Marten Mickos, the former chief executive of MySQL, will soon be named the chief executive of Eucalyptus, another open-source software maker.

A spokeswoman for Eucalyptus said an announcement about Mr. Mickos’s arrival as chief executive was expected next week.

Mr. Mickos helped steer MySQL through its $1 billion sale to Sun Microsystems, and then stayed on at Sun for a while to work on its open-source software projects. Last year, Mr. Mickos was named as an entrepreneur in residence at the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

But rather than starting his own company, Mr. Mickos has ended up taking over one that Benchmark has invested in: Eucalyptus.

The start-up has gained a lot of attention of late as one of the more innovative players in the cloud computing arena. It has software that helps companies set up internal cloud-computing-type systems and that helps transfer their applications from a local data center to a cloud center, like the EC2 system hosted by Amazon.com.

11:30 p.m. | Correction. A single issue of the VIVmag is $6.

VIVmag, an all-digital lifestyle magazine that is  available online, plans to introduce an interactive iPad version of its content when the device, from Apple, is released next month.

The videos above and below offer a preview of the kind of experience that readers, or rather viewers, can expect for some iPad versions of the digital magazines. Similar to the Wired video released last month, Viv and other magazines are getting ready to offer touch, video and a wave of other hands-on experiences.

Read more…

Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely — Wired.com
Nick Bilton says: In Austin, Tex., more than 100 Web-connected cars were disabled by a disgruntled 20-year-old hacker.

iGroups: Apple Files for Patent on New Social App — patentlyapple.com
Jenna Wortham says: According to a patent application, it looks like even Apple wants in on the location-based social networking game.

Amazon Introduces Kindle Software for Mac — phx.corporate-ir.net
Brad Stone says: The Macintosh joins the PC, iPhone, BlackBerry and the Kindle itself as places where you can now read an e-book from Amazon.

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Back in the Start-Up Business With Jumo.com — Fast Company
Nick Bilton says: A Facebook co-founder begins a new start-up to help people find nonprofits. Read more…

Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach A data visualization exploring the changes that take place on Wikipedia by a single software bot.

Gizmodo, the technology blog, has a fascinating series this week about memory. Titled Memory [Forever], the blog takes a look at the topic from multiple angles, including memory and our brains, how the Internet remembers and the memory inside computers.

The image above, from the series, is a result of a visualization using the the Web site Many Eyes, a product from the I.B.M. Watson Research Center in Cambridge. Each color illustrates a change to pages on the Web site Wikipedia. For this visualization, the I.B.M. researchers followed the changes by an individual software bot on the Web site.

After the jump is a list of some of the most interesting posts in the series:

Read more…

As I recently reported, location-based services are quickly becoming  the newest territory that companies are hoping to lay claim to.

Now it seems that even Apple is eager to get in on the game.

The PatentlyApple Web site uncovered a set of freshly published documents from the Patents and Trademark Office indicating that Apple is developing a new social networking application or service.

In short, the Apple application would use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to allow a group of users in the same area to share information like contact information or chat about an event while it’s happening.

The patents don’t go so far as to give specific examples, but it’s not hard to imagine something like a group playing a game of fantasy football during halftime at a sporting event, using the tool as a channel to chat about a keynote speech during a conference or moviegoers answering trivia questions before a film premiere.

Read more…

Is there room for another socially oriented question-and-answer service on the Web?

That’s actually a question I just posted on one such service, Formspring.me, to Ade Olonoh, its co-founder and chief executive.

If you haven’t yet heard of it, Formspring.me is a fast-growing forum for people to ask and answer personal questions. Users register an account on the site, link it to their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or other accounts, then ask and answer questions and can publish those answers to the major social networks.

The formula has turned out to be somewhat infectious. The site, introduced over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, has received 50 million unique visitors over the last 30 days, according to the company. Three hundred million questions have been answered on the service since its introduction, and the site has drawn such attention in social media circles that it was actually the subject of a fast-spreading hoax on Twitter earlier this month during the South by Southwest conference.

Riding the momentum, the six-employee, Indianapolis start-up has just raised $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors, and it is planning to move to San Francisco this month. Investors include Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and individual investors like the Digg founder Kevin Rose and the former Facebook executive Dave Morin. Read more…

5:24 p.m. | Updated Adding document from Viacom discussing possible purchase of YouTube.

Thousands of pages of court filings that are part of Viacom’s copyright infringement suit against Google, the owner of YouTube, were unsealed on Thursday. The filings are the first significant revelations in the three-year-old lawsuit, which Viacom filed when tensions between YouTube and Hollywood were at their peak.

Here’s our article about the filings. Below are two briefs from Viacom and one from Google, along with a July 2006 internal PowerPoint presentation from Viacom, revealed in the discovery process, in which an argument for buying YouTube is laid out. Read more…

randomdorm.com

Taking a dizzying spin through the video chat service Chatroulette can be highly entertaining — you might stumble onto a celebrity or an impromptu performance by a pianist.

But there’s always the chance of encountering something unsavory on the service, which randomly matches strangers for video interaction.

One entrepreneur is hoping to limit the chances of that — at least for the collegiate set — with a new Web site called RandomDorm.

RandomDorm takes the thrilling serendipity of being paired with an anonymous stranger in a video chat room and limits it to college campuses. Participants need a college e-mail address to access the Web service. Alternatively, they can sign in using Facebook as long as the primary e-mail address tied to that account ends with an .edu.

Tying the users to a specific identity will in theory make them more accountable, although it’s unclear whether RandomDorm’s limited pool will increase the chances of seeing someone chugging beers online or performing more extreme college antics.

“The good thing about Chatroulette is that it has a low barrier to entry. Anyone can hop on and be instantly connected to someone in the world,†said Josh Weinstein, creator of RandomDorm. “We hope to emulate that simplicity and ensure a degree of community and security.†Read more…

HTC, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, is stepping forward and publicly addressing allegations made by Apple that it infringed on 20 patents related to the iPhone.

The company had been quiet, up until now, about two lawsuits filed by Apple earlier this month that claimed HTC phones running Google’s Android operating system violated Apple’s intellectual property, including patents related to the iPhone’s touch-screen interface.

HTC had expressed surprise, and little else, on the day the lawsuits were filed.

But in an interview, Jason Mackenzie, vice president of HTC America, said that “HTC disagrees strongly with Apple’s actions and we plan to use all the legal tools we have at our disposal to defend ourselves, as well as to set the record straight.”

The company, whose American division is  in Bellevue, Wash., stopped short of discussing its legal strategy. But it said that its previous smartphones, which predate the iPhone, used elements of the technologies that Apple says it owns.

“We were working on our first touch-screen smartphone in 1999,†Mr. Mackenzie said. “That eventually came to market in 2002 as the XDA phone in Europe, and the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone in the U.S. Since that time we launched over 50 smartphones, and are fortunate to have relationships with most of the carriers in the U.S. We have been recognized as an innovator by our carrier partners.†Read more…

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times jumped from drinking and eating to watching the nighttime sky on Wednesday. In between, there was Twitter and Foursquare and Bing. Another typical day.

Girl Talk: How Men Dominate Twitter — Jezebel
Claire Cain Miller says: Is Twitter better suited to men or women (or neither)?

Dodd’s Attack on Angel Financing — techflash.com
Vindu Goel says: Will the banking reform bill clip the wings of angel investors?

How drunk is SXSW? Follow the Tweeting Breathalyzer — latimesblogs.latimes.com
Jenna Wortham says: The combo of Internet geeks and booze-drived festivities spawns a Twitter-enabled breathalyzer.

Foursquare Notches 100,000 New Users in 10 Days — businessinsider.com
Vindu Goel says: South by Southwest gives Foursquare a giant boost.

AOL Partners With Celebrity Chefs to Launch Recipe and Foodie Site KitchenDaily — TechCrunch
Miguel Helft says: AOL serves up more content. Read more…

In this week’s Tech Talk podcast from The New York Times, Bettina Edelstein is in a spring cleaning mood. She talks about how to recycle an old computer hard drive into an external backup device. All it takes is a screwdriver and the right enclosure.

Having problems with Flash Player on your PC? J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado discuss how to fix common problems, and they also give some advice on the best way to uninstall and reinstall the program. Ms. Biersdorfer’s tech tip of the week, drawn from her weekly Q&A column on the Gadgetwise blog, is about automating Windows 7 disk cleanup.

Mr. Rosado reviews the wired and wireless Kidz Gear headphones for small ears and, for the older set, the ultraportable Fiio E5 headphone amp.

Ms. Biersdorfer’s weekly roundup of tech news includes the Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband plan, the posting of C-Span’s archives on the Web and Twitter’s plans to broaden its reach with its new @anywhere service.

To find more information about the podcast and the links to the show’s topics, go to the Tech Talk page. Read more…

Pop quiz: You’re the new chief executive of a software maker that has been ridiculed ad nauseam for being years late with a product. What do you do?

Answer: Talk about speed, speed and speed. And that’s exactly what the top brass at SAP is doing these days.

SAP, based in Germany, has two chiefs to carry the torch of agility far and wide. After chief executive Leo Apotheker resigned last month, SAP’s board installed Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe as co-chief executives. The pair met earlier this week with Silicon Valley reporters at SAP’s office in Palo Alto, Calif.

The first words out of Mr. Snabe’s mouth: “It is obvious we will accelerate our innovation capability going forward.â€

Later, he added, “What we want to do is increase the speed,†and “I don’t think we did a lot of wrong things in the past. We just have to do things much faster.â€

Mr. McDermott chimed in as well, saying, â€I do think we are a little bit bolder in terms of our clock speed.â€

Despite a fair amount of prodding from reporters, the executives offered few specifics on how SAP would foster this newfound culture of speed. Read more…

There are 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament.

Yahoo has built a new tool for this year’s tournament intended to determine which of these results are most likely.

Called Predictalot, it is a prediction market that allows users to bet on any outcome. It then continuously regenerates the odds of each outcome based on people’s bets.

Using prediction markets to guess the likelihood of future events is not new; solutions to various problems relying on the wisdom of crowds are increasingly common as better computing tools are developed to refine the predictions. Sporting events are seemingly good targets for experimentation, with clear results and many people who are willing to take a guess. Yahoo hopes to develop further markets based on Predictalot that will go beyond sports.

But how good is the crowd at picking N.C.A.A. winners? Read more…

Images courtesy of General Motors R&D The navigation element of General Motors’ enhanced vision system could help drivers find their destination by pointing to an exact building.

In foggy or dark conditions, the system helps define the edges of the road and points to upcoming road signs.

The research and development labs of General Motors have been working closely with several universities, including Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California, to build an augmented reality system that could assist motorists in difficult driving situations.

The new system, called the enhanced vision system, would embed an array of sensors and cameras inside and outside vehicles that could monitor a driver’s eye and head movements and provide relevant additional information to help him deal with current driving conditions.

General Motors hopes the system could alert drivers when a possible danger might be approaching the car from the outside, away from a driver’s field of view. The system could also monitor for children playing in the street, animals approaching from the side of the road, or motorcycles and cars in a driver’s blind spot. Read more…

For Outlook users who are addicted to Xobni, an add-on service that organizes and searches e-mail messages and contacts, it has been frustrating to use Xobni-less e-mail on smartphones.

For BlackBerry users, that  changed on Tuesday, when Xobni started selling Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry devices.

Xobni Mobile essentially takes over your cellphone address book. You no longer need to enter names and contact information for people with whom you correspond.

The average person has e-mail messages from 4,000 people. Xobni pulls contact and other information from the messages and from sites across the Web, like LinkedIn and Facebook. Read more…