The company, which raised $10 million in venture funding last December, has an initial Fortune 50 company customer that’s looking to reduce energy consumption at its corporate data center, according to CEO Rudy Kraus.

The effect of using direct current is to reduce the number of voltage changes and conversions between AC and DC, which makes the overall system more efficient. Kraus said DC power is also more reliable and flexible.

Ultimately, the company envisions on-site power generation at data centers, where solar panels, wind mills, or fuel cells supply direct current electricity into buildings with DC wiring.

Can going back to direct current–favored by Thomas Edison–make data centers more modern and energy-efficient?

Start-up Validus on Monday is scheduled to announce the availability of a DC-based electricity distribution system tailored specifically for data centers.

In practice, the lower power consumption may give corporate data center operators the ability to pack in more gear in the same amount of space, he said.

By going DC, a company can save up to 40 percent on its energy consumption on equipment and cooling, the company says.

The idea of using direct current, rather than alternating current, to reduce power consumption has been around for a long time. The telecom industry relies primarily on DC power equipment, Kraus said.

Its product lineup includes a device that takes power from the grid and distributes it as high-voltage direct current. A distribution board acts as a point for wiring and to connect energy storage. And a power conversion unit steps down the voltage to 48 volts.

A power distribution model for supplying DC to servers and other data center gear.

What Validus has done is make power distribution equipment suitable for “high density” data centers–that is, racks of servers or blade servers that consume a lot of electricity (and generate a lot of heat) in a relatively small space, he said.

For all its promise, a lack of DC equipment poses barriers to bringing DC power into data centers, according to a study by The Uptime Institute. The research firm last year listed a number of barriers to DC power in the data center, including monitoring equipment, appropriate IT equipment, and DC power-modeling software.

Kraus said that data center equipment vendors offer an option for direct current power supplies, which customers could choose for hardware upgrades or new installations. He said he expects to announce some partnerships with equipment companies in the coming months.

Max Harper, a social-media consultant who worked for the Obama transition team, said Web 2.0 tools have to be refined to better meet the goals of civic engagement. For instance, if user questions and comments on a government Web site can be directed to a specific category, government officials can try to address every issue in an appropriate manner.

The user-driven nature of Web 2.0 technologies may create complications for the government, but it served as an effective format for the conference itself. The two-day Gov 2.0 Camp was billed as an “unconference,” in which the participants planned the entire event themselves in a collaborative manner on site.

“If you’re talking about how our unemployment office can be improved and they go off on a rant on gay marriage, that’s not useful,” she said.

“I have no idea how to measure success,” said Sarah Bourne, chief technology strategist for the Massachusetts Web site Mass.gov.

Whether a conversation is meaningful “has to be definied from the citizens’ perspective,” Bourne explained. Yet if they lead the discussion to a seemingly insignificant topic, is the discussion still a success?

Attendees of Gov 2.0 Camp wait for different discussions to start.

“It’s kind of like the pot issue,” she said, referring to the deluge of marijuana-related questions users submitted to the White House on its “Open for Questions” tool–and which became the elephant in the room during President Obama’s online town hall on Thursday.

Bourne and Fulton made their comments about meaningful citizen discussions during a session called “Engaging the Public and How You Define Success.”

“Part of it is showing a face inside an agency and letting people realize they’ve made a human impact,” he said.

Leaders in government agencies have been slow to adopt Web 2.0 technologies, bemoaned many government-employed new-media strategists in attendance. Yet in a well-attended discussion at the event, the new-media directors admitted that if they were to use more online tools to engage citizens, they wouldn’t quite know how to tell whether it accomplished anything.

After a brief introduction, the organizers turned the microphones over to the hundreds of attendees packed into the auditorium at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Over the course of an hour, each person there introduced himself and briefly described the issues he hoped to learn more about or lead a discussion on.

The Obama transition team, he said, was constantly critiquing its online engagement with citizens and refining the process. Even with the potential pitfalls, he said video discussions could significantly improve the government’s interactions with citizens.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/CNET)

WASHINGTON–Washington may be a city of policy wonks, but the District’s self-proclaimed “tech geeks” are intent on adding some Silicon Valley flavor to the capital.

“It’s like a Woodstock for the 21st century,” said A.J. Malik, a technologist for the county of Arlington, Va., and one of the attendees.

Bourne said that Mass.gov visitors often question whether anyone in the government even reads user comments on the site. Yet addressing user comments has proven to be a challenge, since they are often off topic.

“If you’re talking about how our unemployment office can be improved and they go off on a rant on gay marriage, that’s not useful.” –Sarah Bourne, chief technology strategist, Mass.gov.

Hundreds of Web 2.0 evangelists flocked to a school auditorium in Washington Friday morning to kick off Government 2.0 Camp, the inaugural event of Government 2.0 Club, a national organization created to allow government, academia, and industry to collaborate on Web 2.0 solutions for government.

The organizers jotted down notes during the introductions and quickly slotted together a schedule of discussions to take place. The attendees all set down their laptops and iPhones to crowd around the large piece of butcher paper with the schedule scribbled on it.

“But if you’re not prepared to respond, don’t tell people you’re ready to respond,” he said. “People know when something is inauthentic.”

“Photo Gallery is focused on the consumer experience. We’re looking at things more interesting to prosumers that would be complementary to Photo Gallery,” Weisberg said. “We’re also looking at Expression Media on the high end and walking a fine line between the two.

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today’s technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.

Microsoft wants Pro Photo Tools to be a work in progress–a frequently updated utility that evolves rapidly. “It’s the evolving software model,” Weisberg said.

One of my favorite features is a slider that let me correct for discrepancies between the camera time and my GPS unit’s time.

The software can process data from a handheld GPS unit that shows where a photographer roamed, adding the latitude and longitude data to photos depending on when they were taken. That’s how existing geotagging software typically works, but Pro Photo Tools has some more distinguishing features, too.

Pro Photo Tools’ future
Weisberg wouldn’t detail much about what new modules are next for Pro Photo Tools beyond a few smaller features such as batch renaming to let photographers rename photos in bulk or a “painter” tool to let location tags or other metadata quickly be copied from one image and pasted to another.

Geotagging is just the opening salvo, though. Pro Photo Tools can be extended with new features; Microsoft is working on some and is considering whether to allow other companies also join in, Weisberg said.

Pro Photo Tools’ origin
The software is an outgrowth of the Microsoft Photo Info software the company released in 2007 to help photographers label some images with metadata such as copyright notices, captions, and titles, but it’s expanded considerably.

What does the software portend for its overall digital imaging strategy? Weisberg is cagey, and given that Microsoft axed its Digital Image Suite product a year after it acquired iView Multimedia and its software to manage digital photos and other digital files, reading the tea leaves can be difficult.

That’s because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word “Paris” rather than sifting through folders with obscure filenames like IMG_5829.jpg or squinting at hundreds of image thumbnails. Until the still-distant day when computers can recognize your Aunt Polly or the Grand Canyon, geotagging holds potential as a way for people to get a handle on ever-growing digital photo collections.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

One nice feature of WIC is that raw-image processing engines called codecs can be plugged in. Unlike Adobe and Apple, Microsoft relies on camera makers to supply the codecs for their formats. That means the company is wedded to them for support, but the major manufacturers all have released codecs, and relying on the manufacturer means Microsoft doesn’t have to worry as much that writing data to raw files will corrupt them.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools lets photographers geotag their photos and show where they are on a map.

Microsoft doesn’t see Pro Photo Tools as competing either with the Expression Media product from iView Multimedia or with Microsoft’s basic browsing and editing software, the Windows Photo Gallery package built into Vista or its more elaborate alternative, Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Pro Photo Tools has a slider that lets people correct mismatches between the time recorded by a camera and GPS unit. Thumbnails of images pop up that can be matched with actual locations.

“We’ve talked about making it extensible to third parties, but…It’s a big question. I haven’t decided yet whether we’re going to do it,” Weisberg said.

Looking at the digital photography software market, it’s easy to imagine Adobe Systems is a competitor. But it looks to me like this is actually positioned more against Apple whose computers are popular among “creative professionals” and come with iPhoto editing software.

But new features are en route. Microsoft plans another announcement at the Photokina show in September in Germany.

I had some problems on Windows XP with the software showing being unable to show larger versions of the photos and some other problems writing geodata to Canon’s CR2 raw files. Weisberg said both problems have been fixed, and it worked fine with Nikon’s NEF format.

He also views Pro Photo Tools as a strong statement about what Microsoft can accomplish by building off its existing Windows infrastructure. “One hundred days ago, I wrote a memo,” launching the project. “One hundred days later, we have a product. That’s not typical Microsoft.”

For one thing, it also lets photographers assign locations to photos by placing pushpins on an online map. For another, it adds rough geographic coordinates based just on a region name, such as “Boston.” It can work with many of the proprietary “raw” image formats that higher-end digital cameras produce. And perhaps most significant, it uses Microsoft’s Windows Live Local interface to add text fields such as region, city, and street to the photo.

I tried a pre-production version of the software and found it rough around the edges but a refreshingly thorough attempt to tackle the geotagging challenge.

Happily, Adobe plans to fill in the DNG codec gap.

“People are doing a lot more geotagging, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome,” said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft’s director of digital imaging evangelism. “We want to make it mainstream.”

Weisberg shied away from competitive analysis, but agreed that Pro Photo Tools is designed to help make Windows more compelling. “It’s focused on making the platform better for photographers,” Weisberg said.

“We’ll be releasing a DNG codec shortly,” said Lightroom leader Tom Hogarty in an e-mail. That will help out other Microsoft software such as Windows Photo Gallery that uses WIC to show image thumbnails and print photos.

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

One annoyance for me was the lack of a free codec to handle Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format. A company called ArdFry Imaging offers one for $29.95, but that seemed like a lot to pay for a plug-in for a free tool.

One shortcoming, though, comes with Sony’s codec, which doesn’t let people write metadata such as keywords or geotags to its raw files.

“We’ll open up detailed information very soon,” Partovi said in his August 29 e-mail. “In the mean time, we’d love to encourage a few Web sites or (Facebook) apps to be early adopters.”

“If you’re working on a Web site or Facebook app and are interested, shoot me an e-mail and we’ll get you into the early preview. And if you’re interested in being referenced as part of our launch and PR efforts, let me know too. We’re considering picking a short list of launch partners to promote to our 15mm Facebook users.”

The Seattle-based company, which announced plans to build a third-party developer platform in July, has begun notifying news outlets that it will have a “significant technology announcement” on Wednesday.

A source close to the music industry, who requested anonymity, also said that iLike’s platform was opening next week.

iLike is making this announcement in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo, the O’Reilly Media-organized confab set to hit New York next week. But conferences aside, this is a particularly notable time for iLike, which rose to fame as an application on Facebook’s developer platform, to make this move. The News Corp.-owned social network MySpace will be launching its much-anticipated MySpace Music service soon, and has confirmed that on Monday it will be announcing the program’s initial brand advertisers.

An iLike spokeswoman declined to comment.

Two weeks ago, iLike’s President Hadi Partovi, wrote an e-mail to third-party developers notifying them that the company was “gearing up to prepare for launch” of the platform. According to Partovi’s e-mail, the iLike Developer Platform is designed to add “interactive music features to Facebook apps and Web sites.”

CNET News’ Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.

Next week, likewise, should shape up to be a big one for digital music. iLike already has a partnership in place with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service so that members can stream full-length songs, and the company announced this summer that membership has surpassed 30 million users.

It looks like social music site iLike will launch its developer platform early next week.

Here’s a fun tool for play around with over the long weekend. It’s called SuperLame, and it’s a simple tool for adding speech bubbles over photos. It’s missing out on some of the special effects found in other similar tools like Comeeko, but what it lacks in versatility it makes up for in flash and user experience. It’s simply a joy to tag up a photo with captions, speech and thought bubbles. Best of all, the end result is total eye candy.

To make your own creation you can upload any old photo from your computer. There are just a few options to add the captions or bubbles to your photo, including small knobs to control the borders, shape and size. Each button pops with a little animation that’s very fluid and organic, making it an experience on it own just to click on something. Kids will love it.

SuperLame is completely free to use, however it adds a small watermark to the bottom right hand corner of your images with a link back. There’s no way to get it off without using additional photo editing soft or Webware, so if you’re not keen on watermarking an image then use a similar tool like Fotoflexer, Picnik or Picbite (review).

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

SuperLame's image editor does only one thing (comicbook like speech bubbles), but does it well.

One nice thing about the tool is that it lets you go well outside of the photo if you’ve got a caption or bubble that needs to stick out. It will automatically add more space around the photo and save it with the additional border.

“The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry,” an expert covering the case said. The new figures prove “any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself.”

Why haven’t these organizations focused on the real pirates who cruise in gunships overseas and account for well over 15 percent of that revenue loss the MPAA is so quick to mention? Even better, why doesn’t the MPAA realize that the 15 percent loss is nothing compared with the incredible box-office losses it’s incurring because of crappy movies and skyrocketing ticket prices?

The MPAA and the RIAA are two organizations that should be looked upon with the greatest amount of distaste and downright condemnation. Trust me, they’re really that bad.

Sadly, the MPAA and RIAA just don’t like college students. In fact, why would they? After all, isn’t this the group that, according to RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth, “has reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized, and their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development”?

According to a recent report from the Associated Press, the Motion Picture Association of America–Hollywood’s antipiracy wing–admitted to releasing data that was not only factually incorrect, it grossly overstated the impact college students have on the movie industry’s losses.

Let’s face it: The 18 to 25 crowd represents change and innovation. It represents a new way of thinking and the condemnation of the old guard. And it’s the old institutions like the movie and music industries that can’t seem to grasp that the change that’s occurring–the right to own your own digital media after purchasing it–is a rogue tidal wave that will eventually lead to their demise.

The MPAA claims its original figure citing a 44 percent loss due to college piracy was inflated by a whopping 29 percent. In fact, the MPAA admitted that the actual impact college students have on the industry’s revenue loss is just 15 percent.

I simply don’t understand these organizations. Instead of being the bastions of progress in an age where everyone can see that a change is coming, the RIAA and MPAA have decided to insult college students and cite faulty statistics to back up their ludicrous claims.

So why do the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America focus so much of their time on college students? Is there something that these disgusting organizations aren’t telling us? Are college students really that bad? Sadly, it’s just another example of these organizations trying to vilify the easy target when the real violators are left to roam free.

Unfortunately for them, that simply won’t happen. Realizing this, both organizations made a conscious decision to vilify college students in the hopes the rest of us would jump onboard. We didn’t.

The main reason the RIAA and MPAA can’t stand college students is actually quite simple–they’re the easiest target. How many times have you heard organizations blame so many of the world’s problems on the 18 to 25 crowd? A quick history lesson on what happened in the ’70s should be enough to satisfy that assertion.

Insight now has a “demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience,” Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

“We show you general information about your viewers in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts,” the company said. “This means that individual users can’t be personally identified.”

The company has added a demographics section to an analytics tool called Insight that YouTube released in March.

The move dovetails with Google’s high priority of making more money from YouTube through advertising. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt last week promised new YouTube ad possibilities, and advertisers and marketers love demographic information as well as the detailed records of media consumption the Internet can provide.

User privacy also is protected, Google said.

YouTube now lets those who have uploaded videos see details about the types of people watching them.

Red Hat pulled in $156.6 million in its Q1 (fiscal year 2009), a 32 percent increase over Q1 2008 and 11 percent growth over Q4 2008. Red Hat’s operating income was also up 33 percent over the same quarter in 2008. But it’s perhaps the deferred revenue (i.e., subscriptions and other services booked but not yet recognizable as revenue because they have yet to be delivered) that is most impressive: Up 36 percent to $491.8 million.

commentary

What about the cost side of the equation? Here there is perhaps even more cause for optimism, but also a creeping concern.

Interestingly, Red Hat increased R&D costs by 33 percent (to $28.9 million), which dragged on its profit. Presumably this rising R&D cost will pay off in increased sales down the line, which seems to already be in swing as Red Hat reported that existing customers are deepening their financial commitments to the company.

Red Hat continues to impress with strong financial performance, delivering an impressive Q1 2009. Not bad when you consider the company gives away its products for free.

We see strength across the board internationally and across the country. There’s so much opportunity in the developing world for us. We are fighting a bit of an upward battle in the developed world, where there are established players.

Of concern? It’s costing more to hit Red Hat’s numbers. Sales and marketing expenses jumped to $59.3 million, an increase of 28 percent. Red Hat long ago stopped relying on incoming leads fed by open-source downloads. Can it keep bookings and profit out in front of the increasing costs of selling a more complex, diversified product suite? This remains to be seen, but I suspect that it will take some time for Red Hat to perfect the art of selling middleware alongside its operating system, something that competitors like Oracle seem to have figured out a long time ago.

Guess what? Each of the major software vendors is seeing growth in developing markets. Oracle has found a way to also win in developed markets: Buy beachheads into new customers by buying adjacent products to its database and other products. John Donne once speculated that “No man is an island, entire unto himself,” and the same holds true for software vendors: “No software company can be an operating system, entire unto itself.”

I asked the company specifically about JBoss performance, as rumors have swirled that JBoss has lagged under Red Hat’s guidance. Quite the opposite. While there were initial hiccups in bringing the JBoss brand under the Red Hat umbrella, the unit is firing on all cylinders now, contributing a healthy amount to the Red Hat top and bottom lines. Red Hat wouldn’t give specific numbers, but I heard the JBoss confidence from a range of different sources within Red Hat.

Today’s market demands an ecosystem, a suite. While I don’t know that Red Hat should be charging into applications any time soon, complementary products like Hyperic’s IT management tools, MuleSource’s enterprise service bus, Puppet’s IT automation product, etc. make sense.

Clearly, Red Hat is doing something right. Many things right, in fact.

Red Hat has time. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has indicated he intends to focus the company on operational excellence with its existing product line before making any forays out into applications, which might load Red Hat’s costs even higher. But as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM increasingly vacuum up IT dollars with their expansive product portfolios, Red Hat will arguably need to start to respond at some point in order to avoid being squeezed out of deals.

This “downgrade” option hasn’t been fully sketched out yet, but presumably, it involves eating the cost of a more expensive Vista license, and this being Dell, paying some kind of modest fee.

Per the Microsoft Windows life-cycle policy, direct OEM and retail license availability for Windows XP will end-of-life (EOL) on June 30, 2008. To meet Microsoft’s June 30 last-day-to-ship OEM Windows XP deadline, June 18 is the last time to purchase a Dell laptop, desktop, or workstation with an OEM Windows XP license (or while supplies last).

 
After June 18, you have the option to purchase
Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate with a downgrade service to Windows XP Professional.

 
This option will be available on XPS 630, 720 H2C, and M1730 systems. After June 18, Windows XP will no longer be offered on currently available Inspiron desktops.

XP isn’t totally dead, however–Microsoft will still offer it to individual system builders until January 31, 2009, and a suddenly popular stripped-down version will continue to be available for Netbook-style laptops, such as the Asus Eee PC and Dell’s own (still not officially announced) E series.

Better get on board the XP train soon…

The moment you’ve all been dreading has finally come. Dell says that June 18 is going to be the last day that you can order a desktop or laptop with an OEM version of (almost) everyone’s favorite operating system, Windows XP. According to details posted on the Dell Web site:

I guess that shoots to heck my prediction that Apple would soon add e-books to the iTunes Store.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

While most of Steve Jobs’ energy on Tuesday was spent touting the new MacBook Air, the Apple chief did take some time to praise longtime rival Bill Gates, who plans to stop working full-time at Microsoft at the end of June.

I’m guessing Jobs probably won’t issue a Bill Gates edition
iPod, but the two have been making nice in public, including a rare joint appearance at last year’s D: All Things Digital conference.

“Bill’s retiring from Microsoft is a big deal,” Jobs told the New York Times. “It’s a significant event, and I think he should be honored for the contributions he’s made.”