News
Winners Announced for November's Best Post in Customer Forum
In our October newsletter, we announced the launch of our new community forum, at http://community.eapps.com. Our goal is to help this forum grow into becoming a valuable resource for customers. The intent is not to replace our support function, but rather to provide a supplemental source of information from the experiences of the users of our services. To further that goal we select two people each month that made the best post on the forum and award a $50 credit to each person's account. The envelope please!  The winners for November are . . .
Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question, offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50 credit in December!

Promotion
Customer Incentives, up to $100 Credit!
eApps Hosting does not employ an outbound sales force. We rely on the 'word of mouth' of our customers, organic searches, and paid click ads on search engines.  We are continuosly amazed at how the positive energy of our customers helps our business succeed.

It occurred to us that many of our customers would say good things about us, but are often too busy to post a comment on the Internet. This month's incentive will reward those customers for their efforts. Just post a positive comment on any forum, blog, or bulletin board related to hosting, Java programming, PHP programming, MySQL databases, or PostgreSQL databases with a link to one of our key pages listed below and send an email to sales@eapps.com with "Customer Incentives" in the subject. Just make sure you include a link to your post in the body of the message and choose a page from the list below that is relevant to your comment. We will issue a credit to your account in the amount of $5 for each post you make with a link that we can verify and is relevant, up to a maximum credit of $100 allowed per customer! This offer is valid until December 31, 2007 for any eApps customer. Here are the pages that you can link to in your posts:

General Comments about eApps
 http://www.eapps.com

Tomcat Specific Comments
 http://www.eapps.com/ManagedHosting/TomcatJSP.jsp

JBoss Specific Comments
http://www.eapps.com/ManagedHosting/JBoss.jsp

PHP Specific Comments
http://www.eapps.com/ManagedHosting/PHP.jsp

MySQL or PostgreSQL Specific Comments
http://www.eapps.com/ManagedHosting/MySQL.jsp

eApps Support Center Specific Comments
http://support.eapps.com
Feature
Meet eApps
This month's featured staff member is Adrian Alves. Adrian is a member of our Research and Development department. He is responsible for making our application services available to customers. He also chips in on support when needed and contributes by helping with our customers that feel more comfortable speaking in their native Spanish.

Adrian was born and resides in Capital Federal, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He attended the Swiss Confederation school there, where he honed his technical skills. 

Prior to joining eApps, Adrian worked for several companies, always in some capacity related to Unix-like systems. He has close ties and involvement in the FreeBSD and OpenBSD open source projects and a Linux User Group - linux.org.ar. On a personal note, Adrian mentioned that he and his father attended the same high school.

Adrian says about his job at eApps Hosting . . . "in many ways eApps is like my home and my co-workers are like my family." As for hobbies, Adrian does "geek things" like giving talks at Open Source conferences, working on Open Source projects, or taking a new Open Source software product out for a test drive. He also learned the Tomahawk Chop while rooting for the Atlanta Braves baseball team, and is a big fan of "Cheeper" Jones and the other Braves players. If you run into Adrian in your dealings with eApps, ask him "Yo Adrian! Que Pasa?" 

New Application Version
An update is now available for MySQL 5. This version is available for all customers on a CentOS plan. If you are not on a CentOs plan you might consider making the move. Contact us for more information. Applications can be upgraded from the System tab of your Control Panel. Please read the eApps Release Notes before you upgrade your application versions! For info on how to upgrade in the eApps Control Panel see http://support.eapps.com/release/all.

MySQL 5.0.45 - This new release has a number of bug fixes and new features. For more info visit the official release notes. Customers are advised to upgrade to this version as needed.

 Article
Google Releases Android: Mobile Application Development Platform
In perhaps its most ambitious move to date, Google has released Android, a Linux/Java based mobile application development environment with broad implications. The goal of Android is not merely to provide tools to build mobile applications, but to supplant mobile device environments such as Windows Mobile and Symbian. Analysts say that Android is the key to Google's plan to stake a large claim in the rapidly growing mobile device land rush.

Android consists of the following:
  • Linux kernel
  • Libraries
  • Run-time environment which includes the Google built, proprietary, Dalvik Java Virtual Machine
  • Application Development Framework
  • Base applications
In conjunction with the firing of the Android salvo, Google has also announced the formation of the Open Handset Alliance and established $10,000,000 in prize money for the Android Developer Challenge. The Alliance consists of mobile operators, handset manufacturers, sofware companies, semi-conductor manufacturers, and commercialization companies. The objective of the developer challenge is to entice developers to embrace the platform and build "great" Android applications.

The scope of Google's ambitions for Android would be daunting to even the largest companies in the world due to the number of major competitors and entrenched interests that will have to be faced. But the audacity and seemingly unlimited resources of Google make this a war worth watching.