Nik Cubrilovic (koo-bree-low-vick) is an Australian-born entrepreneur, technologist, software developer and blogger. Nik has been a writer and advisor to Techcrunch since 2005, is a founding editor of TechcrunchIT, and is currently working at Techcrunch and on the Crunchpad project. Nik is the founder and CEO of Omnidrive, a web content and storage platform. Nik was also the founder of Solutionstap, a technology solutions and software development company. Prior to Solutionstap, Nik was a freelance developer, project manager and security specialist in Australia, the UK, South Africa and throughout Europe. Nik has contributed to a large number of open source projects and published a number of security vulnerabilities for various platforms and applications since 1996.
In 2007, Nik was named in The Bulletin magazine as one of Australia’s “Smart 100.”
In 2005 Nik was a founding member of 2web, a loose-knit group of Australian technology entrepreneurs. Nik has advised, or is a current advisor to a range of companies and startups based in both Australia and the USA.
Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from Wall Street analysts. Todays fall is an indication that the economic… → Read More
When Gmail first launched, it was lauded for its spam filtering and security – there was no spam leaving the systems and almost no spam coming in. But all that has changed as a study from Roaring Penguin has found that spam originating from Gmail has risen from 6.8 to 27% in just the last month. The impetus for the big jump is likely to be that the Google account registration CAPTCHA has… → Read More
ZDNet were the first to report that Gotuit Media, a company nobody has heard of, has filed suit against Microsoft for alleged patent infringements in Silverlight. If you go to the Gotuit website to see what they do, you may expect that they have built a browser-based virtual machine, with markup for defining interfaces and that their platform is starting to gain traction, but instead they are a… → Read More
Gartner and IDC have reported that Apple has climbed to third place in the US desktop market, with a market share of approximately 7.8 to 8.5%. Worldwide, Apple has yet to crack the top 5 spots, but in the USA Apple has finished almost tied for third place with Acer (the new merged Acer-Gateway). Dell retains top spot in the USA with 31.9% of the market, and HP is in second place with 25.3%. Apple… → Read More
In Febuary of this year Google re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Google had acquired Jotspot some 16 months earlier, during which time Jot was only available to existing customers and closed to new signups. What happen during those 16 months and why did the process of integrating with Google take so long? Looking through the list of companies that Google has acquired, Jotspot would be… → Read More
Microsoft has dominated the desktop market with Windows since the very first PC’s – a solid run of almost three decades. Despite a late start and some tactics that lead to a lengthy DOJ trial, Microsoft also has the majority of market share in the browser market with Internet Explorer. With the advent of smartphones, Microsoft released Windows Mobile and through device manufacturers… → Read More
Geeks and enthusiasts wearing WordPress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in… → Read More
ZDNet broke the story this morning that Apple has filed suit against Mac clone maker Psystar. The Florida-based manufacturer of PC’s is famous for its ‘OpenMac’ line of Mac clones, which were released earlier this year. The devices are standard PC hardware running a hacked copy of Mac OS X – so the legality of their sale was always questionable. Regardless, Psystar have… → Read More
At the upcoming HackInTheBox conference in Malaysia, security researcher Kris Kaspersky will demonstrate how bugs in microprocessors can be exploited to take control of local machines and servers. Commonly security holes have involved exploiting flaws in software applications, such as developer errors made in bounds checking (buffer overflow), input filtering or user access etc. But with each new… → Read More
There are currently numerous commercial laptop-tracking solutions, most of which register the laptop with a central server and then report back periodically. Tracking solutions are often used when a laptop is lost or stolen, where users are able to disable the laptop remotely, take a log of user activity or take a photo using a built-in webcam whenever there is unauthorized usage. Adeona is the… → Read More
On Friday we wrote about how NBC were partnering with Microsoft and others to use the Olympics coverage as a test-bed for researching new user habits in viewing content between online, television and mobile. The web experience at NBC is powered by Silverlight, also giving Microsoft its first large-scale opportunity to gain distribution for the new web platform. It seems that there are very high… → Read More
Sun has used Salesforce.com as a primary case study of Sun hardware and software powering the future Saas platforms. The early versions of the Salesforce website and application even included a ‘powered by Sun’ logo in the footer, as part of a tight relationship between the two companies. But recently we learnt, and the register is confirming today, that Salesforce has been phasing out… → Read More
Dare Obasanjo has pointed to the Casandra Project, a new open source project hosted on Google Code from Facebook. Cassandra is a P2P clustered data storage engine developed by Facebook, and heavily inspired by the BigTable project at Google. The code is written in Java and has been made available under an Apache 2.0 license. As Dare says, the model used in Cassandra is straight-forward and… → Read More
Zoomix, an Isreali-based company that provides a data optimization and acceleration layer for storage engines, has confirmed today that they have been acquired by Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. The primary product from Zoomix is the Accelerator, a data server that normalizes, links and synchronizes data without requiring user specification or input. It learns from your data sets and… → Read More
Starting today Google has integrated results from Code Search as snippets in the main search results page. Code Search was launched by Google in October of 2005 as a seperate vertical search property. As the name suggests, Code Search indexes and parses source code on the web and provides users a simple but flexible search and repository browsing interface. For a Google property such as Code… → Read More
Engine Yard, a managed hosting services provider for RubyOnRails applications, announced today that they closed a $15M Series B round of financing from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark Capital. The company had previously raised $3.5M from Benchmark back in January of this year – so only 7 months ago. In that time, the company has grown to 80 employees across four continents with servers across two… → Read More
Jason Calacanis announced on Friday that he was retiring from blogging. There was a very mixed reaction to the news, with most believing it to be a publicity stunt. Jason said in his farewell post that instead of blogging, he would instead be posting to a mailing list made up of his followers, capped at 750 subscribers. That subscriber limit was reached very quickly, and today Jason sent out his… → Read More
It has been reported that 1,000 employees are going to be losing their jobs at Sun, with layoffs potentially reaching up to 2,500 employees. The losses are mostly within marketing and sales, and affect the main headquarters as well as the Menlo Park Campus and employees in Colorado. Sun stock is down 6% today to end the week at $9.11, down 64% on its 52-week high of $25.04. Jonathan Schwartz took… → Read More
MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August. It’s another example of data portability in action (as well as… → Read More
Steve Gillmor and I met today with Brian Wick, a director of product marketing and the VP of the Livecycle division at Adobe. Livecycle is a J2EE based enterprise stack for data capture, management, assurance, etc. with the two main Adobe client formats – PDF and Flash. Currently there are over 5,000 customers using LiveCycle application server and apps within the enterprise, the advantage… → Read More
A few days ago we posted about Twitter switching off XMPP support to the public, but keeping it open to select partners such as Summize. Since then, a number of developers have been putting together ways to achieve the same thing but without actual official support from Twitter. One of those developers is Dustin Sallings (Twitter), who has written an XMPP proxy that uses both the Summize and… → Read More
We have been tracking the exodus of employees from Yahoo and have counted 114 executive-level departures since January 2007. The news isn’t going to get any better as we have learnt that of the executives remaining at the company, a large number of them are biding their time and waiting for a large vesting period that finishes up in the first week of August, the same time as the critical… → Read More
Stock in virtualization provider VMWare today dropped almost 25%, as growth expectations were lowered and founding CEO Diane Greene was replaced by the board. Prior to today, VMWare was the fourth largest software company in the world, with a market cap of over $20B. They have slipped down the list and lost $5B in value as the company struggles to match high growth expectations places on it after… → Read More
Over the weekend Diane Greene and VMWare were featured in a profile peice in The Economist which praised both the company and its CEO. EMC acquired VMWare for $650M, and then within a few years had split VMWare out on its own by floating 10% of the company. It was the biggest and most exciting tech IPO since Google, and analysts lavished the company with praise while institutions piled in driving… → Read More
Microsoft has announced this morning the availability of hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, collaboration and communication as part of the Microsoft Online suite. The hosted platform is a direct competitor to the Google App platform, which is currently available either for free or for as little as $50 per year. The service plans for the Microsoft deals start from $3 per user per month – and with… → Read More
VMWare announced this morning that the board and directors have asked CEO Diane Greene to step down as President and CEO effective immediately. Greene, an original founder of the VMWare company, will be replaced by Paul Maritz as President and CEO, and he has also been assign to the board of the company. Maritz was the founder of Pi Corporation, a cloud based storage and services provider that was… → Read More
This morning during the keynote at the Microsoft Partner Conference in Houston, Texas, head of the business division Stephen Elop announced a new program and suite of hosted online services. The new service offerings include hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, Communication Server and Dynamics CRM – all hosted by Microsoft as part of the new online services platform. The new offerings compete… → Read More
Tim O’Reilly broke the news late last night that the CTO of Segway, Doug Field, is leaving to become VP of product design at Apple. Doug had been in charge of Segway’s entire engineering team since day one. John Grohol, Segway’s former Web Architect, wrote on Segway Chat earlier today: Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed… → Read More
Over on our sister blog Techcrunch, we just reviewed a new Windows-based IM client called Say2Go. The client itself is simple, but the main value-add presented is being able to record a message and then have it transcribed automatically and then sent as a text message. Microsoft thought that this use of their new speech technology was so great that they awarded the company first prize in their… → Read More
Last week we received an email from an eagle-eyed Gmail user pointing out a strange graphic that has appeared in the top-left hand corner of the application. The icon is a ten by ten pixel graphic with a diagonal line across it, with one half in black and the other in gray. It isn’t an inline image, as you can not highlite it or select it in your browser, nor right-click on it. There is also… → Read More
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