The DataPortability Project was created to encourage vendors to allow users to take their data with them.

Existing Technologies: Invent nothing
+ Turnkey Reference Blueprints: Keep it simple and open - put it all in context
+ Simple User Story: Create the 'Intel Inside' brand

On Thursday, several blogs reported that Red Hat sent a cease & desist letter, claiming that the DataPortability logo was too similar to their Fedora logo:

Yesterday, Chris Saad (Co-Founder and Chair, DataPortability Project) blogged their response:

While the claim is arguable, we have decided that rather than dispute the issue, we would take the advice of community members to hold a Logo Competition to replace the current logo with a new one.

So I would like to announce the “DataPortability Logo Competition”.

Good choice! In case they didn't notice, here's one more reason: ReadWriteWeb's coverage included a comment from Alex Eckelberry that the logo is even more similar to that of Dataproducts:

(That's no surprise: combining "d" and "p" is an obvious logo trick; no explicit copying is required.)

Eckelberry gives some background at the Sunbelt blog:

(Dataproducts was actually a customer of mine back in the mid-eighties, and the lead engineer on our Ninja product used to work for them. While they are not widely known, they made printers for mainframes, and apparently now they’re in the business of ink refills.)

Back in January, NewsGator made their desktop feed readers free in order to expand their audience and therefore gather more "attention" data. Rather than just using the information to improve their enterprise products, they're giving something back to all readers:

Today, we released a feature based on that data.

At the top of the NewsGator Online reader, you’ll see a “Sort” option. When you click it, you’ll see the “Sort By Activity” option. If you choose that, you’ll see something like the display [above] when you click on a feed or folder.

Your unread posts will be sorted based on total user activity in NewsGator’s online reader, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and Go!. The green bar gives a graphical view of the total activity based on a scale much like the decibel system.

By the way, what do decibels (sound levels) have to do with blog posts? It's the difference between a linear scale (1, 2, 3, 4...) and a log scale (1, 10, 100, 1000...).

Logarithmic scales allow one to examine values that span many orders of magnitude without losing information on the smaller scales. ...

Many aspects of nature are logarithmic. The human eye responds to changes in light intensity on a logarithmic scale. Since the difference in light intensity between sunlit areas and shade is so great, if your eyes did not work on a logarithmic scale, you would never be able to discern details in the shade!

A more familiar example is the logarithmic response of the human ear to changes in sound intensity. No doubt you know that the sound level of your stereo is measured in decibels (dB). The decibel is a logarithmic unit designed to reflect the response of the human ear. Each additional decibel represents a factor of 1.26 in sound intensity.

(Here ends the science lesson.)

Amol Sharma of the Wall Street Journal covers a clever product:

Jerry Knoblach wants to bring wireless service to millions of rural Americans. His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space.

This isn't just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-size payload of electronics that acts like a mini cellphone "tower" covering thousands of square miles below.
...
The inexpensive balloons are good for only 24 hours or so before ultimately bursting in the thin air of the upper atmosphere. The electronic gear they carry, encased in a small Styrofoam box, then drifts gently back to earth on tiny parachutes.

The article reports that Google might be interested, though tech blogger Om Malik is skeptical. If the product offers enough data throughput, I could see Google using it for rural broadband.

So, let's take a look. Space Data's Web site includes some vague marketing speak about their commercial SkySite®. No prices. (Perhaps: "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"?) No mention of bandwidth. (Perhaps: "pretty low, but better than nothing for certain high-value applications"?) Alas, the lack of info. is still way too common on corporate Web sites. I'm never sure whether companies intentionally hide the details to force people to call them, or just don't understand what potential customers want to see.

We're looking for someone to gather and organize information, roughly 20 hours/week. The job requires lots of research, some editing, and very little writing.

See the CraigsList posting for details. We've received some good applications so far, but there are several ways to stand out from the crowd.

As an aside: I know there's tons of advice (online and off) about how to apply for a job. The basics are clear, e.g. write a custom cover letter and proofread it for typos that the spell checker missed. But unless the job market for a specific position is incredibly tight, that's not enough. If anyone knows of a book, Web site, or coaching service that shows people how to go above and beyond, please add a comment below. Thanks!

At the Investor Relations Blog, Dominic Jones makes an excellent point:

THE spotty success rate of mergers and acquisitions in creating shareholder value has long dogged investors who must try to decide whether a proposed acquisition by a company they own makes sense.

But with the advent of employee bloggers on the open Internet, especially those who work for leading technology companies, investors may be getting valuable insights into at least one factor that can make or break a successful deal: corporate culture.

In the ongoing Microsoft/Yahoo saga, there's been plenty of discussion of the severe mismatch between the two corporate cultures. (Way too much for me to provide links!) Jones quotes a Yahoo employee: "I estimate that 1 in 10 Yahoos will refuse to work for Microsoft". (I'll add: mere numbers don't tell the story; it's the best technical staff who are most likely to leave.)

Here's more from the Yahoo employee's blog:

Key reason #1 - Microsoft is anti open-source, Yahoo! utilizes open source technologies extensively.
...
Key reason #2 - Microsoft is evil, Yahoo! is not.
...
Key reason #3. Microsoft technologies suck.

(Note that it doesn't matter whether any of the above are objectively true, only whether Yahoo folks agree.)

How about some views from inside Microsoft? Mini-Microsoft is worth a read:

Feb 1:

I'm surprised yet not surprised. Internally, a number of us had heard reasons from Steve Ballmer why a Yahoo! acquisition didn't make sense. One that sticks in my mind right now is how if we acquired Yahoo! - such a big company - we'd have to naturally have layoffs within Microsoft to accommodate it.

Feb 10:

Microsoft's Yahoo! Acquisition is Bold. And Dumb.

Please, Yahoo!: fight to stay independent.

There's plenty more where that came from.

Yesterday's Business Week describes "How American Andrew Paulson is building a growing Internet empire in Russia".

Paulson founded SUP in the summer of 2006. "That October, he signed a licensing agreement to manage [Live Journal's] Russian-language pages." In December 2007, SUP acquired Live Journal from Six Apart. Shortly thereafter, Jason Shellen (who was at Pyra Labs, the developers of Blogger) joined as VP of Product Development.

The Business Week article is worth a read. I also found an interesting video interview of Paulson at Intruders.tv (in the UK).

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has a great quote from Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera:

press releases are kind of like poorly-written company blog posts

Well said! It's a defense and critique all rolled into one. I'm not convinced that blogs will replace press releases, though I think blogs continue to make PR of all sorts better.

There's been plenty of blogosphere discussion of press releases, e.g. see this wrap-up from PR Blog News in January. One result: an ongoing effort to create a Social Media Release.

Last week, O'Reilly Media ran the first Money:Tech Conference.

Money and technology are inseparable. Massive new tradable data sets are being exposed by the Web; new bottoms-up social networks are creating alternative ways of discovering investing ideas; a rising percentage of newswire content is being written and consumed by machines; new classes of monitoring services are revealing deep data that might otherwise go unnoticed and untraded for weeks; and real-time itself is being redefined.

Today, program chair Paul Kedrosky posted links to slides from several of the presentations.

Worth a look to see "Where Web 2.0 meets Wall Street".

VentureBeat provides ongoing coverage of the venture capital community and venture-backed startups. Last week, founder Matt Marshall announced a new hire:

I’m delighted to report that Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech writer from the San Jose Mercury News, is joining VentureBeat.

Dean is one of the most prolific writers I know. He has written about chips, servers, computers, gadgets and particularly, games, which is his real passion.

Paul Boutin at Valleywag reported yesterday that VentureBeat matched Takahashi's previous salary. (I'm betting there was some upside too, whether equity or bonus potential.)

So, how can a blog afford that? VentureBeat reports:

VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been hiring writers and we have record traffic. I’ve bootstrapped the company thus far, and while it’s been rewarding, there’s just so much more we’d like to do. We’ve been pretty much in the black since I launched, and I’ve hired writers as cash afforded. Now that we’ve got our feet on the ground, its time to get to the next phase.

We’ve raised $320,000 cash from a number of angel investors, including Georges Harik, a very early employee at Google and manager of several of its early products; Aydin Senkut, another early Google employee who is now running a small angel fund called Felicis Ventures; Mike Brown, an investor at Foundation Capital, but who invested on his own accord; Philippe Cases, an investor specialized in open source; MHS Capital; Amidzad; and Elliott Donnelly’s White Sand Group among others.

Buried in the comments of a recent A VC post, Marc Coullier (posting as "bpm140") has some great advice for entrepreneurs:

I learned a valuable lesson with the MyBlogLog acquisition that I've passed on to at least a dozen startup founders who ask me about my experiences. I'll post it here to that I never have to say it again:

Figure out exactly how much money you would need never to improve your product again. If they offer you that much, take it and don't bitch when you never get to improve your product again. Otherwise, keep your head down and build.

There are exceptions to the rule, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

The context: kudos to Yahoo for buying innovative startups like MyBlogLog, Flickr and Delicious -- but all 3 seem to have stagnated since the acquisition. In theory, large companies like Yahoo can bring greater financial resources -- and of course a larger audience. In practice, the "big company" culture often grinds things to a halt.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started a blog to "facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process". The TSA is not popular so I give them credit for walking into what could easily be a lion's den.

Jon Stokes of Ars Technica welcomed them (in a manner of speaking) with a request: Explain to me about bomb juice, which they did in some detail. (Whether it's convincing is a topic I will leave for other blogs.)

Even better, they listened to complaints and took action!

On Monday afternoon we began receiving questions about airports that were requiring ALL electronics to be removed from carry-on bags (everything, including blackberrys, iPods and even cords). This practice was also mentioned on several other blogs and left us scratching our heads.

After some calls to our airports, we learned that this exercise was set up by local TSA offices and was not part of any grand plan across the country. These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon

I'm impressed. Will other government agencies join in?

Hat tips: Ryan Singel at Wired's Threat Level blog and Ryan Paul at Ars Technica.

Thanks to a tip from our exclusive source, we're happy to present the blogosphere's first link to the Nuremberg Zoo's videos of a polar bear cub named "Flocke" (German for "flake", as in snowflake). The cub makes quite a sound when hungry. (The Zoo doesn't seem to encourage embedding, so click through to the collection of 52 short videos.)

Well, not quite the first. Technorati doesn't show any links, but Google Blogsearch has two in English and two not.

For still shots, see the January and February archives.

The Nuremberg Zoo also maintains a polar bear news page.

National Geographic covers some backstory on why the cub was taken from its mother.

Update: as expected, Cute Overload posted pictures on Jan. 10 and again Jan. 13. And of course there are plenty of Flocke videos on YouTube. "haha.nu - a lifestyle blogzine" posted one from LiveLink on Saturday.