At 12 noon EDT (4pm GMT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3. The most awaited version of GNU GPL is finally going public after many drafts that helped highlight vital issues for the community of free software users. There will be live footage of Richard Stallman announcing GPLv3 from Noon EDT at www.fsf.org , less than one hour remaining from now. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we have more information.
Today AdSense Referrals goes public after about four months of testing. The new version will be rolled out progressively to all publishers in referrals-supported languages. Best feature in the new referrals version that it provide more than Google products, and include products from thousands of AdWords advertisers so you can have a better choice of what could better fit with your blog or website. From AdSense Blog : Expanded product inventory : While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren’t able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites. Category and keyword targeting : With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That’s why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site.
Oracle and Forrester Research are organizing a webcast titled “CRM & The Power of Choice” on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 (8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT). You can hear from Mike Betzer, Vice President Product Management Oracle, and Liz Herbert, Senior Analyst Forrester Research, in addition to live Oracle customers.Some vendors preach the software model du jour as the only surefire path to CRM success before understanding your business requirements. In many cases organizations have different needs within their enterprise and choosing only one CRM application, without the flexibility to adjust to organizational differences, diminishes the success of both the organization and the customers they serve
A new experiment just goes public for AdSense to use Rounded corners instead of the classic squared corners. The new feature provides two flavors of rounded corners: slightly rounded and Very rounded. Of course if you don’t opt for anyone the squared will be displayed by default. What I find interesting is that usually borders are annoying to make ads stick with content and generate very low CTR, now it’s interesting to experiment the new ads especially with the rounded Google logo which fit very well with the new design. AdSense goes web 2.0 with the new look, and it’s the first contextual advertising program which started providing such new look for its ads. I think blogs concerned are mainly those with very web 2.0 designs and which usually don’t generate much clicks. I have opted for very rounded corner just to test it, and thing that I didn’t like is especially the text which is very close at the corner with very rounded corners, probably it’s more interesting to experiment slightly rounded corners instead of the very rounded ones.
Three open source projects phpAdsNew, phpPgAds and Max Media Manager have joined forces to create a single and global solution that is called OpenAds . The solution which is very well known for the PHP Community and the advertising business, have been used widely even by very well known advertising companies such FMpub . The investment have been raised by Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and a number of incredible angel investors – to help Openads realise its vision: to become the platform that all websites use to make money online. According to OpenAds Blog , the money will help releasing new versions of the software fast. A good news for an open source PHP project which is moving a step forward to confirm its position as best “ad server”. Currently 3 different version of OpenAds is available for download, but this going to be merged very soon. Also I wanted to mention that OpenAds is hiring, if you are around central London you might check this . Below the press release : Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver designed for and used by publishers worldwide, secured a $5 million Series A financing led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The London-based company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team.
Two great news for the PEAR community, now the PEAR project got an official blog available at blog.pear.php.net . The blog will be used for announcements, sharing ideas with the community, and general information about the PEAR project. The second good news is that PEAR Installer 1.6.0 have been released with some bugfixes and improvements including : minor improvements to the output of list-all, list, list-upgrades, search. Channel is displayed for many of these commands by default, and with an optional switch for the others implementation of code coverage reports using xdebug for .phpt-based tests with the pear run-tests command
Christopher Jones posted an excellent step by step howto upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on Linux . Pretty useful if you want to migrate to PHP5 for example with the release 3 or Oracle 10g. Personally my big worries is not with Linux, but with Sun Solaris, because I have here a quite old server with some funny limitations like the command line to type the PHP configure, and an old oracle version. Sincerely I can’t wait to move everything to linux and update oracle, and stop facing everyday old systems limitations. The technical problem faced with building PHP is that the Oracle libraries for AS do not include header files. This can be overcome by linking PHP with Oracle Instant Client but care needs to be taken so that AS itself does not use the Instant Client libraries. Otherwise you will get errors or unpredictable behavior.