Our first week is over on TechcrunchIT and it has been a busy one. Steve Gillmor and I spent time with Salesforce, Sun, at Velocity with a super-smart guy about to join Twitter and with two other smart guys who have a new Javascript platform called SproutCore that Apple has taken a keen interest in. It was also a big week for Open Source as a business as we heard about rapid growth at RedHat and MySQL now at Sun talking about their $100M revenue rate, strong growth and future plans. The cloud is getting more crowded and competitive with a serise of announcements this week starting with Cloudstatus, new stuff at Mosso and a new cloud-based video encoding platform. Bill Gates finished his last fulltime day at Microsoft and we wrote up a list of things he can now get around to now that he has all that time on his hands, while Steve analyzed the future at a Microsoft now without Gates. To subscribe to TechcrunchIT hit up the feed, or follow us on twitter at www.twitter.com/techcrunchit. To get in touch with us with stories, news or tips visit our contact page. → Read More

We just launched TechCrunchIT, our newest property, with editors Steve Gillmor and Nik Cubrilovic. The site is focused on the enterprise tech space – all the software, technologies, standards, platforms, etc. that help companies do their thing, and form the building blocks of the products we feature on TechCrunch, MobileCrunch and our other blogs. TCIT will be a lot like TechCrunch in editorial and content style – a range of enterprise-related news and analysis including applications, open standards, platforms, cloud computing, microenterprises, customer experience, legacy enterprise, social media, information management and software among other subjects. They aim to promote an understanding of emerging and existing enterprise technologies and products and to analyze their commercial, social, and consumer impact. Make sense? If it’s not clear where the line is between TechCrunch and TechCrunchIT, perhaps my muffler analogy will help. A frequent debate on the Gillmor Gang is over the importance, or at least the interestingness, of end user/consumer products (think YouTube) v. the technologies that allow those products to exist (in YouTube’s case, Adobe Flash). I personally think the YouTube’s of the world are more interesting, and I refer to those products as “Ferarris.” All the technology that goes into making those Ferarris I refer to as “mufflers” (the enterprise guys hate that, which is why I keep doing it). Basically, TechCrunchIT is a blog about the mufflers. And Steve and Nik are going to do their best to keep you entertained while reporting every important development in the muffler market. Quite often there will be cross coverage between the blogs when we think a particular story will interest both sets of readers. Also, Steve and Nik will continue to occasionally write here on TechCrunch. You may even see me hop over to TechCrunchIT once in a while to write a post or two. We have two terrific sponsors right out of the gate – Microsoft and Sun. Thanks to both of them for believing in us as we get started with TechCrunchIT. There are still a few bugs on the site, so bear with us as the paint dries and everything settles down. But if you hurry over there now, you’ll see some live coverage of the Salesforce/Google event in San Francisco today. → Read More