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The government’s current IT architecture consists of standalone repositories, many of which duplicate what is dubbed PII, or personally identifiable information.

“It cannot be emphasized enough that this centralized data store approach is NOT being recommended,” the report says. “The applications supported by this architecture will be enormously diverse, as will the nature of the content-specific data they use and retain. At the same time, the scale of the object architecture will be global and massive, as needed to support the full range of federal government activities and enrolled participants.”

“If you don’t use the cards to change the way you do business, we have all wasted a lot of effort and money to produce cards people stick in their desk,” warned Mary Dixon, director of the defense manpower data center for the Defense Department.

This image represents the vision of a federated ‘network of networks’ laid out in the Identity Management Task Force’s recent report.

With no common authentication system within the federal government, employees currently may have four or five credentials to gain access to various buildings and may only be expected to flash those credentials at a security guard. By contrast, the smart cards will be equipped with microchips, will hold biometric data like fingerprints, and will eliminate the need for multiple credentials.

Blackburn maintained, however, that such information would be more secure with standardized privacy stipulations and methods of access. He also reiterated that information required for specific applications would only be accessible to the relevant agencies.

There will always be privacy concerns when personally identifiable information is being collected, the task force acknowledges. The “basic information” about an individual would be supported by the network, conceivably accessible to any government agency.

To address those weaknesses, the task force presented the idea of a federated “network of networks,” with cross-organizational and cross-domain interoperability. The task force breaks down PII into two categories: “basic information” and application-specific data. The architecture laid out by the task force would support the basic information, but not application specific data.

An agency, such as the Defense Department, would retain application-specific data (such as a special clearance) itself and would not share it across the network. However, it could access basic information–now often duplicated across agencies–in the supported data stores using a predefined querying process.

“As such, differences exist in the ways the same PII and other information are retained, portrayed, weighted, and valued across the total data architecture,” the report says. “Further, the existence of these duplicative and nonstandard data increases opportunity for data exploitation and unauthorized access.”

Chartered by the National Science and Technology Council’s subcommittee on biometrics and identity management, the task force released a report (PDF) in September. The report offers a set of recommendations, including possibly creating a position within the executive branch that would be responsible for coordinating identification management across all agencies.

WASHINGTON–The federal government is trying to find better ways to standardize and coordinate personal information about American citizens that is currently spread across thousands of databases, according to a White House official.

Blackburn said the task force stayed away from policy prescriptions because “if you try to specify that now, you run the risk of someone trying to do it now when it’s not fully thought through–you run the risk of these recommendations being politicized.”

Blackburn said the report presents “a vision–it’s not a policy.”

The task force’s report–the first of its kind–was produced after a six-month analysis of information management across all departments and agencies.

Government agencies will face a test in the development of coordinated authentication programs on October 27, when every federal employee and contractor is expected to have a government “smart card,” as required by a presidential directive.

Blackburn helped establish an Identity Management Task Force that examined the government’s current identity management architecture and how to consolidate the personal information collected.

(Credit: Office of Science and Technology Policy)

“You have a lot of duplication of data” among various agencies, said Duane Blackburn, a policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Moreover, he said, privacy controls and security measures vary from agency to agency.

At a forum here Tuesday hosted by the Information Technology Association of America, representatives from the federal government and the tech industry discussed how the government conducts identity authentication–either for federal employees or regular citizens–and how it can improve.

There are more than 3,000 programs or databases in the federal government that hold personal information–Social Security numbers, addresses, fingerprints, and so on–yet the government is only beginning to develop a plan for collecting, protecting, and using such information.

To approach this vision, the task force recommends tackling a number of issues, such as standards and guidelines that would have to be in place to support a federated network, the appropriate technologies to use, and how to best coordinate interagency efforts.

It was only a question of time. BigBelly Solar has expanded its product line with a solar-powered compactor for recyclables.

Now the company has developed a compactor for recycled goods. It comes in a few configurations, but the recycling units (for paper or bottles and cans) have their own panels and are placed next to solar trash cans.

The Needham, Mass.-based company first started selling trash cans with a small 30-watt solar panel on the top that powers a compactor a couple of years ago.

Ultimately, BigBelly plans on equipping its units with communications capabilities so that they can tell garbage collectors when they are full or broken.

There’s also the “green PR” when people see the solar panel on the top of a trash can.

But for now, cities and towns just need to hope consumers know how to sort their trash.

(Credit:
BigBelly Solar)

The product design is meant to be green all the way through by using recycled plastic and nontoxic paint.

Solar-powered recycling and trash bins from BigBelly Solar.

Municipalities have been buying them to cut down on the number of trips that garbage handlers need to make. That cuts down on fuel costs (garbage trucks get about 2.5 mpg) and reduces street congestion and pollution.

At this rate, Microsoft may be able to acquire the entire company for what it was willing to pay for just the search business, should it decide to make another run at the company.

With its shares dipping into the $13 range, Yahoo not only sets a new 52-week low but also reaches a trading level not seen since late May 2003.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance) Updated at 8:33 a.m. PDT, with analysts comments on whether Microsoft might make another bid for Yahoo.

Sanderson noted that because Yahoo’s third quarter is expected to be weak, he’s cutting his price target for the company and financial outlook.

OSB leadership and organizational structure remain in flux following the departure of Platform & Services President Kevin Johnson and the re-organization in July. Two months later, Microsoft has yet to name a new head of OSB. Other senior managers have also jumped ship with the general manager of digital advertising solutions leaving for Amazon and its media network VP & chief marketing officer going to Yahoo.

Yahoo's stock has been trending downward since the spring.

Said Sanderson in a research note Wednesday:

On the revenue front, Sanderson expects Yahoo to pull in $1.78 billion in the third quarter, slicing that projection down from his previous forecast of $1.85 billion. Similarly, for the year, the analyst revised his earlier estimates to $7.34 billion from his previous projection of $7.62 billion.

Yahoo fell as low as $13.62 a share during intraday trading, down more than 6 percent from the previous day’s close. Although Yahoo’s shares continue to give up ground, the company’s performance during the trading session has largely mirrored the broader markets.

Analyst Rob Sanderson with American Technology Research, meanwhile, believes Microsoft may make another run at Yahoo, but at a “significantly” lower offer.

His new 12-month price target for Yahoo is $22 a share, verses his previous forecast of $33 a share.

Since “walking away” from the previous Yahoo offer, the OSB (online services business) division of Microsoft has not come close to meeting expectations. Organic revenue growth has decelerated from 16 percent in March to 2 percent in June, according to our estimates. Losses have nearly doubled sequentially, from $1 billion operating loss run-rate in March to nearly a $2 billion loss run-rate in June.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s organic efforts in search are falling further each month. ComScore reports that MSN has lost 260bps of U.S. search query share from a year ago to only 6.4 percent in August. This represents a greater than 30 percent drop in market share in one year.

Yahoo shares broke through another psychological barrier Wednesday, edging down into the $13-a-share range.

At its July analyst day, Ballmer emphasized the importance of traffic and scale in the online search business…

Yahoo, as a result, also now has a market cap of $19.35 billion.

Last May, Microsoft walked away from its buyout offer of $47.5 billion to snap up all of Yahoo, only later to return with a partial buyout offer of $9 billion to acquire just the company’s search assets.

Sanderson also lowered his earnings estimates for the company to 8 cents a share for the quarter, compared with 9 cents under his earlier forecast, and an earnings per share of 67 cents for the year, verses his earlier projection of 69 cents a share.

Several analysts weighed in with their view that Microsoft has little incentive to raise its initial buyout bid, which was valued at $31 a share on February 1.

Adding a drag on its stock performance were comments Wednesday from Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, who said the software giant is unlikely to raise its buyout bid for the Internet pioneer and is “prepared to move forward alone without Yahoo,” according to a Dow Jones report.

Yahoo, during its earnings conference call with analysts Tuesday, displayed a “greater willingness” in its comments to negotiate on price, Citigroup Global Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said in his research note.

Update: Wednesday, April 23, 11:22 am PT:

Here’s a Bloomberg News video link that captures Ballmer’s presentation Wednesday, in which he discusses the possibility of Microsoft walking away from its Yahoo offer.

Shares of Yahoo were down 2.38 percent, or 68 cents, to $27.86 a share in early morning trading. They gained back some ground a bit later to trade at $28.27, down 0.95 percent.

Yahoo shares headed a bit south when markets opened Wednesday, as analysts posted lackluster reviews on its first-quarter results and, in at least one case, lowered recommendations.

Analysts with the Stanford Group, meanwhile, are increasingly becoming convinced that Microsoft will “go hostile” in trying to acquire Yahoo. Nearly three weeks ago, Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo with an ultimatum to make a deal, or to face a proxy fight for control of its board and direct solicitation to its shareholders. Yahoo’s deadline to conclude a deal is Saturday.

“We don’t believe that anything in last night’s report changes the outlook for the deal and we continue to believe that Microsoft will increase its bid or perhaps make it an all-cash deal valued in the $32 to $35 range,” Schachter said in his research note.

“With Yahoo likely to continue to drag its feet on any deal with Microsoft, the risk of a long regulatory approval process before the deal can close, and little chance of a higher offer coming from either Microsoft or another bidder, we are revising our rating on Yahoo to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Outperform,’ ” Heath Terry, a Credit Suisse Securities analyst, said in a research note.

A number of analysts, such as Benjamin Schachter of UBS Securities, assert that Yahoo’s share price will trade based on the prospect of a Microsoft buyout versus its performance for the quarter or its forecast guidance.

So, kudos to O’Reilly for following up and to Schwartz for taking the extra time to respond to the questions. This all turned out to be a good example, after all, of incorporating the backchannel into conference proceedings and showed that everyone involved had the class and courtesy to take the situation seriously instead of just blowing it off to bad luck.

(Credit:
O’Reilly Media)

On Saturday, O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly put up a blog entry with a series of answers from Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz that were in response to Twittered questions from the audience at their Friday morning keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Afterward, O’Reilly offered a mea culpa on CNET News.com and via his Twitter account, saying that he had inadvertently had his mobile phone set up to receive only Twitter posts from people he follows. That meant that he didn’t see any of the audience’s questions on his phone.

And in fact, this turned out to be a better outcome than if O’Reilly had taken a Twitter question or two because there were only a few minutes left in the keynote when he made the offer. This way, anyone interested in what Schwartz had to say got a much deeper set of responses from him.

O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly posted a blog Saturday with a set of answers from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to questions posed via Twitter by audience members at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote address on Friday morn.

This is a nice resolution to the situation. In his blog post, he presented Schwartz with 11 questions that had come from Twitter, along with the Sun CEO’s responses.

Better late than never, as the saying goes.

The post was a result of O’Reilly’s having offered the audience at the keynote address the ability to ask questions of Schwartz via Twitter, but subsequently not posing any of those questions.

But it’s a bit curious on Facebook: most popular social-media sites already have applications built on Facebook’s developer platform, and those can pull updates into the Mini-Feed–so at first glance, it seems slightly redudant.

(Credit:
Facebook)

Using the Mini-Feed import, however, requires no application to be installed on Facebook (read: it’s easier), and is fully opt-in, unlike Facebook’s controversial Beacon advertisements (of which Yelp is a partner). I originally speculated that perhaps Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, and Delicious were “partners” in a Mini-Feed import program, meaning that Facebook may have gotten some revenue out of the deals.

Currently, this is limited to business reviews site Yelp, bookmarking site Delicious (owned by Yahoo), and photo-sharing sites Flickr (also owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google). More are on the way, including Digg, the post by engineer Harry Huai Wang assured members.

Facebook members now have the options to import their activity from a number of external social-media sites into the “Mini-Feeds” on their profiles, a post on the company blog explained on Tuesday.

Importing my Flickr feed into Facebook

But a Facebook representative confirmed to me that there were no formal partnerships in place, meaning that it was more likely just an API integration–curious.

This post was updated at 2:54 PM PT with comment from Facebook.

With aggregation the hottest topic in social networking these days, plenty of sites from Pownce to Plaxo have opted to let members pull in feeds from external sites, and an entire genre of “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and SocialThing have sprung up for those social-media junkies who want to be able to track everything their friends do in one place.

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

Yahoo veteran Matthew Berardo, who was hired as general manager of the service less than a year ago, was affected by the layoff.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees–20 out of 28–had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was “about a dozen” cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

“LiveJournal Inc.’s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States,” the release explained. “LiveJournal’s global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal.”

LiveJournal was founded nearly a decade ago by OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who sold the company to blog software firm Six Apart. But that led to widespread reports of management difficulties, and late in 2007, Six Apart resold LiveJournal, phenomenally popular in Russia, to the Moscow-based software company SUP.

How about an
iPod small enough to be injected into your bloodstream? You would just think about a song or movie, and it would play back in your head.

Perhaps we’ve hit an impasse and we’re not going to see any really new products for a few decades. What will a 2012 Blu-ray player do that a 2008 player cannot? Oh right, there may not be any Blu-ray players by 2012, there may a new format by then. But what will it do that a 2008 Blu-ray player cannot?

Who knows, maybe by 2012 there will be wireless speakers that don’t have any wires. But it might take until 2022 before someone figures out how to make totally wireless speakers that actually sound good.

Or if you agree that there’s nothing left to invent, by what year were we done?

This infamous quote has been bandied about forever, but let’s try to apply it to our times. Sure, the old commissioner was off by a bunch of decades, but what’s left to be invented in audio and video now?

Yes, there will be higher than high-definition video, HDMI 1.4, and speakers that sound like real life, but those are refinements of already existing technologies.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Give us an idea for a totally new audio or video product.

Maybe the best we can hope for are products that are easy to use–ones that don’t come with thick user manuals; they just work. Products so intuitively designed they don’t need explanation.

What do you want that doesn’t exist now?

Something bigger or smaller than what you have now?

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
–Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899.

All of which leads to Babcock’s conclusion:

What do I mean by “private equity buyout?” Consider XenSource.

XenSource was bought for the princely sum of $500 million despite offering virtually nothing in the way of revenue and a clear business model. Under Citrix’s proprietary hand, however, XenSource has gone from pocket change to what XenSource CTO Simon Crosby says will be $50 million in revenue this year. Crosby tells InformationWeek that “XenSource has close to 3,000 customers, compared with 1,800 at the time of the acquisition.” Considering that it made less than $10 million or so in sales off those 1,800 “customers,” XenSource may well be thanking the proprietary gods right now that Citrix gave it a new way to monetize adoption.

commentary

InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock takes a fascinating look into the pros and cons of open-source mergers and acquisitions, and comes up with some interesting perspectives in the process. In sum, if you want to acquire an open-source software company, you’d better be very clear about what you’re buying, and how you’re going to pull value from it.

The key is to understand what you’re buying (Code? Cash? Community?), and act accordingly. Don’t be misled by myths. Ultimately, an open-source acquisition is just like any other: if it’s not driving dollars, it’s not worth doing. Those dollars may be short or long-term, but if you’re acquiring an open-source project to be Top of the Pops on SourceForge, you probably deserve the failure you’re going to acquire.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to acquiring open-source projects, as the article points out. Indeed, sometimes a private equity buyout of sorts ends up yielding the most value.

Squeeze too hard, and you risk alienating the community of customers, developers, and interested onlookers that made the open-source project successful. Squeeze too lightly, and you end up being popular and poor.

Some acquirers will seek a return on their huge investments by turning the open source into an enhanced “enterprise” product line that, in a matter of months, creates lock-in no different from proprietary code. Some will sustain and encourage a community, balancing the community’s interests with the need to drive profits. Some software companies have grown by being good at acquiring and integrating startups. They have a new skill to learn in doing that with open source.

Two years later, JBoss is thriving under Red Hat’s hand, with some geographies showing JBoss sales set to surpass Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business, I’ve heard from sources both inside and outside the company. Red Hat cracked the code on open-source M&A. It took awhile, but it is paying dividends now.

So there you have it. Open source code has gained in value over the last two years, and that value is recognized in the high acquisition prices. The open source code, of course, remains freely available, but the code’s value withers if there’s no community of independent, critical users and developers driving it forward, with leadership to guide it.

But this doesn’t tell all of the story on open-source M&A. If it were a matter of “buy open source, make it proprietary,” more would have done it by now. Some, like Red Hat, actually go in the opposite direction, as it did with Sistina, taking proprietary code and open-sourcing it. But the JBoss example is even more interesting, because it involves taking a pre-existing open-source project and trying to improve its financial yield by changing its business model.

By all accounts, including Red Hat’s, Red Hat initially botched its JBoss acquisition. An exodus of JBoss employees resulted, prompting Red Hat to reconsider its approach to the company and its product. While Red Hat proceeded with applying its RHEL model to JBoss, it also (eventually) embraced JBoss’ model for working with system integrators, among other things.

(Credit:
Inside Facebook)

In late May developers will get access to the new code, and users the new interface a few weeks later.

Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has the scoop on Facebook’s new profile page design, which will give users more granular controls and application developers some new tricks.

Read Justin’s post for all the details

The new Facebook profile will have five tabs: Feed, Info, Wall, Photo, and Boxes. The Boxes can be moved to the main profile area.