TECH CHRONICLES / A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle's technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech)

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Facebook executive director graduating to VC firm

Matt Cohler, one of Facebook's earlier hires, is leaving the Palo Alto social-networking startup for a occupation at a Silicon Valley venture working capital firm.

Facebook made the proclamation Thursday. Cohler, frailty president of merchandise direction at Facebook, will autumn in Benchmark Capital as a general spouse in the fall. But he'll remain in touching with Facebook as a particular advisor to Facebook laminitis and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and the senior direction team.

The 31-year-old executive already have A jammed resume: He was a initiation member of LinkedIn, the Mountain Position societal web recently valued at $1 billion; served as a adviser for McKinsey; and worked in Peking at AsiaInfo Holdings Inc., a telecom company that helped construct China's Internet infrastructure.

Said Zuckerberg in a statement: Cohler "has been an of import subscriber to Facebook's growing and success."

- Ellen Lee
GM, museums among robo-cars' admirers

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which most famously sponsored the early research behind the Internet, have lit a fire under robotics in recent old age by sponsoring a series of driverless auto races meant to develop crash-avoidance sensors and software.

Now, two of DARPA's title-holder robo-cars are back in the news. General Motors Corp. said Thursday that it will put $5 million in a five-year joint research undertaking with Dale Carnegie Andrew Mellon University, whose "Boss" robo-car won a race held last twelvemonth in a citylike setting.

"Imagine being virtually chauffeured in your auto while doing your e-mail, eating breakfast and watching the news," gram Frailty President for Research Larry George Burns said in a statement. "The work we're doing with Dale Carnegie Andrew Mellon is a large stepping rock toward making this a reality."

Stanford University's "Stanley" - the robo-car that South Korean won a 2005 dash across the Mohave Desert - is making a monthlong cavity halt at the Technical School Museum of Invention in San Jose before going on show at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Stanley, a Volkswagen guided by self-driving software developed at Stanford, just returned from a planetary triumph lap that took it to Singapore, Johannesburg and Munich. Until July 17, it will be strutting its stuff, for free, at San Jose's Technical School before being sent to rest on its award at the newly renovated Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

- Uncle Tom Abate
ITunes atop the human race of music retailing

Earlier this year, iTues leapfrogged into the No. One place as the nation's top music retailer, surpassing even Wal-Mart, according to NPD. The iTunes Shop offers more than than 8 million songs for sale online.

Apple, the Cupertino shaper of the iPod and iPhone, also said it is renting or merchandising 50,000 movies per day.

- Ellen Lee
HP to consolidate its printing businesses

Print 2.0, Hewlett-Packard's transmutation of its printing business, continues. The company said it is consolidating five of its printing groupings into three units of measurement with an oculus toward streamlining the concern around certain key client segments.

The move affects foldable HP's stores grouping into the remaining units of measurement and combining the endeavor grouping with the ink jet plane unit. That assists horsepower focusing on three markets: consumers and little businesses, enterprise, and commercial printing and graphics.

HP said the reorganisation was not aimed at eliminating jobs. There will be a rebalancing of resources to suit the changes, the company said.

HP have been remaking its black and white concern over the last twelvemonth since it announced its Print 2.0 strategy. It's moving away from being just a shaper of pressmen to being a printing company that supplies a assortment of hardware and solutions for all kinds of customers.

One of the big countries of growth, which this reorg addresses, is the chance in large graphical and commercial printing jobs, such as as signs, hoardings and publications. horsepower have said that the small-scale printing it's been known for in the past brands up lone 15 percentage of the millions of pages printed each year.

- Ryan Kim

Sun Locks Up MySQL, Looks To Future Web Development - InformationWeek

Sun Microsystems have completed its acquisition of MySQL six hebdomads after announcing its purpose to make so. As of today, Marten Mickos, MySQL's former CEO, is now senior VP of a new software system system database group, reporting to Rich Green, executive director VP for software. Sun chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz said Mickos also will describe directly to him as portion of Sun's senior direction team.

The $1 billion cost of acquiring MySQL was deserving the price, said Schwartz. MySQL "was the crown gem of the unfastened beginning marketplace," with 11 million clients and "the strategical value of gap new marketplaces to Sun," he said in a teleconferencing announcing the closing of the trade on Tuesday.

MySQL is the speedy, unfastened source, Web-page-serving database that's used by Facebook, Google, Slashdot, and other giants of the Web. With Sun's help, MySQL can now defeat what Schwartz termed "the head liability of unfastened beginning companies," supplying 24/7 planetary technical support.

The acquisition "marks the end of a singular epoch for MySQL and the beginning of another singular one," Mickos said at the teleconference. "As portion of Sun, we will turn to function more than clients with larger deployments and larger scalability."

The proclamation was filled with superlatives. "This is the most of import acquisition in Sun's history," said Schwartz, even though Sun's $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technologies in June 2005 was much larger. Reminded of StorageTek, Schwartz said, "We don't have got any 2nd ideas about history. MySQL as a database is as much about storage as StorageTek. We're gathering together the most compelling unfastened beginning storage platform in the industry."

Sun is counting on MySQL's continued growing in the $15 billion-a-year database industry to fuel further software system gross sales out of the Sun portfolio, although analysts set MySQL's share of that at somewhere less than $100 million a twelvemonth in revenue. Both Mickos and Schwartz took striving to state that Linux, not Sun's Solaris, will stay MySQL's primary operating system. In fact, MySQL runs on Linux as its most popular platform, with Windows second, and Solaris coming in a distant third. Nevertheless, MySQL was developed on Solaris, said St Simon Phipps, main unfastened beginning military officer at Sun.

At a mass media acme Feb. 13, Schwartz raised some superciliums when he said the popular lamp stack, which includes Linux and MySQL, doesn't have got to be taken literally. Sun will promote developers to utilize Solaris, instead of Linux, with the stack.

Regardless of operating system choice, Schwartz asserted that with MySQL, Sun have a set of software system that more than directly vies with Microsoft's Windows Waiter and SQL Waiter database. "I couldn't hold more than strongly," he told a questioner, when asked if the acquisition conveys Sun closer to head-to-head competition. But Sun will vie on edifice out the adjacent coevals of Web applications for the Internet, not laterality of the desktop.

Sun's Green said it wasn't the right clip to speak about future possibilities stemming from the acquisition, but it wasn't unreasonable to anticipate Sun to more than closely incorporate MySQL with Sun middleware, such as as its GlassFish application waiter project.

As developers construct out Web applications that interact with individual land site visitors, reply inquiries with fresh merchandise information and data, and behavior transactions, Sun desires to be the provider to the endeavor for the network's adjacent phase. Sun bes after to purchase further unfastened beginning companies, but it clearly sees MySQL as the basis of its campaign. It gives Sun an unfastened door to the detergent builders of the adjacent coevals of applications.

That acquisition wasn't only large for Sun, said Schwartz. "It was the most of import acquisition in the industry," he said during the teleconference.