I feel like this is becoming an M&A blog, but there been a lot of relevant M&A activity of late that I felt I needed to cover (e.g., Microsoft/FAST, EMC/Document Sciences). Yesterday's big news (aside from Oracle / BEA for I think
On 12/27/07, EMC announced the acquisition of Document Sciences (DOCX) for $85M in cash. DOCX's stock has been flat in the $6 range for most of the past two years, recently moved to the $8 range, and is up to about $14 on the announcement of
It's a busy week so no time for a deep analytical post (yet), but I wanted to get this news out fast. Microsoft has bid $1.2B for Fast Search & Transfer. See this New York Times story for more. My initial take: * It's a quite
Making the point that messages don't always carry well across media, check out this video parody of Facebook, translating it from webpage to live TV news show. Enjoy. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SH9iEn8Jfk&rel=1]
Cloud
Continuing to steadily and patiently execute on their Amazon Web Services vision, Amazon recently announced SimpleDB, a web service for running queries in real time against structured data. It's the first instance of which I'm aware of someone offering DBMS-level services in the cloud. Arguably,
Strategy
A friend pointed me to this interesting post by Allan Packer of Sun entitled Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? Overall, I think it's a well done analysis of the DBMS market and well worth reading. First, a nit. When I was a lad, "proprietary" didn't
On December 13th Google took its first step from organizer and indexer of the world's knowledge to supporting-creator of it with the announcement of a new free tool called "knol" (a cutesy-ism which stands for unit of knowledge). The folks at publishing industry watcher
Frankly, I don't spend much time worrying about my web search history -- but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should. Sure, I blogged about the topic once here (You Are What You Search). If you've never looked at the rather famous anonymized AOL
Just a quick post to direct you to this interesting presentation, entitled Software Trends Update by Kris Tuttle and Dennis Byron of Research 2.0. I know Kris from his days at SoundView, and I always found him a particularly astute financial analyst. I particularly enjoyed this slide, which does
A quick post to refer you to this outstanding article in the New Yorker, entitled Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents which covers the history of libraries and archiving, an overview of the Microsoft and Google digitization projects, the information explosion problem (e.g., "scholars have to deal with
This Slate story, entitled The Death of E-Mail, has been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere of late. I felt compelled to comment because the story was published so close in time to our launch of the MarkMail service for getting intelligence from e-mail archives. If
BI
Newsweek recently published an article that should be sending shock waves through the business intelligence (BI) market, populated with vendors like Business Objects, Cognos, and MicroStrategy. BI tools help business people get access to information in corporate databases and data warehouses, so they can make better business decisions. In fact,
