Liferays CEO Bryan Cheung offers insights into its business. Liferay has hit 1 Millions downloads in the forth quarter of 2007 and currently employs 55 people worldwide.

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8314322112100513065

Mario: What can I do with Liferay?

Bryan: You can do blogs, wikis, message boards, document library, web publishing, more traditional things like having an intranet or extranet . You can do e-commerce. I think the key difference from just having standard litte blog or message board is, it is community based. So you have different groups of people that have a message board.

Mario: About your business case. How do earn money?

Bryan: Some of the major revenue sources are professional services, professional support, sort of providing insurance for large enterprises, that want someone to call if something goes wrong and then things like training. We also do performance tuning as well as partnerships with other businesses...

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Mario: Why did you actually start as an open source company? Why did you take that decision?

Bryan: ... Looking back, we do agree very much with the philosophy and we do think that software development in the future an increasing percentage of it will be done in open source fashion. The way we started the business and the project was very grassroot and so having an open source development philosophy meant getting a lot of development and systems from the community. It has worked out very well for us.

Liferay, Inc. is a professional open-source company that provides free documentation and paid professional service to users of its software. Mainly focused on enterprise portal technology, the company was founded in 2000 by Brian Chan and currently has its headquarters in Los Angeles, CA. Liferay was created in 2000 by Chief Software Architect Brian Chan to provide a enterprise portal solution for non-profit organizations. In 2006, the company was incorporated under the name Liferay, Inc., formalized its Germany subsidiary Liferay GmbH and named as its new CEO Bryan Cheung, the company's former Director of Business Development. In 2007, the company opened a new Asian headquarters in Dalian, China. ... In July 2007, they announced a partnership with ICEsoft Technologies for developing AJAX technology for their enterprise portal software. In January 2008, the company hired the lead engineer for jQuery UI, Paul Bakaus, to exclusively work full-time on the JavaScript library. (Version 2 April 2008, 18:33, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liferay)

Mario, Mario! Bravo! Gratulation für diesen riesen Erfolg! Hab die Photos von der Berlinale auf sina.com gesehen! Sehr lustig. Eigentlich bin ich neidisch auf dich, weil ich mich jetzt daran erinnere, wie ich mit Vale auf die Berlinale gegangen bin und einen Film gesehen habe.

Jetzt bin ich wieder in Deutschland. Meine Hotmail-Mailbox ging irgendwie in China nicht richtig. Also gibt es jetzt erst Nachrichten von mir aus Berlin. Ich war weniger als 20 Tage in China. Die Zeit war zwar nicht sehr lang, aber ich habe sehr viel gesehen. Ich bin direkt in Peking angekommen, habe mich mit einem alten Freund aus Deutschland getroffen und dann mit Susi (meiner Freundin) zusammen in Shanghai Weihnachten gefeiert. Susi kommt aus Deutschland und macht gerade ein Praktikum in China.

Jing wohnt im Studentenwohnheim am Ostbahnhof. Für manche das neue Szeneviertel, denn hier befinden sich viele neue Clubs und Bars wie die Panoramabar, das BKA und das Maria am Ostbahnhof und auch die Spree mit den vielen neuen Strandbars ist nicht weit… Obwohl es jetzt natürlich schon viel zu kalt ist, hier zu sitzen.