CTO

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Yesterday the biggest soft­ware patent troll of all fi­nal­ly woke from its slum­bers: Intellectual Ventures filed patent in­fringe­ment com­plaints in the US District Court of Delaware again­st com­pa­nies in the soft­ware se­cu­ri­ty, DRAM and Flash mem­o­ry, and field-pro­grammable gate ar­ray in­dus­tries. Intellectual Ventures was co-found­ed by Microsoft's former CTO Nathan Myhrvold, with others from Intel and a Seattle-based law firm." We dis­cussed IV's po­ten­tial for patent (...)

Michael Birch, the founder of Bebo, is re­turn­ing to where it all be­gan, sign­ing on as an in­vestor and ad­vi­sor to the so­cial net­work he built and later sold to AOL for $850 mil­lion. It’s un­clear how much Birch has in­vest­ed in Bebo or if the in­vest­ment is re­lat­ed to the pro­posed sale that Om re­port­ed was in the work­s last week. But it nonethe­less rep­re­sents a ma­jor, per­haps des­per­ate, ef­fort to turn the com­pa­ny around by woo­ing back the man who start­ed it. Birch ob­vi­ous­ly has a lot of money (...)

I’ve re­al­ly been get­ting in­to Quora, a new Q&A ser­vice that was start­ed by a former CTO of Facebook. I’m not sure why this one took for me, where there have been many others, but I think it’s just the smart com­mu­ni­ty that’s sprung up on this ser­vice. I al­most didn’t blog about it, be­cause so far there’s been some of the best dis­cus­sions of tech­nol­o­gy and star­tup help I’ve seen any­where and I didn’t want to see that wa­tered down, but when some­thing is good I just have to share it, so here we (...)

CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, has raised $4 mil­lion in Series A fi­nanc­ing led by Matrix Partners with par­tic­i­pa­tion from in­di­vid­u­al in­vestors, in­clud­ing JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone vet Bob Bickel. The round is said to be on­ly the first in a mul­ti-stage in­vest­ment to provide CloudBees with the re­sources to build out a cloud-ag­nos­tic, cloud-na­tive Java PaaS that cov­ers both de­vel­op­ment ser­vices and a pro­duc­tion run­time for Java. The fund­ing (...)

MyLikes, the per­son­al en­dorse­ment-based ad­ver­tis­ing plat­form best known for the abil­i­ty to cre­ate spon­sored tweets and YouTube videos, has seen sig­nif­i­cant growth since the com­pa­ny an­nounced an ini­tial fund­ing round last April, open­ing up to the pub­lic and un­veil­ing its ad­vi­so­ry board, of which I am a mem­ber. The com­pa­ny's CEO, Bindu Reddy, re­ports more than 100,000 "in­flu­encers" are reg­is­tered on the plat­form, reach­ing more than 160 mil­lion peo­ple. The com­pa­ny, who was found­ed by a pair of (...)

Andy Baio is a man who gets things done, though his ac­com­plish­ments are often quite unusu­al. Now he's tak­ing that at­ti­tude straight to the na­tion's cap­i­tal. In 2008, Baio post­ed on­line, and re­fused to take down, the grainy video tape of Sarah Palin's par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant. He's re­ceived cease and de­sist let­ters from lawyers rep­re­sent­ing Disney, the Beatles and Bill Cosby. He made mil­lions co-found­ing the ear­ly so­cial cal­en­dar­ing web­site Upcoming.org and selling (...)

—Col­lege­Hu­mor Media: Paul Greenberg re­cent­ly joined as CEO of the com­pa­ny that op­er­ates CollegeHumor.com, Dorkly.com, TodaysBigThing.com and SportsPickle.com. He pre­vi­ous­ly served a brief stint as pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal at Time’s lifestyle group. Prior to that, he was EVP and GM of TV Guide Online. —ChaCha: Greg Siefert is now CTO, re­spon­si­ble for the com­pa­ny’s engi­neer­ing and tech­nol­o­gy op­er­a­tions. He pre­vi­ous­ly found­ed and was pres­i­dent of Springhead, a lead­er­ship and tech con­sult­ing firm. (...)

The first chief tech­nol­o­gy of­fi­cer of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is do­ing more than just work­ing to make com­mu­ni­ty health data as use­ful as weath­er data. HHS CTO Todd_Park (@todd_park) is us­ing Twitter to ac­com­plish the core goals of his role at HHS: in­no­vate, com­mu­ni­cate, and it­er­ate. "I just think that it is a fan­tas­tic way to get in­ter­est­ing mes­sages out there, to get the word out about key things, to get feed­back -- all in an in­cred­i­bly open, re­al-time way," he (...)

So, if you haven’t heard about Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 yet, you are ei­ther liv­ing un­der a rock or Amish or some­thing like that. Microsoft is spend­ing a bil­lion in ad­ver­tis­ing the new sys­tem. Will it be suc­cess­ful? Well, I’ve been vis­it­ing app de­vel­op­ers to fig­ure that out. Early re­sults? Yes, it will be suc­cess­ful. Why? A few rea­sons: 1. It’s a sexy new OS that gives app de­vel­op­ers more ca­pa­bil­i­ties. You’ll see that in the Loopt video when CEO Sam Altman brags that his app is able to (...)

CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes of RockMelt in­vit­ed me over on Friday to see a new browser. Who is be­hind this? Marc Andreessen. The guy who start­ed Netscape. He, and a bunch of other in­ter­est­ing peo­ple are in­vestors in this com­pa­ny. In this video you’ll see what makes this browser dif­fer­ent. Or, you can see the other peo­ple who’ve seen it and are writ­ing about it on Techmeme. You can sign up for ac­cess to the be­ta at RockMelt.com. After all that, I’m left with the ques­tion: does this (...)

Our read­ers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that's ahead of the tech­nol­o­gy curve. Our spon­sors know us as that, too. Once a week we in­tro­duce our spon­sors to our read­ers and let them know a lit­tle more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the com­pa­nies that make ReadWriteWeb hap­pen by tweet­ing them (see the link be­low each spon­sor) or fol­low­ing them us­ing our Twitter list. Interested in be­ing a ReadWriteWeb spon­sor? Our read­ers are smart, tech-savvy de­ci­sion mak­ers; 40% (...)

The fi­nal tal­ly for the third quar­ter of 2010 is in, and the news — not that it will re­al­ly come as a sur­prise — is that the de­mand for wire­less data is on an up­swing and seem­ing­ly end­less, de­spite the new tiered-pric­ing plans. According to Chetan Sharma, an an­a­lyst who tracks the wire­less-data in­dus­try, the U.S. wire­less-data mar­ket grew 25 per­cent in the third quar­ter of 2010 ver­sus the third quar­ter of 2009. The mar­ket gained sev­en per­cent over the sec­ond quar­ter of 2010 to to­tal about $14 (...)

The au­thor of the web's first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dress­es as a me­dieval war­rior and goes to bat­tle on the week­ends and a wom­an who fol­lows World of Warcraft, acupunc­ture and bal­let, have raised $24 mil­lion dol­lars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got in­cred­i­ble press cov­er­age when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week - but they are prob­a­bly go­ing to get slaugh­tered. In the mean­time, they have pro­vid­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for count­less other (...)

A few peo­ple from Facebook's database teams (yes, plu­ral) re­cent­ly gave a MySQL Tech Talk at Facebook head­quar­ters about how Facebook us­es MySQL to pro­cess 13 mil­lion queries per sec­ond. Former Facebook CTO and Quora found­ed Adam D'Angelo has said that Facebook is "stuck" with PHP and MySQL for le­ga­cy rea­sons, but it sure sounds the Facebook team is mak­ing the best of it. Video and notes after the jump. Sponsor Watch live stream­ing video from face­bookevents at livestream.com The main (...)

This is a sur­prise, but re­al­ly ex­cel­lent news. Princeton Computer Science pro­fes­sor Ed Felten -- one of the few folks out there who seems to re­al­ly un­der­stand var­i­ous tech is­sues hav­ing to do with e-vot­ing, DRM, net neu­tral­i­ty, copy­right and other is­sues has been ap­point­ed as the first ev­er CTO of the FTC. Felten is the guy who was threat­ened by the RIAA years ago for crack­ing their DRM and dar­ing to want to ac­tu­al­ly pub­lish an aca­demic pa­per about how weak the DRM was. He's al­so been (...)

Demand for wire­less data around the globe will dou­ble each year through 2014 as the pop­u­la­tion turns to smart­phones and data de­vices for in­stant in­for­ma­tion ev­ery­where. To bat­tle this growth, car­ri­ers are drop­ping un­lim­it­ed plans in fa­vor of tiered data buck­ets, which re­search firm iSup­pli to­day says will boost de­clin­ing car­ri­er mar­gins, while al­so help­ing to pre­dict de­mand for ser­vice. That makes sense, but it’s too ear­ly to tell if cus­tomers will come out the win­ners. Indeed, car­ri­ers (...)

ITU Headquarters in Geneva The tech world loves num­bers, fea­ture-driven mar­ket­ing and pedan­tic ar­gu­ments over … well, tech­ni­cal­i­ties, which is why the wire­less de­bate du jour is over 4G. As op­er­a­tors roll out faster net­works that are built us­ing acronym-heavy stan­dards such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), 802.16 (WiMAX) or HSPA+, it’s hard­ly a sur­prise that ev­ery press re­lease is tout­ing 4G, which pre­sum­ably stands for the fourth gen­er­a­tion wire­less net­work. Only, ac­cord­ing to the (...)

There is no deny­ing T-Mobile USA, in its lat­est ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paign, is diss­ing AT&T for what it be­lieves is lack of fastest wire­less broad­band. And it is not just AT&T. As T-Mobile USA’s CTO Neville Ray points out, his com­pa­ny has an edge over Sprint and Verizon Wireless; in his opin­ion, his HSPA+ net­work is a bet­ter op­tion than the com­ing U.S. LTE or WiMAX net­works. Ray was talk­ing to me ahead of the launch of new mar­kets and avail­abil­i­ty of new de­vices for its HSPA+ net­work. The (...)

The fast grow­ing sales of Android-based smart­phones and Apple’s iPhone mean the onus is on Nokia and Research In Motion to come up with com­pelling and com­pet­ing prod­ucts, ac­cord­ing to Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer of T-Mobile USA. In an in­ter­view with me, Ray didn’t mince words when he said, “Nokia and RIM have had a great his­to­ry. They need to step up and make sure they’re go­ing to be of­fer­ing a great ex­pe­ri­ence go­ing for­ward, too.” “I think that com­pe­ti­tion is healthy,” Ray said, “I (...)

At the Qt Developer Days event this week in San Francisco, Nokia CTO Rich Green dis­cussed the val­ue that ap­pli­ca­tions bring to mo­bile de­vices and the role that the Qt toolk­it will play in Nokia's mo­bile plat­form strat­e­gy. Qt will ac­cel­er­ate Nokia's own mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment and sup­ply the third-par­ty de­vel­op­er com­mu­ni­ty with a uni­fy­ing toolk­it that will work across both of Nokia's mo­bile plat­forms. Green says that hav­ing a rich plat­form sim­ply isn't enough any­more. "It's all about (...)