IBM Set To Acquire Cisco-backed Database Security Startup Guardium For $225 Million
Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardiu

Calling Twitter’s bluff
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twit

Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter
The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google's ChromeOS, Microsoft's Silverlight 4, and salesforce's Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff's position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shootout in Y2K suggests there's more t

Microsoft’s Robbie Bach on Realtime and the Cloud
Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to talk realtime and the cloud with senior Microsoft executives. In this conversation with Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, I tried to delve into what “we inelegantly call Three Screens and A Cloud” from Bach’s vantage point atop Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Media Server, and related hardware. The subtext: Microsoft’s nextgen realtime strategy at the cusp of consumer and enterprise. STEVE GILLMOR: By h

Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz Raises $9 million For New Collaboration Startup, Asana
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel. Moskovitz, who was Facebook's first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (