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Since then, Borland hadn’t been able to find a buyer.

Borland Software CEO Tod Nielsen

CodeGear products are aimed at individual programmers, while the lifecycle management suite is designed for teams of developers, testers, and architects.

Borland Software has sold its CodeGear development tools division to Embarcadero Technologies for about $23 million, the companies said Wednesday.

Two years ago, Borland CEO Tod Nielsen announced a plan to sell off the tools division separate from its application lifecycle management product line. The tools division has been hurt from competition from free, open-source products, notably the Eclipse IDE.

CodeGear sells the products that Borland used to be best known for–its JBuilder Java development tool, Delphi, and C++Builder. More recently, CodeGear has created development tools for PHP and Ruby.

Embarcadero brings in more than $60 million in annual revenue selling database management and design tools. The acquisition gives it access to the millions of developers that use CodeGear software, it said.

Update 7:50 AM Pacific: corrected figure for Embarcadero’s annual revenue before its planned acquisition of CodeGear.

The Child Safe Viewing Act, introduced last year by Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., requires the Federal Communications Commission to issue a notice of inquiry to examine what advanced content-blocking technologies are available for various communication devices and platforms. It also calls for the FCC to consider how to develop and deploy such technologies without affecting content providers’ pricing or packaging.

The legislation still must go through the House of Representatives before being sent to the president.

The bill defines “advanced blocking technologies” as technology that enables parents to protect their children from “indecent or objectionable video or audio programming, as determined by the parent, that is transmitted through the use of wire, wireless, or radio communication.”

The Senate on Wednesday unanimously voted in favor of providing parents with more control over the content their children receive through various technologies.

While the bill does not empower the FCC to do anything other than to produce a report on its findings for Congress, it is one of a handful of steps Congress has taken in recent weeks to address threats new technologies can expose children to.

While security compromises from mobile phones have been small in scale, and mostly isolated incidents, Komisnky believes that cell phones dangle attractive lures for hackers along three vectors–As mobile messaging becomes ubiquitous and malware authors propagate poisonous code in links; as mobile phone commerce takes off, and as the mobile Web becomes easier to surf from devices like the
iPhone.

Bluefire’s bid joins them to the ranks of other security vendors who have created mobile versions of their desktop apps. I got a chance to preview Mobile Defender at CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas. The app, currently available in private beta for Windows Mobile phones, has a simple four-button interface, with each button corresponding to an element of protection–firewall, SMS and MMS spam-blocking, an application protection shield that guards against auto-installing malware, and a feature to remotely wipe the contents of the handheld should it get stolen or irreversably corrupted.

Traditionally focused on securing mobile devices for corporations and even the U.S. Government, Bluefire Security plans to enter the consumer market with Mobile Defender.

Mobile Defender is of the “set and forget” variety, which means that after you install it, it pretty much runs on its own. Bluefire intentionally withheld tweaking options, which Mark Kominsky, Bluefire’s CEO, explained as a big usability win to keep users from worrying if a lack of configuration knowledge is somehow crippling their coverage. Pro users who enjoy customizing their settings would disagree.

What if you realized that you didn’t want to host your application on Google App Engine anymore? Good luck; almost everything you are given access to is proprietary–that means all your data is locked into BigTable in a format that isn’t like a traditional relational database. It’s also very tempting to use the APIs Google provides to interface with things like Google accounts.

(Credit:
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet) Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google’s cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google’s infrastructure:

On the other hand, Google is just trickling out its platform-as-a-service with support for Python. Support for other languages will follow. Whether Google would support other databases in its cloud remains to be seen.

On top of that, you will be using the “Webapp framework” that Google built that makes writing Python applications really nice–but good luck porting that to another language or putting it on a machine of your own.

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon’s approach to providing infrastructure services to Google’s. He found that Amazon’s set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google’s App Engine.

(Credit:
CNET)

You can check out the official page for Nvidia’s Optimized PC campaign here. You’ll find a Flash presentation informing you that “Your PC is more visual than ever,” as well as a generic configurator demonstrating the supposed benefits of a “balanced PC.” There’s also a page of links to various online retailers that lead you to lists of Nvidia graphics cards for purchase, as well as links to configurators from Gateway, Velocity Micro, Cyberpower, and Puget Systems, which lead to presumably “optimized” systems.

What’s frustrating is that Nvidia offers little in the way of specific processor and graphics card pairings that might help you make an actual purchase. As for the vendor links, if you click through and start to build a system, Velocity Micro is the only one with a visual indicator that shows you the balance between graphics and CPU processing capability as you select different components. The allegedly balanced Cyberpower systems still allow you to match Intel’s highest-end quad core processor with an integrated graphics chip.

Arguing for the necessity of 3D hardware in day-to-day computing has traditionally been a tough position, largely due to a lack of compelling software. If Nvidia is going to continue with this marketing push, we need to see more than just a handful of applications that truly benefit from accelerated graphics. The question is, will that happen before Intel makes its next move? With graphics card plans of its own on the near-horizon, it’s possible that Intel may be able to offer a balanced computing experience of its own.

If the Optimized PC site isn’t all that useful, the point Nvidia is trying to make is clear. Rather than throw all of your money at a quad-core Intel chip, Nvidia wants you to spend less on the CPU and more on a graphics card. In turn, Nvidia promises that its 3D hardware will not only allow you to play games, but it will also enable you to watch and edit HD movies, edit and organize photos in flashy new interface designs, as well as turn on all of those visual effects in
Windows Vista. You can do some of those things with quad-core CPU and an integrated graphics chip, of course, but you need a dedicated 3D card for the most robust visual experience. Therein, the battle for your processing dollar.

So says Nvidia.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

Nvidia’s “Optimized PC” campaign, announced today, is the market-oriented manifestation of its larger ambitions. The idea is that Nvidia wants to show you how to build or buy a PC that’s “balanced.” In Nvidia’s opinion, that means that rather than spend all of your PC budget on a quad-core processor (and relying on a built-in graphics chip), for a truly modern PC experience you’re better off spending less on the CPU and more on a dedicated graphics card. What this campaign really signifies is that a new fight over who gets to do your processing dollar has officially begun.

Whether Nvidia has a compelling argument depends on just how visual you like your computing. Do you turn the 3D cities on in Google Maps? Do you like Vista’s translucent windows? Have you even heard of PicLens (which we actually like, but that’s not the point)? PC Gamers already tend to favor Nvidia, but in order to appeal to mainstream PC buyers, Nvidia has to convince you that there’s a nongaming need for the specialized visual processing capabilities of its hardware.

PicLens benefits from a 3D card, but have you heard of it?

Brin was loath to call Chrome an operating system, but it was clear at Tuesday’s event that he defines Chrome’s success in terms of the applications that can be run.

CNET News Poll Browser wars, redux
What browser is in your future?

And Google didn’t have much to convince me that average users would be moving to Chrome anytime soon. Faster browsing and various features for user interface, security, privacy, and search are handy, but not enough to get most people to take the trouble of downloading and installing a new browser.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–On the Web, a site that responds a few milliseconds faster can make a big difference in people’s engagement. It’s for this reason that Google believes its new Web browser, Chrome, is a project worth investing in rather than a footnote in the history of the Internet.

JavaScript has grown from modest beginnings into the language of many fancy, interactive Web sites and the foundational technology for rich Web applications using a technology called Ajax. However, for many applications, it’s not powerful enough, which is why Picnik’s online photo editing tools use Adobe’s Flash and why Microsoft is pushing its own technology called Silverlight.

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In short, Chrome is more of a long-term competitive threat to
Microsoft Office and Windows than it is to Internet Explorer.

Why speed means money
Google benefits materially from fast performance. First, when it comes to search, Google discovered when its search page loads fractionally faster, users search more often, which of course leads to more opportunities for Google to place its highly lucrative text ads. Second, a faster Web application foundation means that Google’s online applications for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and calendars can become faster and fuller-featured.

Note that Google likes to talk about its three main efforts: search, ads, and apps, and with Chrome or a faster browser in general, all three benefit.

“Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

That may sound a little grand, but the evidence is on display in Google’s own lobby, where the search company’s computer kiosks present a browser only–no start menu, no desktop shortcuts, no operating system.

With a JavaScript speed test Google showed during the event, Chrome trounced IE 7, Microsoft’s current browser, but I was leery of generalizing too much from a press conference demonstration. Lars Bak, though, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for V8, is confident in the technology.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

“Most developers don’t use JavaScript a lot because it doesn’t run very fast,” he said. V8 “will enable a whole new class of applications for tomorrow.”

Chrome’s V8 engine
Google’s has a two-part claim to faster performance. One is its use of the open-source WebKit project, also used in Apple’s
Safari, to render Web pages on the browser screen engine for showing Web pages. More important for Web applications, though, is the brand-new V8 project for running programs written in JavaScript.

And Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president of product management, was salivating over the possibilities.

Lars Bak is proud of Chrome's JavaScript performance.

Chrome, Google said during its Tuesday launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google’s hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today’s Web-based applications.

And, Brin added, Google benefits even if Chrome has no other influence than to get the competitive juices flowing faster among developers of competing browsers: “Even if IE 9 was much, much faster as a result of Chrome, we would consider that a success,” Brin said.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Of course, Bak was basing his claims on Google’s own suite of JavaScript benchmarks, available on the V8 Web site. But at first blush, the tests, with 11,000 lines of code, aren’t a wildly skewed set.

Google, Yahoo, and others, though, are JavaScript fans, and speeding it up will boost countless Web sites, not just bleeding-edge applications such as Google Docs. Faster JavaScript performance is why Mozilla is so eager to talk about a project called TraceMonkey coming with Firefox 3.1, why WebKit programmers are working hard on a project called SquirrelFish, and one reason why Microsoft is eager to move people to its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.

The biggest buzzkill for Google’s vision, though, is that the Internet is just as much a boat anchor as an engine of innovation. Firefox has achieved notable market penetration and has inflamed the passions of many Net aficionados, but it still lags the market share of Internet Explorer 6, which was introduced in 2001, when the first Internet bubble was still in the process of bursting.

Google faces many challenges with Chrome–convincing anyone other than a few early adopters and Web developers to adopt it, matching the pace of development of rival browsers, and assuring the Google-phobic that it’s OK for the company to be in charge of yet another essential element of computing. But Google’s influence is strong enough that just talking about performance and rattling its chrome-plated saber is probably enough to advance its Web-application agenda.

“The word ‘operating system’ comes with a lot of baggage. We have a lightweight, fast engine for executing Web applications,” Brin said. But, he added, “I think we’ll see more and more Web applications of greater sophistication. All the things (you see) today are pretty challenging to do.”

Google Chrome
Internet Explorer
Firefox
Safari
Opera
Other

But even if Chrome never gets far beyond the stage of publicity, don’t discount the power of Google promotion. The company has a lot of power in setting the technology agenda. And as long as the company is willing to count a faster IE as a successful outcome, its Chrome project looks like it’ll be a win.

New horizons for Web developers?
Faster JavaScript means that applications can be faster, but also that programmers can push the Web application limits farther. “You can include more code in the browser. It really opens up the creativity of the Web app developer,” Bak said.

Bak wouldn’t share any specific numbers, but he said Chrome is “many times faster” than IE 7. How about
Firefox, now and later with TraceMonkey? “Many times faster. I guarantee you.”

The real question going forward is whether Linux, with Nokia involved, can compete with Apple’s
iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry platforms as they move “down-market” to not-so-smart phones.

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Nokia suggests that it’s not embracing Linux for mobile phones, but instead for mobile Internet tablets. Well, that’s clear–for the minute–but as more phones end up looking like “Internet tablets,” what will it do?

It’s a battle that will have one major beneficiary: consumers.

No longer.

Indeed, with competitors and partners such as Motorola, Verizon Wireless, Orange, Vodafone, and others joining the LiMo Foundation, a rising mobile Linux organization, it was just a matter of time before Nokia shelved its pride and joined the Linux ranks.

With a 47.9 percent stake in Symbian, the leading mobile platform that it co-founded in 1998 and which today powers some 206 million mobile phones, Nokia has long championed it at the expense of rival platforms such as Linux.

The mobile-phone maker is increasingly selecting Linux for Internet-enabled mobile devices, with its CFO declaring of Linux, “It’s going to be terribly important.”

And so far, it’s quite apparent that only Google understands that basic premise.

Nielsen yesterday released a study it conducted on the popularity of the top 10 search engines for July. As expected, Google sat atop the list, commanding more than 60 percent of the market after enjoying 16 percent year-over-year growth. Trailing behind, Yahoo and Microsoft captured 17.4 percent and 11.9 percent of the market, respectively. More importantly, both companies lost ground to Google–Yahoo witnessed an 11 percent decline, while Microsoft suffered through a 10 percent decline.

Think about that for a second. Doesn’t that run directly against everything we know about the Web? Practically every site is designed to keep you there. How many times have you tried to click links in a blog post, only to find that it links you back to another section of the same site? It happens all the time.

Basically, more Web sites try to keep you from going elsewhere for fear that you will never come back. But Google doesn’t worry about that.

Search engines are nothing more than middlemen that are designed to get your thought to your destination. In other words, if you’re looking for places to live in Naples, Fla., you get to Google, ask it for places to live in Naples, and hope that one of the results will give you what you want. But if you don’t, you’re forced to keep searching until you find what you’re looking for. And as anyone who queries search engines on a daily basis knows, nothing is more frustrating.

It may sound counterintuitive, but if Google has shown us anything, getting rid of you in the search space works extremely well.

A quick jaunt to Yahoo’s search page tells you everything you need to know about the company’s ideas about search: it wants you to stay on Yahoo’s pages and look around. But Google doesn’t feel that way. It’s of the opinion that the less time you spend using Google search results, the more often you’ll go back instead of using a competitor’s service.

Surely, some will attribute Google’s success to its better search results or Yahoo’s management troubles or Microsoft’s poor offering, but it goes far beyond that. Search isn’t simply about relevant results or the competition. Instead, search is all about getting you to your destination as quickly as possible.

But Google, unlike Yahoo and Microsoft, has made it a key point in its business model to ensure that you get off the Google search result pages as soon as possible. Its competitors, on the other hand, fail to fully understand that premise.

Google wants you to leave and feels like it has done its job when you do. Now, part of that equation revolves around the quality of search results and the service’s usability, but we can’t downplay the fact that letting you go is a key to the company’s success.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

And although countless tech pundits will chime in and discuss exactly why Google has been able to run roughshod over its competition, few will point out one basic fact that is too often overlooked: Google search is designed to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

Google was the first company to embrace the idea that letting users go can actually turn into a business model. And so far, it’s really the only company that still believes it. But maybe site owners can learn something from Google. Instead of worrying about where you go and making sure you don’t stray too far, site owners need to be willing to let you go and be confident enough to stand on the quality of their content to keep you coming back.

There’s been no official word from the companies on what the new channel lineup will look like, but apparently, many music stations will be merged–there’s no need for two stations featuring music from the 1950s, for example. Somebody on Saturday posted a purported lineup for existing XM subscribers on the Digital Radio Central forum. Take it with many grains of salt, though it apparently maps somewhat to an advertisement that appeared in USA Today.

Apparently, all existing XM radios will be able to get this Best of Sirius package, while only the recently released Sirius Starmate 5 will be able to get the comparable Best of XM package. The Starmate 5 will support a la carte options as well, letting users pick their favorite 50 or 100 stations for a lower monthly fee.

Sirius and XM combined operations in May, and according to Rolling Stone magazine, the two systems will begin merging their channels beginning Wednesday.

The combination of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio has more than 19 million paying customers and still expects subscriber growth, even in the worst economic climate in 80 years, though it’s warned that the drop-off in car sales could hurt.

There will also be new subscription offerings for each system–for example, XM subscribers can pay about $4 extra per month to get Sirius content like Howard Stern and the NFL.

I’ve expressed my lackluster opinion of satellite radio before, but it has a lot of passionate fans, particularly people who spend a lot of time in the
car and enjoy hearing music, as well as news and sports.

An aside: for XM fans who want a portable receiver, be sure to check out CNET’s Friday review of the Pioneer Inno XMP3.

The indie-band metaphor stands. Facebook wasn’t bought, but it sure isn’t the same company that sprouted up in a Harvard dorm room more than four years ago. Zuckerberg’s aim of helping the world communicate might not have changed, but the company’s operations inevitably are very different when there are offices around the world, more than 70 million users, and prominent ex-Google employees like Sheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage pulled in as executives.

Reports swirled that he was at odds with Zuckerberg, or that he was no longer interested in the position; whatever the reason, I speculate he may have timed the announcement so that it came after Facebook’s announcement of its Facebook Connect data portability project had been finalized. As CTO, D’Angelo, who didn’t keep a very high profile in the company, would likely have overseen many of Facebook Connect’s operations.

It’s kind of like this: an indie rock band gets signed to a major label, and after a taste of the high life, the bassist jumps ship.

No rumored catfight with Zuckerberg is necessary. Sorry, scandal fans.

On Sunday, word got out that Adam D’Angelo, chief technology officer at Facebook and a friend of founder Mark Zuckerberg since high school, had submitted his resignation on Friday. D’Angelo had been one of Facebook’s first employees, though he did not have formal “co-founder” status.

Every company on the rise is going to have at least one, probably more early employees who just don’t mesh well with the boardroom furniture and prefer the old dorm decor. A recent survey found that some employees departing Google–which is, to be fair, a much more mature company than Facebook–leave because it’s no longer “the revolution.” Depending on who you ask, Facebook is still “the revolution,” or maybe it isn’t, or maybe it never was in the first place and it’s still fated to go the Friendster route. Perhaps the Caltech-educated D’Angelo wanted a return to start-up fever, and felt it was his time to bow out.