Netizen

Monday, June 08, 2009

Rajeev Motwani

From my readings I was aware of an Indian professor at Stanford who had advised the two Google founders, but I had forgotten the name. Today it was like I discovered the Rajeev Motwani name. I was at the official Google mobile blog. From there I ended up at Sergei Brin's blog - I did not know he had a blog, I promptly added it to my blogroll. Brin's blog is not active. He has about three posts, one about his wife, one about his mother, and one about Motwani. That tells me more than anything he has written in his recent blog post about Motwani.

This blog post was going to be about Android, but I will tackle that later.

Rajeev Motwani, Early Google Advisor And Silicon Valley Luminary ...
Investigation pending on death of Stanford computer science ...
Rajeev Motwani - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Google mentor Rajeev Motwani dies in drowning accident - US ...
Probe into Rajeev Motwani's death

From The Netizen BlogRoll

Design It Shelter Competition: Unleash your inner architect
New African countries live on Google Maps
Pro-Rata Still Dilutes VCs
Got an idea to change the world or your local community?
You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me what the user experience might be if there were a keyboard version of the iPhone
A tour of my property I always thought it would be fun for my television crew to film a garden tour at my farm in Bedford.
Elections 2009: What Next for the BJP? If the trends of what happened in 2004 and 2009 are to be extrapolated, India is one election and one party away from creating a dominant political force - much like the nation experienced for most of the first three decades after Independence.
DAY 411(i)

Vision Objects’ Handwriting Recognition in Android [VIDEO]
You Tell Us: Cupcake… Worth the Wait? Tell us below what you think of Cupcake/Android 1.5 now that you have it. ...... I like the camcorder feature and the ability to upload straight to YouTube is wonderful. ...... Gmail improvements are great. The camera is no longer a joke. .... I used to accidentally dial people a lot (from the log). ........ Considering it was everything that should have been on Android 1.0, I'd say it was "overhyped". ...... Eclair will be the real thing, come Christmas 09. ....... Still hoping that the next upgrade brings a lot of fixes and even more new stuff to at least catch up with the iPhone in some aspects. ......... Camera support is also still primitive with no APIs for selecting a camera, inquiring about supported resolutions, decoding preview images, etc. Hopefully Donut will deal with these remaining basic issues. ......... Although this is an operating system, Google have to remember that basic phone features are a requirement, rather than having Flash which will make every page grind to a halt. ....... The improved battery life is the best part by far.uploading to youtube also rocks.I also love the auto rotate,on screen keyboard is cool ......... now it is the perfect phone ........ Android is still 6 - 12 months behind Apple in terms of UI polish and speed. Android scrolling, launching, and interactivity still has plenty of hesitation ......... Android is open-source and backed by Google, which is why I have the G1 and not an iPhone. And, I'm fully confident that with newer processors and newer OS releases this whole platform will eventually lead the field. ....... GPS positioning speed (so slow it felt broken, now it's faster than my GPS!)
Moto Labs introduces Android based home energy use monitor
Android may get a better Facebook app soon
Google Android Ion Phone AKA Magic myTouch 3G Battery Keeps Going & Going
Best. Review. EVER.

5 Palm Pre Lessons for Android
Motorola to introduce Android based smartphones in India
T-Mobile 4G Network Coming With Help From Comcast
Demo of ZAGAT’s ‘nru’
Palm Pre launching with Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Introducing the orkut Mobile App
The importance of being immediate - Google Mobile App now for Nokia S60 smartphones
Places Directory app for Android
Nearby Intersections on GOOG-411
Google Sync Beta - Now for S60
The Iterative Web App - Gmail for Mobile Gets Labels
Remembering Rajeev Motwani His contributions and impact on CS theory community, Stanford CS Dept, and Silicon Valley enterprises and entrepreneurs is unfathomable. ....... As a young graduate student, I remember him working on some of the toughest theoretical computer science problems of the day. ....... Rajeev had an unmatched clarity of thought and perceptiveness that was evident not only in doing research with him but also in the invaluable advice he gave me about career choices and life in general ....... Rajeev Motwani’s work on the intersection of theory and practice inspired not only the way Google processes information, but also Google's core scientific values: we fundamentally believe in the power of applying mathematical analysis and algorithmic thinking to challenging real world problems
Remembering Rajeev It is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life. ........ When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. ...... Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational. ..... Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly.
LRRK2 I have one copy of the fast twitch muscle fiber ...... I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. ..... I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person ...... exercise may be protective against Parkinson's ...... Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age only we don't know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine -- and I have decades to prepare for it.
Silicon Valley Grieves Rajeev Motwani's Passing a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting

Google Developing “Eyes-Free” Android Interface - Video
HTC Hero / Lancaster running Android and "Rosie" UI launching on June 24th?
Google IO Was the Android I Opener Developer Conference
Samsung and HTC rolling out Androids
Status Update
Hack: Howto get root on your G1

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Google Wave: Enormous Buzz

Google Wave has had enormous buzz since it was presented to the world. It has had the technology world abuzz. That was but predictable. But its penetration of the mainstream media has also been fairly massive.

The real mainstream media buzz will come after the product is actually released and the average person gets to fool around with it. Then people will be like, wow. What is this thing?

And then there will be buzz around major developments that will take around the Wave. You will see applications and gadgets built around it.

Google Wave will come to us in waves, wave after wave. There will be a corresponding wave after wave of buzz.

Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

In The News

Google makes a new wave and transforms the browser guardian.co.uk Eich's scripting language was first called Mocha and then LiveScript, but wound up being called JavaScript. ....... the web has evolved from a publishing medium to a programming platform, which is one reason why many malware attacks now come from malicious scripts embedded in pages. ........ Gmail, which uses a development of JavaScript called Ajax to enable a web-page to interact with a distant server without ever moving away from the page ...... steady accretion of Gmail features like instant messaging, audio - and then video - chat, and so on. ...... until the end of last month we were still unsure about where all this was headed. ...... The product's name allegedly comes from the Firefly TV series, in which a "wave" was an electronic communication. ....... Files of every description - text, movies, audio - can be dropped into a wave, making them accessible to everyone. There's spell-checking and translation on the fly. You can replay everything that's happened within a wave. And it all happens in your browser...... the scale of Google's ambition ..... the browser has become the platform. And that's big news.
Ray Ozzie: Microsoft is not threatened by netbooks, Google Wave is ... VentureBeat “In reality, I don’t know what a netbook is,” said Ozzie ....... “We’re always going to need an operating system. . . . The experience on top of that OS is what’s changing.”

Microsoft's Ozzie Damns Google Wave with Praise eWeek as a complex application Google's latest attempt to move into the application space is so complex as to be "anti-Web." ....... little more than a Web-based version of the Groove collaboration software that Ozzie built when he founded Groove Networks after leaving IBM's Lotus business unit. ....... if Google will assume the intellectual leadership for collaboration on the Web. ....... collaboration on the Web will require a more modular approach in order to be sustainable across a large number of users. Microsoft is employing such an approach with its Live Mesh technology, which ultimately may not yield as rich a collaboration environment as Google Wave or Groove, but will prove to be more usable across millions of users. ......... both companies have been reduced to the equivalent of political parties that accuse each other of being "un-American." ....... Ozzie said his focus will remain firmly on a "three screens in the cloud mode'" that focuses on how PCs, televisions and mobile phones all become integrated across a common set of federated cloud services

Microsoft May Bing Google as Wave Grabs Market Sci-Tech Today
Google Wave - the New Facebook? Gerson Lehrman Group character-for-character transmission, the ability to integrate pictures, maps, emails, instant messaging, games ...... has most of the functionality of the Facebook platform but takes it a step further.

Google's new Wave is much more than an application Gerson Lehrman Group a platform and protocol that will enable a new breed of social and collaborative applications. ...... accelerate the adoption of Google Apps for businesses ...... a significant boost in productivity over current email systems ....... one more reason to migrate from a premise based email and messaging platform to Google's hosted solution.

Google Wave: Why it's so good and enterprise software is so bad CNET News Google has no incumbent enterprise products to which it must pay obeisance. ....... And so Google Wave is born, while Microsoft continues to churn out tired retreads of Exchange/Outlook, IBM gives us Lotus version 10,001, and Oracle works furiously to tie its collaboration products into its existing suite of heavy, "enterprise" software. ......... few break the mold and start again on what computing means, as Google has done with Wave. ..... some of the best Wave innovation is yet to come, as significant parts of Wave will be released as open-source code to encourage add-ons, extensions, and other derivative works

12 Reasons Why Google Wave will Change the Web Black Web 2.0 Google Wave is the shiniest new thing that everyone is talking about. ...... You can embed a Wave on any blog or website. This isn’t just a view of the wave, but a completely interactive interface to the wave. You could use this as a chat room on your website or maybe even to replace your commenting system on a blog. ...... spell check much smarter. Instead of being based on a simple dictionary, it’s based on the entire web ...... Just add Rosy to the wave and you suddenly speak any language you’d like. Your comments or blips will be translated into the native language of whoever you’re talking to. ....... We won’t have to wait for the Google developers to implement new features and functionality. ...... This will either be one of the greatest things that’s happened to the web, or an epic fail.

From The Netizen BlogRoll

What is that number again? Transcribing voicemail accurately is not a small challenge because no two people pronounce the same word exactly the same way and because background noise and mobile phone line quality can vary dramatically.
Keyboard shortcuts & Search Operators
Archiving now available in your inbox
Helping you fight Phone Spam
Accessing GrandCentral after upgrading to Google Voice
Tips on upgrading
Moving to Google Voice!
Getting Started in Free and Open Source over 80 talks in five tracks of Open Source topics and a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints
Improving Freenet's Performance
Web Storage Portability Layer: A Common API for Web Storage
Support for Mercurial Now Available for All Projects Hosted on Google Code
2009 Google Summer of Code™ Celebration at Beijing LUG
Happy Birthday, ICU!
Report from Day 2 of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop, April 6-7th, 2009
Zurich Open Source Jam 7
Google Update Releases Update Controls
Spreading the Summer Love in Chicago
Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books Matt Cutts .... Using a simple USB-powered barcode scanner, Matt shows how you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books.

What's in a logo?
Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Old School Transportation edition!
Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Sea Creatures edition!
From the Mailbag: Illustrating your point with a book
Drop Everything and Read!
The Bodleian's treasures, available to all

China: Shanghai pride festival
Robin song and Mysterious Raven
Steller's Jay, contemplating inconveniently placed suet
21st century statecraft: texting for Swat Valley refugee assistance
StripeyWatch final: RIP
Democracy and transparency as human rights per Obama
New! The FDA transparency blog
UPDATE: Help Iraq/Afghanistan Vets: Support stop-lossed troops
(repost) Mona Eltahawy: "The Happy Muslims Who Confuse You"
The craigslist Foundation nonprofit boot camp
Future of news: "trust is the new black"
Alec Ross: more about 21st Century Statecraft For the first time in its history, the State Department is conducting international relations by encouraging online interaction between individual Americans and foreigners.
A few words about the future of media
Real results from the Open Government initiative: next steps
San Francisco recoverySF.org
New! San Francisco 311 customer service Twitterized
breaking: FDA transparency task force
Some reflections on "lightweight governance" by Josh Skolnick If Obama can get us to trust government like we trust Facebook -- that is, to trust both it's power and it's empowerment -- he'll go a long way toward defanging Reagan's old anti-government arguments. If he does that, he'll set the groundwork for an entire generation to trust government again.
Bearing witness: the transformation of American government
The Library of Congress blog
Natalie, Roxie, and also Cong. Gabrielle Giffords
Serious about health care reform "Pardon the interruption," came a voice as Stewart talked. "This is the Air Force One operator. I have President Obama on the line."
Sum of all fears
Kickstarting a 7"
Term Sheet Manners
Open Platforms and Innovation It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India. ..... Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.
Time Puts Twitter on Cover, at Vanguard of American Economy That it drives the American economy. In fact, Twitter is the new GM! ....... America might not make actual things any more, but at least we've learned to occupy our time talking endlessly and unprofitably to one another, in an entirely massless location, about which other entirely massless things deserve our time and/or increasingly worthless borrowed dollars.
When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
Introducing America's First Black, Female Rabbi
Why Nice Guys Should Finish First — but Don't
Racial Attacks Trouble Indian Students in Australia
The World of Twitter
How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live (in 140 characters or less)
10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business
The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
Come see how I hay my fields
The Leap Of Faith I was on a call yesterday with another VC who asked me why we made our investment in Zemanta last summer. There's a blog post I wrote up that explains our thinking at the time, but I did not point him to it. I explained that we had a gut instinct about the technology, market, and team that made us think there was a substantial opportunity in allowing people to "write smarter."
Is Twitter A Substitute For Set Top Box Data? if TV viewers can be understood, segmented, and targeted in the way that Internet users are, the TV experience and the TV advertising business can be transformed ...... Unlike traditional ratings or second-by-second set-top-box information, Twitter has rich qualitative information that reveals motivations behind viewers’ surfing. ....... Twitter can be used as a panel that once it is large enough (and maybe it is already) that can produce much of the same data that is currently locked in set top boxes and controlled by the cable companies. ..... The Internet is disruptive and reminds me of that fact every day.
The Free Music Business name for a business model that uses free as its foundational element - ie freemium. ..... Scarcity works great for physical goods, but crumbles in a digital world. ..... Free music will be a better business than paid music ever was. ...... what we’ve learned is more people want the music than are buying it. Should we try to convert them, or sue them? Is music failing, or is the SELLING of music failing? ...... The print companies went free, accepted advertising dollars instead of subscriptions, plugged into Google for traffic, and the money is now pouring in. ......... On top of the content layer is the "discovery/nagivation" layer that makes even more money than the content layer online. ........ iTunes isn't a discovery/navigation layer. It's an online version of Tower Records, but it's worse. ...... Services like last.fm (social networking), pandora (personalized radio), the hype machine (music blog search & listen), and playlisting services like project playlist and iMeem (which is being sued by Warner Music) are examples of this "discovery/navigation" layer. ......... Imagine if Google was a paid service. It wouldn't be driving a lot of traffic to anyone would it? ....... lala.com is going to try an ad supported free version of an "on demand" service. ........ we will have an abundant free music business where all the music is available to everyone and discoverable via search and social discovery ....... eventually the music owners will be better off taking an ad revenue share than a per listen payment ....... File based music has to exist today because there is no good mobile broadband internet solution. ....... almost every song ever recorded is on the Internet somewhere. ...... Free music is going to be a great business.
Our Web Site Is A Blog
Hacking Education The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education. ........ He relies heavily on the networked community of editors as sources of knowledge and expertise and as models to aspire to. ....... In theory, Gepetto could have learned video editing in school. In practice his school was not equipped to teach it. He found content, help, a social life, and even credentialing (as others linked to his work) on www.animemusicvideos.org. ........ I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. Someone said [college is] expensive. I said no, it's free, you just won't get credit for it. ........ A byproduct of the disaggregation of education will be to weaken the authority of schools, but the bigger challenge may be to align their cost structures and business models to remain competitive in a hyper connected world. .............. we should work to drive the marginal cost of education to zero. ....... zero, plus bandwidth. ........ Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news. ........ we teach only two courses, business and information technology. ......... You need to know English, you need to have a computer ....... deliver a limited, but valuable education to an important segment of the global population for free. He will ask them to pay only for testing (accreditation). .......... someone with access to a computer and a desire to learn can learn a lot on the web. ......... how to be obsessed with things ....... And I just immersed myself to learn as much as I could. ......... the idea of game based learning. ........ kids that have struggled in traditional schools do really well with some of the work we have been doing around game-based learning. ......... they get crushed by the organizing efficiencies of the Internet. ......... the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. .......... the cost structures embedded in the education industry's current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses. ....... home, church, and school. ......... over time.... all of it got stuck back in the school. ........ If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.
Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture aying to our public: Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, what do you know. ...... We who publish must learn how to say what we don’t know at least as well as we say what we know. ...... journalism as beta ...... the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be ......... Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning. ........ bartenders break more glass because they handle more beer, so journalists who traffic in facts are bound to drop some along the way.
DAY 410 there really is no substitute for passion.
Blog Past: Emerging Enterprises and Emergent Networks April 2002: As employees and enterprises go online with a PC on every desktop, online clusters of enterprises and people will give greater voice and power to the group hitherto which has mostly been only partially connected to global networks. This may be as unimaginable as the prospect of a million bloggers was a year ago. But it is a future which is rapidly emerging at light speed.
VCs Generally Retain Pro-Rata Rights
Entrepreneur's Social Fabric
Twitter Tech Communities
Save our rainforests clever campaign built around a frog - which the Prince, his sons, Harrison Ford, Pele and Daniel Craig among others, have all been filmed with.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Larry Ellison

Image via Wikipedia

Cisco's Big Dreams: A Clash Of Titans?
Mideast Peace: Tech Industry Style
That StartUp Mentality (2)

Of all the dead people, Einstein is my favorite. Larry Ellison is very, very smart, but he is no genius. But of all the people alive today, my number one hero just so happens to be Larry Ellison. He is very, very smart, but I am sure I can dig up smarter people on the planet. Stephen Hawking is alive and he is borderline genius. (Stephen Hawking Has Taken Sick) It is Larry's life story. I find it vastly inspiring. It is not his smarts, but his out of the box thinking, his guts, his aggressiveness that gets me. I like the guy tremendously. I am fond of him. He gave the world his middle finger the first three decades of his life and then went ahead and created a multi-billion dollar company. That kind of gets me.

Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures

Q: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

On another note, Brooke Ellison is my favorite New York politician. Larry does not know me, or of me, but I am honored to have an active Facebook friendship with Brooke. I have met her in person. (Hands Off Brooke Ellison) She has the most interesting Facebook wall of anyone I know. She says the darndest things.

Jesus was born a Jew. Buddha was born a Madhesi. I am a Madhesi. Buddha was born on a full moon day. I was born on a full moon day.
There are about 13 million Jewish people on the planet. There are about 13 million Madhesis on the planet.
The Jews carved out their own land: Israel. We Madhesis are working to get our own state in a federal Nepal.
There is anti-Semitism. There is strong anti-Madhesi prejudice in Nepal. http://demrepubnepal.blogspot.com
NYC is the first hometown I ever had, and I was past 30 when I got here. There just so happen to be more Jews in NYC than in Tel Aviv.

Larry just bought Sun. And the world knows he is best friends with Steve Jobs. The question is could Larry come up with data centers that are the size of servers? Since now he is not just in the software business, but also in the hardware business like his friend Jobs. I think this bad boy of Silicon Valley could pull it off.

Larry Ellison - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lawrence J. Ellison | Executive Biography He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.
Transcript of an Interview with Larry Ellison by Reuters on the ...
Larry Ellison relives reveals network computer netbook dream‎ Oracle could get into the stripped down client PC business. ....... now Oracle is swallowing Sun, he could well imagine the market welcoming Java-powered netbooks.
Larry Ellison Gates and Microsoft compete with Oracle by offering consumers lower-priced products. Ellison and Oracle compete with Microsoft by hiring corporate spies operating through front companies, trying to pay off late night cleaning crews. ......... After conspiring with the Clinton gang to go after Microsoft - now Clinton is hitting him up to help pay for his library. ....... The guy from Oracle (NasdaqNM:ORCL) pushing national ID cards ... "in the electronic age, little privacy is left anyway" ......... in 1999, Oracle hired Investigative Group International ....... IGI....“promptly went trash-hunting” – literally prowling through dumpsters containing the garbage of trade associations and other groups friendly to Microsoft. Ellison’s response to this sleaze: “I feel very good about what we did,” he told the press. “All we did was to try to take information that was hidden and bring it into the light. I don’t think that’s arrogance. That’s public service.” .... "Hi there, can I buy you a car?" ........ a 33-year-old former employee accused of forging an email message. The woman [Adelyn Lee], who was fired shortly after an affair with Ellison, obtained a $100,000 settlement from him. ............ Ellison had previously been invited to join the year-old start-up's board of directors by the company's founder, Marc Benioff, a former Oracle employee. Then last month, Ellison, who is also an investor, was asked to resign because of a conflict of interest. The conflict? Oracle is launching a direct competitor called OracleSalesOnline.com. ............. Friends and foes alike are verbally abused by Ellison. He ridiculed America Online last year ............ Nathan Myhrvold, chief technologist at archrival Microsoft Corp., has been labeled an "idiot" by Ellison. ....... Ellison trounced the company last year by calling its products "very, very thin" and then adding: "You think everybody will start their day with a Netscape logo? No way. It's not going to happen." .......... -- one must wonder if we would actually choose to trade a Bill Gates dictatorship for Larry Ellison's form of technological totalitarianism. ............ Oracle has funded or supported numerous groups that have attacked Microsoft in recent years, such as ProComp, the Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association.......... crass behavior and pompous posturing. The highlight was his phony threat to lead a takeover of Apple. Retire to your mini-Japanese-village estate in Woodside, Larry. Let your teenage son fly around in the jet fighter you gave him for his birthday. Spend your billions. But please shut up ............ Larry Ellison, CEO of Redwood Shores-based Oracle Corp., is constructing a 23-acre Japanese-style imperial villa that will feature 500 mature cherry, maple, ginkgo, and other trees; 5,000 tons of Yuba River boulders; about 81,000 cubic yards of prime dirt; 10 buildings, including a 7,800-square-foot main residence; ponds, hills, islands, and a 2.7-acre main pond with a 3,200-foot shoreline that's fed by two waterfalls cascading from an upper level pond. Reportedly, the chateau has more than doubled in price to about $100 million
Larry Ellison Biography -- Academy of Achievement Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York. At nine months, he contracted pneumonia ....... raised in a two-bedroom apartment on the city's South Side ....... As a boy, Larry Ellison showed an independent, rebellious streak and often clashed with his adoptive father. From an early age, he showed a strong aptitude for math and science, and was named science student of the year at the University of Illinois. ......... enrolled at the University of Chicago the following fall, but dropped out again after the first semester. His adoptive father was now convinced that Larry would never make anything of himself, but the seemingly aimless young man had already learned the rudiments of computer programming ......... Berkeley, California, arriving with just enough money for fast food and a few tanks of gas. For the next eight years, Ellison bounced from job to job, working as a technician for Fireman's Fund and Wells Fargo bank. As a programmer at Ampex, he participated in building the first IBM-compatible mainframe system. ........ Codd's employers saw no commercial potential in the concept of a Structured Query Language (SQL), but Larry Ellison did. ........ Ellison and his partners won a two-year contract to build a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA. The project's code name: Oracle. They finished the project a year ahead of schedule and used the extra time to develop their system for commercial applications. ........... In 1980, Ellison's company had only eight employees, and revenues were less than $1 million ......... The million dollar company was becoming a billion dollar company. Ellison renamed the company Oracle Corporation, for its best-selling product. ........... Oracle went public in 1986, raising $31.5 million ......... zealous young staff habitually overstated revenues, and in 1990 the company posted its first losses. Oracle's market capitalization fell by 80 percent and the company appeared to be on the verge of bankruptcy ........ Oracle 7, released in 1992, swept the field and made Oracle the industry leader in database management software. In only two years the company's stock had regained much of its previous value. ......... In 1998, Ellison and Sayonara won the Sydney to Hobart race, overcoming near-hurricane winds that sank five other boats, drowning six participants. ......... His own yacht, Rising Sun, over 450 feet long, is one of the largest privately owned vessels in the world. ........ the 1990s. America's banks, airlines, automobile companies and retail giants all came to depend on Oracle's database programs. ....... Oracle became a pioneer in providing business applications over the Internet. Oracle benefited hugely from the growth of electronic commerce; its net profits increased by 76 percent in a single quarter of the year 2000. ........ 2004, Ellison set out to increase Oracle's market share through a series of strategic acquisitions. Oracle spent more than $25 billion in only three years to buy a flock of companies and large and small, makers of software for managing data, identity, retail inventory and logistics. ....... in the depths of a global recession, Ellison once again acted boldly, acquiring computer hardware and software manufacturer Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. Oracle is now the world's largest business software company, supplying all 100 of of the Fortune Global 100. ...... Since its founding, he has been Oracle's only Chief Executive Officer.
Pillar Data - Larry Ellison's other storage company • The Register Pillar Data is backed by Larry Ellison's personal investment vehicle, Tako Ventures, possibly to the tune of half a billion dollars. ....... Come the end of the recession, he can make a decent return on his investment by getting the company to IPO. Or, he could broker a deal one day to fold Pillar into Oracle.
Can Oracle survive Larry Ellison? - CNET News His senior management team is woefully depleted, with the loss over the past several years of Ray Lane, Gary Bloom, Robert Shaw, Randy Baker, Polly Sumner and many more. Not only is there no one at the top to challenge the often-mercurial Ellison, there is no clear successor to take over in an emergency. ...... a nearing-60 CEO who indulges in high-risk behavior and whose interest in his company is fitful. Two years ago, he told the Oracle AppsWorld conference that if he had to do it over again, he'd probably go into genetic engineering rather than computing. After three generations of computing (mainframes, client-server and Internet), "there will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years," he proclaimed. "The computing industry is about to become boring." ....... most of Oracle's problems are internal, related to its loss of management at the top, its alienation of everyone from customers to partners, its conflict-ridden culture that sucks energy into the black hole of corporate politics and, last but not least, the flawed personality of the Oracle himself, Larry Ellison. ........ he owns one-fourth of its stock and has a relatively weak board of directors ........ his propensity for fast jets, fast cars and sleek yachts ..... One wonders if he can even conceive of Oracle's existence without him. ...... "It's unclear if Oracle is a sustainable enterprise without Larry, because his personality is so firmly entrenched." ....... an aggressive, expansionist management style works, as long as you're winning. ........ With or without Ellison, his company's future seems so murky that even the ancient Delphic oracle could not predict it.
The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think ... - Google Books Result Larry Ellison started the high-flying tech company Oracle with $1,200 in 1977

Pages