Tags: Cake

Just a reminder that we’re aggregating news & views here, both positive & negative.

Ivan Ristic writes:

I first encountered (and used, in production) Spring Framework in its pre-1.0 days, and it was love at first sight. I loved it because of its vision, a very good design of its MVC and database libraries, and, most importantly, quality (I am yet to encounter a single bug in it, actually). The licence, Apache Software License version 2, was right too. I had even wanted to join the development team, but ultimately decided to focus on ModSecurity instead. Spring had a lot going for it: the Java server-side programming was in a state of disarray. We needed a beacon to guide us.

Fast-forward a few years, and we have Spring firmly established as the leading player in server-side programming. Then, a few more years down the road, the bloat is starting to appear, after the development team (apparently) decided small and focused is not beautiful after all. In parallel with the evolution of the framework, Rod Johnson (the author of Spring) grew his consultancy business, Interface21.

Then, the inevitable happened. The success of Spring became too tempting. Interface 21 sought venture capital, changed its name to SpringSource, and went on to buy Covalent (or merge with, depending on whom you ask), a quiet but persistent company, also in good standing with the community.

My fear, when I heard the news of funding, was the same as Corby’s (from a post at InfoQ):

If anyone had the ability to grow organically, I thought Interface21 did.
VC don’t give you money unless they’re going to grow you 20X. I am very
concerned about seeing an explosion of Spring subprojects that lack the
quality or the relevance of Spring core. And VC don’t give you money
unless you’re going to cash out. I don’t see Interface21 operating as a
standalone IPO, so that means they will be actively seeking
acquisition. I hate to see one of the big guys get ahold of this very
independent entity.
I wish the Interface21 folks great financial success, but I hope Spring
does not turn into a bloated, slow-release monster. I have already
heard rumors that Benchmark Capital is pressuring Rod Johnson to change
his name to something more kid-friendly.

Things started to go wrong after SpringSource had decided to experiment with their licensing strategy. They introduced a number of proprietary products and started using other open source licences. Their most recent product, SpringSource Application Platform, is licensed under GPLv3, in stark contrast to ASLv2 used for the framework itself. (GPL allows business to essentially retain control of the code base.) The changes made many members of the community feel insecure, and lead to heated exchanges on the forums. Prior to the changes the company was often called a darling of Open Source (it sounds like something I would have said too), because they were a rare example of someone building a business (Interface21 consultancy) around the restriction-less Apache Software Licence. I can only conclude that, under the changed circumstances, their business was not growing fast enough, and that they felt that they needed to do things differently.

This story is a clear demonstration of the challenges facing open source commercialisation. Where we previously had a clean separation of the project and the company, now we have a company that is using the project to build a proprietary business model around it. They may still be contributing to the open source parts–today–but do you trust them they will continue to do so? SpringSource are saying they are on the same path they have always been. Maybe they believe that, but they are not, and users see it. SpringSource are saying they will keep the Spring Framework alive and open source. I actually believe they are being honest when they say that. But I also know that people come and go and that, eventually, the prosperity of the company may matter more at some point in the future.

Let me be clear when I say there is nothing wrong with making money of your work, be it open source or not. It’s the change of direction that’s making everyone nervous. For many people open source is about freedom and certainty. They don’t want to have vendors to depend on. They’ve chosen to work with Spring Framework on the basis it’s vendor-free. So it’s not surprising that they are starting to feel twitchy now that they’ve realised the company behind their favourite project is a vendor too. If SpringSource want to preserve their hard-earned credibility they need to act fast to insulate themselves from the core Spring Framework project. It’s certainly a tough thing to do (convincing the VCs, I mean), but it’s the only thing that would bring the user trust back.

Tags: SpringSource

Dion Almaer of Ajaxian.com writes:

The Bay Stack: Ever notice how Silicon Valley stacks up just like technology?

I was sitting in a session at Web 2.0 Expo last week with Salil Deshpande, one of the original investors and advisors to Ajaxian and a former boss at CustomWare. (Salil is now a VC at Bay Partners, and you can follow his new blog here).

We started on the observation that the bay stacks up with technology somewhat similar to a stack of technology itself. We then took the analogy to the extreme as we plotted it out, as seen below.

At the bottom of the stack you have the hardware crud, such as chips (Intel), networking (Cisco), disk drives (Seagate) and hardware (Sun). The operating system should go next, but that was a tough one to squeeze in. Oracle and the database is up in Redwood shores. BEA is further down in real geography, but Oracle has now bought BEA, so it also lives in Redwood shores (phew, thanks for the purchase!).

Then you get up into the city itself, where the hipsters define Web 2.0 (Twitter) and design cool things (Adaptive Path).

Tags: Salil Deshpande

Joshua Lipton of Forbes.com writes:

Last week brought more tough news about the state of the U.S. economy, all but confirming a recession with plunging consumer confidence while energy prices soared even higher, unfazed by the fresh news of economic weakness.

Stock market investors decided to stay optimistic, responding to the latest in a deluge of bad news with a collective “So what?”

Perhaps believing that the worst of the credit contraction is over and that central bankers have staunched the flow out of stocks with aggressive rate cuts, targeted liquidity injections and the bailout of Bear Stearns, investors sent stocks higher.

On Friday, April 28, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 42.91 points, or 0.33%, to 12,891.86. That was the highest close for the blue chips since Jan. 3. The Dow rose 0.33% for the week.

The best-performing online investors, Marketocracy’s M100, were busy hunting for smart bargains last week. One area of the market these gurus have continued to favor: energy. In fact, it’s one of the few areas of the market that continues to please investors.

So far this reporting season, earnings are coming in 14.1% lower, on average, than they were a year ago, according to Thomson Reuters. But the story is a bit different when you look at energy. The energy sector is reporting the highest earnings growth rate of any sector at 29% (with 39% of companies reporting as of April 25). If energy sector earnings come in at 29% overall for the quarter, it will mark the highest growth rate for the sector since 2006’s second quarter, says Thomson.

Energy’s strong performance has also helped to make the market look better. Excluding energy, the first-quarter growth rate for the remaining nine sectors would be -20.5%. Longtime market pro Ed Yardeni points out that the sector’s share of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 has increased from a low of 5.4% in November 2003 to 14.3% this April. He now says he wouldn’t be surprised to see energy’s market cap share rise to 25% to 30% by the end of the decade.

Why exactly have oil prices been soaring to new highs? “Maybe all we need to know is that Chinese auto sales are rising nearly 20% per year and that they are buying more SUVs and luxury cars as they prosper,” Yardeni says.

The M100 have certainly become believers, increasing their investments in energy. A year ago, the M100’s energy holdings made up 13.85% of their combined portfolios. Now energy accounts for 24% of their overall portfolios.

One position in the space that the gurus added to last week was independent oil and gas producer Cabot Oil & Gas.

The Houston-based company has operations in the U.S. Gulf Coast, mid-continent, Rockies, and Appalachia. Analysts note that Cabot, which has a market capitalization of about $6 billion, has a very long operating history: It has produced natural gas since the late 1800s as part of its old parent, Cabot Corporation.

Bulls on the stock argue there are a few reasons why investors should consider pushing cash into this stock. Recent discoveries in gas zones in Appalachia and east Texas make Cabot’s properties more attractive. The company’s properties are among the most diverse of the small oil and gas companies, and they are all in North America, which limits the kind of political risk competitors have to deal with when they do business overseas.

Analysts following the stock also write that Cabot’s financial health is better than average compared with other small oil and gas producers. That’s helped the company maintain profitability during industry downturns.

Cabot is a bit pricey relative to its expected growth, with a price-to-expected-growth ratio of 2.81. The industry average is 1.38. But the company does have a much better operating margins that its peers. The stock has popped more than 60% over the past 12 months. It’s now swapping hands for about $58, but that’s still below its 52-week high of $62.

Cabot will release its first-quarter 2008 results on April 30. Ahead of that report, the M100 moved in.

Other buys in the Energy sector last week for the M100 included oil and natural gas producer Arena Resources and independent oil and gas exploration and production company Mariner Energy.

Our gurus were also busy buying stock across the pond, carving out big positions in a handful of exchange-traded funds that track markets in both Asia and Europe. They particularly liked the look of WisdomTree Japan Total Dividend Fund. This is an ETF that tracks the performance of the WisdomTree Japan Dividend index, which measures the performance of dividend-paying companies incorporated in Japan and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The ETF hasn’t been much of a performer over the past year, down about 9%. But, in the past month, it’s jumped more than 4%.

The M100 are perhaps now banking on a turnaround for the Japanese economy. Earlier this month, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said it’s seeing a recovery in Japan. The OECD reported that its composite leading indicator (CLI) for Japan was 4.7 points lower than the same month last year. But it did increase 0.4 to 96.7 in February.

The CLI is designed to provide early signals of turning points between upswings and downswings in the growth cycle of economic activity. Recovery is signaled when the CLI is increasing but below 100.

The M100 also liked the look of four other ETFs tracking stocks overseas: iShares MSCI Malaysia, iShares MSCI Japan, iShares MSCI South Korea and iShares MSCI Germany.

The M100 were also just as busy selling last week. One company they no longer consider a sound investment: Diana Shipping, a global shipping company specializing in the transportation of dry bulk cargoes.

The last several years have been terrific ones for dry bulk shippers in general. Surging prices of commodities like iron ore and coal have helped companies like Diana expand margins and grow profitably.

Last year, the company had operating margins of 72.4% and Return on Equity of 23.1%.

But Diana has already enjoyed a monster run, rocketing up more than 50% in the past 12 months and 20% in just the past four weeks. Last week, the company announced that its financial results for the first quarter of 2008 will be released on May 14.

Our M100 decided now was the time to jump ship.

Other top sells for the gurus included telecommunications company Tata Communications, real estate investment trust Medical Properties Trust, biotechnology company Momenta Pharmaceuticals and independent shipping company Euroseas.

Guru Buys:

Cabot Oil and Gas

Arena Resources

Mariner Energy

NRG Energy

Cooper Tire and Rubber

Guru Sells:

Diana Shipping

Tata Communications

Medical Properties Trust

Momenta Pharmaceuticals

Euroseas

Tags: Marketocracy

Grails took #2 and dynaTrace took #1 in the JAX Innovation Awards:

Tags: Groovy Grails

Blogger Leslie Poston writes about her experience with Triggit:

Triggit has been making waves as an innovative way to make web site monetization easy. It is often mistaken for a downloadable toolbar. In fact is it a web based application that matches your site to ad opportunities, Triggit brings the monetization to you.

The genius of Triggit is the simple drag and drop interface. If you have ever tried to shove an ad into a place on your web site using HTML, PHP or CSS, you know what a hassle it can be for the amateur web designer. It’s often a hassle for the experienced web designer as well to place ads on a site.

She concludes:

I must say I added Triggit to one of my personal blogs using WordPress 2.5, and I love how easy it is to use. It took only a few minutes to sign up and place the code in my blog. Once everything was ready, simply clicking on the Trigget short cut in my toolbar got me started. The jury is out on how well the ads will perform, but for ease of use, Trigget gets an A+.

Tags: Triggit

Windover has a report on Vaxart:

Vaxart Inc.

By Jim Kling (Contributor), Start-Up 1/2008

Executive Summary

One reason that oral vaccines are so rare is that, generally speaking, the immune system in the gut does not respond to foreign proteins such as food or normal bacteria. Vaxart Inc. has developed an oral vaccine system based on a key immune receptor that recognizes a signal for viral infection that is not normal in the gut and can therefore elicit a strong immune response. The vaccine platform targets toll-like receptor 3 (TLR-3), which occurs on the surface of cells in the small intestine. TLR-3 binds to double-stranded RNA, which is only found in double-stranded RNA viruses, and then alerts the immune system to the presence of the invader.

For $85, purchase this 1352-word article as a PDF, and receive immediate delivery via email. View a complete sample article.
Questions? Call (203) 838-4401, ext. 232.

100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Tags: Vaxart

Advisor Perspectives is read by approximately 60,000 people in the financial advisor community. Dougal Williams wrote an article entitled  Collective Wisdom, Financial Markets, and Investment Lessons from Google™. In response, Ken Kam, CEO Marketocracy, wrote the following article as a rebuttal:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to the April 1, 2008 article titled, “Collective Wisdom, Financial Markets, and Investment Lessons from Google.”  In the article, the author uses a thought experiment in which a stadium full of people are called upon to flip coins to reach the conclusion that you cannot tell anything about a manager’s future performance from his past track record.

It sounds persuasive until you realize that once you assume that everyone is tossing a fair coin you’ve already conceded the argument because no one can be “better” at tossing fair coin than anyone else. Dr. Hersh Shefrin, a professor at Santa Clara University, uses a similar thought experiment in his book, Beyond Greed and Fear to reach a very different conclusion. Let me try to explain.

Let’s suppose we have a group of 42,000 people who each receive one of three types of coins - gold, silver, or bronze. The gold coins are weighted so they have a 60% chance of coming up heads. The silver coins are weighted evenly to give a 50% chance of tossing heads. The bronze coins are weighted to come up heads only 40% of the time.

If everyone tossed their coin 10 times, the group of 42,000 people would average 5 heads.  If we want to bet on someone to beat the average of 5 heads out of the next 10 tosses, it would be smart to bet on someone holding a gold coin because each of these people can be expected to throw 6 heads. But, there is one more twist: all the coins are painted green so you can’t tell what kind of coin anyone has. Now, let’s see if a track record has any value.

At the start, there are 14,000 people who have a gold coin, 14,000 with a silver coin, and 14,000 with a bronze coin. If you had to choose someone to bet on now, your chances of selecting someone with a gold coin are 33%. But if you wait until after the first coin toss the odds improve to 40%. Here’s why. Of the 14,000 people holding gold coins, 60% will throw heads so they will comprise 8,400 of the people still in the stadium after the first toss. Of the 14,000 who hold a silver coin, 50% will throw heads, so 7,000 of them will remain. Of the bronze coin holders, 40% will throw heads accounting for 5,600 of those remaining. After the first toss, there will be 21,000 people in the stadium, but 8.400 of them, 40%, will be holding gold coins.

With each successive toss, the odds of selecting a gold coin holder from the people who remain improve. After the 10th coin toss, there will be 100 people in the stadium. But, 85 of them will have gold coins, 14 will have silver coins and 1 will have a bronze coin. If you select randomly from among the people who threw 10 heads in a row, your chances of picking someone with a gold coin holder are now 85%.

Restricting your choices to those with a track record of throwing 10 heads in a row greatly increases your odds of selecting a gold coin holder who can then be expected to throw 6 heads in the next 10 tosses and thus beat the average of all 42,000 which will be 5.

Since many who hold gold coins will not throw 6 heads in the next 10 tosses, even though they can be expected to, there is a good argument to choose all 100 of the people who threw 10 heads in a row. The expected performance of the entire group of 100 in the next 10 tosses is 5.84. By choosing all 100, the probability of the group averaging more than 5 is higher than if you just choose a single person with a gold coin.

I don’t mean to imply that anyone should select managers based solely on their past performance. Investing is a lot harder than tossing coins. My point is simply that the thought experiment used by the article’s author to explain why a manager’s track record contains no useful information for investors does not stand up to scrutiny.

Best regards,

Ken Kam
President

Marketocracy Capital Management, LLC

Tags: Marketocracy

John Nogrady is Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. He writes: Congratulations to Zach Coelius and Triggit as the winning startup at Web 2.0 Expo. Triggit helps bloggers and small website owners make money. Their simple WYSIWYG editing tool uses just one line of JavaScript to enable instant drag-and-drop publishing of AdSense, Amazon and other affiliate programs and ad networks. Users can also easily add content from sites like Flickr and YouTube.

Tags: Triggit

Real-Time SMS-Voted People’s Choice Winner Helps Websites Make Money

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 /PRNewswire/ — TechWeb (Formerly CMP) and O’Reilly Media, Inc., co-producers of the annual Web 2.0 Expo, today announced the winner of the Launch Pad start up program. Triggit, one of six on-stage presenters, took home the title of People’s Choice Winner on Thursday, April 24th during Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco at Moscone West.

This year Web 2.0 Expo hosted a Venture Capital Edition of the Launch Pad program, showcasing the best Web 2.0 startups and providing a unique public forum for unveiling new companies and products. Web 2.0 Expo, in its second year, is the leading global gathering of developers, designers, marketers, and business professionals building the next generation Web. http://www.web2expo.com/sf.

Triggit (http://www.triggit.com/), the winning startup, helps bloggers and small website owners make money. This simple WYSIWYG editing tool uses just one line of JavaScript to enable instant drag-and-drop publishing of AdSense, Amazon and other affiliate programs and ad networks. Triggit can source, integrate, optimize and track ads on the site, making ad management and monetization pain-free.

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Tags: Triggit