Fididel is seeking a $1 million round of Series A funding for its e-commerce business, VentureBeat has learned.

The San Jose company has raised $761,250 from investors already. Participants include a new venture firm, Quest Venture Partners of Atherton. The company’s web site, www.fididel.com, has very little information except a form to request e-mails for users to join its e-commerce beta program.

Hal Wendell, CEO of Fididel, said that the company is still in stealth and isn’t ready to describe its e-commerce business. He said it started about a year and a half ago. Wendell said this is his CEO position but he is a veteran of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Nortel.

I asked Wendell about the company name. He said, “It doesn’t mean anything. I woke up one morning and had an epiphany. I knew a Mexican restaurant named Fidel’s and played around with that.”

Lars Buttler isn’t shy in this story in GameDaily. The CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion World Network says that Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision (whose merger with Vivendi’s game unit is pending), was really just trying to scare away rivals when he said recently that it would take $500 million for a competitor to dislodge World of Warcraft from its No. 1 position in the massively multiplayer (MMO) online game market.

Buttler’s own start-up is focused on creating original online games. He previously served as head of online gaming at Electronic Arts and so far has proven adept at raising large sums for his startup. EA itself is going to take on World of Warcraft with the upcoming launch of its Warhammer Online MMO.

“Nice try Mr. Kotick. We understand that Activision has to defend its merger and scare competition — but I have to call his bluff,” Buttler told GameDaily BIZ. It’s not entirely clear how Buttler will compete with WoW, which has 10 million paying subscribers. But he has been building up his arsenal.

Interested in the details about these much talked about and little understood funds? Here’s an outstanding piece in Middle East Quarterly about the investment funds you are hearing more about in the news.

Countries have used sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) as instruments through which to buy assets with their surplus foreign exchange since the 1950s when Norway and Singapore, and soon after Kuwait, sought new strategies to insulate themselves from exchange rate fluctuation. Central banks employed SWFs only as buffers for currency stabilization when countries had little or no international debt and large current account surpluses. Today, SWFs have become quite common. As of March 2007, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia had, respectively, the first and third largest SWFs internationally, and Kuwait ranked sixth.[1] Because of burgeoning oil prices, Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds have become the preferred investment vehicles of Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. As SWFs blur the line between public and private investment, however, Western nations worry about the security implications of foreign countries, including Persian Gulf states, acquiring important positions in key industries and companies.

[From Sovereign Wealth Funds: Investment Vehicles for the Persian Gulf Countries - Middle East Quarterly]

Patents generally have a fixed lifetime, but some can linger on like zombies, thanks to clever lawyering that extends their life unnaturally.

Zombies’ cost to the healthcare system can be significant. Genentech’s Cabilly patent, for instance, should have expired in 2006, but instead stands to cost buyers of antibody drugs $1 billion or more over the next decade. We have the skinny over at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

Who would have thought of a Solaris LiveCD being developed? This is exactly that the folks in Russia did - develop a Live-CD version of Solaris (Nevada b81) and name it MilaX.

The small (less than 100MB) package includes Beaver, Vim, Dillo, Midnight Commander, emelFM, XMMS, Xpdf, VNC viewer, Rdesktop, AxyFTP and Irssi. In addition, you also can the Solaris-exclusive (right now) features such as DTrace, ZFS and brandZ.

I wish I still have my Eee to test it on but what the hey, will ask my friends to test it for me. Who knows? They might just love it over the stock Linux installed. See full article.

Related Entries:

Solaris cluster code to become a part of OpenSolaris community - 27 June 2007

After Java Sun has ambitious plans for Solaris - 06 September 2007

Running Linux on Solaris - 15 September 2007

Is Solaris better than Linux? - 04 January 2008

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

(UPDATED: See below.)

A few weeks ago, we broke the news that 5AM Ventures is nurturing a stealthy startup called — for now — ImmunoNewco. The trail led back to the Danish biotech Borean Pharma, which is developing protein-based drugs against autoimmune conditions, and which may be in the process of transferring some or all of its programs to ImmunoNewco.

5AM partners stopped responding to calls and email when I asked them about Borean — information that emerged thanks to the incautious LinkedIn profile, since edited, of a former Borean employee — and that naturally just sparked my curiosity. Now, with the assistance of a very useful database at the California Department of Corporations, I’ve managed to dig up some additional details.

According to this ImmunoNewco filing (PDF link) with the department, it appears that the startup is headed by Phyllis Whiteley, formerly VP of business development and licensing at Perlegen Sciences and now an entrepreneur-in-residence at 5AM. Perlegen, which spun out of gene-chip maker Affymetrix, has long been focused on personalizing medical treatments to an individual’s genetic profile. In particular, Perlegen wants to salvage failed or otherwise unsuccessful drugs by using genetic scans to determine which patients are most likely to benefit or avoid side effects — a concept known formally as “pharmacogenomics.”

Whiteley, who’s named as president of ImmunoNewco in the company’s California filings, appears to have worked at Perlegen for about three years — she was hired in late 2004 and apparently left sometime last year (her signature is on an ImmunoNewco filing from last October, although her replacements at Perlegen weren’t named until two weeks ago). She has a long history of negotiating drug-licensing deals and gave an interesting interview on Perlegen’s strategy to Pharmacogenomics Reporter in 2005.

It’s entirely possible that Whiteley is involved strictly because of her business skill at acquiring drug cast-offs from other companies. But if all these pieces really fit together — and I have to stress that this is only speculation at this point — it’s beginning to look as though one or more of Borean’s drugs didn’t work out, but that the folks behind ImmunoNewco think they can be salvaged via pharmacogenomics. I tried to reach Whiteley, but she’s not listed in 5AM’s voicemail directory and their operator seems to have taken the afternoon off.

What does all this amount to? At this point, frankly, not a whole lot beyond a stealthy company that’s fun to noodle with. I happen to agree with Seth Levine’s partners that stealth is overrated as a business strategy, although of course VC firms like 5AM are well within their rights to keep whatever secrets they want to keep. But we’re also within our rights as journalists to pull on threads and see where they lead. Puzzles are fun, dammit.

UPDATE: Puzzles are also extremely satisfying when they start to come together. Borean’s Web site has been replaced with a blank page referring inquiries to “Katherine Bowdish, PhD.” in San Diego. I called Bowdish, who declined to speak on the record but hinted that there may be new developments shortly, so stay tuned.

Bowdish co-founded Prolifaron, a San Diego biotech focused on — guess what? — antibody engineering technology. That company was acquired by Alexion in 2000, where Bowdish eventually became a senior VP in charge of antibody technology. You can read her capsule biography here.

Whilst it is true that apt-get and synaptic (or insert your favorite package manager here) make it easy to install and upgrade applications. However, uninstalling is still quite tricky specially if the application has lots of dependencies. I have been victim to getting my system borked because of an error in uninstallation - removed an app and all associated libraries accidentally. Charged it to experience and re-installed the entire OS. Good thing it is not that difficult. However, how do you prevent such from happening? See full article.

Related Entries:

Apt-file, your installation companion - 21 February 2007

How to create your own CD-based package repository - 03 September 2007

How to install applications in Ubuntu - 29 September 2007

Evaluation of the statistical packages available in the market - 30 October 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

Who doesn't like a speedy computer? Whilst there are quite a number of hacks to speed up your computer, here is *another* one that has a different approach. The tool is called preload, a daemon that does magic with your system. Well, magic is pushing it but what exactly does preload do? See full article.

Related Entries:

Mac Hack: The Story Continues... - 05 September 2006

Need for Speed - 03 January 2007

2007 Goodwood Festival of Speed, the Speed Fest We'd Most Like to See in Person - 23 March 2007

Need for Speed 12: Schon in Planung - 31 August 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

We all know that files, specially from digital cameras, are named in a specific format that have no information whatsoever about its contents. There are other files that behave the same way, i.e., no intelligible or descriptive filenames. So what do we do, we rename it but if there are dozens of these files, we often write a script to process it so we will not be manually renaming the files individually (yeah, crazy, huh?). See full article.

Related Entries:

The Rise of DarkNets in Response to File Sharing - 02 August 2005

Creating Multiple User Accounts in Batch - 27 August 2006

PHP-Klasse::Pictoru's File Tree - 01 März 2007

Batch Operations and More - 27 August 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

The ultra-affordable portable market is booming! The Asus Eee PC, Everex Cloudbook, Intel Classmate PC and the XO Laptop are joined by another player from across the pond, the Elonex "One".

Just like the other players, Elonex decided to use Linux as its operating system to cut on the cost. Priced at UKP99, this 1kg wonder packs a 7" 800x480 screen, 300MHz processor, 128MB (upgradeable to 256MB) RAM, 1GB (upgradeable to 2GB) storage, IEEE 802.11b/g, 100Mbps Ethernet, 2 USB2.0 ports, mic and headphone ports with optional Bluetooth module. This critter boasts of a 4 hour battery life, too!

What sets this one a tad above the others is the ability to function just like a tablet PC with a detachable screen. Well, I just don't know how that will be functional without a touch screen but what do I know? :)

What is important now is that we are getting more players in the market and this is good. Hopefully, we will see the likes of Apple, Sony, Lenovo, Acer, and the rest, to realize that this is a healthy market. So, will you be getting one? See full article.

Related Entries:

Sony's latest ultraportable Notebook - 21 April 2005

First Look: Mini-Notebook Offers Maximum Power - 15 May 2005

One Classmate Per Child? - 13 July 2007

OQO Demonstrates WiMax UMPC for Sprint's Xohm Network - 07 January 2008

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.