Allaire to Join Venture Company
Macromedias former chief technology officer, Jeremy Allaire, has landed at General Catalyst Partners.
Allaire joins the venture capital company as a technologist in residence, officials said.
Allaire announced his intention to leave Macromedia two weeks ago on his Weblog, or blog.
Allaire joined Macromedia two years ago when it purchased Allaire Corp., which he co-founded in 1995 and helped develop the ColdFusion application development platform.
At his original company, Allaire worked with David Orfao, who was the companys CEO and is now a managing director at General Catalyst Partners.
Allaire said he will remain involved with Macromedia as a founder emeritus.
In other executive movements, Lucent Technologies president and chief executive, Patricia Russo, was appointed chairman of Lucent, succeeding Henry Schacht.
Russo predicted that the company will become profitable by the end of September and said she expects the business to return to an annual growth rate of 5 to 7 percent.
Google Wades Into Weblogs
Search site Google has jumped into the blog business by recently acquiring Pyra Labs, the maker of the Weblog publishing tool Blogger. Terms were not disclosed.
Pyra counts more than 1 million users of its software for creating Weblogs, which resemble daily diaries of technical, cultural or personal happenings. This month, Terra Lycos announced a blog product of its own, and AOL Time Warner plans a blog service for this year.
Separately, Overture Services, which competes with Google to provide paid search services at portal and content sites, is buying AltaVista from CMGI for $140 million in cash and stock.
Overture plans to incorporate AltaVistas advanced search algorithms into its services, Overture officials said.
Overture officials said they plan to test new technologies at the AltaVista.com search site and enhance AltaVistas paid search services. The deal is expected to close by April.
Shipments to Rise, Report Says
First-quarter shipments of PCs should increase 4.8 percent over the same period last year and 7.9 percent over the course of the year, according to research company Gartner Dataquest.
In a report issued last week, the company said it expects 33.2 million PCs to ship this quarter and 138.7 million PCs to ship this year.
There are a number of hurdles that must be overcome, including the possible war with Iraq, the sluggish economy and the lack of a killer application to jump-start the industry, according to the company.