TechHaze.com » Steve Kim

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Steve Kim — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:39:24 +0000

According to a number of reports, the European Commission decided on January 21, 2010 that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems does not pose substantial interference to monopoly regulation and fair trade acts, thus authorizing the $7.4 billion takeover.

According to Neelie Kroes, the European competition commissioner in charge of analyzing this case, stated recently that she is “now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned,” and that “Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products.”

Oracle also released a statement on the same day, deliver the same news. It also urged China and Russia to approve the acquisition in a similar manner and stated that it would try to finalize the transaction as soon as possible.

In April 2009, when Oracle, the world’s largest Database Management System (DBMS) firm revealed its decision to acquire the industry’s fourth largest company, Sun Microsystems, the American regulations commission was quick in approving the takeover. Starting in September, the European Commission went into anti-monopolistic studies, claiming that the deal could disturb the fairness of the database software industry.

However, the European Commission’s apposition waned when Oracle announced that it would sustain MySQL, a free, open source DB possessed by Sun. On December 14, 2009, Oracle stated that, should it ultimately acquire Sun Microsystems, it would prolong all licenses of MySQL by 5 years and not claim any intellectual property ownership over the said DB. Oracle also added that it would continue to support all corporate and private users and use $72 million in MySQL development over the course of 3 years. The sum is, in fact, much higher than what Sun has been investing in MySQL until now.

After the announcement, Neelie Kroes became more open to the deal, and the European Commission and Oracle had several meetings, finally reaching an agreement on January 21, 2010, just one week before the deadline of January 27. On this day, the Swiss Competition Comission also approved Oracle’s acquisition.

In its official statement, the European Commission noted that another open source DB, called PostgreSQL, will be able to play the role of competitor to MySQL. It also revealed its interest in seeing Oracle’s commitment to multiyear investment in MySQL, as this will sustain fair competition between MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, whether or not the European Commission will be able to oversee Oracle’s promise is unclear.

With the approval in hand, Oracle announced that it will host a live event for customers, partners, press, and analysts on January 27, 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM PT, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components engineered to work together. The event will be broadcast globally.

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YouTube’s Auto Captioning

Steve Kim — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:48:10 +0000

The worldʼs largest video sharing site, YouTube, has launched another new feature, which may be especially useful for the millions of users who browse through the videos that are not in their native languages, as well as for those with hearing impediments.

Subtitles are widely used in the media sector to facilitate and enhance understanding of visual contents, but it is not so easy to caption videos, word by word. Now, however, YouTube has introduced its solution: Auto Caption.
It is not surprising as Google has already launched Google Voice, which uses its distinct ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) technology and voice-to-word algorithms to convert voice messages into text. Itʼs like transforming voice messages into emails.

Currently, this Auto Captioning feature is available on Googleʼs corporate videos and those pertinent to academia. YouTube, which has cited is goal of allowing everyone convenient access to all shared videos, says it will expand the implementation of this feature to videos in more subjects.
On a similar note, YouTube has also launched a secondary feature, Auto Timing. Until now, users had to type subtitles, stop and play the video repetitively to record minutes and seconds, time code them, and hope that the text and video would synchronize as perfectly as possible. But, with YouTubeʼs Auto Timing, users can simply type the subtitles in .txt format and upload. YouTube will take care of the rest by synchronizing the text and video precisely using its Auto Captioning technology.
YouTube proclaims that both of these features function smoothly on anglophone videos, but it does also state that the technology work – to a certain extent – quite well with several foreign languages. As they say: some work, some donʼt, but itʼs better than nothing.

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Gold Rush for VoIP Companies?

Steve Kim — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:12:47 +0000

The worldwide online auctioning giant, eBay, recently sold Skype to its founders and investment group for $2.75 billion. Google acquired Gizmo5, an ex-Skype acquisition prospect, for $30 million. And now there are rumors surrounding another major M&A in the VoIP sector.
This time, itʼs a web-based bridge call (callback) service provider Jajah. The firm in consideration bases its business on dialing both ends of a conversation and connecting them through a bridge call concept. This is similar to the way Google Voice connects users to one another. While Jajah service dosenʼt require headsets, this duplicate calling structure makes them endure costs that are double those of Skype. In fact, at the initial stage of its development, Jajah became somewhat of a sensation through its aggressive marketing, which included headset-breaking performances. It also received over $20 million of investments from Deutsche Telecom and Intel. However, its consumer service did not last long, as the cost was too high. It still does provide the bridge call service to regular users, who total up to supposed 25 million around the world, but Jajah now provides Managed Service Platform for business partners, who have made over 1 billion calls through this B2B VoIP service, as of July 2009. Most recently, Jajah also got on the Twitter bandwagon by launching its @Call service, which allows Twitter users to call each other.
Rumors around this potential acquisition of Jajah suggest prices ranging from $200 million to $400 million. Possible takers are Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and O2. Since Jajah is already an official partner in development of the SIP Trunking Service, implemented in Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007, the software giant seems most probable in becoming a winning bidder for this VoIP company. At the same time, Cisco Systems is also concentrating efforts to fortify Internet communication services for its business clientele, so Cisco also remains a viable acquirer of Jajah.

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