A bit of business info. Anyware Technologies, the company of which I am the CTO and which I cofounded 4 1/2 years ago recently received 3 million euros funding from Spef Venture, a french VC.

This funding is targeted at developing a wide range of applications and products to connect enterprise systems with industrial automation devices and small embedded devices, all using the same underlying technologies, namely Java+XML+HTTP, mainly using Apache Cocoon.

The interesting point in the VC press release (in french) is that Cocoon and opensource software are explicitely mentioned as a being strenghs of the company, that allowed us to develop higher-level products and value.

So although we will develop proprietary products and solutions, our involvment in opensource communities will continue to grow. This knowledge of the OSS world is a strong selling point and large customers come to us because of it.

The company is growing (we're now 35) to build lots of nice things. Stay tuned!