| Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, has done a remarkable job of marketing his company and the software-as-service business model. But less known is his interest in philanthropy. Through the Salesforce.com Foundation, the company donates 1% of its equity and income, and its employees volunteer significant chunks of time, to worthy causes. Benioff wrote about this in his previous book, Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well. |
| Just days after having to stand idly by while the Romanian president talked up how unauthorized copies of Microsoft software helped build that country's IT industry, Bill Gates has another critical issue to decide concerning such "piracy." Over in Russia, Microsoft has apparently been pressing charges against a Russian school headteacher, Alexander Ponosov, who Microsoft accuses of running "pirated" software on school computers. |
| So the second best thing about being in Bolton yesterday after the amazing group of Year 6 students that were in attendance was that I got to sit in on an introductory Garage Band workshop that and Joe Moretti, and ADE from the UK was giving. We did some blogging yesterday, too, and another highlight from yesterday’s workshop was an impromptu Skype call with Chris Turek from November Learning to ask a question about the software that Bolton was using to support its network. |
| I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. |
| Consider Visto, a mobile e-mail developer that has sued Microsoft, Research In Motion, Good Technology, Seven Networks, and Infowave and accused them of violating its patents. We do work the patents, but we're not a troll," insists a slightly miffed Daniel Mendez, one of Visto's co-founders and its senior vice-president for intellectual property, the guy who works the patents. Even while Visto set out to beef up its core business it started going after companies it considered patent infringers. |
| Here’s the mission: “Educational Blogging” is a positive, tranformational technology that is often confused with “Social Networking” sites like MySpace.com. While there are similarities in the web technologies used for blogging and social networking sites, they serve different purposes. The current backlash against social networking sites has the potential to overshadow the benefits of educational blogging. |
| Joel Spolsky, who has written some of the smartest and most useful articles on software development done right in his Joel on Software blog, is also the CEO of Fog Creek Software. As CEO he recently posted an open invitation for would be software managers to apply for paid on the job training at Fog Creek. Joel describes the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program : The key component of this program is rotating through just about every job at Fog Creek Software. |
| Three things in the Mac OS X 10.4.4 update caught my eye: .Mac now syncs which RSS feed items you have and haven't read in Safari. On the other hand, I am quite pleased that now I no longer have to decide, via the pop-up menu in the lower right hand quadrant of the iTunes window, whether I want to use external speakers via the Airport Express, or my computer's built-in speakers; now there's a third option, that uses both, "Multiple speakers." |