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San Francisco - Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and CTO at the Linux Foundation. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena versus Linux.

InfoWorld: What exactly is Debian?

Murdock: Debian is a Linux distribution. It's the basis of Ubuntu Linux. I suppose the basic innovation of Debian was that it was developed by a distributed community, so we intentionally set out to build it in a distributed fashion, and it's one of the first open-source projects to operate that way.

InfoWorld: Are you still involved with the Debian project?

Murdock: Not so much, but that's more of a function of lack of time.

InfoWorld: Why did you join Sun?

Murdock: When I was in school as a computer science student in the early 1990s, I was a huge Sun fan. There were Sun workstations all over the place, and I wanted one of these more than anything in the world, and Sun was the company I wanted to work for. And when I had the opportunity to come to Sun and in particular bring some of my Linux experience to sort of a new set of challenges, I jumped at the opportunity.

InfoWorld: What do you do at Sun? I see the OpenSolaris project seems to fall onto your plate.

Murdock: Initially I was working on OpenSolaris and started Project Indiana, which culminated this week [with] the first version of the OpenSolaris binary distribution.?? These days I am running the developer and community marketing organization, so I am responsible for marketing Sun's developer tools, the developer programs like Sun Developer Network and Tech Days Events, our open-source projects and communities. [Also, I do marketing for] StarOffice, OpenOffice, Network.com. So basically anything that relates to the developer community in some way, I run the marketing piece of that.

InfoWorld: Is Sun completely open source with its software right now?

Murdock: Well, not entirely, but that's again mostly a function of how complex it is to take a piece of intellectual property that has not been open source and then moving it into open source. We are in the process of open sourcing all of our software, as [Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz] has said many times.?? But, for example, with Solaris there, are still a few bits and pieces that have been licensed from other companies. We are working out the arrangements with those companies to be able to open source them.

InfoWorld: What pieces are those?

Murdock: Well, for example, some device drivers [and] certain bits of functionality that were licensed.

InfoWorld:I heard a former Sun official last year who basically said that he thought Sun was kind of moving too fast with open source, maybe over-emphasizing it a bit. You're probably going to disagree with that, but how would you respond to that?

Murdock: I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything you could possibly need to put an application into production. So you don't monetize at the point of acquisition of software any longer, you have to monetize at a different place. So it's not to say that there is not money to be made in software, it's just made at a different place, and the different place is with all of the developers adopting technology, putting it into production, some of those applications that are deployed are going to be successful. They're going to run into the traditional challenges of having to grow and scale that application. They're going to need to have a relationship with the vendor behind the technology. So there are ample opportunities to make money because even though open source is free in the monetary sense, it still requires a lot of expertise and knowhow to make it operate efficiently. So there's plenty of opportunity there to add value.

InfoWorld: I heard two different computer industry executives make the following comments. One is, how do you have a software industry if there's open source? And the other is, open source lowers revenues for everybody. How would you respond to those?

Murdock: Well again, open source is only free or free software is only free if your time is free. And I don't know about you, but my time is definitely not free. And in terms of lowering revenues, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the money changes to a different place. The revenue opportunity changes to a different place. So it's a disruptive event in the software industry. But disruptive events create opportunities for those who are agile enough or have the foresight to see the changes that are coming and can adapt. And so Sun's embrace of open source is just a part of adapting and changing with the changing of landscape. There's still plenty of money to be made, it's just shifting to a different place. Again, pay at the point of deriving some value from having a relationship with your vendor versus pay to get access to the technology.

InfoWorld: With OpenSolaris, Sun changed the packaging to make it more like Linux. Is it too late for OpenSolaris to compete against Linux?

Murdock: No, I don't think it's too late at all. In fact, I think there's a huge amount of interest in the Linux community for the technologies that we have in Solaris. So whether it's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) or DTrace [providing a dynamic tracing framework] or containers or any of those things. And the problem has always been barriers to adoption, right? The changes that we have put into OpenSolaris are primarily designed to lower barriers to adoption to that technology that the market has been wanting, but it has been too difficult to this point for to get at it. It'll be interesting to see how OpenSolaris is received in the Linux community. I would look at it as it's not so much an OpenSolaris versus Linux thing. We're putting another alternative out into the marketplace just like Ubuntu is an alternative and Red Hat is an alternative and SuSE is an alternative.

InfoWorld: As somebody who has developed Debian and now is an advocate for OpenSolaris, which do you see as superior?

Murdock: I think they're both good for different reasons. One of the advantages of Debian is it has a huge ecosystem of packages around it, so just about anything you could possibly want is just an app to get installed away. OpenSolaris has some of this functionality, like ZFS and D-Trace, that Debian — or no Linux distribution for that matter — has. So it all depends on the application environment.

InfoWorld: Won't those capabilities you mentioned be added to Debian in other Linux distributions?

Murdock: Well no, because those are part of the Solaris platform, and Debian is based on Linux. Now certainly we're going to see a lot of the reverse happening, so now that we have the package system in place around OpenSolaris, we have the same kind of infrastructure around it to enable bringing in this open-source software that is available for Debian.

InfoWorld: No one is permitted to take ZFS and port it to Linux?

Murdock: Well, today the licenses are not compatible with each other, so that can't be done.

InfoWorld: What are the differences in the licensing?

Murdock: Linux is governed by the GNU Public License, or GPL, and open source is governed by the CDDL, the Common Development and Distribution License.

InfoWorld: Why CDDL and not GPL like you did for Java?

Murdock: Well, OpenSolaris was open sourced, what, a year and a half before Java? There's a desire in some of our customer base to have a license that allows you to build value-added products on top of OpenSolaris. And so the ability to easily drive commercial versions based on Solaris technology was one of the drivers behind the CDDL. And basically, the CDDL is just a slightly modified version of the Mozilla Public License, so it is an OSI-approved open-source license. It's no more or less open source than a GPL is. But it turns out that the GPL is very restrictive, and so you can't combine some of the things that the CDDL says with some of the things that the GPL says.

InfoWorld: What are you expecting developers to do with Open Solaris?

Murdock: I think first of all, there's going to be a lot of experimentation now that the barriers are gone for a Linux developer, a Linux user to take a look at what OpenSolaris has to offer. We are spending a lot of time understanding what those developers are doing; namely, how they are moving up the stack and working in environments like PHP and Ruby on Rails. So how do we describe the capabilities of Solaris, such as DTrace, in a way that's relevant to them? For example, OpenSolaris is going to be an ideal environment for Web-facing applications because we've moved the DTrace functionality up into somebody's Web application frameworks. And if you think about it, the basic problem behind a Web application is, particularly if you are successful, how do you scale? If you build an application, you put it out there, you gain a large user base, people start hitting your servers, you have to figure out where in your code you need to optimize so that you can scale along with it. DTrace offers those kinds of developer's capabilities that are not available on any other operating system.

InfoWorld: What do you see happening with the Amazon-based hosted version of OpenSolaris?

Murdock: That represents yet another barrier to entry being removed. Now you can take advantage of these same capabilities without necessarily having to provision your own infrastructure. And it's all a part of the same trends that you've seen coming out of Sun over the last several years. The embrace of AMD and Intel, Linux, Windows. I mean, it's all about how do we get Sun technology as broadly adopted as possible, no matter what the vehicle?

InfoWorld: Do you see a role for OpenSolaris in the Web 2.0 world?

Murdock: Absolutely. If you are building a Web application and you become popular, your servers are getting hammered by all of these users who are coming, how do you scale with the increasing demand? And we've actually done this in several Web 2.0 shops where they've run into scaling problems, we've been able to come in, point DTrace at it, and extract some very amazing performance improvements in a very short amount of time. So we feel that now that the barriers to adoption have been removed, we're going to be able to play a much bigger role in this space than we have with Solaris 10 and previous.

InfoWorld: Is there anything else you wanted to bring up?

Murdock: One of the things to watch here in the coming months is what we are doing around Network.com [which is Sun's grid-based cloud computing platform]. At Sun we are fully committed to open source. To your earlier question about open source and business, we have a very clearly defined business model where the core offerings that are for developers are free and open source, no barriers to adoption. The one interesting question is what role does open source play in a world where software is no longer delivered as a product but rather delivered as a service? Web 2.0, for example, wouldn't be possible without open source. But why are people going to open source? They're going to open source for the same reason that they went to open standards and open systems. [There is] the desire to not be locked into a single vendor. Are we going back to the 30-year-old model in the pursuit of simplicity and moving everything into the cloud? I think you're going to see, coming out of Sun and around Network.com in particular, some pretty interesting answers to these questions.

The move toward data portability for denizens of social-networking sites gained more momentum Thursday with MySpace's announcement of its Data Availability project.

MySpace described the initiative as empowering “the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to Web sites of their choice throughout the Internet.” CEO and cofounder Chris DeWolfe said that “the walls around the garden are coming down” and his company and several partners are pioneering ways for sharing “social experiences Web-wide.”

Launch Partners

The partners at the launch were Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter. MySpace said its partners will complement its efforts in a variety of ways. For instance, if a MySpace user has Yahoo Instant Messenger, that user's MySpace default photo, interests and favorite music could be shown through the IM client. MySpace data can also be shown in Yahoo's universal profile or through Yahoo Mail's inbox.

On eBay, profiles can have MySpace data and media, and on Photobucket users can see their photos across various sites and can, if they choose, show their MySpace profile data in Photobucket albums. Twitter profiles can also be populated with MySpace data, blogs and photos.

Information that can be shared includes publicly available basic profile data, photos, videos and friend networks. Users can control what information is shared and with whom. A centralized location on MySpace will provide a kind of control panel, and the initiative will roll out within coming weeks. According to news reports, non-MySpace sites will not store or cache the data, and permission to use the data can be revoked by a MySpace user at any time.

The initiative will make it easier to distribute news like a new job to friends. A MySpace user could update a profile and dynamically share the new information to other sites where his or her data also resides.

Embracing Open Standards

The wave of information coming from MySpace users could be huge, since the site reportedly has 117 million users worldwide. The company said it is embracing open-source standards, and will use the OAUTH and Restful APIs. The company also said it is officially joining the DataPortability Project.

The DataPortability Project is also backed by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Digg and others. Yahoo is not an official member, but it has its own Open Strategy initiative so third-party developers can create applications for its sites.

Although ways to monetize the new data portability were not announced, some observers assume that eventually there will be advertising and other revenue streams. MySpace's parent, News Corp., recently announced that it will miss MySpace revenue targets by about 10 percent. According to news reports, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin has told analysts and investors that it's difficult to assign revenue values to having friends online, but the management is optimistic about social networking as a business.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O) said on Friday that “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski will make a movie version of “BioShock,” its hit video game about an underwater utopia gone disastrously wrong.

The movie will be made by Universal Pictures, a unit of NBCUniversal owned by General Electric Co (GE.N), and John Logan, writer of “Gladiator” and “Sweeney Todd,” was in talks to pen the screenplay, Take-Two said.

“Gore is an avid video gamer and true fan of 'BioShock'. That was extremely important to us in deciding to move forward with this project,” Christoph Hartmann, president of Take-Two's 2K Games label, said in a statement.

Take-Two did not disclose financial terms of the deal or other details, such as when the film would be released. The company is the target of a $2 billion takeover bid by rival game publisher Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O).

Released last August for Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360 game console, “BioShock” won praise for its complex story, haunting art deco atmosphere and creepy characters such as Big Daddies and Little Sisters.

“BioShock” has sold more than 2 million copies and Take-Two is working on a sequel.

The “BioShock” movie deal is the latest sign of the growing importance of video games in popular culture.

Earlier this week, Take-Two said its “Grand Theft Auto 4″ criminal action game racked up more than $500 million in global sales in its first week.

That handily topped Hollywood's biggest film debut, Verbinski's “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End,” which pulled in $406 million in global box office receipts in its first six days.

Microsoft made headlines when it signed “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson to produce a movie adaptation of its hit “Halo” video game, but the project was put on hold in 2006 when financial backers Universal and 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp (NWSa.N) pulled out of the deal.

(Reporting by Scott Hillis; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

LAWRENCE, Kan. - Meat retailers can now trace their wares from the ranch to the refrigerator case using DNA analysis.

IdentiGEN Ltd., based in Ireland with U.S. offices in Lawrence, Kan., said its DNA TraceBack technology can boost consumer confidence, as well as the value of the hamburger, steak, pork cuts and other meat.

TraceBack can determine not only where meat came from but whether it’s organic or Angus — or whatever the label says, company officials said. Chief Executive Don Marvin said it’s the first product to offer DNA tracing for the entire meat supply chain.

“If you see a DNA TraceBack label, believe it,” Marvin said. “It’s true. It’s DNA.”

But some in the industry aren’t convinced it’s worth adding to their many rising costs by adopting the high-tech tool.

The technology — approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in October — has been in use in Europe since 2000. British grocer Tesco and Ireland’s Superquinn and Dunnes Stores use it, and IdentiGEN officials said two U.S. companies have inked contracts to use it and a third grocer is close to a deal.

Public announcements of the deals are expected in the next few months, Marvin said. Both Tesco and Superquinn launched marketing campaigns in Europe after implementing DNA TraceBack, but the U.S retailers haven’t publicly announced their use of the product.

Bovigen LLC, a Louisiana company recently purchased by Pfizer Animal Health, also offers USDA-approved DNA tracing. But Bovigen plans to use it only to help producers identify beef cattle for specific traits for breeding purposes, said spokesman Rick Goulart.

Dave Schafer, executive director of the KansasMeat Processors Association, said he is skeptical that DNA tracing is necessary in the U.S. or that producers will want to add to already high food prices.

“There is no evidence there is a serious safety problem or even a very minimal problem to justify the cost,” Schafer said.

And producers like Brian Beckman of Grinnell Locker Plant in Grinnell, Kan., said they wondered how accurate the technology could be, noting some slaughterhouses process hundreds of animals at once.

But Marvin said IdentiGEN’s technology, which can identify the multiple animals whose parts were used in a given sample of ground beef, could have helped reduce amount of meat recalled after undercover videos revealed employees at Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino, Calif., abusing sick and weakened cows.

The revelations in February led to the recall of 143 million pounds of beef, the largest meat recall in U.S. history.

Workers take DNA samples at the processing and retail links on the supply chain and send them to IdentiGEN, which correlates them and determines the specific animals each product came from. Information kept by farmers or others in the supply chain can be added to give a full history.

IdentiGEN, founded by researchers from Trinity College in Dublin, developed the process, which assesses a panel of genetic markers using what’s known as high-throughput DNA analysis. The company simplified the collection process so processors and retailers can easily implement the technology, Marvin said.

Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Adrian Polansky, who is familiar with IdentiGEN through its use in his state, said DNA tracing offers a foolproof way to improve safety and verify claims made by suppliers.

“This is a way to ensure consumers are actually buying products they desire to buy,” said Polansky, who predicted that producers will be willing to cover the technology’s extra cost.

And Kansas State University’s Curtis Kastner, a professor of animal sciences and director of the school’s Food Science Institute, said DNA tracing could make U.S. meat more marketable in other countries, as well as offer safety and consumer confidence advantages.

“Here’s a pretty powerful tool to help the market here in Kansas and in this region of states to say, ‘Here’s a product that is not just perceived as safe and secure, it actually is,’” Kastner said.

DALLAS - Texas officials may claim that Amazon.com owes millions in sales taxes on purchases that state residents made from the Internet retailer.

A 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling lets states collect sales taxes from out-of-state retailers that have a “physical presence” in their state. Seattle-based Amazon runs a distribution center in Irving.

The Dallas Morning News reported in Friday’s editions that it asked the Texas comptroller’s office why the retailer didn’t charge sales taxes on Texas customers. Robin Corrigan, a sales tax policy executive in the comptroller’s office, said the agency didn’t know Amazon operates a facility in the state.

Company officials “told me they don’t have a distribution center in Texas,” Corrigan said. “We will definitely send out a team to investigate.”

Amazon media officials did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press for comment Friday.

Texas officials didn’t say how much they think Amazon may owe, but Comptroller Susan Combs said in December that the state lost $541 million in sales taxes on Internet and mail-order sales during 2006.

The question of Texas taxes arose after Amazon sued the state of New York last month, saying it shouldn’t have to pay sales taxes because it doesn’t have a presence there.

The conflicts with Amazon are part of a larger debate over taxing Internet sales.

Some retailers, such as Plano-based J.C. Penney Co., have complained that competitors who don’t collect sales taxes have an unfair advantage.

Legislation now pending in Congress would standardize the taxation of Internet sales while exempting small online retailers.

On its Web site, Amazon says purchases shipped to Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota or Washington are subject to sales tax. It has operations in all four states. According to its Web site, it doesn’t charge sales taxes in several other states where it also has operations, however.

Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes.

Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

“When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,” said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis. “It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.”

During Columbia’s fateful mission, the drive had been used to store data from a scientific experiment on the properties of liquid xenon.

Most of the information was radioed to Earth during Columbia’s voyage. Edwards was able to recover the remainder, allowing researchers to publish the experiment in the April issue of a science journal, Physical Review E.

That led Kroll Ontrack to share details of its salvage effort.

Columbia broke apart during re-entry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, killing its seven astronauts. The shuttle had been damaged at launch by foam insulation that fell off an external fuel tank.

Like other Columbia debris, the mangled disk drive turned up in Texas. It was six months after the disaster when a NASA contractor sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack, which specializes in data recovery.

Edwards had reason for pessimism. Not only were the drive’s metal and plastic elements scorched, but the seal on the side that keeps out dirt and dust also had melted. That made the drive vulnerable to particles that can scratch the tiny materials embedded inside, destroying their ability to retain data in endless 0s or 1s, depending on their magnetic charge.

However, at the core of the drive, the spinning metal platters that actually store data were not warped. They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not yet been written.

Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.

After cleaning the platters with a chemical solution, Edwards used them in a newly built drive. The process — two days from start to finish — captured 99 percent of the drive’s information.

Edwards was gratified.

And to drive home just what a long shot his recovery had been, he later had no success with two other drives found in Columbia’s wreckage. Blasted by the unfathomable furnace of entry into the atmosphere, their metals had lost the ability to hold a magnetic charge.

___

On the Net:

NASA write-up of the experiment whose data was recovered:

http://tinyurl.com/44nqgv

NEW YORK - Shares of Activision Inc. hit a record high Friday after the video game publisher reported profit and sales that soared past guidance and Wall Street’s expectations.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company’s stock jumped $2.01, or 7.3 percent, to $29.71 Friday, after earlier hitting an all-time high of $30.15. The stock movement could make Activision’s pending acquisition by French media conglomerate Vivendi SA more valuable.

Activision said Thursday the deal is on track to close in the next few weeks. The new publicly held company, to be called Activision Blizzard, will rival Electronic Arts Inc. as the world’s largest video game publisher. Vivendi will own a 52 percent stake.

As part of the deal, shares of Vivendi Games will be converted into 295.3 million new shares of Activision at $27.50 per share, for a value of $8.1 billion. The deal also calls for Vivendi to purchase 62.9 million newly issued Activision shares the same price.

But, with Activision’s stock trading above the set price, the value of the deal will most likely increase.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said the combined company could reward shareholders for the increased value by buying back shares. With fewer shares outstanding, each would reap more of the gains from the company’s performance.

For the three months ended March 31, the fiscal fourth quarter, Activision earned $44.2 million, or 14 cents per share, compared with a loss of $14.4 million, or 5 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.

It was the company’s most profitable quarter outside the holiday season, fueled by stellar sales of “Guitar Hero III” and “Call of Duty 4.”

Excluding stock options costs, Activision earned $54.9 million, or 17 cents per share, far more than the 5 cents per share that analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected.

Revenue jumped 93 percent to $602.5 million from $312.5 million, beating analysts’ average projection of $369.1 million — and topping Activision’s own guidance of $350 million.

Noting that the company had no new releases during the quarter, Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said the results show the power of Activision’s “Guitar Hero” and “Call of Duty” franchises.

The video game marketplace is thriving, even as U.S. consumers are cutting back spending in other areas. Games, Kotick told The Associated Press, “are starting to capture the hearts and minds of the broadest audiences.”

The latest generation of customers, he said, expect that video games can be an important part of their leisure time, even during an economic slump: In the past year alone, Americans spent nearly $18 billion on video games.

“Video games as an entertainment medium is probably the lowest cost per hour,” Kotick said.

When the Vivendi deal closes, Activision Blizzard will be worth $18.9 billion and draw significant revenue in Asia with “World of Warcraft,” the world’s most popular online game. The deal already has won EU regulatory approval and cleared U.S. antitrust hurdles.

“The beauty of the transaction is that it puts all of the markets, platforms and geographies that video games are consumed on in one place,” Kotick said.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2009, Activision forecast earnings of 4 cents per share on sales of $500 million, excluding any contribution from Vivendi. Excluding stock options costs and expenses from the Vivendi transaction, it expects adjusted earnings of 13 cents per share.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson forecast a profit of 12 cents a share on sales of $484.3 million.

For the full fiscal year, the company earned $344.9 million, or $1.10 per share, up from a profit of $85.7 million, or 28 cents per share, the year before. Revenue grew 93 percent to $2.9 billion from $1.51 billion.

For the current fiscal year, Activision expects earnings of 72 cents per share, or $1.30 per share excluding costs from the Vivendi Games transaction and other items. The company expects sales of $2.75 billion. Not counting the effects of deferred revenue for online-enabled games, revenue is expected to total $3.1 billion for the year. Activision, like other video game companies, makes most of its money during the holiday season.

Analysts are predicting earnings of $1.18 per share on sales of $2.82 billion.

For many years the average video gamer has been male and aged 24 or more.

These young men typically have the disposable income and time needed to support a gaming habit and, it has to be said, many of the titles being released were designed to appeal to such folk.

But casual games and the appearance of the Nintendo Wii have changed that profile and now it looks like it is about to change again.

Research suggests that there are about

158 online games and virtual worlds in development or up and running designed specifically for children.

While some of that total are recognisable games, most should be classified as virtual worlds, said Joey Seiler, editor of Virtual Worlds News, who drew up the exhaustive list.

Although these worlds, such as Club Penguin and Neopets, have games in them they are more an environment children can explore via their avatar.

“There are things to play with, like monkey bars or virtual snowballs, but it’s up to the kids to figure out what to do with them,” said Mr Seiler.

Big numbers

Some virtual worlds are hugely popular. Habbo has 90m accounts, Neopets 45m, Club Penguin 15m and Star Doll 15m. All these virtual worlds are aimed at children under 13.

For Mr Seiler this popularity is based on three factors: friends, freedom and fun.

“One reason virtual worlds are extremely compelling is that they offer a way to get out of the house and reconnect with friends after their curfew hours,” said Mr Seiler.

The virtual worlds also give kids great freedom to express themselves.

“For kids, though, when they don’t have as many options in real life to decide what their house looks like, what type of clothes to wear, or where they go, virtual worlds must seem like a whole new land of opportunity,” he said.

Finally, he said, these virtual worlds are enjoyable places to be.

“Successful virtual worlds encourage creativity, imagination, and fun,” he said. “That’s pretty appealing to any kid.”

But, said Lane Merrifield co-founder of Club Penguin, creating a game that appeals to children is not easy because they are both technologically adept and very critical consumers.

Respect for the audience, said Mr Merrifield, was vital for that success.

“If it doesn’t matter to an eight-year-old it shouldn’t matter to them,” he said.

“Kids are so perceptive,” he said. “Those that enter this space for financial or business benefits, I think kids are going to see through that and there’s potential for them to shun those products.”

Mr Merrifield added that while children had to be engaged by the world, there was also a job to do to re-assure parents these places were safe.

Club Penguin has a limited chat system and a large number of moderators monitoring interaction in the virtual world to ensure there is no inappropriate contact.

Karla Buchl, a spokeswoman for Burda:ic which runs Hello Kitty online in Europe, said all those overseeing virtual worlds aimed at children had a duty of care for their users.

“It’s in our interest to have the sites stay safe,” she said, “given our target groups we really need to do that.”

But, she added, virtual worlds had to walk a fine line between giving people enough freedom to communicate and limiting the potential for abuse.

Bought and sold

Beyond safety many parents are also worried about the commercial connections of many virtual worlds.

Nic Mitham, head of the K Zero consultancy which watches this industry sector, said entry to many of the virtual worlds was via the purchase of a toy or game.

For instance, he said, the Barbie Girls was won when a child got hold of the Barbie MP3 player. Similarly access to Webkinz is based around purchase of a soft toy.

That trend was only going to grow over the next few years, he said adding that soon it would be hard to name a toy that didn’t have some kind of web content associated with it.

Partly this was a marketing move to engage children with the products they buy or get as presents but equally, he said, it was one of the few ways available to generate cash from virtual worlds.

To pay their way some virtual worlds, such as Club Penguin, offer access to more content for a small subscription fee.

Others use adverts on a home page or portal to offset running costs and some use make money by asking users to pay for the virtual goods used to adorn their in-game homes or avatars.

But, said Mr Mitham, there was no doubt that this stampede to entice children into virtual worlds associated with products, be they books, soft toys or films, would create casualties.

“I expect to see the first signs of fall out next year,” he said. By that time the seed cash from venture capitalists behind many of the worlds will have dried up and it will be obvious which ones have managed to grab a significant audience.

“We will see some worlds closing and some acquisitions take place,” he said. “In the place of the more generic virtual worlds will come those allied to a particular genre or interest group - such as Lego Universe.

For Mr Mitham there is nothing virtual about this phenomenon.

San Francisco - Sun Microsystems is counting on the ubiquitous nature of Java to help its JavaFX technology compete in the rich Internet application (RIA) space against rivals Adobe Systems and Microsoft.

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon.

“The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today,” Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh.

“The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available,” Singh said.

Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

“In our product design, we have looked at all competing environments. But our focus remains to provide the best RIA,” said Singh.

JavaFX, which was first revealed a year ago, features a client runtime for building rich Internet applications as well as the JavaFX Script scripting language. Runtimes for platforms such as the desktop, mobile device, and even televisions are planned.

Monetization of JavaFX will come via licensing and advertising opportunities, Singh said.

In other discussions at JavaOne, Sun officials detailed potential changes to the Java Community Process (JCP) for amending the Java platform, as well as plans to enhance the Sun SOA Platform.

Sun's dominant role in the JCP would be lessened a bit under a proposal put forth by the new chair of the program, Patrick Curran. The plan calls for no longer guaranteeing Sun a seat on two high-level executive committees, one of which oversees the Java Platform, Micro Edition and another that governs the Java Platform, Standard and Enterprise Editions of Java. There are 16 members on each committee, but Sun is the only one with rights to a guaranteed seat on these two boards, said Curran.

“I think that [situation] probably will change,” he said. Discussions are being held on this issue now, but changes could take time.

Asked if Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz is concerned about Sun possibly losing the right to guaranteed seats, Curran said Schwartz has other things on his mind.

“The entire process of reform may take us a couple of years, but there are certainly things we could do in a period of months,” Curran said. He cited planned reforms around openness and transparency, which include putting forth a formal process for submitting public comments on JCP proposals and having responses developed to these comments. Public mailing lists might be set up toward this end, Curran said.

Sun's control over Java is lessening. Sun, Curran said, is no longer the specification lead for the majority of Java Specification Requests (JSR) submitted to the JCP. JSRs encapsulate proposed changes to Java on many fronts. Sun also bowed recently to those who want OSGi supported in the upcoming version of Java SE, said Curran.

Sun offered Java up to open source in November 2006. The open-sourcing, however, does not eliminate the need for the JCP to oversee development of the Java platform, said Curran. Open source guarantees openness and transparency, but it does not provide for?? the development of formal specifications, conformance tests, or the likelihood of competing implementations, he said.

Meanwhile, in June Sun plans to upgrade to its SOA package, Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS). Version 6 of the suite will have capabilities to show unified subject views. These capabilities are derived from Sun's open source Project Mural, which focuses on master data management, Sun officials said. Project Mural unifies information about a customer, or perhaps a citizen or medical patient, to present a single view of the subject in question.??

CAPS also features the GlassFish application server, the Open ESB enterprise service bus, business process capabilities, and legacy adapters.?? The upgrade will be called CAPS 6.

“[CAPS] is our SOA platform,” said Mark Herring, Sun vice president of software infrastructure marketing.

After Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, small businesses such as the Silk Road Collection antique store in New Orleans had little hope of surviving. Tourists and local customers had vanished, and it would take years for the city to rebuild.

Donald St. Pierre, the owner of Silk Road, and his business and life partner, Robert Turner, feared that they might have to close the shop. They couldn't land government or bank loans, and their personal savings were keeping the business afloat.

But then Turner attended a small-business, e-commerce seminar co-sponsored by Internet giant Yahoo and AT&T. After the disaster, it was like tech manna from heaven.

Yahoo offered free online small-business services. E-commerce firm Solid Cactus designed a professional-looking website (www.silkroadcollection.com). Google provided free online software to analyze Internet traffic to Silk Road's website. And online marketing firm Constant Contact created an e-newsletter for thousands of customers. Total cost: $5,000.

The impact has been dramatic. Silk Road's total sales in 2007 grew to $201,000, up 23% from the year before. This year, sales are up 19%, with online and foreign sales an increasing percentage of the total take. Now, Silk Road is adding a travel blog and online videos so customers can view products as if they were at the store.

“Technology has been a tremendous tool,” St. Pierre says. “The tourists weren't coming to us, so we had to reach out to millions of tourists.” Adds Turner, “It's been a godsend for us.”

St. Pierre, Turner and millions of U.S. small-business owners are geeking out in the digital bazaar. As online commerce grows and technology gets cheaper and easier to use, small firms - especially mom-and-pop shops that had shied away from technology - are using tech tools more than ever to sell goods, market themselves and run their operations. Technology used for years by tech-savvy “early adopters” and big companies now is hitting small businesses on Main Street USA.

In earlier years, setting up a vast business technology infrastructure required millions of dollars, affordable mainly for just big and midsize corporations.

Now, even tiny, cash-strapped firms can use so-called Web-hosting and other tech services offered online to small and midsize businesses by Yahoo, Intuit, Google, Microsoft and many others. Some are free. Others may cost $40 a month or tens of thousands of dollars altogether.

Just like big companies, small firms can design their own websites. They can sell and market online to millions of U.S. and global customers. They can conduct meetings and seminars over the Internet. They can use tech tools for accounting, shipping, inventory control and other nitty-gritty business functions.

“There's a myth in Small Business America that you need to be a rocket scientist in order to use technology,” says Jimmy Duvall, director of e-commerce products for Yahoo. “We want to demystify that technology and bring it to the average merchant and small-business owner in an easy, approachable, digestible way.”

EBay's portal to the world

Small-business owners also are using eBay's digital marketplace, the equivalent of a vast global bazaar for neighborhood merchants, to sell goods to customers worldwide. They're using blogs and online marketing to reach consumers. And as the commercialization of the Internet quickens in the so-called Web 2.0 era, small companies are using Facebook, LinkedIn and other social and professional networking sites to market their wares to friends, families and colleagues.

Big companies have sought for years to sell products to the multibillion-dollar small-business market. A growing array of corporate titans - IBM, Bank of America, MasterCard, American Express, UPS, FedEx and others - are wooing small businesses with a blizzard of financial and tech products and services.

Even in this downturn, small and midsize businesses are expected to spend $82 billion on technology in 2008, according to technology research firm IDC. That's a 6.2% increase from 2007, and it outpaces the 4% growth rate for projected technology spending by all corporations, according to IDC.

Demographics and globalization should keep the market growing, according to recent reports on small business by the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank, and software firm Intuit, which makes QuickBooks, TurboTax and other tech financial tools.

A young Internet generation of small-business owners will spend billions of dollars on laptops, mobile devices and software. Millions of baby boomers and women are starting small firms and home-based businesses. U.S. small businesses also are leaping into global trade, with their exports rising to $400 billion last year, according to early estimates by economist Harvey Bronstein of the Small Business Administration.

When the commercial Internet and high-speed Internet access started taking off in the 1990s, only a handful of small businesses had websites. But as broadband access spread, the number of small businesses with websites also grew rapidly. Now, 53% of U.S. small businesses boast sites, says Ray Boggs, IDC's vice president of small and midsize business research.

A surprising 47% of small businesses still do not have websites, and that could hurt them.

“My local deli or dry cleaner may think they don't need to be online, but the reality is they do,” Boggs says. “If you're not Internet-active, you're at a competitive disadvantage. It'll be like not having a telephone.”

Moreover, small and midsize businesses are far more nimble than larger competitors and can quickly reinvent themselves using new technology, according to George LeBrun, chief strategy officer of O'Reilly InPractice, a tech training and consulting firm.

“This levels the playing field,” he says.

Amy Shuen, a former Intel manager and author of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, says that small-business owners are pleasantly surprised at the vast improvement that affordable technology brings to their operations.

“They may not understand the technology, but they understand the impact it can have on their business,” Shuen says. “At one-tenth the cost, they can reach 10 times more users and 10 times more partners at 10 times the speed.”

Sophisticated tools

Just as corporate giants use “best of breed” technology, or a blend of software, computers, networking gear, mobile devices and other technology, small businesses are using a wide range of software and online services.

And as small firms grow larger, selling to larger corporations or to consumers worldwide, their technology tools also grow more sophisticated to handle their orders, their inventory and other business functions, says Angus Thomson, vice president of Intuit's midmarket group for small businesses.

“People are really embracing these digital tools and mixing and matching these services,” Thomson says. “Some are on their computers, and some are Web-based. We want to give them the best of both worlds.”

Even unexpected small businesses - from auto-repair shops to plumbing companies - are adopting tech tools, according to Catherine Harrell, senior marketing manager at Intuit.

More also are using what Intuit calls digital “intelligence devices,” such as Global Satellite Positioning devices to track drivers, or sensor devices used by swimming pool maintenance firms to detect chlorine levels in the water. “They're getting savvy and utilizing technology in every corner of their businesses,” Harrell says.

Other small businesses - especially those run by under-40 executives who grew up in the Internet age - are raising their tech games to higher levels.

Sweet success

Look at Sweetriot, a New York-based firm that sells organic chocolate beans covered in dark chocolate.

Founded by Sarah Endline, a Harvard MBA and former Yahoo manager, Sweetriot was launched as an online business that uses a whole arsenal of tech tools: a website, blog, e-commerce payment tools, a monthly e-newsletter and pages on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. Customers even pick the artists' designs used every three months on new chocolate bean tins.

Sweetriot's sales have doubled every year since its founding in 2005 and continue to grow. The company sells to consumers around the world and to 1,500 U.S. bricks-and-mortar retailers, including Whole Foods, Pier One and Cost Plus World Market.

“For a small amount of money, you can get an incredible return on interaction with your customers and team,” Endline says. “For us, technology is the crux of the issue, and we always try to work faster and smarter.”