Some interesting news in the world of Big Business Software.

A week after IBM walked away from buying SUN, good old Larry has stepped in, upped the price and made the purchase.

Interestingly Oracle have said they were after JAVA, but others speculate they were more interested in mySQL.

Here is an interesting article analysing the purchase.

Well the conference finished and I still had another day in Malta, so today we headed off to Valletta.

The streets were amazing, everything is so incredibly dense but it doesn’t seem crowded in anyway just extremely historic.

Today was the first day I’ve ever seen an elliptical dome which was simply amazing!

The architecture is mostly Baroque but also includes some Neo-classical and Modern Architecture.

It was great to see Xero’s recent annoucement about raising more capital.

The main thing this highlights to me and I talked about this in an earlier post: Even with economic times being the worst they have been for 60 years there is still opportunities to grow.

It also highlights that I have heard mentioned previously “Raise Capital before you need it as it will be easier to source than when you actually need it!”

My travels this time have taken me to Malta for Graphisofts International Partner Conference.

After last year only just arriving at the conference a couple of hours before it started, this year I decided to arrive a couple of days early to avoid the stress.

Yesterday two of my Swedish friends and I set off on a mountain bike around the island. We didn’t actually do a complete circuit but certainly saw an enormous part of the island.

Fortunately for me, having not been on a bike for a couple of years, the Maltese drive on the left so all I had to worry about the pot holes. However as an British ex-pat said

The British drive on the left, the Europeans drive on the right and the Maltese drive in the shade.

So there were a few hairy moments!

Anyway check out the photos below: