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The service price varies by ISV, based on the scope of work needed, according to Sun. The price “can vary from a thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars based on how many seats are required,” according to Vince Vasquez, a business development manager at Sun.

Sun Microsystems is launching a program to help software makers convert their existing, on-premise applications into software-as-a-service offerings.

Sun, along with partners, will offer a 90-day proof-of-concept trial to give independent software vendors access to hosting, hardware managed services, and backup services. The company guarantees a service level agreement of 99.5 percent uptime.

The Solaris On Demand program, announced on Wednesday, is targeted at independent software vendors. Sun offers the software, hosting and services to convert applications. Sun says it is partnering with NaviSite. AT&T’s USi Communications, and NTT Europe to provide hosting services.

The next generation of SSDs will use multilevel cell (MLC) technology, which will require a more sophisticated controller–a crucial component in solid-state drives. These drives will have capacities ranging up to 128GB, 160GB, and later, 256GB. MLC drives are expected to appear in a wider selection of notebooks later this year.

Speaking during SanDisk’s second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid-state drive makers. “As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk,” he said.

Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. “We have very good internal controller technology, as you know…That said, I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment,” he added.

SanDisk said Monday that
Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

SanDisk has a production joint venture with Toshiba, which also makes solid- state drives.

“Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we’ll start sampling end of this year, early next year,” Harari said.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are used instead of hard disk drives in select high-end notebook PCs today such as the Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500.

(Credit:
SanDisk)

In the very low-end of the market, however, this is not an issue. “In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated…requirements,” he said.

This is due to Vista’s design. “The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,” he said.

Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, was also on hand at the plan unveiling in Hawaii on December 2. According to Agassi, Hawaii is the second state in the U.S., and the fifth place in the world, to adopt the Better Place electric-car infrastructure. Better Place stations have already been implemented in Denmark and Israel, with Australia and California recently announcing intentions to add them.

According to the plan, Better Place will pull permits for its stations in 2009, offer electric cars within 18 months, and make both available for the mass-market in Hawaii by 2012.

Hawaii Electric is also onboard. The state’s electric utility signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Better Place which plans to power its public charging and battery-swapping stations with renewable energy resources.

(Credit:
Better Place)

(Credit:
Better Place)

Not surprising due to its geography, Hawaii spends about $7 billion a year on oil imports with its drivers facing some of the toughest prices at the pump in the U.S. The plan to implement Better Place stations coincides with the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI) intended to change that. Signed in January, it sets Hawaii’s renewable energy bar at 70 percent clean energy by 2030, as well as encouraging programs that foster local economic growth.

Better Place stations, similar in concept to gas stations, offer drivers with electric vehicles an automated system that swaps out exhausted lithium ion car batteries for fully-charged ones. The swapping system is intended to be convenient for both drivers and local electric companies, since Better Place can recharge the exhausted batteries with excess electricity generated from renewable sources during off-peak electricity hours.

Lingle said the project is an example of Hawaii’s efforts to gain independence from foreign oil, and to stimulate its economy through investment in energy technology.

“Hawaii, with its ready access to renewable energy resources like solar, wind, wave, and geothermal, is the ideal location to serve as a blueprint for the rest of the U.S. in terms of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, growing our renewable energy portfolio and creating an infrastructure that will stabilize our economy,” Agassi said in a statement to the press.

The Better Place Rogue is an all-electric version of the Nissan Rogue crossover SUV.

Better Place has said it’s in talks with major automakers and would like to offer swappable batteries for any electric vehicle regardless of which company makes the car. But right now the company’s stations only service two electric vehicles: the Renault Megane and the Better Place Rogue, an electric vehicle based on the Nissan Rogue crossover SUV.

Hawaii's plan with Better Place is to install about 20 electric battery-swapping stations across its islands.

Hawaii has decided to partner with Better Place to bring
car battery exchange stations for electric vehicles to the islands, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle announced Tuesday.

I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.

That said, software developers are best when solving problems they are passionate about, which generally does not include compliance software or industry-specific applications, which is why subject matter experts are so important to our collaborative model. Gartner likes to call us the first vendor to represent community sourcing, which it says is when users decide to band together to create their own solutions. Our collaborative model enables that phenomenon.

The unique value Collaborative Software Initiative brings to the market is our recipe for collaboration that enables developing and deploying software in a variety of ways: software as a service (SaaS), on-site, and as an appliance. In short, our mission is to work with companies that have identified common needs in their vertical, reduce their upfront cost of development and deployment, and create a community around the code to improve the technology past the point of delivery, leveraging dollars for competitive differentiation.

Asay: In what other vertical markets is Collaborative Software Initiative seeing demand for its development model?

Cohen: It’s amazing how many people I’ve talked to over the last two years about how the Collaborative Software Initiative model can work for them. When customers see our model, they quickly identify opportunities to collaborate with their peers. People from a range of industries have expressed interest and we see organic growth from our first few projects in health care, government and financial services. We’re also talking to folks in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and energy industries.

You can think of us as a combination of the best of commercial software, open-source software, and custom software for the benefit of like-minded companies.

(Credit:
Collaborative Software Initiative)

Asay: Tell me more about TriSano and your choice to license it under AGPLv3.

To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI’s founding:

Asay: Open source really is about collaboration, as you indicate in the name of your company. Given your experiences over the last five years, what’s your advice for the open-source industry today?

Cohen: We’re really excited about TriSano and our decision to go with AGPLv3 was one to which we gave a lot of thought. TriSano is a public health application focused on infectious disease surveillance, outbreak management and bioterrorism attacks, and it’s a community where epidemiologists, doctors, nurses, health officials and software developers work together to create critically needed public health applications. AGPLv3 best supports the confluence of software-as-a-service and open-source development models. The reaction to TriSano has been quite positive.

Cohen: I’m really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.

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Cohen: Go beyond the code. Extend your business model to address the needs of business users and subject matter experts. The best software is developed with collaboration among all constituents - the developers, users and partners. The principles that made open source disruptive to the software industry can be applied to a new level of applications that broaden the opportunities for any software company. This brings greater value to the customers and communities served.

Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?

We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a “network effect” for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.

Stuart Cohen

Excellent insight, confirming to me that CSI continues to push the envelope on what open source can do for the enterprise.

Cohen: Yes, very much. Enterprise organizations have gained a significant amount of value from infrastructure applications that have been community built - from Linux to MySQL to JBoss, the results are undeniable.

Asay: A year ago I said that Collaborative Software Initiative was changing the rules of the enterprise. Do you think this still true?

With the popularity of TinyURL and it’s automatic integration with services like Twitter, most of the good ones have already been snatched up, so if you’re looking to get a vanity mini URL from another similar service, your best bet is to go with one of the little guys. My CNET colleague Nicole Lee did a great roundup on some competitors back in March. Of the bunch, my favorite MooURL has always seemed to have the most open of any, but now that I’ve told you, the secret is out.

Not content to just sit around recovering from Independence Day shenanigans this past weekend, TinyURL released a much-needed feature to its URL-shortening service that others have had for ages: vanity URLs. This means the nonsensical shortened URLs it spits out from your 1,000 character-plus links can now be changed to whatever name you want after the forward slash–that is as long as it hasn’t been taken by someone else.

Now you can make TinyURL vanity URLs too.

Come on, come on, come on and touch me, baby.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

For this to happen, Microsoft would have to make the tables more broadly available and offer a software development kit to the general development community, who will think of all sorts of clever ways to use it. Imagine what Pandora or Last.fm could do, for example. Right now, the company’s limiting rollouts to a few customers to make sure the first apps offer a consistent experience. (For example, making sure that they’re all multitouch and that drag-and-drop works in the same way.) But I expect the company to open the program up by the end of this year, at which point the product could really start to flourish.

Starwood Hotels, one of Microsoft’s initial partners for the Surface touch-table, has begun rolling the tables out in some Sheraton Hotels. I happened to be in downtown Seattle this morning and stopped by the Sheraton there to check it out.

Sheraton and Microsoft built a jukebox application for the table, and while the song selection is extremely limited–it’s got about two dozen albums, all from Sony BMG, each with a single song on it–I saw how Surface could be a great jukebox. You drag albums from a menu onto the main surface, touch them twice to see a list of songs, and drag the songs onto a playlist. In this case, the music played through small speakers on the side of the table, creating a little ambience for folks sitting on the chairs around the table, but I could imagine it working like a regular jukebox hooked into a house sound system in a bar or restaurant.

I’ve seen Surface in a controlled demo environment at Microsoft, but this was my first time encountering it “in the wild,” and despite the big-ass table criticisms that some have leveled at the product, there’s an undeniable thrill in seeing something so weird and new in a public place. No, it’s not going to revolutionize computing like the
iPhone, but I think it has great potential in public spaces like hotel lobbies and restaurants. At 7 a.m. in the Sheraton lobby, all four tables were occupied, and three of them had people actually using them. (The fourth was serving as a more conventional table, as one traveler rested his bag upon it.)

Also included is search engine optimization and the option to leave short audio annotations that can be attached to each chart. These clips follow it along wherever it goes, even on PowerPoint presentations, which means you can put together a pretty slick presentation that plays itself without using any other sort of narration software.

What makes iCharts less worthy of the YouTube cringe is that it’s a solid business model. As billionaire panelist Mark Cuban pointed out, you can leverage out this technology to other companies that want to make their charts suck less, making a quick buck as a service provider instead of ending up as a destination site for orphaned sales charts.

Any time I hear a company reference their product as a “YouTube for _____,” I cringe a little. Newcomer iCharts said the same thing about its charts product at its presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference this morning. The service takes your data from spreadsheets and turns it into charts that are both hosted on the site and can be embedded elsewhere, including things like PowerPoints, message boards, and PDFs.

You can adjust what you're seeing with the slider on the left. All the data on this chart is also SEO friendly, making your data accessible on major search tools.

The service is launching later today with the tools to upload and build, along with a portal that shows off user charts that have been set as public.

(Credit:
iCharts.net/CNET Networks)

The service has a few tricks up its sleeve, including a building tool that lets you drag and drop data sets from a centralized document list. You can add as many sets as you want as long as the X & Y data axis match up. This comes with a live preview of what your charts will look like on the site, letting you see how it looks before hitting the publish button.

In a research note on Monday, Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal projected that Microsoft will finalize the code for
Windows 7 by June or July and also suggested that a search deal with Yahoo is likely to happen sooner rather than later. And, although it won’t be here this year, Aggarwal said that the next version of Office, code-named Office 14, should come early next year.

Although slumping PC sales will certainly hurt Microsoft, the software maker’s year could be better than expected, according to one financial analyst.

The release of Windows 7 should allow Microsoft to make $1.5 billion in additional revenue, Aggarwal said, with nearly $1 billion coming from the upgrade market and as much as $680 million possible if Microsoft is able to increase the number of premium versions of Windows being used on Netbooks.

Brokerage Collins Stewart said on Monday that it expects Windows 7, now in beta, to be finalized by June or July.

Even with a sluggish PC market, that makes the company’s shares a good investment, Aggarwal wrote in the note. “We are recommending Microsoft as our top large cap pick because at the current level risk-reward appears to be very compelling,” Aggarwal said.

Officially, Microsoft has said only that it will have Windows 7 on the market by next January, the three-year anniversary of Windows Vista’s mainstream launch. However, the company has been aiming to have it out in time to be on PCs that ship during this year’s holiday shopping season. PC industry sources told CNET News last month that Microsoft continues to push toward that goal.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET )

Clearly not all is rosy, Aggarwal noted. “There is no doubt that the trends with PC shipments and Netbooks will get worse for at least the next 2 (quarters) but both of these concerns are now largely reflected in the stock price,” he said.

He goes on to talk about the company’s missteps, admitting its marketing muscle had gotten a bit “flabby.”

Microsoft Windows marketing executive Brad Brooks told those attending Microsoft’s partner conference on Tuesday that the company is trying to put a different face on the 18-month-old operating system.

Brooks acknowledged Apple’s impact and said the “sleeping giant” had woken up and hinted at the company’s forthcoming $300 million multiyear marketing push.

Microsoft’s launched-but-not-yet-ready compatibility tool isn’t the only stab the company made Tuesday to help resuscitate
Windows Vista’s tarnished image.

Although Vista has some tasty treats, like better photo handling and built-in desktop search, its new features haven’t exactly taken the world by storm. I doubt I’m saying anything the Windows team hasn’t already realized–but the next time they come out with a new OS, they would be well-served to have three or four drool-inducing features that motivate people to get a new PC or upgrade their old one.

The company has taken a step in the right direction in announcing that Windows 7 won’t make any major architectural changes (less veggies), but they need to make sure that their entree is appetizing and that the dessert is top-notch.

From my perspective, Vista faces two major issues. Clearly, there is the image problem. For the last 18 months, Vista has been getting poor press, and the loudest marketing has been the negative stuff coming from Apple.

“Today, we’re making a statement,” Brooks said. “We’re drawing a line right here on this stage that we’re going to do things differently going forward. We’re going to tell our story–our story, the real Windows Vista story.”

But the second issue, which is beyond the image problem, is what I’d call the operating system’s dessert-to-vegetable ratio. Many of Vista’s changes are under the hood. They were necessary things like improved security, a new graphics engine and driver model. Those are like veggies. You have to eat them, but you are going to have a tough time getting people to flock to the table.

The company also launched a program that offers free support to small businesses willing to make the move to Vista.

Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like an brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

While the initial content delivery offering won’t compete with the major CDNs like Akamai…and Limelight…when it is released, it has the potential to down the road if Amazon adds some specific product functionality.

Amazon.com is in the midst of creating a new content delivery service aimed at developers and businesses that it expects to launch by year’s end.

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels wrote in a separate blog that his company is “expanding the cloud” with this service: “Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.”

This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

Amazon’s content delivery service is hoping to make its money by allowing customers to pay as they go when using the service. Pricing has not been made public.

According to an Amazon Web services blog posted Thursday:

Seeking Alpha’s Dan Rayburn agrees, with one caveat:

Clarification at 8 a.m. PDT: The Amazon.com Web services blog posting was not written by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He wrote a related blog on the subject.

GigaOm’s Om Malik said that Amazon’s service will be disruptive to content delivery network (CDN) incumbents, such as Akamai and Limelight Networks:

Amazon’s service will allow customers to store their content in an Amazon S3 holding tank and then mark it as publicly readable when its ready. According to Amazon, customers will then “make a single API call to register the bucket” and have a domain name assigned for their content. When clients “request the object via the returned domain name they’ll be routed to a nearest edge location,” which aims to deliver content at high speeds.