According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

While the Théâtrophone was an impressive invention in its day, the subscription model itself has a prolific and fascinating history of enabling innovation throughout the world. Subscriptions have helped companies pioneer new distribution models across a diverse set of business applications; all in the name of seeking efficient annuity revenue streams that outweigh the cost of production and distribution. From an end-customer “subscriber” perspective, the convenience of easy access or repeat consumption can greatly outweigh the incremental cost of subscribing.

Subscriptions have historically also found ways to take on greater social meaning through the signaling of a certain status by way of access to a secret society, social club or charitable organization. In the 1700s, by “subscribing” to become a benefactor to a charitable organization or society, individuals were able to achieve certain significance among their peers. Subscriptions to charity balls and full-seasons of theatre access were as much of a status symbol as they were convenient. Country clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, fraternities and other private clubs have almost always been entirely member funded by way of the subscription membership model. Memberships, dues, donations and even tithing from the Catholic Church were achieved via scheduled “subscription” payments.

During the 18th century, the notion of subscription that we know today arrived when subscriptions to periodicals, magazines, books and theatre events became common. These subscriptions typically included delivery of the printed material and were sold for a specified number of issues or a period of time.

During the 1800s, the idea of pay-as-you-go subscriptions emerged to support the need for staple items such as heating oil, coal, milk, ice and even diapers to be delivered to your home. In Paris, a five-franc annual tariff was levied on all residents for their “subscription” to a hectoliter of drinking water per day.

Throughout history, we observe some interesting commonality across each of these examples. Whether we’re talking about subscriptions for the purpose of convenience, pay-as-you-go consumption, engagement or status, the underlying business driver has always been that subscriptions provide the ability to generate capital in the form of an attractive annuity revenue stream. From a financial perspective, companies that are able to generate a growing audience of subscribers producing predictable revenue streams are far more capital-efficient than companies that need to acquire, and then re-acquire, each customer interaction. (If you’re ever curious about this assertion, just ask yourself why so many insurance companies occupy the largest buildings across all major cities in the United States.² By definition, insurance is an annuity-based, subscription business.)

Fast forward to today. We are in the midst of yet another explosive expansion of subscription business models. From traditional media moving to digital media, to the rapid adoption of SaaS and cloud-based businesses, mobile and social products, applications and services are all careening toward some form of subscription-based offering. This is largely because the cost of developing and launching new businesses has declined to such an extent that it requires a very different level of up-front capital investment to chase these opportunities.

Why are subscription models everywhere today? The following intersection of trends is powering the recent appeal for subscriptions:

From the business perspective, there has always been a strong appeal in creating a predictable stream of revenue. Beyond that, the notion of maximizing lifetime value from existing customers is something that has always existed, but is now enabled through better visibility into activity. Traditional e-commerce companies like eBay have long focused on optimizing the “Triple A’s” — Acquisition, Activation and Activity. With today’s technology in place, we now have the ability to solve for all of these variables in a way that is not only more palatable to the end customer, but in many respects the optimization is couched in a way that is actually a benefit to the customer. (Think about the recent reminders you’ve likely received from your oil changer, dentist or even hair stylist that it is time for you to come back for your next appointment.)

Consumers have evolved a long way from the cable and magazine subscriber of yesterday as well. Today, consumers expect to have a range of choice in their offerings. They’ll commit to subscribe particularly if they have the ability to select from a range of feature/pricing options that best suit their own preferences.

There exists a psychological minimum. If a service is offered at a price level that feels low enough in relation to the marginal benefit that they receive, a consumer will subscribe. Conversely, they will elect to cancel if the marginal benefit wanes and is no longer worth the cost to continue subscribing. Managing the perceived value of any subscription product or service over time creates a relationship between the consumer and the service provider, each of whom seeks to maximize the value they are receiving from the other.

At the same time, the upfront capital investment required to launch a new enterprise service has declined to such an extent that it affords businesses a greater opportunity to test and learn as they go. As recently as 10 or 12 years ago, during the first dot-com boom, companies raised massive amounts of money not only to signal a coveted first-mover market position, but also to fund the huge amount of investment required to scale out a company. Today, we have cloud services and SaaS/PaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and RackSpace.

The Web has become too fragmented to sustain ad-only revenue models.
Ten years ago, venture capitalists were inundated with companies seeking funding for ad-supported business models. Today, the Web is far too fragmented to support businesses seeking to aggregate massive ad dollars.

There has been a 100X reduction in the cost of software infrastructure within 10 years.
Here is an example: In just over 10 years, the “rented” application infrastructure model once offered by Kontiki (before it was called SaaS/PaaS) would have cost a customer approximately $100,000 per month to launch a business. Today, the same offering is delivered by Amazon Web Services for approximately $1,000 per month.

The cost of storage has plummeted 16X in the last 10 years.
Today, it costs you $0.085 per GB to store data. Ten years ago, it cost $1.39/GB. This decline in storage costs has created the opportunity for subscription-based file-sharing and backup companies like Box.net and Dropbox.³

The cost of Internet bandwidth “transit” has declined 75X in the past 10 years.
Entirely new business models have emerged due to the proliferation of inexpensive and ubiquitous broadband connectivity. This has allowed companies like Hulu and Netflix to have distribution to large markets at economically sustainable rates.⁴

Open-source software has eliminated the need for expensive licenses.
Ten years ago, companies aiming to deliver a service at scale were likely to sign up for expensive Oracle and Microsoft licenses. Today, startups have an impressive roster of free open-source software to choose from to run their operations.

On the Web today, the confluence of these trends is creating new markets and opportunities. The functional role of marketing has evolved to become increasingly data-driven.

Financial CRM allows the consumer to get what they want, and the business to provide a well-crafted migration path of high-probability options for cross-sell and up-sell options in the future. The management of this path for monetizing users post-sale has become an even more critical discipline for maximizing enterprise profitability than the sexy and creative brand-building efforts on which companies have traditionally focused.

All of these factors combined increasingly lead entrepreneurs to a similar conclusion. It is now far more efficient to offer products and services via subscriptions. Subscription pricing easily attracts customers, eliminates their purchase anxiety and, if designed well, keeps them happily paying over a longer period of time. Subscription models not only allow for attractive and efficient pricing, but also alleviate the need for a heavy-handed sales pitch. Ultimately, customers appreciate that they are in more control — always having the ability to upgrade their service, or to cancel and move on to something better.

Based in San Francisco, Dan Burkhart is the CEO and co-founder of subscription billing service Recurly, Inc. He was also an executive at eBay and NBC Internet.

Brought by Linux group Hispalinux, the complaint claims Windows 8’s UEFI Secure Boot — a feature designed to protect Win 8 machines by only booting operating systems signed with a trusted certificate — is really just an anticompetitive “obstruction mechanism.”

“[UEFI Secure Boot] is a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems,” Hispalinux said in its complaint. “[It makes] Microsoft’s Windows platform less neutral than ever.”

Harsh words, but are they valid? Tough to say. UEFI Secure Boot clearly makes it more difficult to run anything other than Windows on Windows machines. That said, back in February the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Microsoft did release some software that enables Linux to work with machines running the UEFI. It’s not a perfect solution by any means. But it is a solution. And, as Microsoft has repeatedly noted, UEFI Secure Boot can be disabled. “We designed the firmware to allow the customer to disable secure boot,” Microsoft’s Tony Mangefeste wrote in a February blog post. “However, doing so comes at your own risk.”

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

Here’s something new going up on GitHub: Starting today, the latest version of documents from Series Seed, a basic set of documents for companies working with early-stage investments, will be up on GitHub, too.

No, it’s not software code, but the fact is, said Ted Wang, the Fenwick and West lawyer behind Series Seed, it’s pretty much the first place that companies look when they evaluate people they want to hire. “When my clients are evaluating people, they look at GitHub. It’s sort of replacing the resume,” Wang told me.

Wang, of course, is the well-known lawyer who has guided companies like Twitter, Facebook, and has advised companies that were acquired by Google, Zynga, eBay and others from their earliest days.

Wang created the Series Seed documents in 2010, and since then several major venture capital funds, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, among others, have agreed to use them as the basis of their own seed-stage investments.

As the costs to start a company have come down, it no longer made sense to have more than 100 pages of legal documents to sign and review.

Now the documents themselves will be available on GitHub with all that implies. Discussion about changes and tweaks will move to GitHub and off private email chains and comments on the Series Seed blog. But it also means that other people can take the basic version of Series Seed documents, change the bits they don’t like and upload their own.

“I think that would be great,” Wang told me. “All the time, I hear from people who like the documents, but don’t like a few little things they’d like to see changed. Now they can create their own.”

(Update: I made some minor changes above in the description of companies advised by Wang.)

Big Blue announced today that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. It’s good news for potential IBM customers because it means they can mix and match service and equipment vendors — Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace are also big OpenStack fans — without worrying about getting stuck with one.

Its first move will be to spin up a private cloud service based on OpenStack. There’s also some new software, specifically something called IBM SmartCloud Monitoring Application Insight, that’s aimed at monitoring the progress and availability of cloud applications. There are also two other applications coming out, but they’re in beta.

While IBM isn’t the biggest player in the area of cloud services — right now, it’s Amazon’s Web Services — it has been gearing up for a big push into the business, sensing an opportunity. And there is an opportunity: Gartner says the market for cloud services this year will total $131 billion. And while there will certainly be some purists who sniff that “private clouds” aren’t real clouds, the fact is that IBM has about 5,000 customers running their own clouds, or in a mixed public-private environment. These hybrid cloud arrangements are something IBM has been talking about for a few years now.

Looking back in history, it appears that this sort of backing by IBM can have a significant effect. In 2000, Big Blue backed Linux, the open source operating system, as a critical piece of its systems business. A year later, it invested $1 billion in the Linux movement. IBM’s seal of approval over time helped Linux gain acceptance and credibility in big businesses.

For the cloud, it will help nudge the industry toward an accepted standard. A Booz & Company study found that efforts to set standards and craft a working set of best practices for cloud computing has been, at best, fragmented. In its current state, the study argues, with numerous inconsistent and incompatible standards, cloud services won’t evolve, and companies won’t get the benefits they need.

“Everyone is talking about the cloud, but in order for it to have real scale and impact, it’s pretty clear that standards and open source are going to be pretty important,” says Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president for software standards, open source and high-performance computing. “Without standards, the cloud is going to be complex, not simple, and clients will be stuck with one vendor.”

Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist and a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a firm that has had a long-term investment interest in open source software and open standards, and has backed companies like Plumgrid and Sonatype, says that OpenStack has essentially become the operating system for the cloud. “I think the trend here is that OpenStack has won the race to become the standard, and it has done it rapidly,” Winblad said. “We’ve made some investments around the software-defined data center, and OpenStack is a key component. It is the OS for the cloud.”

A few other things IBM is doing: It has created a 400-member customer council devoted to cloud standards. The council initially started with only 40 members. It’s also backing the OpenStack Foundation as a platinum member, and contributing a lot of code to OpenStack projects. And it is backing other OpenStack-related standards, like one called Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration which aims to make it easier to manage software over time, and to use multiple tools for the job together.

Schireson joined New York-based 10gen in 2011, and previously served as COO at MarkLogic. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Oracle where he was chief applications architect and vice president for eCommerce and Self-Service Applications.

MongoDB has certainly got a lot of momentum behind it. It has been downloaded 3.8 million times. 10gen’s commercial customers include Cisco Systems, Disney, eBay, Salesforce.com and FourSquare. It has raised more than $81 million in funding from investors including Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Merriman, a former CTO at DoubleClick, the Web advertising company that Google acquired for $3.1 billion, started MongoDB in 2007 with current CTO Eliot Horowitz.

“We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device. You know, there will be countries around the world where people may never own a tablet, or a PC or a desktop. They will do everything on the smartphone. We’re a computing company; we have to take advantage of that form factor. … We did take a detour into smartphones, and we’ve got to get it right this time. My mantra to the team is: ‘Better right than faster than we should be there.’ So we’re working to make sure that when we do this, it will be the right thing for Hewlett-Packard, and we will be successful.”

HP, you’ll remember, acquired Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion, not long before its then-CEO Mark Hurd departed. Under his replacement, Léo Apotheker, HP sought to apply Palm’s webOS operating system to a tablet that it hoped would challenge Apple’s iPad. It didn’t work out that way and Apotheker shuttered HP’s webOS hardware operations in August of 2011.

Whitman, who replaced Apotheker 40 days later, ultimately decided that the webOS software was better off in the hands of the open source community, and is working on an OS called Enyo. Meanwhile, HP has placed the remains of the company formerly known as Palm into a stealth subsidiary called Gram.

Also during the interview, Whitman said HP has no interest in buying the troubled Canadian smartphone outfit Research In Motion. Well, thank goodness for that! Fox Business (which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.) has broken the interview into three segments, which I’ve embedded below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120914/whitman-says-hp-has-to-do-a-smartphone-again-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120816/can-you-guess-the-super-short-domain-name-hp-just-registered-for-gram/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/can-you-guess-the-super-short-domain-name-hp-just-registered-for-gram/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 21:14:16 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=242270 Yesterday we learned about the creation of Gram, the new brand name for the Hewlett-Packard subsidiary formerly known as Palm. The plan is to build a brand and a business around the open source operating system that is evolving from Palm’s old webOS operating system.

There’s not much to know about it beyond the name and that HP is keeping it stealthy for now, but AllThingsD just learned an interesting detail: HP has registered the Internet domain name gr.am.

See my screen shot of the domain registration information. We also have another small detail: The company paid $18,000 for the domain. According to this post on the message board for Namepros, the person who had it before, who goes by the name XMAN, makes the claim.

As domain names go it fits perfectly with the super-short type of domains that are popular precisely because they fit easily into Tweets.

And it’s probably not the last domain that HP will register for the purpose of doing business under the Gram name. It turns out you can make practically any word into a top-level domain name, so there will probably be a .gram when the time comes, along with probably a gram.hp, too.

Thanks to Jay Mahal for pointing me to the post on namepros.

Now, Meteor Development Group, the small team behind the framework, has gotten $11.2 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and including Matrix Partners.

Meteor helps move much of the guts of Web applications onto users’ phones and computers, rather than their usual place on outside servers. Obviously, it will still be important for apps to connect to the Internet to send and receive data, but the idea is to get them as close as possible to the user, so they can be faster and more responsive.

The project has been one of the most watched on developer hangout GitHub, itself another developer favorite that Andreessen Horowitz just backed.

Actually, it’s the same AH partner in both: Peter Levine, the former CEO of XenSource.

Meteor doesn’t have a full release date yet, but it continues to be developed in public, with authentication being one of the latest projects.

To make money, the team plans to sell complementary tools to large companies that use Meteor.

It’s similar to building a house: Most of the component pieces are standardized and are used in predictable ways; some are tweaked a bit to function just a bit differently than originally; and some are custom-made to fit the taste and desire of the builder.

It’s certainly efficient, and saves the time and effort of recreating a block of code that gets the job done. But there can be a problem. Let’s say the home builder chooses a wonky model of dishwasher, but no one knows it’s wonky until its too late. The dishwasher can be swapped out for a better one. But what if there’s a problem in the parts used to build the foundations of the house?

A software developer can easily choose an open-source component that has some unknown security weaknesses, or which uses some code that is subject to a license. Or it simply might not be up to date, or the component might not be very good. And once it’s used, one block might turn out to be a linchpin to other critical bits of the application, so swapping it out can get complicated quickly.

Software developers need a little help in vetting and evaluating and managing all the software components they use. And a start-up called Sonatype is out to help them do it. It announced this morning that it has landed $25 million in funding in a round led by New Enterprise Associates, with existing investors Accel Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures and Bay Partners all participating.

Sonatype runs something called the Central Repository, essentially a library of some 400,000 software components that is so widely used by software developers that it gets about five billion requests a year. That gives it a lot of visibility into what components are being used, and what potential problems might be cropping up. Simply keeping track of what software components were used to build an application goes a long way toward solving problems as they arise down the road, Sonatype CEO Wayne Jackson told me.

According to a study Sonatype commissioned in March, developers at the world’s 500 biggest companies downloaded 2.8 million components suffering from security problems last year. When you consider that 80 percent of software applications built are using these prebuilt components, you get an idea of the potential scale of the problem. Here’s another tidbit that, on its face, is kind of alarming: Firms in the financial services industry were the heaviest users of these insecure components, downloading some some 567,000 of them in one year. One user in three hadn’t downloaded the most up-to-date version of the component with known security problems fixed.

Sonatype’s approach to this problem comes in helping developers evaluate and manage the components they use. Its customers, which include Intuit, Cisco Systems, Skype and Hewlett-Packard, get a deep look at everything there is to know about a given component, so they can decided if it’s really the best bit of code for the job at hand. It has essentially created its own market niche, known as “component lifecycle management.”

As part of the investment, Harry Weller, a general partner at NEA, will join Sonatype’s board of directors. In a statement, he described the company as being “… In a prime position to become the must-have tool used by every development organization in the world.”

The round brings Sonatype’s total capital raised to $35 million about $41 million. It was founded in 2010 2008 by by Jason van Zyl, the creator of Apache Maven and the Central Repository.

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s record-setting $100 million Series A investment by Andreessen Horowitz in GitHub, it’s a pretty clear sign that software-development tools and infrastructure are where the VC money is flowing right now, and another sign of Marc Andreessen’s argument that software is “eating the world.” Think of GitHub as where open-source software is born. Sonatype’s Central Repository is where that software goes when its all grown up.

One way they often do this is by installing a system running Hadoop. This is the open source tool that evolved out of work done by Google and Yahoo, and basically takes big blocks of data and makes analyzing it a manageable process. The creation of a thriving business environment around Hadoop, which by itself is freely available, has attracted mountains of venture capital funding to start-ups such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Add another Hadoop player to the pile. Today, Mortar Data, a company devoted to making Hadoop easier to use, will announce a round of seed funding. Usually I don’t pay much attention to companies at the seed stage but in this case I made an exception, in part because the lineup of investors is so interesting. The lead investors are Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica who left his job at Hewlett-Packard last month, and TechStars, the noted start-up accelerator, which is also a customer.

Other investors are Atlas Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and Great Oaks Ventures as well as Brightcove founder and CTO Bob Mason, and Matt Turck, managing director of Bloomberg Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media concern. The precise amount of the funding hasn’t been disclosed.

As widely used as Hadoop is, it requires a lot of specialized knowledge, says K Young, Mortar’s CEO. Mortar’s secret is to use the Python programming language and Apache Pig, running on cloud infrastructure. The combination makes working with Hadoop a lot more accessible to people with more generalized programming knowledge. It’s not all that different from SQL. Easy enough that Vertica has said it will offer Mortar’s solution to its clients. That makes Mortar Data worth watching.

Although Yahoo isn’t generally in the business of creating developer tools, the company said it doesn’t want to see a world in which companies have to develop apps for every mobile device.

“The Web is under threat,” Yahoo Chief Platform Architect Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz said in an interview.

Some of the characteristics that the Web counts on — particularly a consistent, high-speed connection to the Internet — aren’t always present. Mojito tries to address this by providing a means for apps that can persist even when the connection doesn’t.

Yahoo has used Mojito and other of its “Cocktails” suite of tools to create several mobile apps, including its Livestand product, as well as a fantasy soccer program.

“It doesn’t make much sense for Yahoo to keep those technologies closed,” Fernandez-Ruiz said. “We want the Web to win.”

And since that is the goal, Yahoo can win even if developers ultimately find Web tools that are tastier than Mojito, he said.

“If the community doesn’t find it interesting, it is probably because something better emerges,” Fernandez-Ruiz said.

You never think about it, and yet every time you attach a photo or a Word document, or practically anything else to an email message, you’re using it.

It was created by Nathaniel Borenstein, a computer researcher who, 20 years ago, worked for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell telephone companies. At the time, no one really gave much thought to the idea that email could or even should comprise any more than basic text messages, and when attachments were involved, incompatible formats caused the kind of headaches that we would consider unacceptable today. Curiously obsessed with the evolution of email, Borenstein teamed up with Ned Freed, a fellow Internet pioneer, to write the MIME standard that is the backbone of email attachments today, supporting more than 1,300 types of files and enabling billions of email users to ignore any worries about compatibility among email programs.

The first message containing a MIME-encoded attachment was sent on March 11, 1992, and today the standard is used something like a trillion times a day. And no, he didn’t get rich (but he did once turn down a job offer from Steve Jobs). He’s now the chief scientist of Mimecast, a cloud-based email outsourcing company that just happens to riff on the name of the standard he helped create. I got a chance to talk to him by phone a few weeks ago. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

AllThingsD: Nathaniel, no one really thinks about MIME, but everyone uses it. Tell me how it happened. The story goes, you thought that one day you’d like to use email to receive photos of your grandkids. Is that true?

Borenstein: I can’t say it was my primary motivation, but it was an easy way to explain what I was thinking of. Email had been around since 1965 on time-sharing systems, and then moved to the fledgling Arpanet. Then more and more people outside the English-speaking world started to come up with a lot of incompatible ways to encode their email. At the same time, people wanted to send around files occasionally. The only way that was really safe to do it was to package up a file with a program called UUencode, which had multiple versions that weren’t always compatible. There were all these ad hoc things that people were doing for these complementary needs. In 1980, I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, and I was put in charge of maintaining an email program. It was just a job at first. Then we got some Unix machines. I thought I could do a better job by rewriting the email program. And I was also in charge of running an email system. It became sort of a hobby. Then, later, after I finished my dissertation, my adviser asked me to write what he described as the world’s best email programs. Suddenly my career was my hobby.

So what was it you were asked to work on?

It was Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew Project, which was intended to envision the next generation of computing environments for campuses. What was really interesting then was that it had very advanced — for that time — multimedia capabilities. And so we had a chance to make multimedia work. There were a few programs with multimedia that came before, but we had the chance to get it into people’s hands. And then something interesting happened. Steve Jobs came to visit. This was in the days that he was running NeXT. [Jobs founded NeXT after leaving Apple in 1985, and ran it until he sold it to Apple in 1996. -Ed.] He came to the campus, and a light went off in his mind when he saw the mail system. He had not completely gotten email until he saw what we could do with it, and so he tried to hire our entire team. And he got none of us. None of us wanted to go to work for NeXT.

Why was that? Was it about Steve, or about NeXT?

I’m not sure we all had the same reasons. In my case, it was that I had heard from other people that working for him was difficult. I have enormous respect for him, because he was one of the captains of our industry. But I had a feeling that if you went to work for him and you had a disagreement with him, you lost. It was that simple.

And let me guess: He built email into the NeXT operating system anyway?

His team built NeXTMail, which looked a lot like Andrew did. In fact, if you use Apple’s Mail.app on the Mac, you’re using something that looked a lot like Andrew did. But he did something interesting. He created a way for people to send files around. And so you had two communities of users on NeXT and on Andrew who couldn’t send files to each other. So after I left Carnegie Mellon, I went to work for Bellcore, which was the research arm of the Baby Bell phone companies. My job was as a researcher, and my mandate was to work on things that would encourage the use of bandwidth. I thought I was done working on mail. Then I started noticing these problems with compatibility, plus I had an idea for something I called active messages. And Bellcore was a very heterogeneous computing environment. There were all these Unix hackers, and each person had their favorite email program — I counted more than 20 in use. And I wanted them all to be able to read these active messages. So what I did was start patching them all. That led to something I called Metamail, which would be triggered by a header in the email that would then call on any one of a number of other programs. So if you received a JPG image in Atomic Mail, which was one of the programs in use at the time, it would display the JPG in Atomic Mail.

So this led to the MIME standard how?

Metamail was already in use when the work that led to MIME started up. I got involved with some efforts at IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force]. I got introduced to Einar Stefferud, and he became a mentor of mine, and introduced me to Ned Freed, who became my co-author on MIME. I was worried about email and multimedia compatibility, and Ned was working on email gateways — the problems of translating messages between different email realms — because we weren’t all running SMTP back then. Stef thought we should work together. Now, Bellcore had allowed me to take Metamail and contribute it to the public domain, or what we would now call open source, and so anyone was allowed to modify it. So every time there was a new draft of the MIME standard, I could update to support the new standard. So when the first public draft of the MIME standard was ready, I was ready with Metamail, and it was just picked up at an incredible rate. I wrote it for Unix, and three days after the release, someone had already adapted it for Microsoft DOS. That’s what told me I had a hit on my hands.

What about MIME made it flexible?

One of the reasons I think we were successful with it was the fact that we had an incomplete vision. Yes, I was thinking about pictures of grandchildren someday — I am a grandfather now, by the way — but I knew that there would be things coming that I couldn’t forsee, and I didn’t want the system we designed to have to be completely redesigned in order to accommodate the new things. That is why the MIME type system is so open. You just go to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and register a new MIME type. The original supported 16 MIME types, and when I checked a few years ago, we were up to 1,309 different supported file types. When I tried to explain why I wanted it to be open-ended, I tried to explain things that you could, at the time, just barely imagine. I had two examples — one was smell. I thought that one day you might be able to send files containing smells, and one day you might, but no one is really focused on it yet. The other was one I thought of almost as a joke. I proposed a MIME type for matter transport. I thought we could send matter around as an email attachment, and in a way, it came true. When you think about 3-D printing and the models for that, people are sending around schematics for 3-D objects that can then be printed. So open-ended is very good in a world where science fiction is quickly getting overtaken by reality.

You now work for a company called Mimecast. What do you do there?

The short tag line is that we do unified email services in the cloud. We take all the things that surround and administer your email, and everything except the basic core operation of it, we outsource to the core. We archive your email, we set policies about how and when it can be deleted. We do data-loss prevention. We do continuity and disaster recovery. Our BlackBerry users didn’t notice when the service went down last year. And I’m not the founder. A lot of people think I am, but I’m not. I just work for the company as its chief scientist. Once you get all those things in one place, there’s a lot of potential. You can do things that you couldn’t do before. I’ll give you just one example: Imagine you’re composing an email, and as you type, there’s a sidebar next to it. In the style of Google Instant, it becomes an implicit search query that searches both your email archive, but also, say, news stories. The point is that it might help you shape your message or change what you want to say in your email, who you want to say it to, or whether or not you want to say it at all. Having an email archive solves a very deep problem, which is organizational memory. Everyone wonders from time to time whether someone knows the answer to some question. The point is that the bigger an organization is, the more often it’s necessary to rediscover the same thing over and over. Having an email program that searches for things that might help you would go a long way toward solving this.

Here’s the Infographic on the history of MIME. Click to see it bigger:

This would be the second round of cuts in the webOS group. The first came in September and affected about 500 people, bringing the total to about 775 since former CEO Léo Apotheker announced HP’s intention to end production of webOS hardware, after sales at Best Buy and other retailers failed to gain traction.

The webOS business has been a particularly difficult subject at HP. The company acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010 under former CEO Mark Hurd. In a November filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, HP said about half of a $3.3 billion in write-down came in the webOS unit.

HP just issued the following statement on the subject and it appears that some will get a chance to be redeployed elsewhere within the company. But make no mistake, most of those affected are being laid off:

“As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term.

HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company.”

The cuts come after two key events in the webOS group’s recent history. One was the departure of former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, which was first reported by AllThingsD on Jan. 27.

Before that came the decision, announced in December by HP CEO Meg Whitman, to take the webOS software that Palm had developed and turn it into an open source project.

Hernacki had joined Palm in 2009 as its chief security architect, before it was acquired by HP in a $1.2 billion deal the following year. Previously, he’d spent nearly seven years at Symantec, where he was a researcher and architect.

His departure follows not only that of Rubinstein, but of Richard Kerris, the former head of webOS developer relations, who decamped for Nokia in October.

Coming as these moves do after HP’s decision to turn webOS into an open source project, one suspects they aren’t the last.

To start with, HP has released an updated, open source version of its Enyo developer tools and plans to deliver Open webOS by September. The company published a roadmap (see below) detailing its plans to release different components of the software, including key apps and its Linux kernel, over the coming months.

“This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform’s development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of Web applications,” newly minted Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a statement.

Of course, the big question now is how much interest there is outside HP in using the operating system.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

It’s the third board seat that Schwartz has taken since leaving Sun. He also sits on the board of Taleo, a cloud-based talent management software company, and has a seat on the board of SilverSpring Networks, a smart-grid outfit.

He’s also the CEO of Picture of Health, a start-up focused on applying technology to problems in the health care field.

So what is Moxie? It plays in the same space that Jive Software, Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter do. Its software not only connects employees internally, but with customers and partners as well. It’s the kind of “big theme” that Schwartz likes. “If you’re a company, you have to interact with the customer,” he said to me last night. “Now, do you want to dump a product spec on them, or do you want to captivate their interest over a long period of time? To me, it feels like an I.Q. test.”

Moxie’s software is used in 270 million individual social enterprise interactions per month, and its customers include the consumer electronics companies Epson and Sharp, as well as the Web retailers Newegg.com and Tupperware.

Schwartz, who is also on the board at SilverSpring, was approached for the Moxie board seat by Warren Weiss, a director and lead investor in Moxie and a general partner at Foundation Capital. Weiss and Schwartz are both alums of Next, the Steve Jobs-owned computer company that Apple acquired in 1996, beginning its legendary turnaround.

After Diaspora emailed its users to ask them to donate this week, having published an expense report that showed its $200,000 in Kickstarter money had all been spent, some assumed the end was near.

That wasn’t the impression I got when the Diaspora team recently invited me to lunch at their favorite Indian restaurant in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. They might be in over their heads, but they are most definitely not dead yet. (Though I feel like I might die if I ate that rich food every day.)

The Diaspora team is young, smart and, most of all, tiny, considering the scope of what they’re trying to do. They’re busy preparing for a mid-November launch, timed for a year after Diaspora went into alpha testing.

According to their view of the world, Diaspora has already had success because its ideas are turning up in other social networks, given that Google+ Circles resemble Diaspora Aspects, and Facebook has recently stepped up its sharing controls.

Diaspora counts more than 100,000 users on its own Diaspora pod (twice as many as a month ago), with hundreds of other installations around the world, including someone in Seattle who has 20,000 users on his own server. (If you want to sign up for Diaspora today, you can either request an invite on joindiaspora.com, install your own pod or join an existing independent pod.)

Team Diaspora now consists of three of its four co-founders (Raphael Sofaer still contributes but has returned to college at NYU) plus a few volunteers who help with strategy, tech and communications.

The crew at lunch were co-founders Ilya Zhitomirskiy (he does infrastructure and encryption), Daniel Grippi (he does design) and Maxwell Salzberg (jack of all trades); plus Yosem Companys (outreach) and Sarah Mei (an engineer at Pivotal Labs, which gives Diaspora free office space, who will be CTO once Diaspora has enough funding to pay her).

The Diaspora vision is expansive, but the way it expresses itself is in a social network that looks and feels like many others — with an extra dose of animated GIFs.

Silly GIFs have emerged as a favorite part of the Diaspora culture (as on other corners of the Internet), but they do serve a purpose. Though Team Diaspora talked about how much they love online sharing and want to encourage more of it by assuring people they control their own data, the biggest attraction of their service may ironically be heightened fear about online privacy. That’s part of why nurturing a fun community — even if it’s around silly GIFs — is so important.

In the spirit of the occasion, I made a GIF of Team Diaspora using the iPhone app Loopcam. I was going to post it here, but honestly, it will make you seasick, so watch it in this Diaspora post and check out some stills above.

Salzberg, who declined to go on the record about funding plans, maintained that the nonprofit Diaspora would figure out how to make money while respecting its users’ interests. He would say that he looks to Firefox as the prime example of an end-user open source project, and that Diaspora may try to make money by charging users to host pods.

Diaspora has support from a broader community of open source contributors, but the core team sets the tone for both the product and the larger project. They are goofy, idealistic and nerdy — just like the folks who work at Google or Facebook — but they maintain an outsider’s bent, chatting about the things they read on tech blogs rather than the Silicon Valley types they’ve actually met in person.

Grippi — who personally created Diaspora’s first app, a photo bookmarking tool called Cubbi.es, and had just redesigned the Diaspora mobile site himself — kept repeating at lunch that he’d heard Google had seven people assigned to designing the black bar at the top of Google+. He said he could only imagine what seven people working on Diaspora could do.

On Tuesday, Rubin highlighted the difference between something being released as open source code and a community project. Android is most definitely the former, Rubin said, but not as much the latter.

“Android is light on ‘community-driven’ and heavy on open source,” Rubin said, speaking to reporters after the Android keynote at Google’s I/O conference. “Everything that we do ends up in an open source repository.”

The challenge, he said, is that Google is building a platform rather than just an app. Open source projects for entire platforms don’t work so well, Rubin said, because it is hard to tell when anything is final.

“Typically, in my opinion, community processes don’t work, because you need to know when you’re done,” Rubin said. “If it’s a community process, someone could take an early version before (it is) locked down, and those devices would be incompatible.”

Although the company does accept submissions for Android code, it acts not only as its main creator but also as a shepherd to make sure that the same programming interfaces make their way to all Android devices (or at least all that claim full Android compatibility.)

Concern over Google’s tight control over Android has been heightened after the company said it was delaying the release of Honeycomb’s code. The company said that to get Honeycomb on tablets quickly, the company didn’t bring over the necessary software to make sure it worked well on phones.

On Tuesday, the company reiterated that the next release of Android–Ice Cream Sandwich–will work on all devices and it is that software that will be released as open source code after it is finalized later this year.

We’ve done a lot of onstage interviews at our D: All Things Digital conferences with the leaders of tech.

That includes Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google smartphone kingpin Andy Rubin, both of whom are now dealing with the fallout over a series of reports that iOS and Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to both companies.

The privacy implications are obvious.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote last week:

Questions about what location-based information Android makes use of followed reports that Apple’s iPhone and 3G-equipped iPads are storing a history of location information in an unencrypted database on the device. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday noted that both Android and Apple devices are sending certain location information back to the companies.

In addition to that issue, there are separate issues over the length of time such information is stored, both on the device and by Apple and Google. The iPhone (and 3G-equipped iPads) appear to be storing a long-term directory of where a device has been and keeping that information in an unencrypted database. Google keeps a small cache of such information, to allow mapping and search to work even if a device temporarily loses GPS signal. However, it doesn’t keep a long-term record on the device.

That’s why we cut this video of Jobs and Rubin talking about privacy, specifically and respectively at the eighth D: All Things Digital last summer and at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

“We take privacy extremely seriously,” said Jobs, who addressed the smartphone location data issue in particular. “A lot of people in [Silicon] Valley think we’re old-fashioned about this.”

And I pressed Rubin on Android being a “probe in your pocket,” and he said its mobile open source operating system did not collect data, although Google services did.

“I think this is a trust and verify,” Rubin noted.

Both Jobs and Rubin make some pretty strong privacy-related statements in these videos, so it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out: