There is one thing about being a teen that every generation experiences. A teen must have a place to hang out, a place to meet and socialize with friends. For some of us it might have been the malt shop, for others the mall. For today’s teen, it’s the Internet, especially MySpace, Facebook and other networking sites. These sites generally offer an excellent way for teens to keep up with their friends while making new friends along with the way. MySpace has grown to be the behemoth of the social networkingwebsites, thanks in part to its openness that allows teens to be, well, open. But it’s this openness that has created a headache for parents, teachers, teens, while raising serious issues of privacy and safety. Trying to restore its good name — and to relieve mounting legal pressure from 49 states and the District of Columbia — MySpace recently agreedto implement new measures to protect young users from sexual predators. Earlier MySpace had deleted the profiles of approximately 29,000 known sex offenders and predators.
Since its inception in 2003, Fitness Singles has been the fastest-growing online dating community for sports and fitness enthusiasts. With Fitness Singles’ user-centric interface and emphasis on a broad range of fitness categories, the agreement with Active.com was a natural progression and ensures Fitness Singles’ continued leadership in online relationships for active singles. “This agreement is great news for active singles who focus on health and fitness,” said Christopher Mattioli, President of Fitness Singles. “Whether you’re into bodybuilding (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Bodybuilding), running (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Running), cycling (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Cycling), weight training, yoga, working out, hiking, playing sports, or any number of other activities, Fitness Singles is where active singles get together.” “In the past five years, we’ve become the Number One dating site for fitness oriented, single adults,” he continued. “With our relaionship with Active.com, we are making it even easier for more singles to find like-minded partners, no matter what their interests.”
Fitness Singles (http://www.fitness-singles.com) and Active.com, an online community of The Active Network, have teamed up to serve single adults who engage in active and fitness-oriented lifestyles. With the arrangement, The Active Network is helping their members connect to a large database of like-minded, active singles by way of Fitness Singles.
With Sun Microsystems’ US$1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open-source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.Called the largest open-source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open-source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform.”MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack,” said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization,Zachary said. Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. “I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open-source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open-source software [stack] that was lacking before,” said Zachary.
According to the announcement, around $US800 million cash will be paid in exchange for MySQL stock and some $US200 million in options will be taken on by Sun. Millions of websites are built using the LAMP stack - and MySQL is the M in that acronym, with the others being Linux, Apache and PHP/Perl.MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos will join the Sun executive leadership team after the deal is finalised.The move will bring Sun up against Oracle, the world’s largest database company, but will certainly improve Sun’s standing with the open source community.The idea of buying an open source database has been floating around at Sun for some time; nearly three years ago, then chief executive Scott McNealy was reported by News.com as raising the idea during a meeting of financial analysts.The same report also said that Jonathan Schwartz, then president, and the current chief executive, told an interviewer that Sun was looking at database software as one way of extending its footprint into the open source realm.Sun already supports the other well-known open source database, PostgreSQL on its Solaris operating system. And many companies run Oracle on Solaris.This means that every big IT company has a major open source offering - Microsoft is the only odd man out.In his blog, Schwartz wrote : “Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. ”With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center (sic) of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy.”
Think digg or netvibes aimed specifically at one demographic-hip-hop culture. Imagine RSS feeds and widgets geared to meet the needs of consumers, not necessarily the tech savvy. Take CEO and President Navarrow Wright, former web designer, programmer, and chief technology officer for BET, and combine his know-how with the experience, knowledge and ideas of hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The end result is Global Grind, a website specifically aimed at the hip-hop demographic and culture in hopes of getting them to gather, collect, share and find data relevant to them in one place-globalgrind.com.
What is Global Grind?
In their own words, Global Grind says that, “it’s the global view of all the content that is relevant in the hip-hop community.” The website, modeled after and pulling components from such social networking sites as Facebook, Netvibes, and digg, is the vision of Navarrow Wright and Russell Simmons. However, unlike websites that are hoping to appeal to the masses, the intended audience for Global Grind is clear. Because they aren’t trying to reach everyone, they have more freedom with their design and features. Wright informed Lindsay Campbell in a recent Wallstrip interview that there isn’t one place online that meets the needs of the hip-hop community, and that he and Simmons feel that Global Grind can be that place. Wright defines himself as part of this demographic, and is working hard to have the site meet his needs, too. His vision is clear.
