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Oracle Acquires Ksplice (Linux Software Firm)

Thomas Oppong — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:01:12 +0000

Redwood Shores-based Oracle said Thursday that it has acquired Ksplice, which operates a service to keep Linux updated with kernel security updates. financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The addition of Ksplice’s technology will increase the security, reliability and availability of Oracle Linux by enabling customers to apply security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without
rebooting. Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates, and expects to make the Ksplice technology a standard feature of Oracle Linux Premier Support for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

Ksplice is short for kernel splicing, and it was created by Jeff Arnold, Tim Abbott, Waseem Daher, and Nelson Elhage, who were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Ksplice tool won a $100,000 entrepreneurial prize from MIT in 2009.

The company was incorporated in 2010, and Ksplice tried to make money selling bootless security patching for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its CentOS clones and its Fedora development release precursors, as well as for Debian and Canonical’s derived Ubuntu Linux.

Ksplice Uptrack had 700 customers and had done over 2 million updates on over 100,000 servers in its relatively short life.

Founder Spotlight: Drew Houston, Founder & CEO At Dropbox

Thomas Oppong — Sun, 29 May 2011 11:53:11 +0000

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily.

# Houston has a Bachelor of Science(Computer Science) degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
# He completed BS in EECS in Jan. 2006; took one year leave for employment and finished a term early.
# Drew Houston spent 1 year 5 months at Bit9, Inc. as a Software Engineer ( Technical lead on a bunch of interesting Windows internals-related projects for Bit9′s application whitelisting product)
# Drew bootstrapped an online SAT prep company while in college. This experience was an importantly great introduction to the wild world of starting companies.
# Changing the way people think about files and storage Drew founded Dropbox. The company is backed by Sequoia, Accel & Y Combinator.
# Today, more than 25 million people across every continent use Dropbox to always have their stuff at hand, share with family and friends, and work on team projects.

Echo Nest: Create Interactive Music Applications

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:48:46 +0000

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company that has designed API platforms for developers to create search, personalization, and interactive music applications. The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis, and machine learning to automatically listen to music, read about music, learn about music trends, and provide in-depth analyses in these areas. The company is a four-time National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant winner. Echo Nest is also funded by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and a great group of angel investors that include three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.

The music platform automatically:

Reads about music, constantly analyzing millions of blog posts, reviews, playlists and discussion forums to understand how the online world describes every artist, album and song.
Listens to music, with technology actually listens to audio files, extracting musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy, harmonic and timbral structures, to understand every song in similar ways a musician would describe it (e.g. “heavy beat, swing groove, fast tempo, 4/4 time, key of B flat, mezzo piano”).
Learns about music trends, analyzing the entire world of online music behavior — who’s talking about which artists this week, what songs are being streamed and downloaded, etc. — to understand the latest trends, buzz and fan opinion.

Top 4 Winners of The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition

Thomas Oppong — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:42:14 +0000

MIT Arab Competition is designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the region to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world. This year, a lot of teams applied to participate, and the list was narrowed to Top 30 Business Plans.

Download The Top 30 Semi-Finalists Catalogue 2010 here

The Four winners of the competition include: The Little Engineer, BioBusiness, Arabia Coach and EG-Bioinformatics. These teams met the following requirements to be considered for the ultimate prize.
The eligibility rules are as follows:

1. At least three team members per application entry
2. At least two of the 3 team members must be Arab nationals
3. Companies submitting cannot have previously been funded or making substantial revenues from sales