which ties together voice, e-mail, text messages and other forms of communication. Users would access intelligence data from computers or mobile phones with secure connections. The two companies have already completed a prototype and will begin development in the second quarter, said Chris Badger, vice president of marketing at Forterra in San Mateo, Calif.

Intelligence agencies could soon use a virtual world to rehearse how they could attack a location that houses a terrorist cell, according to Forterra. The same technology could be used to prepare a hospital’s staff on how to react to a natural disaster.

Forterra was founded as part of There.com in 1998. In 2004, Forterra spun out of There, while Makena Technologies focused on its own consumer-oriented virtual world, There.com.

Forterra’s backers include the CIA-funded In-Q-Tel venture firm and Jerusalem Venture Partners, Chichen Itza Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

While Makena Technologies pursued consumer technologies, Forterra focused on using the virtual world technology for military simulations. Video demos of its projects are available here.

Badger said the alliance with IBM gives it a stamp of credibility as virtual worlds have gone through their own cycle of hype and despair. Deb Magid, director of software strategy at IBM’s venture capital group, said in an interview that business and government applications are now clearly becoming viable as virtual worlds spread beyond entertainment and games.

A new initiative spearheaded by IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony will give companies a way to “donate” patents relating to cleantech or environmental science for use by entrepreneurs, governments and researchers, starting with a seed fund of some 30 patents shared by the four companies.

The Eco-Patent Commons provides free access to an online database of intellectual property maintained by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Any company with any patent is free to join the current four-company coalition and add their own patents.

Rules on how the patents may be used are simple — the donors essentially promise not to sue if anyone else uses their patent, as does the user, through a so-called “defensive termination” clause commonly used for open-source software. In theory, an entrepreneur could start an entire company based on freely available patents from the Commons.

How useful the resource actually is will only be seen over time. While the initial number of patents donated is significant, it pales in comparison to the number of patents issued each year by the large corporations supporting the Commons — anywhere from dozens to thousands. It would be easy for them to donate less valuable intellectual property, gaining a positive return from the “greenwashing” of their own brand image.

On the flipside, the initiative is open to participation from any company with even a single patent to donate, meaning it will likely grow in significance over time. Also, its terms provide what should be a trustworthy framework for entrepreneurs to use existing technology without fear of litigation, something that did not previously exist for the cleantech industry.

The Commons may also help in part to mollify growing economies like China, who complain that richer countries demand environmental responsibility from their poorer cousins without sharing their technological know-how.

A full, searchable list of patents should become available on the WBCSD website today, located here.

The holiday break felt especially long this time, so here’s a longer roundup than usual — of everything you may have missed over the last few days:

Ebay’s Kijiji tries to tar Craiglist’s reputation — The NYT has a story about Kijiji, a competitor to online classifieds company Craigslist. The remarkable thing about the story is that it lets Kijiji executives associate Craigslist with offers of “sadomasochistic encounters and prostitutes,” without some sort of response from Craiglist. Kijiji, meanwhile, is positioned as family friendly.

Nokia has agreed to acquire Apertio, a UK mobile data network management provider for about €140 million —