ReadWriteEnterprise

The first major release of Adobe's Flash Player in two years was announced today. While anyone could download a beta of v11 over the past several weeks, the finished code will be available early next month and comes packed with new features. As an indication of demand (or just paranoia about potential security exploits), the beta was downloaded a million times in its first week. Flash is used in 98% of desktops that are connected to the Internet, according to Adobe and in just about every device imaginable with the notable exception of the iOS family.

The huge problem for online services is that traditional SQL database managers don't scale up when database sizes approach "exascale" - the tremendous and fast-growing repositories needed by services like Facebook and Twitter. There's nothing conceptually wrong with SQL, it's just that the underlying RDBMS architecture does not perform well with these tremendous workloads.

Simpler database constructs can handle bigger workloads, as long as the work they do stays more along the lines of simple storage and retrieval and doesn't get too analytical. Today, a new vendor named DataStax whose backers include Rackspace is launching a commercial rendition of an exascale database manager that marries an open source database manager project launched at Facebook with an open source distributed processing project started at Google.

Today VMware released Fusion 4, the latest in its line of desktop virtualization products for Mac OS X. Promising a "more Mac-like experience," Fusion 4 sports a revised user interface, and the ability to virtualize Mac OS X, Fusion 4 has a lot to offer.

I had a chance to get my hands on the release a bit early, so I decided to take VMware Fusion 4 for a spin to see what it has to offer. The early verdict? Fusion 4 is a no-brainer upgrade for folks already using VMware Fusion, and a good choice for new switchers who need a way to run Windows apps on their Mac.

Last year, financial analysts took note of the steepening share decline by SAP in the CRM software market, with the other three major players - Salesforce.com, Siebel (Oracle), and Microsoft Dynamics - reaping the benefits. This week's buzz around the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco (which formally gets under way tomorrow) lends credence to the observation that SAP is no longer the acknowledged market leader, at least among hearts and minds.

One way Microsoft has always competed with hearts and minds when it really needs to is with dollars. This morning, in advance of its competitor's big show, Microsoft announced a rich set of $150 per-seat rebates on new client access licenses (CALs) purchased directly from Microsoft.

Earlier this week Oracle took the wraps off of Oracle VM 3. Oracle's Adam Hawley, senior director of product management, says that Oracle VM 3 is ready to roll out across the entire data center, and not just for managing Oracle's applications.

If you're a long-time reader of the many dozens of blogs out there, no doubt you've run into inline contextual ads - those double-underlined terms that bring up little video screens when your mouse passes over them, courtesy of such providers as Kontera and Vibrant Media. Advertisers generate campaigns around a handful of words, and whenever those words appear in the articles of participating sites, they instantly become ad triggers.

This morning, a new advertising platform called Stipple announced it has built a similar kind of platform around images, based not on text matching but image pattern matching. Stipple's platform examines images for similarities to pictures that advertisers provide, such as an article of clothing or a particular style of purse or a certain vehicle. Whenever the reader's mouse pointer passes over them in a picture, up pops a little screen, perhaps with a price tag and links to a vendor.

On October 1, 2013, the US Deptment of Health and Human Services will expect all of America's health care providers to have transitioned their business bookkeeping and transaction records to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) standards. Although the latest set of the so-called ICD codes (International Classification of Diseases), called ICD-10, were rolled out in 1992, a study by the Medical Group Management Association estimates that the cost for each U.S. hospital simply to change its forms and retrain its office managers could exceed $2 million.

Why the change? The term "disease" has been stretched somewhat since the ICD was first implemented after World War II. Now the system is being used to classify every kind of conceivable ailment; and now healthcare professionals and office managers are being expected to comprehend a system of codes that has expanded from just over 10,000 classifications (ICD-9) to potentially over 140,000 (ICD-10).

Joyent, a company well-known to RWW readers for its backing of Node.js is announcing a step in a different direction today: the company has ported Linux KVM to its SmartOS offering and is making SmartOS available as a ready to install distribution and putting all the source on GitHub.

Citrix announced Wednesday that it has acquired RingCube to expand its virtual desktop product line and add flexibility to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). By adding VDesk's technologies to its current XenDesktop offerings, Citrix plans to simplify the transition from physical desktops to virtual desktops.

Earlier this month VMware announced a new pricing scheme for vSphere that immediately raised the ire of many customers. VMware has now revised its pricing scheme again, this time increasing the per-license entitlement for vRAM, which should help customers affected by the earlier change contain costs.

VMware shifted the basis of pricing from CPU cores to vRAM, which some customers expected would triple costs even though VMware claimed it would simplify and reduce costs. One commenter in the VMware forums wrote "You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor."