ups

If you were looking to create a start-up, and particularly an open-source start-up, you could hardly do better than to stumble upon a pre-existing open-source project with millions of downloads, widespread adoption by some of the biggest names in the industry, and a fast-growing enterprise need.

Take Lucene, for example, as CMS Watch's Kas Thomas noted on Monday. It is a hugely popular project with one big failing: no enterprise support. Writes Thomas:

Lucene has a lot going for it...(It's) one of the safest (open-source projects) around, in terms of governance and oversight (through the Apache Foundation), … Read more

Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?

Venture capitalists put a virtual lock on their funding during the fourth quarter, doling out a mere $3.4 billion, according to a report released Monday by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.

The meager performance pales in comparison to the $11.7 billion distributed to start-ups a year ago during the same period. That's a decline of 71 percent. Funding is down nearly 60 percent from the previous quarter.

During the fourth quarter, venture capitalists launched 33 follow-on funds and 10 new funds, resulting in a 3-to-1 ratio for … Read more

David Nash's Startup Manager is a free utility that lets you choose the programs you want to run at start-up. We had to visit the Help feature to make sure we were on the right track, but in the end it worked well for us.

The program's user interface uses a tree menu to locate the different start-up sections--StartUp, Registry, and WinINI. Depending on what you select, the individual files appear in the main panel. All of the command buttons were within quick reach at the top of the window. But even though the interface appeared to be … Read more

Historically, the Consumer Electronics Show hasn't been a place where we'd find a ton of new laptops, desktops, or computer components. After all, PC makers had Comdex (a now-defunct Vegas trade show), and are generally more interested in hitting the back-to-school and holiday seasons than releasing new products in January.

Still, this year was a decent one for new introductions, and almost every major name in the computer business had a handful of new products to show off. Most were more evolutionary than revolutionary, but when you're dealing with essentially the same small pile of CPUs, GPUs, … Read more

The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show is history. As far as the home audio world is concerned, the product lineup and trends were pretty much right in line with our predictions.

Wireless speakers: Panasonic showcased the SC-ZT1, a unique "4.4" speaker system with wireless speakers (except for that pesky power cord, of course). But the bigger trend was wireless subwoofers: Samsung, Philips, and Polk Audio (among others) all showed surround systems with wireless subs, enabling more flexibility when placing them in the room.

Network audio: Whether it was more affordable tabletop Internet radios from the likes of Sanyo … Read more

CES 2009 is officially over, so we can take stock of the major home video trends we saw at the show. The most obvious difference from CES 2008 is that now that HD DVD is dead, Blu-ray dominated the show like never before. While most of the major trends at the show basically matched up with our CES preview, there was one nice surprise that ended up being the Home Video Best of CES category winner.

Blu-ray trends

If you've been confused by all the different Blu-ray profiles, you'll be happy to know that nearly all (tsk, tsk Philips) … Read more

If you've been keeping up with my monitor blog posts from CES 2009, there's one term you've probably heard tossed around more any other: "Full HD."

Yes, Full HD was the buzzword for monitors this year. Full HD basically means a monitor has a 16:9 aspect ratio screen--as opposed to a 16:10--and either supports 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution natively or is at least compatible. All of the monitor vendors I covered this year had either their full lineup moving to 16:9 or at least the majority of it.

The reason for moving to … Read more

While this program goes a long way in removing the intimidating elements from system maintenance, it simplifies the matter to the point that it hides important details. As a result, an uninformed novice could actually harm their system instead of enhancing its performance.

Smart PC Suite launches a colorfully designed palette of icons, each of which represents a tool for performing system maintenance and enhancement. Actually, the icons and color scheme look like something designed for a child's game site instead of for serious business like maintaining a PC system. The provided tools include the usual suspects for this … Read more

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