But as we learned today, mobile devices are growing at 5 times the rate of PCs.

And with WiFi or Ethernet chips now appearing in “things” like TVs and disk drives, and arriving soon in every electronic device in the home, the potential for malware instability (AKA SkyNet) is increasing exponentially.

That’s why Symantec announced a strategic partnership and an investment with Mocana. Mocana makes a “device security framework” that secures communications and data on any connected device.

Mocana’s CTO is James Blaisdell, the best emebedded software developer I have ever met (and those of you who know me know that I have met quite a few of them in my time). I have had the pleasure of working in various capacaties with James at four different companies over the last 16 years.

He first worked for me in 1994 as a QA engineer at Tribe Computer Works, and after I left he took over my work on a 56Kb serial driver I had been working on, redesigning it using a unique technique that I had never before seen and making it much faster than my original .

A couple of years later he started RapidLogic along with a few other people from Tribe who also worked for me, and sold that company in 2000 or so for $56MM to Wind River (now part of Intel). I served on RapidLogic’s Board of Directors.

When James decided to leave Wind River, which had acquired RapidLogic, I hired him on the spot at Kenamea, knowing full well that it was a waypoint for him while he decided what his next venture would be. James built the embedded versions our product for Palm, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile simultaneously, from scratch, in just a few months, which is quite a feat since he had never before programmed on any of those unique platforms.

James left a year later to start Mocana (which happens to have been the code name of one of our releases), and not long after that I wrote a check as one of the first investors in this venture. What makes his effort at Mocana so extraordinary is that James knew very little about security before starting Mocana, and over the last 5 or so years he has become one of the world’s foremost experts in a field notorious for being among the most dense and difficult areas of computing.

So, congratulations, James and the rest of the Mocana team. You have come a long way, and I am very proud of you.

Not only does it encompass what we traditionally think of virtualization: running multiple guest OSes on the same piece of hardware, but it also is the enabling technology for other large initiatives, such as server consolidation, data center continuity, virtual desktops, cloud computing, and “infrastructure as a service.”

The dirty little secret is that virtualization places a huge burden on storage systems. VMWare has a suite of products, a team, and a blog all dedicated to storage issues.

And Azure Capital Partners, where I am the CTO-in-Residence, recently co-led the Series A investment in CORAID, a leading storage networking company for virtualized environments. CORAID’s EtherDrive product provides a 5-8X cost reduction over legacy storage systems with its “scale-out SAN architecture that is ideally suited to dynamic virtualization and cloud environments.”

But the virtualization storage problem is multi-faceted and complex, so the breadth of solutions must be equal to the task.

This is why I am pleased to announce my participation, along with Bipul Sinha of Blumberg Capital, in a seed round at Nutanix, an enterprise-class storage management company led by three world-class entrepreneurs Dheeraj Pandey CEO, Ajeet Singh COO, and Mohit Aron CTO.

Nutanix is still in stealth mode, but they do have a hint on their career page:

Nutanix is a stealth-mode startup building a disruptive product that is designed ground-up to leverage trends in virtualization, solid state drives, and cloud computing, each of which plays a very critical role in reducing cost and management complexity, improving performance, and providing revolutionary data management capabilities to the enterprise.

Keep an eye out for Nutanix. Big things are happening.

As Internet usage shifted from USENET to WWW, so, too has the technology for human-powered answers to our burning questions. We’ve had Keen.com, Yahoo! Answers, Google Q&A, Linkedin Answers, and recently Hunch and Aardvark (acquired by Google for a reported $50MM).

The main problem with these sites has been keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high.

StackOverflow solves this problem is a number of well established, clever ways: reputations, voting, bounties, and merit badges, and it has become the de facto site for technologists to get questions answered. (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/)

I’m honored to be backing a great team led by two extraordinary technologists: Joe “On Software” Spolsky and Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood.

Stay tuned. More answers are coming.

The Angel List list reads like a who’s who of the angel investing world, and you can pitch all of us at once.

This is a great way to get your company funded.

Special thanks to Nivi and Naval for putting this together.

http://www.getservo.com/press/12152009/

Coherence March 2009 Update

A week ago Oracle massively exceeded expectations, completely crushing the hopes of the doomsday crowd. Part of those results stems from the growth in Fusion Middleware, which includes BEA WebLogic. This past quarter I saw a big jump in the number of accounts switching from WebSphere back to WebLogic on the high end, and (quite surprisingly, considering the economic climate) from JBoss to WebLogic. I could mark it up solely to a great sales organization, but there are some really interesting things at work that have made a huge difference in the ability to win business with WebLogic:

WebLogic is getting a higher level of technology investment as part of Oracle than it has seen in a long time, and those investments are starting to pay real rewards for our customers.
We showed a plan for WebLogic and the other BEA products. We have been steadily delivering on the plan. Customers appreciate the “ability to execute” combined with actual execution.
Several of the technologies in the Fusion Middleware stack just can’t be found elsewhere. Start with jRockit, the real-time JVM that dominates all of the performance records (see here, here, here and here for example.) Add reliable cross-platform, multi-portal session clustering with single sign-on support via Coherence*Web, and the ability to globally load-balance a single application across multiple data centers. Top it off with end-to-end operational monitoring. Wow!

Note that this is in addition to http://theabstracttruth.wordpress.com . both will work, but in case I decide to change blogging systems, its probably better to use http://blog.pasker.net for web and RSS .

This was not meant to be an introduction, because they already have messaging systems in use. Rather, I wrote this presentation (in about 15 minutes) as a springboard to remind everyone what messaging system are capable of, so we could talk further about how to capitalize on the products they were already using.