Calling all Open Source innovators: showcase your innovative product at the ‘Demo Cup’ and enter it for the ‘Open Innovation Awards’ at the 2010 Open World Forum

Paris, 30 June 2010, for immediate distribution.

The Demo Cup, which will take place on 1 October in Paris at the 2010 Open World Forum, is a ‘demo’ competition, open to all Open Source and free software innovators.

Twelve companies, chosen from written applications, will be nominated and invited to give an eight-minute presentation of their work to the large audience expected to attend the Open World Forum, including decision-makers with a keen interest in Open Source, and a jury of experts in innovation (investors, Open Source integrators and experts).

The Open Innovation Awards 2010 will be awarded to the top best presenters at the Demo Cup. The contest is open to all Open Source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market. The jury will be looking at those projects and solutions most likely to have a significant impact on society and on the marketplace.

The Open Innovation Demo Cup is about products; it requires timed, live demonstrations; and does not allow slide presentations! In recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of Open Source projects on stage in a short 8 minutes, the Demo Cup will honor outstanding presentations. Chosen for their style, passion, clarity, and sometimes for their sheer fun, these Open Innovation Awards reward a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off its most compelling features, to differentiate it from other products — and along the way to entertain a tough and critical Open World Forum audience.

So this event is a three-fold opportunity for Open Source entrepreneurs: to present their company at an international event; to make contact with potential customers and partners; and for the winners and finalists, to enjoy the recognition that comes with a prestigious award which reflects the fact that their product has successfully convinced a demanding panel of judges.

Last year’s Open Innovation Awards, organized according to slightly different arrangements, were given to five companies: BonitaSoft, Kaltura, ScaleDB, SonarSource and Ulteo.

To enter the Awards, all you have to do is to submit your entry, before 15 July 2010, in the form of a five to ten-page executive summary (in English, given that this is an international competition) along with an initial draft of the storyboard for the demo that would be presented during the final, to the following address: democup@openworldforum.org.

You can also use this address should you have any other questions about the contest.

The 2010 Demo Cup is organized by the Open World Forum, with operational support provided by the Open Source Software Special Interest Group at the Systematic competitiveness cluster.

For more info, visit: http://www.openworldforum.org/connect/awards/awards

About the Open World Forum

The Open World Forum is the premier global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers from across the world to discuss the technological, financial and social impact of open technologies, and to cross-fertilize ideas and initiatives in these areas. At the hub of the Free/Open Source revolution, the event was first staged in 2008, and takes place every year in Paris with more than 140 speakers from 30 countries, a 1,500-strong international audience and numerous conferences, workshops and think-tanks. The 2010 Open World Forum will be held on 30 September and 1 October, under the banner of “Open is the future: Open Innovation – Open Enterprise – Open Society”. Organized by a unique network of partners including the main Free/Open Source communities and most of the leading IT players worldwide, the Open World Forum is a must-attend event to discover the latest trends in open technology, business and social issues and to explore the future of Free/Open Source initiatives. It also offers a unique opportunity to share insights and best practices with many of the most respected visionaries, entrepreneurs and community leaders, and network with technology gurus, CxOs, analysts, CIOs, researchers, government leaders and investors from six continents.

To request an invitation, please visit http://www.openworldforum.org

About the Open Source Software Special Interest Group

With its stated mission of “developing the open source ecosystem in the Île-de-France”, the Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre or Open Software Special Interest Group of the Systematic competitiveness cluster now consists of a network of over 90 partners, including 15 major companies, 50 SMEs and 25 research and higher education institutions. Its aim is to encourage co-operation, innovation and value creation around collaborative R&D projects and other activities that support the development of innovative enterprises, following the Open Source principles and values. 17 collaborative R&D projects dedicated to open source software, representing grants to the value of over €15 million, have already been financed with the support of the Group.

More information: http://www.gt-logiciel-libre.org/

[via Stefane Fermigier]

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.

Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to  Save MySQL!

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”

Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.

Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?

Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…

This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”

The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”