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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS is a major release of the operating system Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical first released in 2004. In this interview with Simon Dingle Shuttleworth discusses the significance of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, competitor operating systems, the move to cloud services, open source advocacy and how it has changed in recent years, application distribution, social networking, smartphones and other topics.

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

Qualcomm is throwing its hat into the augmented reality ring with a new SDK for the development of AR applications. The company issued the following press release today; (more…)

It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were allied against Microsoft and the broader market. The marriage of the two Silicon Valley giants was torn asunder by Google’s ingression in the mobile market with Android. The former confederates went their separate ways with Google CEO Eric Schmidt leaving the Apple board. Now it’s on like Donkey Kong between the three tech behemoths – and cloud computing is a new frontier in the ongoing war.

In the enterprise space cloud is less remarkable than its most vehement proponents would have you believe. The IBMs and Microsofts of the world have established metrics, case studies and methodologies for how it’s done. And, as IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said in a meeting with press at Armonk, New York Yesterday – this cloud stuff is “nothing new”. He’s seen it all before. In the consumer space things are different, however, and here I include small business.
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The Fins have landed their latest evolution of mobile messaging in South Africa. Nokia Messaging was previously available as a global Beta, but is now ready to roll and MTN has been signed as the first local partner for the service – which will no longer be free if you switch over to the official release. I’ll state up front that I’m honestly confused by this announcement.

Nokia says that their Messaging service is easy to set-up and use with push e-mail services that support up to ten personal e-mail accounts on one device.

Nokia Messaging supports all leading consumer e-mail solutions including Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail as well as local email services from MWEB, MTN Play and Webmail. (more…)