Sun Microsystems has announced plans to discontinue Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Java Studio Creator developer tools, encouraging users to migrate to NetBeans. More info

The second day of Sun&#8217;s Developer Days 2006 conference in Melbourne last week was a similar mixed bag to the first. Be sure to read my coverage of day one if you missed it. Before the day&#8217;s sessions began in earnest, Sun organiser David Coldrick got up to plug two useful resources for Java developers to [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=bd1dc6ad37ac1f456880600bf44fd5ad"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=bd1dc6ad37ac1f456880600bf44fd5ad"/></a> More info

Sun Microsystems is winding up a tour of Australia and New Zealand with the final stop of its Sun Developer Days 2006 conference today and tomorrow in Melbourne. Fellow SitePointer Lachlan Donald and I were there today to take in the Java vibes, and as with most free conferences there was a great deal of [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=b11d32bab59310093ddd5cc31c06e8a8"/> More info

Question: What do AOL, eBay, NASDAQ, The New York Times Company, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group's Nick.com, Sharp Corporation and others have in common? The answer is that've all launched pioneering Rich Internet Applications deployed on Adobe AIR, to coincide with the official release today of AIR 1.0. More info

'Curl is, IMO, the easiest to learn, the most productive, and technically the most capable of all the RIA platforms,' said Burton Group analyst Richard Monson-Haefel today as he announced his resignation from his position at Burton Group for a new position as Vice President of Developer Relations at Curl, Inc. More info

Incipient announced that it has closed a $15.6 million Series E round of funding from existing investors including Globespan Capital Partners, GrandBanks Capital, HLM Venture Partners, Greylock, QuestMark Partners, Sigma Partners, and Wasatch Advisors, as well as a new investor. Incipient will use this new funding to expand global sales and marketing initiatives for its enterprise-class award winning storage virtualization and automated data migration software solutions now being used by leading financial services organizations to automate and virtualize their data center operations. More info

Sun Microsystems is a very respectful company, with strong engineering spirit and talented software developers on staff. Sun Microsystems was the company behind the very first technology to support rich Internet applications. Yes, I?m talking about Java applets that were introduced in 1995. The same setup as we see today in the RIA world: a JVM, that is a Web browser plugin and compiled byte code that offers rich UI. But after that, in my opinion, Sun?s Java decision makers made a couple of serious mistakes: More info

Having sat on the board since it was started 10 years ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now going to chair the New America Foundation, a well-funded, supposedly non-partisan Washington think tank (really is anything in Washington non-partisan?). One might imagine he's getting in position to influence the policies of the next administration and wouldn't you know it but the New America Foundation supports using unlicensed television airwaves for high-speed Internet transmission, fancy that, a Google priority too. More info

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who knows a thing or two about hostile takeovers and last year proposed merging his MySpace property with Yahoo, told Wall Street Monday that he's not interested in Yahoo! and even less interested in AOL. Ditto NBC Universal and Comcast. More info