Software: Interviews

Nicholas Carr, of IT Doesn't Matter fame, spoke with Computerworld's Joyce Carpenter about his new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last CES keynote speech as a full-time company employee, he talked with the IDG News Service about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week and directions for Microsoft.

We hear from SourceForge and SourceForge.net Marketplace Vice President Mike Rudolph about the world's largest Open Source software development web site, which, as of today, claims 162,855 registered projects and 1,732,552 registered users.

Venture capitalists hail from all different backgrounds. Many are investment bankers or entrepreneurs; some are even former journalists. David Tennenhouse, a recent entrant into the venture capital world, hails from the research and development trenches. Tennenhouse is a former vice president and director of R&D at Intel Corp. He also previously worked as director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and as DARPA's chief scientist. In addition, he has taught at MIT.

After Google released an initial set of details about its plans to alter how mobile applications are created and distributed, industry watchers are compiling a long list of follow-up questions about the Android platform and the Open Handset AlliancE.

Email sender remorse is a thing of the past, if Bigstring.com CEO and founder Darin Myman has his way. The start up has developed a service that allows emails to be edited, recalled, or made to self-destruct. Emails, videos and pictures can also be rendered non printable, non-save-able or and / or non-forward-able.

Although Google's non-search engine products, like its Google Apps Web hosted collaboration and communication software suite, get much attention, search technology and its companion ad system and network still generate most of the company's revenue.

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

David Heinemeier Hansson was a 23-year-old student at Copenhagen Business School when he began work on Ruby on Rails a little over four years ago. His goal was to write a simple Web application framework that would free developers from the misery of repetitive coding that he sees as inherent in widely used platforms like Java and .Net.

Belgian-based U2U training consultant, and Microsoft MVP, Patrick Tisseghem, has specialised in Microsoft's SharePoint Server since its version 1.0 days. As the author of Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Inside MOSS 2007, he's positioned himself as the go-to man for all things SharePoint, and is now bringing his vast knowledge to Australia for a series of classes to show .NET developers how to leverage the upcoming Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and build better Web applications. Tisseghem takes some time out to share his thoughts on SharePoint 2007 and its future involvement in the development of Web 3.0 with Mitchell Bingemann.

Borland Software plans to unveil a new approach to its application life-cycle management business, called Open ALM, and to roll out a new product designed to provide real-time visibility and software quality metrics for each phase of the application development process. Tod Nielsen, president and CEO of Borland, and Marc Brown, the company's vice president of product marketing, discussed the announcements in an interview with Computerworld last week.