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Kingsley Uyi Idehen
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UK councils dump Windows for Linux
UK councils dump Windows for Linux ZDNet Jun 6 2003 9:09AM ET

The move has particular significance since the council last year completed a successful e-government 'pathfinder' project involving a group of neighbouring councils: Barking and Dagenham, Hackney, Havering, Redbridge, Thanet, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.

"If this is seen to work in Newham, it has the potential to be a significant project, changing the perceptions of other councils," said Tim Dawes, director of local government technology consultants Nineveh.

Nottingham is set to decide on new software for its 6,500 desktop PCs by the end of 2003 and confirmed to E-Government Bulletin this week that open source solutions are being considered. The news follows the council's successful migration to a Linux-based email system last year, after suffering numerous problems with its proprietary system.

According to technology manager Richard Heggs, shifting to open source messaging has cut costs by at least a third, a saving that would be repeated for desktops.

Looks like the municipalities figured out the cost-benefits of Linux vs. Windows much quicker than the corporates.

# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/06/2003 09:58 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
The Market For Money
The Market For Money

I just read this on Scott Loftesness's blog and thought it was worth sharing. Scott was an EVP at Visa in the early 90's and his blog is an unbelievably comprehensive discussion of the payments space. Here is his discussion of Visa's recent announcement that this Visa system had reached $1 Trillion in annual United States transaction volume. It is an amazing growth curve and reminds me of a comment Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, made to me one day when we were having lunch -- he said that when he was pitching PayPal to VCs he was tempted to describe his market opportunity as the "market for money." Visa's numbers prove that that is precisely their market. VC's are always looking for big markets to penetrate and the market for money certainly qualifies. Here are Scott's thoughts:

Visa USA announced this morning that, for the first time, its annual sales volume exceeded $1 trillion.
The record usage means that an average of $32,000 went through the Visa system every second of every day over the 12-month period that ended March 31 - or nearly 10 percent of the 2002 U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
"One trillion dollars is an almost incomprehensible number, but it represents clear evidence of the silent revolution we're witnessing in the way consumers pay for goods and services. It means $12 of every $100 consumers spent in the U.S. is spent using a Visa card," said Carl Pascarella, president and CEO of Visa USA. "This is an important milestone in the history of U.S. commerce. Clearly, more and more people rely upon the security and convenience of Visa credit, debit and other payment products. To put it into context, $1 trillion could buy 162,000 Harley-Davidson motorcycles every day for a year."
By comparison, $1 trillion is greater than the combined volume of all other U.S. payment organizations, a field that includes MasterCard, American Express, Discover and others.
Just before I left Visa in 1994, I remember having a discussion with a colleague about growth in sales volume. 1993 had just ended with $500 billion in annual Visa sales on an international basis. We were focused on that total growing to $1 trillion globally over the next five years. As I recall, the US in 1993 was about 40+% of the global total -- so the growth in US volume over the last nine years has been pretty amazing. Of course, this is also one of those statistics that has a nice built-in inflation hedge too (the numbers just keep growing!). $32,000 a second -- at a $50 average ticket that works out to an average of 640 Visa transactions per second.[via VentureBlog]
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 23:06 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
Linux vs SCO: An opinion from the BSD point of view.
Linux vs SCO: An opinion from the BSD point of view. <P> Greg Lehey has written an excellent article for Daemon News on the Linux versus SCO debacle from the point of view of a BSD user. (Or at least from the point of view of one BSD user). <P> One particularly interesting idea: <P> <blockquote> <quote> Linux source code is freely available. UnixWare source code is not, even less than many other proprietary UNIX implementations. Thus it would be easier to copy code from Linux to UnixWare then from UnixWare to Linux. </quote> </blockquote> <P> Lehey also has a page tracking the debate. [via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs]
Tags: |
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 22:47 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
Linux vs SCO: An opinion from the BSD point of view.
Linux vs SCO: An opinion from the BSD point of view. <P> Greg Lehey has written an excellent article for Daemon News on the Linux versus SCO debacle from the point of view of a BSD user. (Or at least from the point of view of one BSD user). <P> One particularly interesting idea: <P> <blockquote> <quote> Linux source code is freely available. UnixWare source code is not, even less than many other proprietary UNIX implementations. Thus it would be easier to copy code from Linux to UnixWare then from UnixWare to Linux. </quote> </blockquote> <P> Lehey also has a page tracking the debate. [via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs]
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 22:47 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
Venture Capital Thawing Out?
Venture Capital Thawing Out? Since mid-to-late March I've been hearing a lot more stories of venture capitalists doing deals that sound a lot more like deals done in the mid-nineties, than the ones done over the past three years. There's at least been some evidence that VCs are (1) realizing that they're sitting on a ton of money (2) valuations are cheap and (3) there's a light at the end of the tunnel for the economic downturn. Plenty of startups are now saying that VCs are actually chasing them, rather than the other way around. Of course, VCs loosening their purse strings doesn't mean they won't be funding overhyped companies - and many companies with seasoned execs are trying to avoid VCs altogether. However, for folks in Silicon Valley who seem to think our entire economy is based on how much VCs are putting into companies, this is probably good news. [via Techdirt]
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 22:38 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
Blog noise is 'life or death' for Google
Blog noise is 'life or death' for Google Letters Pollution control [via The Register]
 
Look, Google simply needs to evolve! Like all products. It they don't then a semantic search engine will exploit the opportunity.
 
Perpetual improvement is the name of the game, and down with the churn-stiffle sentiment of this article.
 
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 22:34 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
Blog noise is 'life or death' for Google
Blog noise is 'life or death' for Google Letters Pollution control [via The Register]
 
Look, Google simply needs to evolve! Like all products. It they don't then a semantic search engine will exploit the opportunity.
 
Perpetual improvement is the name of the game, and down with the churn-stiffle sentiment of this article.
 
# PermaLink Comments [0]
06/05/2003 22:34 GMT-0500 Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56 GMT-0500
         
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