The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing firm that shares illegal content on its website, has been acquired for $7.8 million by Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory X as reported by New York Times

This despite the fact that the Pirate Bay regularly violates copyright laws,  that four men connected to the company were sent to jail, and that the company has been ordered to pay a $3.6 million fine.

The piarte bay has confirmed the news.

Pirate Bay comments

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen

Last week I went to attend Boston Angel Investor and Venture Capital Workshop organized by Funding Post. I had been skeptic of networking  events lately especially in this downturn where there are lot of similar events going on but they hardly yield any value. Not to mention I was also wondering if it was worth to invest $75 for such event.

Keeping my skepticism aside , I decide to attend the event.  The event was organized in the beautiful office of Bingham in the heart of Boston.  There were around 80 entrepreneurs and some people looking to build contacts and find jobs. But mostly it was a good match of people who had a diverse ideas and were looking for funds to either bootstrap their idea or to take it to the next event.

One of the best parts of the event was the panel of Angel Investors and VC’s who discussed on various topics from how to get fund in this economy , valuations etc . They also offered some pretty good advice to entrepreneurs on keeping their heads high.

I received some good feedback on the products geekevaluation.com and skill-guru from fellow members and had some encouraging words from some of the angels  group.

To summarize my experience, this is not the kind of event where you expect to go with your idea and come back with a check. This event is more in getting tunes with reality ,make some contacts and get feedback from people around as to what could be done to improve your product or service.

It was a time and $75 well spent at funding post event and look forward for some more events in future.

I’ve been working in J2ee/java technologies from 8 years and really loved it. Never wanted to switch or look anything beyond java but started working on Groovy & Grails recently, few months ago, and found that in terms of developer productivity it seems to be light years ahead of other Java solutions (spring, Struts, EJB, JSF, JSP).

What is Groovy-

Groovy is a dynamic language which runs on the Java platform. It has Java-like syntax, although it’s not fully compatible with Java. (i.e. many Java programs are valid Groovy code, but not all.)Consider Groovy if you’re looking for a scripting language with dynamic language features and must deploy your applications on a JVM.

What is Grails-

Grails is an open source web framework for the Java platform. However, unlike other MVC model framework-

• Grails domain classes are automatically persistable and can even generate the underlying database schema.
• Services and other classes can be automatically injected using dependency injection based on naming conventions.
• Grails controllers are request-scoped, which means a new instance is created for each request.
• The default view for Grails is Groovy Server Pages (GSP) and typically renders HTML. The view layer also includes a flexible layout, a templating feature, and simple tag libraries.

I found Grails and java as -

• Groovy is not evolution of Java but groovy compliments java.
• Grails offers some of the best features with seamless Java, Spring & Hibernate integration allowing you to scale in terms of complexity as your application grows.
• Groovy and Grails feel very natural to a Java programmer
• Grails definitely has its own unique features such as dynamic tag libraries, a view technology that is not scriptlet based, the ability to use dynamic finders and persistence methods on any Groovy or Java class and its tight integration with Java, Spring & Hibernate.
• You can develop a Grails application without knowing anything about Spring, Hibernate or SiteMesh
• A Java development like Struts & EJB is a very configuration heavy approach, with Grails you can build an entire application and only ever have to configure the data source.
• Groovy & Grails are very easy on the surface and allow you to be expressive and creative as a developer. They don’t, however, take away the underlying power of the JVM and frameworks like Spring & Hibernate.

Grails and in particular Groovy are very close to Java. A few quick lessons in Groovy and a Java developer and quickly feel at home.

The only real pitfall is that it’s based on Groovy and not on Java are -

• less powerful IDE support.
• some errors caught by Java at compile-time appear only at runtime in Groovy – this is by design and not a fault of Groovy.

Taking cues from US and other developed countries, Indian govt has kicked off the creation of a unique identification database of the country’s citizens.

Mr Nandan Nilekani  will step down from his role of  co-chairman of Infosys to head this project . He would be  chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIA) and would get the rank of a Cabinet Minister. Following the announcement, Mr Nilekani said he would step down from the board of Infosys. Mr Nilekani’s resignation would be effective from July 9.

The UIA, under the aegis of the Planning Commission, is aimed at providing a unique identity to the targeted population of the Government’s flagship schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and Bharat Nirman.

The proposed Authority will be entrusted with the task of laying down plans and policies to implement the unique identification scheme across the country. It will own and operate the unique identification number database and be responsible for updating and maintaining it on an ongoing basis, according to Government statement.

We are happy that some one with the caliber of Mr Nandan Nilenkani is heading the project.

Imgur( pronunced as “Image -er” or “Imager”) is an online image sharing service that allows you to to upload a picture, manipulate it, and share it with your friends, post it on digg,reddit,add it to your blog,or email it. Imgur intends to making sharing images on the internet simple and easy.

There are many image hosting services nowadays , however Imgur has two features that set it apart. First of all its very simple and does not have any advertisment on its pages and it directly shows you the link to the image file rather than the page that displays the image. Plus it does not require a registration, so it saves you the time and the hassel of filling out registration forms.

It includes a simple editor that allows to resize and crop the image. Currently the file upload size limit is 2 MB , but you can increase it to 3 MB by donating some money to them. It supports the usual image formats , JPG, PNG and GIG . The TIFF, BMP, PDF and XFC formats will be converted to PNG on upload. After you upload the image, you will get the usual code for embedding and the direct link address.

In my opinion these features do make Imgur simple and easy to use. Imgur is now also on Facebook. Go ahead and start sharing.

Spring team has released 3.0 version of their popular Spring source framework. This is a third major release  after 2.0 and 2.5 .

What are the new features in Spring 3.0?

1. The Spring Framework is now based on Java 5, and Java 6 is fully supported.

2. The entire framework code has been revised to take advantage of Java 5 features like generics, varargs and other language improvements.  The code is still compatible with older versions of Java

3. Spring Expression Language – Spring has introduced an expression language which is similar to Unified EL in its syntax but offers significantly more features

The following is an example of how the Expression Language can be used to configure some properties of a database setup

<bean class=“mycompany.RewardsTestDatabase”> <property name=“databaseName” value=“#{systemProperties.databaseName}”/> <property name=“keyGenerator” value=“#{strategyBean.databaseKeyGenerator}”/> </bean>

4. Some core features from the JavaConfig project have been added to the Spring Framework now. This means that the following annotations are now directly supported:

5. Additional annotations such as @CookieValue and @RequestHeaders have been added

6. Early support for asynchronous method invocations through the use of the new @Async annotation (or EJB 3.1’s @Asynchronous annotation).

7. The most exciting new feature for the Web Tier is the support for building RESTful web services and web applications

8. Object to XML mapping functionality (OXM) from the Spring Web Services project has been moved to the core Spring Framework now

9. Extended support for meta-annotations: Spring’s @Scope and @Transactional annotations, as well as specialized stereotypes such as @Service and @Controller, can be applied as meta-annotations on custom annotations now. for eg

Source :  Spring 3.0 documentation

In the most recent news, Nokia the pioneer in mobile telecommunications and Intel the world leader in silicon innovation announced a new partnership. These two major players want to create a mobile computing device which will combine the performance of powerful computers with high bandwidth mobile communications and excellent internet connectivity.

They hope together they could create such new products that will revolutionize the mobile communication world. I would like to add that whenever two major companies get together to produce something new and unique, the consumer has always benefited.

Their current plans as of now is to create Linux running software and Intel will get a license to use Nokia;s HSPA/3G technology. Well only time can tell what these two companies come out with . But i have a hunch it would be something really good. So let’s wait and watch..

There has been news floating around in some tech blogs that bing is ahead of google in search trends. Google gives trend which are 3 days old and bing gives result immediately.

I wanted to test this so entered search trend in google. Guess what came 1 ..Google

Now I searched bing trends. The answer was couple of blogs.

Now I went to bing and searched for search trend..guess what was the result ..Google

Who ever said that bing beats google in trend must be nuts.

Bing can not tell about the trend, how the hell can it beat it.

Google..you are the king!!