Today brings news that Sun has acquired MySQL AB, the corporate entity that develops the open-source relational database management system MySQL. I don’t have much to say about this because I’m not sure what to think. I know that MySQL AB has been slowed since Oracle acquired Innobase, a company that provided the InnoDB database engine for MySQL that featured capabilities such as referential integrity that allowed MySQL to compete against the likes of Oracle’s database offerings. MySQL AB itself had spurned Oracle’s advances before, which makes this acquisition a little surprising. I have worked and continue to work on projects using MySQL. It will be interesting to see what unfolds.
Tag Archive for 'acquisitions'
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I’m a little late on this, but last week the folks at London-based Last.fm announced that they had been acquired by CBS. Most “social networking” sites don’t really appeal to me, but Last.fm hits me in my soft spot: music + cool tech + obsessive data collection & reporting.
Last.fm is all based around “scrobbling” the songs you play in iTunes, on your iPod, or however you listen to digital music. Scrobbling reports song plays to a Web server. Last.fm was born out of AudioScobbler, but where Last.fm takes off is in connection of it’s users based on play history. They’ve branched out recently to provide nice Flash-based playlists (see right column) and player. Anyway, their approach to social networking is especially cool.
Anyway, with CBS acquiring Last.fm, it will be interesting to see what direction they go. Congrats to the Last.fm team.
