Bob's blog

Happy New Year (again)!

I know where I've been, but I don't how how January went by so fast. Not to mention Groundhog Day, Mardi Gras and now the Chinese New Year. This year, I'm glad to wish Happy Holidays from home and not by trying to navigate the Beijing Airport during the peak of the holiday season (something that I strongly recommend you leave to the local residents). But, I did have a nice trip to Beijing and Tokyo last month and while in Beijing saw the local Tsinghua Science Park Newsletter with some familiar logos:

I started the year after a nice two week winter break by heading to Las Vegas for CES. I did get a chance to walk the show floor and see lots of flat panel TVs, but I was there for the HANA booth and demos. I was happy to see the progress that was made this year on the specs and features. The demo showed HD content from a single source distributed to multiple TVs including one connected by wireless HDMI. It looked really good. I'm definitely excited to see where HANA will be at the next CES.

The reason that I was in China (and Japan) is that I've been traveling to meet with Sun Systems Engineers around the world to talk about the Web Industry Group at Sun and how Sun and open source technologies can help their customers. I've been in five different time zone and had attendees from ten different countries talking about web architecture and how they can help support customer requirements. It's been really interesting listening to their experiences and discuss different approaches. Of course, that conversation got very interesting with the announcement about MySQL. I was forwarded a copy of Marten Mickos' recent post talking about their decision and he had some fascinating comments about the MySQL culture and their impressions of Sun. It's worth reading the whole article, but I really like these two from his top ten:

3. Sun has become the world's strongest proponent of free and open source software. We are happy to be part of that!

9. Sun is a bold and fun disruptor again, and we see a huge upside in its strategy. I am not saying that success is a given, but I am saying that Sun's new strategy is one of the most exciting this industry has to offer. We are all in!

This week included a quick trip to Boston for me. I had a mercifully short flight and landed at Logan around lunchtime, which meant that I could stop at a local landmark for lunch on the way to Burlington. Kelly's Roast Beef has been an institution on Revere Beach since 1951 and was always the perfect stop for a midnight snack during college. I did have some work and got to meet with some interesting start ups while I was in the neighborhood. It's great to see all the innovation around the Bay Area and some really cool ideas and events.

Posted at 01:14AM Feb 08, 2008 by bs in General  |