For reasons involving reliability — which is semi-kinda important in low-Earth orbit, apparently — our fellow nerds living aboard the International Space Station have made the switch from Windows to Linux for astronauts’ laptops.

The space nerds will get training from the Linux Foundation for the upgrade to Debian 6. The foundation has actually customized two courses specifically for NASA astronauts’ needs, including a basic Linux user course and more advanced coursework on how to develop applications for Linux.

Previously, the laptops aboard the ISS had been running Windows XP.

The United Space Alliance manages the NASA/ISS computers. A United Space Alliance spokesperson told press the switch was made because ISS astronauts and cosmonauts needed an operating system “that was stable and reliable.”

Ouch!

The foundation also says the first humanoid space robot will also get a fresh Linux install. Called Robonaut (R2), the bot was created to “take over some of the astronaut’s responsibilities. … Running on Linux, the robot can be manipulated by onboard astronauts with ground controllers commanding it into position and performing operations. The Linux training from the Linux Foundation will help NASA developers ensure that R2 can be a productive addition to the ISS. Still in the fine-tuning phase, R2 will eventually carry out tasks too dangerous or mundane for astronauts in microgravity.”

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A new report shows Linux experience is in greater demand — and, hiring managers say, harder to find — than in past years.

The 2013 Linux Jobs Report, released today by the Linux Foundation, surveyed 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linus pros and found that Linux might be a good area of focus for aspiring techsters.

Dice’s annual salary survey shows that salaries for Linux folks are rising at double the rate of other tech salaries. Yet the number of practicing Linux pros seems to be dwindling.

Hiring managers in the Linux survey said they were finding it difficult to source good Linux talent — 90 percent said so this year as opposed to 80 percent last year. And 93 percent of those 850 hiring managers said they will be hiring a Linux person before Q3 rolls around, a 4 percent increase from last year’s survey.

Of course, with all that demand, currently employed Linux professionals are feeling like the belles of the ball, with 75 percent fielding cold calls from recruiters in the past six months. Linux pros told the foundation that when considering a move, they do take into account work-life balance (read: a normal, 40-hour work week would be nice) and work-from-home options, but the biggest pull is all about the Benjamins, i.e., extremely competitive salaries.

And the Linux job title hiring companies are most eager to fill? The humble and infinitely flexible sysadmin. The Linux Foundation says this is representative of “the growth of Linux in the enterprise to support cloud computing and big data.”

Here’s an infographic the foundation whipped up to show off other survey results:

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Steam is now officially available on three different operating systems.

Valve updated the Steam client today to provide full compatibility with the Linux open-source OS. To celebrate the release, all 54 Linux-compatible games are on sale. That includes Half-Life for $2.49, World of Goo for $2.49, and Bastion for $3.74. This sale applies to Windows and Mac (when available) as well.

The free-to-play Team Fortress 2 is also available for Linux, and Valve is giving a free Tux item (the Linux penguin mascot) to anyone who plays it on the alternative OS before the end of the month.

To make things easy, Valve is suggesting people try installing Ubuntu, a specific variety of the Linux OS run by a group called Canonical. Here’s what the Linux page on Valve has to say about it:

Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux. Interested in giving it a whirl? You can install and run Ubuntu from a live CD or USB stick, or install it to run alongside Windows.

Grab an Ubuntu installerfrom Canonical and see what it’s all about.

“The introduction of Steam to Ubuntu demonstrates growing demand for open systems from gamers and game developers,” Canonical director of consumer applications David Pitkin said in a statement. “We expect a growing number of game developers to include Ubuntu among their target platforms. We’re looking forward to seeing triple-A games developed with Ubuntu in mind as part of a multiplatform day and date release on Steam.”

If you already own any of the Linux-compatible games on Steam, you can simply install Steam on your Ubuntu systems and start playing them.

“We’re huge fans of Linux. It’s like the indie OS — a perfect home for our indie game,” Croteam (Serious Sam) chief technology officer Alen Ladavac said in a statement. “And who better to lead the charge into Linux gaming than Valve? With Steam distribution on Windows, Mac OS, and now Linux, plus the buy-once, play-anywhere promise of Steam Play, our games are available to everyone, regardless what type of computer they’re running. That’s huge.”

Valve chief executive officer Gabe Newell seems very keen to get away from Microsoft’s Windows platform. Newell called Windows 8 a “catastrophe for everybody in the PC space” at a conference in July. Out of that distaste for Windows, Valve began pushing to get Steam on Linux.

The software company also plans to release its own so-called “Steam Box” hardware, which Newell said will use Linux.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Linux diehards, rejoice! The Ubuntu smartphone is coming, and it’ll be here in about eight months.

Ubuntu for smartphones will use all four corners of the screen, giving us what Ubuntu maker Canonical calls “a more immersive experience” than the smartphone interfaces we’re already used to.

Perhaps most interestingly, the “superphones” will be able to dock to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and deliver a PC-like experience. That’s a lot of computing power in a little package — the Galaxy Nexus, to be exact, one of the current flagships of the Android fleet.

According to Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the news, the first Ubuntu smartphones will start shipping in October 2013. Application developers will have access to the OS this month so they can start building for the devices.

Canonical expects big corporate customers to be among the first to adopt the device. “Ubuntu uniquely gives handset OEMs and mobile operators the ability to converge phone, PC, and thin client into a single enterprise superphone,” the company said in a statement on the release last month.

Other features we know about:

Edge magic: thumb gestures from all four edges of the screen enable users to find content and switch between apps faster than other phones.
Deep content immersion – controls appear only when the user wants them.
A beautiful global search for apps, content and products.
Voice and text commands in any application for faster access to rich capabilities.
Both native and web or HTML5 apps.
Evolving personalised art on the welcome screen.

The real question is whether the Ubuntu-running Nexus can beat the BYOD (bring your own device) trend, which heavily favors Android and iOS, the most popular smartphone operating systems. Another big competitor for enterprise mobile is Windows Phone, which has consistently pitched itself to IT types as the secure, integrated, logical choice for corporate use.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twenty years after its initial release, Wine is just as relevant as ever. The software, which allows you to run Windows software inside of Linux and other Unix environments, is currently being ported to Android, reports Phoronix.

While the port is likely far from complete, having Wine on Android would mean you could run just about any Windows application (except for newer Windows 8 apps) on an Android smartphone or tablet. That would make Android an even stronger competitor to iOS, and it could make Microsoft pay more attention to Google’s mobile OS.

At a conference in Brussels yesterday, Wine creator Alexandre Julliard showed off the Android port. Phoronix’s Michael Larabel points out that the performance was “horrendously slow,” most likely due to running Android via an emulated environment instead of directly from an Android device.

Larabel notes that CodeWavers, the company that employs Julliard and sells CrossOver, a proprietary version of Wine, is particularly interested in the development of Intel x86 Atom chips for tablets. It sounds like it would be much easier for the company to port Wine over to Android devices running x86 chips. Julliard is also working on a version of Wine for ARM processors, which most Android devices run on.

Photo: Kenneth Lu/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After sending geek hearts aflutter on the desktop, the popular Linux variant Ubuntu is now aiming to take over your smartphone. And in a weird way, it could also lead to an even bigger breakthrough for Ubuntu on the desktop.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, today announced the mobile version of its operating system. Phones running Ubuntu won’t be available until 2014, but Canonical says its first device will come from a “high end” Android manufacturer. The company will offer a test build for the Galaxy Nexus in the next few weeks.

Ubuntu for phones sports an elegant user interface that lies somewhere between iOS and Windows Phone, even though it’s built atop Android’s kernel. You can swipe from any screen edge (similar to Windows 8) to unlock functionality — for example, swiping from the left edge reveals your favorite apps, while swiping from the right lets you jump through running apps. Instead of a lock screen, it features an artistic personalized screen that evolves with you.

“It’s not a lock screen, it’s not a barrier … it’s a welcome screen,” said Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth in an announcement video released today (below).

But perhaps most importantly, Ubuntu phones will also be dockable with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse — theoretically transforming them into desktop replacements. And while Canonical didn’t say this outright, there’s certainly the potential for Ubuntu phones to plug into a laptop shell. (Who would have thought Ubuntu’s most significant foray into mainstream desktops would have come via the phone?)

Ubuntu’s plan to power a desktop platform with your phone sounds similar to Motorola’s innovative, but ultimately doomed, Webtop concept on Android phones. As much as we expect smartphones and tablets to replace traditional computers, some will still have a need for big screens and keyboards to actually get work done over the next decade.

It’s going to be tough for Ubuntu to make much of a dent in mobile since it won’t have any devices to show until next year. But at this point, it looks more elegant than Android, and more functional than Windows Phone. It also fits right in with Ubuntu’s quest to cover all multiple screens — Canonical also has a version of the OS optimized for televisions.

With today’s announcement, the battle between smartphone platforms just got a lot more interesting.

Via The Verge

If 2012 has shown us one thing, it’s that video game development is truly in the “crossover era.” GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year, The Walking Dead, was first available as a downloadable title, not a retail release. Other downloadables, such as indie-developed darlings Journey and Faster Than Light, garnered plenty of votes as well. And in our staff’s and contributor’s top games of the year lists, we even see mobile releases — like Fieldrunners 2.

Gaming has changed, and it’s nice to see that it’s more than just big-budget console and PC titles that have earned Game of the Year attention. Here are the top games as chosen by GamesBeat staffers and contributors. Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments — especially if you feel we’ve left something off our lists!

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

Little green men — yesteryear’s poster boys for mysterious invaders from outer space — are about as menacing as Oompa Loompas armed with toy guns. XCOM’s little gray men, however, are scary as hell. It’s not the ashen skin, bulbous eyes, or creepy-crawly walk. It’s what these Sectoids represent: a greater threat that we are simply not equipped to handle.

In the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we mere humans bring dull knives to plasma gunfights. And just when we start to catch up in weapon technology, the bug-eyed bastards bring bigger guns and meaner friends. These jerks even cheat with mysterious mind-control powers. Meanwhile, we’re barely keeping the checkbook balanced between research, manufacturing, facility construction, aircraft, and an ever-decreasing budget due to world nations pulling out of the program if you can’t keep them safe (and you can never keep them all safe).

It all adds up to an incredibly exciting and stressful experience. Each decision — whether it’s which tree to hide your assault trooper behind or which whiny country gets your last airspace-monitoring satellite — feels monumental and permanent. Humanity’s existence is at stake, and we just want to make it to the next month, when a few more pennies come rolling in and a few more traumatized soldiers get out of sick bay.

It’s a desperate fight. And boy will we celebrate when those little gray men are dead.

Shoe’s other picks for best games of 2012: Fieldrunners 2, Dishonored, Journey, Fez

Lead writer Dean Takahasi

The Unfinished Swan
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Giant Sparrow

The Unfinished Swan is one of the most creative titles yet for the PlayStation Network. It’s an interactive fairy tale where you lob blobs of black paint at a white screen. As you do so, you uncover part of a 3D space hidden within the white scene. Uncovering each scene is a mind-bending task, as you have to navigate perplexing puzzles. You explore the unknown, and as you do so, you uncover a new segment in a fairy tale about a boy who loses his mother. It is a touching story that will remind of you of the zany Alice in Wonderland. Ian Dallas, the game creator, feels that a child who is abandoned is like an unfinished work of art. But just when you think that the game has become predictable, it changes. In some ways, the story seems unfinished. But the title is a wonderful first effort for Giant Sparrow, a new studio bankrolled by Sony.

Dean’s other picks for the best games of 2012: Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Journey, Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Culture editor Sebastian Haley

Hotline Miami
Platform: PC
Publisher: Developer Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games

Indie sensation Hotline Miami is best described as the film Drive, but in a retro, pixelated and somehow even more violent form, with subtle hints of Rockstar’s Manhunt sprinkled on top. The short-but-sickeningly sweet levels allow you to carefully orchestrate your symphony of murder and mayhem, filling the floors with maimed corpses and spraying the walls with crimson, all while its surreal, Miami Vice-inspired soundtrack beats in the back of your mind. Basically, if you own a Wii or like looking at livestreams of kittens, this is not your kind of game.

Sebastian’s other picks for best games of 2012: Trials Evolution, Far Cry 3, The Darkness II, Final Fantasy XIII-2

Staff writer Jeff Grubb

Mark of the Ninja
Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade), PC
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment

For these Game of the Year summaries, we’re supposed to look above and beyond the individual parts of a game. We’re supposed to write about why it is important, but in the case of Mark of the Ninja, it’s those parts that make it so special. Developer Klei’s 2D stealth action game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC is a master class in well-executed gameplay mechanics. Whether it’s a soundwave that ripples off your ninja’s feet to indicate how much noise he’s making or a vision cone that indicates where an enemy is looking, Mark of the Ninja is constantly communicating with the player. It then provides the player with a great controlling character to poke and prod the world with.

It’s not rare that a game makes you feel like a badass, but with Klei’s game it’s not about how powerful you are — it’s about how in tune with the environment your character is. You have so much visual and aural information that every moment is an opportunity for experimentation. You can spend 10 minutes laying out a detailed plan that involves deadly traps, or you can play the entire game without a sword.

In video games, we don’t usually get a lot of new ideas, we just get different takes on old ideas. Stealth is an old idea at this point, but Mark of the Ninja distinguishes itself by executing the concept better than any other game before it.

Jeff’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Trials Evolution, FTL: Faster Than Light

Copy editor Jason Wilson

FTL: Faster Than Light
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Publisher: Subset Games
Developer: Subset Games

I’m low on fuel. My crew raced around my starship like a colony of ants, hastily putting out fires as doors opened to the cold vacuum of space. The Rebels are closing in on me. Do I take a chance and see if I can gain more fuel in the next nebular cloud, or do I make a mad dash for the next sector and hope to find friendly forces instead of angry adversaries? These are just some of the choices the player faces in FTL: Faster Than Light, the indie roguelike that’s swept upon a number of Game of the Year lists in 2012 (including ours!). What makes FTL so compelling to players is that a take on Civilization’s “one more turn” addictive nature — but instead of furthering your game, you’re driven to see if your next attempt takes you closer to escaping the pursuing Rebel forces. And it’s this that makes FTL one of the most interesting, fascinating, and, yes, best games of 2012.

Jason’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Crusader Kings II, Torchlight II, Dragon’s Dogma

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Far Cry 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Something visceral. Something primal. Most shooters don’t have these. They settle you into a safe, comfortable role. Veteran soldier. Seasoned cop. Career criminal. A hero … or an antihero. But Far Cry 3 makes you run blind through the jungle while murderous pirates hunt you like a piece of prey. You’re just a terrified kid. Never held a gun before. Never seen anyone die before. Now you’re covered in your own brother’s blood and getting high off the giddy thrill of mere survival. Then you’re turned lose to roam two amazingly rich, open-world islands where you can really start enjoying yourself, slowly and cautiously picking your tormentors apart. Before you know it, the elation you get from destroying a criminal empire hardens into a different kind of drug: revenge.

That’s when Far Cry 3 surpasses the standard shooter fare. An aimless twentysomething becomes a killer of killers, as feared as the insane warlords he wants dead. Between coolly tense stealth play and straight-up gunfights, you become the predator, stalking intruders in your jungle and murdering them at will. It all culminates in a moment where you must decide just how much you enjoy that particular power fantasy. Enough to abandon your humanity? Maybe.

Far Cry 3 goes there. Solid gameplay — minus a weak-tea multiplayer — and incredibly detailed environments lift it far enough, but its secret weapon lies in how it takes you into that dark, primal place. And then it dares you to ignore your basic animal instincts.

Rus’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Fez, Halo 4, Journey

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Raspberry Pi announced the Pi Store today on its blog, saying that the app store will make it easier for newbies to get into the Raspberry experience, and will also provide the ability to for people to share their creations … maybe even making a little money on the way.

The tiny computer from the non-profit Raspberry Pi foundation first shipped in April of this year, but only reached volume in July. The Pi is a tiny computer that fits in the palm of your hand, but contains a 700 MHz processor, 512 GB of RAM, and Ethernet, HDMI, USB, and audio ports. It runs a version of Linux — including one titled “Raspbian wheezy” — stored on a SD card, like one in your camera.

Raspberry Pi app store

Current apps on the store include Freeciv, an open source sim game, Iridium Rising, a 3-D space fighter game which is also free but not open source, and LibreOffice, a full Office-compatible productivity suite. 23 titles were announced this morning, and two more have already been added today.

Developers who want to submit apps or content to the Pi Store can upload compiled binaries, raw Python code, or simply pictures, audio, or video. Pi owners will find that the store’s recommendation engine will show them the best content that, over time, will become more customized to their likes and dislikes.

The Pi Store is visible online here, and is built into updated versions of the latest Raspberry Pi operating systems. Technically capable people can also add it to existing installs by jumping into the command line and typing a Debian-style command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install pistore

Adding apps to Pi will definitely make it more usable and useful … and could make the operating system as beautifully functional as some have made their Raspberry Pi cases.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular versions of Linux. Stallman is talking about its new network search feature, which he believes spies on the users:

Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth talked about the feature on his personal blog, prophetically subtitled “here be dragons.” Essentially, searching your files on your computer is also, by default, an online search. That online search includes potentially relevant results from Amazon, and if you buy something, Canonical gets a cut. This is not advertising, according to Shuttleworth:

“We’re not putting ads in Ubuntu. We’re integrating online scope results into the home lens of the dash.”

That extremely fine, perhaps microscopic distinction has escaped some of Canonical’s customers, who are wondering why, in the first place, a desktop search should be integrated with an online search, and why, in the second place, that online search wouldn’t be a Google search instead of a online retailer.

As JunCTionS says in a comment on Shuttleworth’s blog post:

Sorry if this is clear to everyone else, but you don’t seem to mention any typical websearch engine. I imagine there are even more Ubuntu users that use Google than those that use Amazon. Will it also search Google?

… it sounds to me that this would be more useful than an Amazon search engine.

For Stallman, however, the core issue is not advertising, although that’s certainly unwelcome. The core issue is the exchange of personal user information … even though Canonical does not send any personal information to Amazon, running the Amazon search query on its own servers based on information that it retains.

That has failed to mollify RMS, who wrote that “it is just as bad for Canonical to collect your personal information as it would have been for Amazon to collect it.”

Shuttleworth’s answer seems to be: just trust us. After all, we control your machine anyways — we have administrator privileges on your computer:

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf.

Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.

That is not very compelling or simpatico.

In a post on the Canonical blog today, the company addressed the issue again, at least to a degree. After running through the new capabilities — searches for the Beatles will bring up their music on Amazon, where it can be instantly purchased without opening a browser — Canonical says that privacy has been a primary concern while developing this service:

Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users.  We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.

Aside from the issue of how unusual it would be for someone to be searching their own computer for commercially-useful queries like “the beatles,” or “Lord of the Rings movie,” this is unlikely to satisfy privacy advocates.

And it most certainly will not satisfy RMS.

photo credit: Maurizio Scorianz via photopin cc, Hat tip: Ars Technica

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

There’s technology out there that won’t only help you track down your lost or stolen devices – but will give you the ability to provide the police with the exact location of your device (along with pictures of the thief in the case of theft). So when your device gets lost or stolen it’s a major blow to your livelihood – and Prey is here to protect and restore it.

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• Sends incredibly accurate location updates.
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But this deal won’t be around for long. Get Prey from the VB Store page for only $49 now – and give yourself peace of mind today!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last week Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shocked the web with news that its subsidiaries Taobao (like a Chinese eBay) and T-mall (like Amazon) sold a massive $3.06 billion in product in a single 24-hour period.

Three billion dollars is almost triple the entire 2011 Black Friday sales of e-commerce sites in the United States, and this is a testament to both the growing maturity of the Chinese online market and the central position Alibaba holds in China.

So how do you do $3 billion in sales in a single day? I interviewed an Alibaba spokesperson, who preferred to remain unnamed, to find out.

Almost as many users as Twitter

First of all, it helps to have users — lots of them.

The two sites, Taobao.com and Tmall.com, share a combined user base of half a billion registered users. That’s only about 30 percent of the total Chinese population, which means that Alibaba has a long runway for continued growth as the Chinese middle class continues to grow — and suggesting that a $10 billion day is not out of the realm of possibility in years to come.

Some of the goods for sale on Taobao.

(It also means, by the way, that it might be crazy for Yahoo to sell its stake in Alibaba now. Yahoo still owns 23 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant after pocketing $7.6 billion U.S from selling almost half its original stake. Down the road, however, it might be like owning a 23 percent of Google, or Facebook … times 10.)

Both Taobao.com and Tmall process payments via Alipay, Alibaba’s payments processor. Alipay has over 700 million user accounts, presumably all with credit card payment information, as of mid-2012.

A cultural sea change

When you’re looking to scale quickly, it helps to be a high-growth company in a high-growth industry in a high-growth country.

But while a huge number of users is necessary, it’s insufficient to generate such massive cash flow. Just as important is a change in Chinese consumer behavior toward e-commerce “increasingly becoming a primary shopping channel,” according to Alibaba. The entire industry has had double-digit growth year-over-year — since 2010 e-commerce in China has enjoyed an average 10 percent quarter to quarter growth rate — and Alibaba is outpacing the industry.

In addition to a general acceptance of e-commerce as perhaps the first option for shopping, Chinese consumers have been increasingly prone to spend big on “double sticks day,” 11/11. Also referred to as “singles’ day,” Nov. 11 has taken on a rough similarity to our Valentine’s Day. Singles try hard to not be single, couples celebrate that they are couples, and probably many more people are simply happy to dogpile any opportunity to shop big and save big, much like Black Friday in the U.S.

Stores galore

Users and demand are great, but you need supply. That is not a problem for Alibaba, as the representative said that Tmall hosts e-commerce operations for 50,000 companies, while Taobao manages online sales and payments and “several million,” most of whom are likely individuals buying and selling much as we see on eBay here.

Of those stores, 10,000 took part in the 11/11 festivities with special sales and promotions. That’s five times the number that participated just last year, which gave Chinese shoppers “access to an even wider range of products.”

Promotion helped too, Alibaba says:

“We also offered new functions, activities and games via the event landing page beginning mid-October and noticed that many online shoppers were visiting the site and browsing through participating stores and available products as well as adding products to their shopping carts.”

Let’s get technical

While I generally like to ask companies for technical details about their server setup, Alibaba was anxious not

to share too much information that might be construed as proprietary, saying only that Alibaba Cloud Computing manages all Taobao and Tmall’s infrastructure from three data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and California.

It also preferred not to disclose what kind of servers it runs, including operating system and webserver details, but a quick search reveals that Alibaba uses Tengine for webserving, which is a 100 percent compatible fork from the increasingly popular Nginx server, and that Alibaba runs, as expected, on Linux.

Mobile buyers figured prominently in Alibaba’s monster day, with one in four Taobao users accessing the site from a smartphone or a tablet. That compares to one in six last year.

Summing up

A $3 billion day doesn’t happen all the time, even in the world’s most populous country. And it’s a huge proportion of Alibaba’s annual goal for Taobao and Tmall, which was one trillion RMB in 2012. That’s closing in on $15 billion U.S., which is serious money.

Given Alibaba’s trajectory and China’s growth, it would seem that a $4 billion or $5 billion day would not be out of the question in 2013.

photo credit: dcmaster via photopin cc, Autorun！ via photopin cc

Steam, Valve’s popular digital distribution service, has been available on PC since 2003 and Mac since 2010, and this limited beta marks its first official move to supporting Linux since it began talking about doing so earlier this year. The beta includes access to hat-collection simulator Team Fortress 2, Big Picture mode (which plays PC games on televisions), and support for two dozen other Linux-supported titles. It might not sound like much compared to the thousands of games available on the service, but speaking as a Mac user, you should probably just take what you can get.

The beta is currently only available to a select group of those who responded to Valve’s survey looking for participants, but it will continue to expand as time goes on. If you weren’t chosen this time, Valve will be selecting more users from the pool of survey responders, so fill it out soon or you might never find out why that hat collection line was so funny. Trust me, those of us who already have Steam are getting a big kick out of it.

Also, Steam for Linux only supports Ubuntu 12.04 for now, but Valve hopes to make it available to more Linux variations in the future. It will be looking at player feedback to determine which are the most popular, and will focus on making those versions work first.

For more information on Steam for Linux, you can go to Valve’s official page.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sandy’s timing couldn’t have been worse, as the Weather Company is in the early stages of a massive transformation, transitioning from 13 global data centers to managed hosting in Amazon’s cloud.

Perhaps it was lucky number 13, however, because in spite of a Boston data center being caught in the storm, the company’s 100-strong technical team maintained the site, apps, and services at a 99% uptime rating throughout the storm.

I talked to the Weather Company’s chief information officer, Bryson Koehler, about how they did it.

“We saw double the traffic that we’ve ever seen before on our digital platforms,” Koehler told me. “We had to handle 10X the traffic we’ve ever had before.”

The Weather Company delivers news on basically any medium you can imagine: the original TV show, smartphone apps, tablet apps, live streaming video online, print, radio, and APIs for partners all over the globe. On a typical day, the company serves the equivalent of about 40 million pageviews on its digital platforms, and it has previously seen service interruptions when the number approached only 120-140 million.

But on Monday, the company was serving 110 gigabytes of data per second, almost without a hiccup, not counting the livestreams — 170 thousand simultaneous streams of live video, pushed out over the Internet.

The question is: how?

While the Amazon Web Services integration is still mainly in the future, The Weather Company did have several hundred instances running at 100% capacity, Koehler said, telling me that the scalability was “exactly what you would expect,” as was the cost efficiency.

But the company had significant help from three additional critical partners.

“We relied very heavily on three partners that helped us deal with the sudden surge: Verizon, Akamai, Google were great throughout the storm.”

Akamai, of course, accelerates and distributes site load. Verizon manages some of the company’s data centers and much of its networking infrastructure, adding gigabytes of capacity literally in real time during the course of the hurricane. Google manages the livestreams, as The Weather Company delivers live video via a partnership with YouTube.

But the 13 data centers were key to the service’s resilience. Like any large organization that has been built over time and acquired other companies, Koehler said, there’s a mix of technologies.

“You end up with a good bunch of technologies that come together, but for the most part, we run Linux servers, Apache for web serving, Tomcat for our app server, and VMware for virtualization. MySQL is our core weather database.”

More than the technology, though, Koehler said it’s about the team. The Weather Company put together a 100-person hurricane team: technicians, system administrators, and networking specialists. “We were very prepared,” he said.

photo credit: cab234 via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Valve’s Steam for Linux team announced that it’s made some serious progress on the ambitious project.

According to a Valve Software blog post, a Linux version of gaming’s best known digital-download service will go into an internal beta starting next week. Quickly following that, the team plans to hold an external private beta that will include 1,000 users at some point in October.

That private beta will work with Steam and one Valve game. It’ll include support for the user-friendly Linux variation Ubuntu (versions 12.04 and up.)

Don’t expect any other Valve games or the recently introduced television-optimized Big Picture Mode, which is still in beta itself.

If you’re a Linux user who wants to sign up for a chance to get into this beta … well, you’re just gonna have to wait. Valve is saving those details for a future announcement.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gabe Newell (pictured top right) is the chief executive and co-founder of Valve, the award-winning game publisher and creator of the Steam digital distribution service for games. He is one of the visionaries of the game business, and his predictions carry a lot of weight. Plenty of speculation surrounds the odd projects that Valve undertakes, and Newell took some time yesterday to explain some of them and talk about the cool and weird things coming in the future.

Ed Fries (pictured top left), the former head of Microsoft Game Studios, interviewed Newell at a reception that Covert & Co., Google Ventures, and Perkins Coie sponsored at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle. Here’s an edited transcript of their interview.

Ed Fries: What are some of the projects you’re working on?

Gabe Newell: When you think about the kinds of digital goods that people want to have, there has to be a richness. We call one of our tools Source Filmmaker, but it also encompasses things like comic books or posters. All our posters were created inside of tools that actually run inside our game engine. But the whole point is driven out of this idea that, rather than these islands of entertainment that we’ve had in the past, five or 10 years from now everything is going to be lumpy nodes in this overall economy. The debate that I have with our economist is how soon that overall economy will hit, say, 10 billion dollars. Then he wants to argue about what GDP represents in that, and you’re off to the races.

When you look at the other questions: Why are we looking at wearable computers? Why did we hire Jerry Ellsworth? Why do we have people working on Linux? That’s the second part of the problem. In order for this innovation to happen, a bunch of things that haven’t been happening on closed platforms have to occur and continue to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the PC. Id Software, Epic, Zynga, Facebook, and Google wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform. I think there’s a strong temptation to close the platform. If people look at what they can accomplish when they can limit competitors’ access to their platform, they say, “Wow, that’s really exciting.” Even some of the people who have open platforms, like Microsoft, get really excited by the idea that Netflix has to pay them rent in order to be on the Internet.

That’s not how we got here, and I don’t think that’s a very attractive future. So we’re looking at the platform, and up until now we’ve been a free rider. We’ve been able to benefit from everything that’s gone into the PC and the Internet. Now we have to start finding ways that we can continue to make sure there are open platforms. So that involves a couple of different things.

One, we’re trying to make sure that Linux thrives. Our perception is that one of the big problems holding Linux back is the absence of games. I think that a lot of people — in their thinking about platforms — don’t realize how critical games are as a consumer driver of purchases and usage. So we’re going to continue working with the Linux distribution guys, shipping Steam, shipping our games, and making it as easy as possible for anybody who’s engaged with us — putting their games on Steam and getting those running on Linux, as well. It’s a hedging strategy.

I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space. I think that we’re going to lose some of the top-tier PC [original equipment manufacturers]. They’ll exit the market. I think margins are going to be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, it’s going to be a good idea to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality. But when you start thinking about a platform, you have to address it. You have to address mobile. You have to look at what’s going to happen post-tablet. If you look at the mouse and keyboard, it was stable for about 25 years. I think touch will be stable for about 10 years. I think post-touch, and we’ll be stable for a really long time — for another 25 years. I think touch will be this intermediate….

Fries: What’s “post-touch”?

Newell: It depends on how specific you want to get. It’s what you do when…

Fries: Is it voice recognition? Is it gesture?

Newell: It’s a couple of different technologies combined together. The two hard problems in the short-term are input and output. I don’t have all these nice slides. But the question you have to answer is, “How can I see stuff overlaid in the world when you have things like noise?” You have weird persistence problems. How can I be looking at this group of people and see their names floating above them? That actually turns out to be an interesting problem that’s finally a tractable problem.

I can go into Mike Abrash’s office and put on this $70,000 system, and I can look around the room with the software they’ve written, and they can overlay pretty much anything, regardless of what my head is doing or my eyes are doing. Your eyes are actually troublesome buggers. But the input side is open-ended. How can you be robustly interacting with virtual objects when there’s nothing in your hands? Most of the ideas are really stupid because they reduce the amount of information you can express. One of the key things is that a keyboard has a pretty good data rate in terms of how much data you can express and how much intention you can convey.

You want to figure out how that actually gets better in the next generation. Doing something like this is incredibly slow, right? I type 150 words a minute. Having to do anything with my arm is a really bad idea. There’s some crazy speculative stuff. One of the engineers actually did something with a…okay, this is super-nerdy. You can come back and tease us about this years from now. But he did a tongue controller. When you look at all of the muscles in your body, if you think of them as SCSI or USB, it turns out that your tongue is a pretty good way of connecting a mechanical system to your brain.

But it’s really disconcerting to have the person you’re sitting next to going, “Arglearglargle.” [Big laughs] “You just Googled me, didn’t you?” I don’t think tongue input is in our futures. But I do think you’ll have bands on your wrists, and you’ll be doing stuff with your hands. Your hands are incredibly expressive. If you look at somebody playing a guitar versus somebody playing a keyboard, there’s a far greater amount of data that you can get through the information that people convey through their hands than we’re currently using. Touch is…it’s nice that it’s mobile. It’s lousy in terms of symbol rate.

Fries: Okay, this is the easiest interview I’ve ever done. That was really interesting. One of the words that you used is “experimentation.” In my own interaction with Valve employees — more than any other company that I deal with — there’s this culture of experimentation and willingness to try different things.

There’s also a kind of spooky thing, at least with some of the guys, or maybe some of the more senior guys, where they sound a lot like you when they talk. [Laughter] Your employee handbook leaked out last year, and that got a lot of press. That and your manager-less system. How do you make the culture that you have at Valve? I think that culture is a huge part of what makes a company successful. How do you turn yourself into a lot of people who think the same way — who can go out and do these crazy projects and be successful?

Newell: When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You’d see all the different ways they’d work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You’d see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you’d go see Aetna life insurance. I don’t know what your experience was like, but it made me think about what the structure of a company should be in terms of the goals that you have as a company.

The opportunity that I think we all saw was as follows: In the same way that the PC drove a bunch of business changes, the Internet was going to make a bunch of minor business functions efficient. So you would, instead, build a company out of the highest-value people. So rather than finding the cheapest people in the world to hire, you wanted to find the most expensive people. I think there was an arbitrage opportunity. That was one of the things we wanted to take advantage of. And then if you have that group of people, you have to think about how to make them as productive as possible because they can always leave.

About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, “How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?” It turns out that you make high-value people more valuable in different ways. Let’s say you worked at Valve. I don’t need to tell you anything about games, management, or technology. I can make you better in other ways. A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That’s an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive. Especially if they’re coming from the film industry, where they spend two-thirds of their time battling entrenched bureaucracies and organizations. It’s easy for us to make a value pitch to someone like Jeremy Bennett, who was the artistic director on The Lord of the Rings movies. However much value he created there, at Valve he can create a lot more value and have a lot more fun.

I could go into a lot more detail about our vacation policies or the fact that all our desks are on wheels, but it all comes back to this question of, “How do you make people like you as productive as possible? How do you attract them to the company and then make them stay at the company?” Although you have your own company, so you don’t need it.

Fries: I don’t know. I’m getting tempted here…. [Laughs]

Newell: The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, “You have to change something in the handbook.” They say, “No, it’s sacred. It’s this text of received wisdom.” Then the people who’ve been there for a long time all laugh hysterically and say, “Yeah, well, it’s your job to move it forward.” When you’re looking for a subversive thing that people aren’t used to, telling them to change the handbook is a good way of convincing them…. It usually takes about six months for new people to really internalize the way the company works. Depending on the person, we have a set of tricks that we use. Changing the handbook is one. Or giving me something to do. In theory, I’m at the top of some hierarchy, right? So I say, “Well, you give me something to do.”

Fries: They have to give you something to do?

Newell: Yeah. It’s just a way of getting people over this idea. A lot of times people will want to complain. The first time somebody complains, you say, “Okay, fix it.” You just say, “I don’t know what you expect to happen now, but you’ve just given yourself a job.”

Fries: Does that train them to complain less or to fix things more?

Newell: If you hired the right person, it trains them to fix stuff. If you hired the wrong person, they’ll say, “Oh, this is mean.” That’s basically a very tiny snapshot of why we’re the way we are and how we try to propagate that into new people.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Despite Nokia’s defection to Windows 7 and Intel’s difficulties finding new partners for the open-source project, the beauty of open source is that the code always lives on … in this case, with a small group of former Nokia employees and open-source diehards, Jolla Group, who have now amazingly, incredibly, unbelievably struck a distribution deal with a Chinese retail chain: D.Phone Group.

The news was first announced in a tweet — Jolla Group‘s site is not yet live:

Great news: Jolla has just signed its first sales deal. What a start for a new exciting week – follow the news today! #meego #jolla—
Jolla (@JollaMobile) July 16, 2012

According to Androidistica, the chairman on Jolla, Dr. Antti Saarnio, said in a statement that “this agreement with D.Phone is a major step in Jolla’s journey towards becoming a significant player in the global smartphone market.”

As much as I am impressed that this tiny group of developers is taking the Meego code-base and actually releasing a product with it, that statement is ridiculous.

A sales and distribution agreement with an unknown Chinese retailer is not a major step. The mobile platform wars are full of powerful and wealthy competitors. And it’s all about developers now … which means that a tiny, almost unknown platform with little distribution has a snowball’s chance in hell of survival.

Alas, it is time again to “bring out yer dead:”

Here are a few that we’ve found that would make you the coolest computer user since Linus Torvalds created Linux.

The cigarette computer

Alas, this case already sold on eBay. But it was made from recycled materials (!) and included a special “foil backed paper lining” which may or may not “stop your weirdly small computer from bursting in to flames.”

Suggestion: don’t give this to your smoker friends.

The Lego computer

Not everyone can say they have a computer built by a 12-year-old kid.

Biz is a young German girl with mad computer skillz and serious Lego talent.

She’s even provided the instructions so that you can make your Raspberry Pi computer actually … look … like … a Raspberry.

Far, far too cool.

Going very, very pro

If lego is not your style and the cigarette case is just a little too James Dean … you can hardly beat this Apple-esque case by Marco Alici.

Alici made this virtual prototype with design tools Blender and Yafaray, and is getting a prototype 3D-printed by Shapeways … after which he intends to make it available to others.

Alici is an Italian design engineer, and it shows.

All fruity colors of the rainbow

ModMyPi has come out with a colorful array of cases that users can mix and match.

The case comes in two parts that snap together, and they’re both fully tested and fully shipping … unlike some of the other cases in this gallery.

ModMyPi touts that they are “made of highly robust, drop and splash resistant ABS plastic.”

Not quite (Product) RED

This case, featured by Wired magazine, looks both sleek and functional … even professional.

There’s no cost or ordering information, or any sourcing of the image itself, so it’s possible this image exists only in the mind of Wired designers … and you.

Until you 3D print it, of course.

The original gumdrop iMac see-through version

This case mod by AdaFruit reminds me of the the original iMacs.

But instead of Bondi blue, these are clear as ice, revealing the hardware beneath in all its gorgeous electronic complexity.

The top opens and snaps back into place, and — a bit of a shocker in the case mod world — the ports are actually labelled.

Uber-industrial chic

Looking like a filing cabinet or a mini rack-mounted server, this Built to Spec laser-cut acrylic case looks like serious business.

You can order the components for only $12.50, and the same case is available in translucent purple for a few dollars more.

Some assembly will be required, but it’s an incredibe looking case.

Poetry in wood

This might be the most beautiful of all the cases.

Stephen at Single Lens Reflections hand-crafted this wooden case  from 3 millimeter layers of plywood sandwiched together and trimmed with a scroll saw.

The Pi fits neatly inside the sandwich, and the ports peek out the sides. This case makes the Pi almost look like a miniaturized concert grand piano.

Honorable mention: ugly but geektastic

This is ugly but it is also undeniably cool: modding the brains of the PC right into its fingers, in a sense.

Ben Heck took a Raspberry Pi home from a Maker Faire and decided to create this: an all-in-one computer (well, minus the screen).

More details on how to do it here.

The indie project, run by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, first shipped in April after getting tens of thousands of pre-orders. But supply has been constrained, limiting hobbyists and others to single orders. Now the foundation has increased manufacturing capacity and announced the ability to buy in bulk.

Some had been so desperate to get their hands on the popular device that they’ve paid over $200 — almost 10 times the list price — to snap up a Pi on eBay.

“This is of special importance to those of you who are using the Raspberry Pi in your businesses, and to people looking to buy classroom sets for schools and universities,” Liz Upton, community manager for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, said in a blog post.

The Pi is tiny, about the size of a credit card, and easily fits in the palm of your hand. But it packs a 700 MHz processor and 256 megabytes of RAM, plus a variety of ports: Ethernet, HDMI, USB, and an audio jack. The minuscule PC runs the Linux operating system off an SD card … the kind of memory you’d ordinarily find in your digital camera.

With that kind of power, the Pi can play full HD video and run video games like Quake 3. Or it can complete ordinary business tasks such as working with spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and more.

You can place an order online at RS Components or  element14.

Selfishness often gets a bad rap, but if you’re Linux creator Linus Torvalds, it often has its rewards.

“Open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons,” Torvalds told the BBC in a recent interview.

And it’s selfishness that’s had no small part in netting Torvalds Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize. Torvalds will share the prize with Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, with whom he will also share the prize’s $1.3 million check.

“Linus Torvalds’s work has kept the web open for the pursuit of knowledge and for the benefit of humanity – not simply for financial interests,” Ainomaija Haarla, President of Technology Academy Finland said in a statement.

Torvalds would agree. Selfishness is, after all, more than just a quest for cash.

“The early ‘selfish’ reasons to do Linux tended to be centered about just the pleasure of tinkering,” he told the BBC.  ”That was why I did it – programming was my hobby – passion, really – and learning how to control the hardware was my own selfish goal. And it turned out that I was not all that alone in that,” he said.

Fast forward twenty-one years and Torvalds’ creation has hit the big time. A massive collaborative project, Linux consists of over fifteen million lines of code contributed by over 1,300 paid developers and volunteers. And it’s everywhere: Linux can nowadays be found in devices as small as smartphones (Android’s kernel is based on Linux) and as large as supercomputers.

All of which, again, is built on selfishness. “In many ways, I actually think the real idea of open source is for it to allow everybody to be ‘selfish’, not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good,” he said.

Selfish or not, Torvalds is in good company. Previous winners of the Millennium Technology Prize include World Wide Web creator Tim Berners Lee , Robert Langer, Shuji Nakamura, and Michael Grätzel. This is the fourth time the prize has been given out since its inauguration in 2004.

Image via Millennium Prize

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Two of the biggest names in the open source world announced a partnership yesterday. Red Hat, the North Carolina based provider of open source software for the enterprise and 10Gen, the New York based company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB, are partnering to help developers deliver on the promise of big data and the cloud.

While both companies focus on open-source software, they are no slouch in the business department. Red Hat recently hit a big milestone, becoming the first company based around Linux to hit a billion dollars in annual revenue. Last September 10Gen raised a fresh $20 million in venture funding and has been expanding its Manhattan office and hiring like mad.

“Enterprise customers are looking for robust platforms to develop and deploy their next-generation of applications,” said Max Schireson, president of 10gen. “As a leader in the NoSQL community, MongoDB is well-matched to the scalability and agility that developers demand, and through collaboration with Red Hat, expect to create the leading open source enterprise solution for companies deploying next-generation applications.”

The companies hope that clients will become joint customers who can benefit from 10gen’s leading NoSQL database and the performance, stability, and security of the Red Hat platforms, enhancing investments in both firms.

“Web and enterprise developers need solutions that allow them to rapidly deploy applications that deal with large amounts of data in flexible public or private cloud environments,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of the cloud business unit at Red Hat. “Combining Red Hat’s technology stack with 10gen’s MongoDB NoSQL database will help developers to deliver on the promise of big data and cloud technologies.”

Image via Flickr user Tim Fields

Linux is everywhere. You might not see it, and you probably don’t know it yet, but it’s powering the web services you use, the phone in your hand, and the ATM at your bank.

The following video, just released by the Linux Foundation, is all about the places and apps where Linux is lurking unseen by the average consumer. It also goes into some detail about how Linux, a free and open-source operating system, is built collaboratively by a global army of volunteer developers. Altogether, around six patches get applied to the Linux kernel every hour. Crazy, innit?

“Linux is the most dominant OS in supercomputing,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation, in an email exchange with VentureBeat. “As for mobile and embedded [devices,] every Android has Linux in it.”

McPherson noted that Linux is making some interesting moves in the automotive space, as well.

“Toyota joined the Linux Foundation not long ago, and we now host an annual event, Automotive Linux Summit, due to increasing demand from our members and industry to use Linux in next-generation cars,” she said. “Maintaining the software needed for an auto today is a huge job and not one carmakers want to depend on one vendor to handle. Carmakers have to maintain their device (the car) for five to 10 years. With Linux, they have a full community supporting and updating the software. They don’t need to worry about it.”

While the Foundation stresses that the worldwide group of Linux contributors is a truly global community, McPherson said that particularly active hotspots have blossomed in North America, Japan, Europe, and Brazil.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Joining the ranks of Apple and Google, Linux is entering the TV market with an Ubuntu TV. Canonical, the team behind the Linux based Ubuntu operating system, debuted the Ubuntu TV at CES on Monday.

No wires, no boxes, no remote is the mantra of the Ubuntu TV. Controls will be touch and gesture based, with the ability to use a smartphone as a remote as well. Of course, the TV will connect to cable and broadcast signals, but all the snazzy features that Internet TVs are known for will also be included; DVR abilities, access to online movies and TV shows, streaming capabilities and apps. To find all of the content you heart can desire, Ubuntu TV will use intelligent search that will also give you suggestions based on what you watch. And of course, what Internet TV would be complete without cloud capabilities? Ubuntu One, Ubuntu’s own cloud, will be built into the new TV so users can watch their movies and TV shows stored on other devices.

True to Linux’s nature, Ubuntu TV’s operating system will be free. However, manufacturers will have to pay Canonical a service fee for each unit. Whether or not this will keep the price low enough to be desired by consumers is to been seen. And who knows, TV manufacturers may pass it over in favor of Apple and Google backed projects.

Ubuntu TV’s success likely lie in its adoption by more tech-minded consumers who enjoy using Linux-based operating systems. Most consumers will gravitate towards big names like Apple and Google for their familiarity and ease of use when choosing an Internet TV. I, for one, am excited about the possibility of a Linux-based TV; excuse me for a second while I geek out.

You might want to hold back on that $600 Mac Mini purchase for just a little bit longer. The Raspberry Pi, the little $25 computer that can run Quake 3 Arena and play HD videos, is scheduled to go into volume production in January. If you want to splurge, you can also pay a $10 premium for the fancy Model B that comes with an ethernet port and 256 – instead of 128 – MByte RAM.

In a new blog post, the developers report that the first finished circuit boards have arrived. “They’re undergoing electrical testing alongside hardware and software testing at the moment, and if all goes well, the Raspberry Pi you’ll be buying in January (or by auction later this month if they all work as they should) will be exactly like one of these.”, says Raspberry Pi blog editor Liz Upton.

The Raspberry Pi has grown in size since the last time we reported on it. An early prototype resembled a USB flash drive, but the new board is about as wide as two credit cards side by side. The Linux operating system runs from a SD card  The computer also has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard, and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

The $25 computer looks as bare bones as it gets, but its ARM11 CPU operating at 700 MHz seems quite capable of playing 1080p HD video.

The Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of engineer Eben Upton and British programmer David Braben, who co-created the pioneering 3D open-world game Elite. Their goal is to manufacture a computer that is so inexpensive that every student can be given one. Braben himself got started on computers as a student. His Elite game was created on Acorn’s BBC Micro, the most common computer at British schools in the mid-1980s. Braben is also the founder of Frontier Developments, the studio that created the virtual animal simulation Kinectimals for Microsoft.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Soon Ubuntu Linux won’t just be a desktop OS for Linux nerds.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is now aiming to mimic iOS and Android by bringing the OS to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs, reports ZDNet. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth will be announcing the news today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

“This is a natural expansion of our idea [of] Ubuntu as Linux for human beings,” Shuttleworth said in an interview with ZDNet. “As people have moved from desktop to new form factors for computing, it’s important for us to reach out to [the] community on these platforms. So, we’ll embrace the challenge of how to use Ubuntu on smartphones, tablets and smart-screens.”

The move makes sense for Ubuntu, which is one of the few Linux distributions to focus on design and wide consumer appeal. For those not familiar with Ubuntu, it has spent years positioning itself as the friendly Linux distribution that’s as easy to use as Mac OSX and Windows. But with Android and iOS having a major head start in all of the above device categories, it’s going to be difficult for Canonical to compete.

The company will finish work on the latest version of Ubuntu, 12.04, as well as its new Unity interface, before it starts work on expanding the software to more devices, ZDNet reports.

And while it seems like Canonical is taking inspiration from Android and iOS, moving Ubuntu to mobile platforms also seems reminiscent of what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8, which is aiming to be both a killer desktop and tablet experience.

When asked how Ubuntu can be competitive when facing more entrenched rivals, Shuttleworth said, “The device world is highly competitive and highly dynamic, while Android and iOS dominate handheld devices, disruptive elements could still establish themselves … Ubuntu and Windows can still be a real force.”

ZDNet figures we likely won’t see any Ubuntu tablets until the middle of 2012, and it will likely take even longer than that before it finds its way to phones. But while I don’t doubt Canonical’s ability to expand Ubuntu to other platforms, I wonder if it’s something that consumers and device manufacturers will actually want. Next year will certainly be interesting for mobile device competition.

Screenshot via ZDNet

The Raspberry Pi computer is a single-board computer that’s capable of rendering video games like Quake 3 at a 1920-by-1080 pixel monitor resolution. The game cruises along at around 20 frames per second with the lighting and geometrical details cranked up to maximum quality. It’s also running at a 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution, which brought the frame rate down slightly, Raspberry Pi foundation’s Eben Upton said. Considering the limited horsepower on the Pi, it’s still pretty impressive.

The computer has a 700-megahertz ARM processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. That’s about half as much memory as most smartphones today, which also sport processors that usually clock in at around 1 gigahertz. That makes it slightly weaker than a smartphone. There’s an SD card slot on the device that handles any storage, and it can output video and other images at 1080p resolution. It has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard, and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

(It’s also tiny — you can see it just under the monitor in the picture above.)

The Quake 3 version running is an open-sourced version of the game compiled for the Pi’s Linux build. The Pi sports a version of Linux, an open-sourced operating system that has become increasingly popular in philanthropic causes like this because it’s free to install and distribute. Braben said earlier he hopes the computer will be available to the public sometime later this year.

You can check out a full video of the demo below.

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Game developer David Braben has created a computer that’s about the size of a flash drive — and it’ll most likely cost less than your last date.

Braben designed the device with the goal of having an extremely affordable computer that children across the world can access. It’s a similar goal the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project had — create an extremely affordable computer that children in both developing countries and first-world countries can get their hands on.

The device sports a version of Linux, an open-sourced operating system that has become increasingly popular in philanthropic causes like this because it’s free to install and distribute. It will likely ship with some variation of Ubuntu, a very popular Linux distribution that has a huge development community, according to tech news site Geek.com.

“In theory, they could be given away to the child. There would be other ways of funding it,” Braben said in an interview with BBC. “They would be able to engage with a lot of things that we are all consumers of but not necessarily creators of — understanding how you put together little scripts that might run on websites and filters.”

The device has a 700-megahertz ARM processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. To put that in perspective, that’s about half as much memory as most smartphones today, which also sport processors that usually clock in at around 1 gigahertz. So it’s slightly weaker than a smartphone. There’s an SD card slot on the device that handles any storage, and it can output video and other images at 1080p resolution. It has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

Braben said he hopes the device will be available to the public in around a year. Based on the components, the device will cost somewhere between £10 and £15, or around $25. It will be distributed through a charitable organization called the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote computer science in schools.

The vulnerability is currently being exploited via a Flash file embedded in Microsoft Excel (.xls) file. The file has been distributed as an e-mail attachment. There are no reports yet on attacks targeting Acrobat software.

Users should be very careful with e-mail attachments until a fix has been issued and the software has been updated. Adobe promises that an update will be available on March 21.

Acrobat and Acrobat Reader are used to create and read PDF files. Flash and PDF files are very popular among malicious code writers because they are so widely used across different platforms. Almost every computer in the world has Acrobat or Flash installed. A single vulnerability can be exploited in Windows, Mac and other operating systems.

The affected versions are Adobe Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris and Android systems. Adobe Reader and Acrobat X are affected on Windows and Macintosh only. The full details of affected versions are on Adobe’s website.

A typical Java development team uses a range of software life-cycle tools for source control (stores the latest version of the code and manages changes), builds (compiles and tests code and produces an executable release) and continuous integration (schedules and manages builds on multiple servers and environments). These tools are usually hosted, configured and maintained on local servers.

CloudBees aims to provide a Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) that covers all these areas. Instead of having servers locally hosting Java life-cycle tools like Subversion for source control, Maven for builds and Hudson for continuous integration, CloudBees provides them all in the cloud in a product called DEV@cloud.

The advantage of DEV@cloud is that life-cycle tools no longer need to be configured and maintained in-house, builds can be run in parallel and there is no restriction on the server capacity. Often, IT departments don’t want to handle development tools so the developers themselves end up managing these tools, costing valuable coding time.

A release may need to be built and tested on both a Windows and Linux environment, which currently requires multiple servers or virtualization. CloudBees’ services could be particularly useful for stress and performance testing, which determine the capacity and speed of the software and how robust it is when it is running on multiple machines under high load. This type of testing tends to be performed intermittently and requires a much higher number of servers than normal builds. CloudBees charges a monthly subscription fee and a fee per minute when builds are in progress.

Linux and Windows environments are available. A source control repository can be hosted locally and still built by DEV@cloud. Amazon EC2 provides the cloud servers. CloudBees plans to release a new product in Q1 2011 called RUN@cloud. While DEV@cloud is a set of services that will help developers during development time, RUN@cloud comes once you want to deploy your apps in production or test them publicly.

I queried CEO Sacha Labourey on how some companies may hesitate to put their primary asset, their code, in the cloud. He said “Some developers are afraid to put their code in the cloud, yet, they do not realize that their company already puts ALL of their sales pipeline, lead contact information, etc. in the cloud at salesforce.com. What’s the difference?”

I asked Labourey about competitors. He says that the current closest competitor is Google App Engine but it will be VMWare’s Code2cloud once that is released in Q1, 2011. Many developers have complained about the restrictions Google App Engine imposes on the Java environment, and it is designed for running applications rather than developing them.

CloudBees recently acquired InfraDNA, thereby adding its founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of the Hudson continuous integration server, to the team. Hudson is the most-used continuous integration tool in the Java development world. The InfraDNA acquisition also brought with it a new product, Nectar, which is a on-site version of Hudson for enterprises that need a more scalable deployment than is possible with “vanilla” Hudson.

CloudBees is based in Boston (although Labourey is in Switzerland) and has 15 employees.

Infrastructure seems to be the sexy acquisition target in 2010. This is the second major purchase of an infrastructure provider in just a few months. Hewlett-Packard announced it would pick up 3Par, a cloud storage provider, for a cool $2.4 billion back in September.

Novell has two significant business operations. It operates a suite of enterprise software products that range from collaboration to security. It also develops the SuSE Linux operating system and manages an online open source development community for the operating system.

As part of the agreement, Novell will be split into two different business units operated by Attachmate. Novell’s SuSE will be spun out into a separate business unit, and the remainder of the company will operate under the Novell brand. Novell bought the SuSE brand and trademarks back in 2003 and was a big promoter of the open source operating system in its infancy.

Novell is also selling a chunk of its intellectual property to a batch of technology companies organized by Microsoft for $450 million. The company didn’t specify what projects it was coughing up to the rest of the world. But given Microsoft’s position on operating systems and the enterprise, it’s possible Microsoft is using this time to pick up some of the enterprise market that’s operating on SuSE. Microsoft recently extended its deal with Novell to help develop better interoperability between Windows and the SuSE Linux operating infrastructure.

What isn’t clear right now is the fate of Attachmate. The company could use this as an opportunity to go public through a reverse merger, or it could remain a privately held company. Attachmate is currently owned by Golden Gate Capital, Francisco Partners and Thoma Bravo. We’ve contacted Attachmate and Novell to try to find that out and will update as soon as we know.

Investors were all over the news. Novell’s shares were up about 6 percent today to $5.96. The share purchase price is about a 28 percent premium to the shares’ closing price on March 2, when the company entertained an acquisition from a private firm for $5.75 per share. Novell rejected that offer, saying it undervalued the company. It represents a 9 percent premium to yesterday’s closing price, $5.60.

Google employees tell the Times that the company started promoting the idea of moving away from the Microsoft operating system in January, following the recent attacks on its Chinese operations. Since then, many workers have migrated from Windows, and new employees are being given the choice of Mac or Linux computers. “Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,” said one employee.

Windows has long been the bane of  IT workers, thanks to the fact that it’s vulnerable to many types of viruses and malware, and is often targeted by hackers due its large install base. The attack that originated from China used malware that targeted Windows PCs running Internet Explorer 6 — an old version of the web browser that’s particularly vulnerable to hacking. Apple’s Mac OS, and Linux operating systems, are far more secure in comparison to Windows.

When faced with an attack like this, most organizations would normally promote updating Windows computers away from older browsers, and remind employees about the importance of running Windows Update to keep their computer as secure as possible. Google has apparently taken that a step further by moving employees away from Windows altogether. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other organizations follow suit, particularly since most IT professionals would prefer not to deal with the daily headache of Windows problems.

In addition to being a security effort, the move away from Windows would also help the company to promote the use of its own products among employees. Its Chrome OS, for example, would be a worthy competitor to Windows on netbooks and ultra-portable laptops.

When asked for comment about the news, a Google representative told VentureBeat, “We’re always working to improve the efficiency of our business, but we do not comment on specific operational matters.”