Hot open source eCommerce solution released to high praises

A new open source eCommerce solution was released last month, and was highly anticipated by the US webdesign and development community. It's called Magento, and it's from the guys at Varien, the leading integrator of OsCommerce solutions in the US...

Needless to say, it has lots of competition, from OsCommerce to ZenCart to Shopify... But it seems like it's going to be BIG. Early reactions from developer communities are praising the product.

It is clear Magento was built based on Varien's over 7 years of experience playing with OsCommerce and building eCommerce websites for their clients: a lot of the 'out-of-the-box' features from Magento are considered as high-end functionalities, that are usually found in enterprise-class, licence-fee riddled software.

These features would definitely require numerous patches, extra development hours and headaches in order to be added to competing open source e-commerce apps...

Here's a small list of some of these 'high-end' features:
- campaign-specific landing pages management,-
- user reviews management,
- multiple storefronts, languages, currencies and sales taxes management
- ...

I've checked out their frontend and backend demo, and it sure is clean, tidy, quite complete and easy to use.

And the best part is since it's open source: it means access to a community to share and enrich features, no license fees and no fees on sales. It's also going to create more business for webdesigners and development companies :)

Let's wish all the best to Magento, and that it becomes 'the Zimbra of eCommerce', as Mashable dubbed it.

Breaking: Microsoft to bid on Facebook for a $10 billion valuation

Seems Facebook founder Mark Z. was right when he turned down Yahoo's offer last March, which would have valuated his company at around $750 million (!).

Setting the stage for a possible bidding battle with Google, Microsoft is thinking over an investment in Facebook Inc. that would value the number 2 online social network at $10 billion, according to a report published Monday by the WSJ.

See here for more info: Microsoft considers stake in Facebook - U.S. Business - MSNBC.com

For info, Microsoft already had secured an ad deal with Facebook last month...

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