Busy week in online professional networking…  After yesterday’s news about a Nokia-Ryze rumor, Om reports OpenBC’s IPO filing.

Congratulations to Lars & Bill.  I don’t know European capital markets well, but I guess OpenBC’s impressive growth and presumably healthy bottom line can justify the implied valuation.  I think this is good timing on their part, riding the steady buzz on SNS.

UPDATE:  According to a comment in Gigaom, they are raising 100mm euros.  That would be a home run!  It’s probably not out of the question, since Lehman and Deutsche Bank are on the cover. Impressive.

Valleywag’s got a scoop that Nokia is acquiring (all or part of) Ryze, the early online professional networking service.

This is interesting because lately (as in the last year or so), Ryze has radiated a sense of neglect.  At one point, most of the activity on it seemed to be driven by Indians, many of whom were recruiting for MLM companies.  I thought this to be a pity, because, early on, Ryze provided a lot of utility without the UI snazziness that Friendster was focusing on, and the tight rule set of LinkedIn.

If the story is true, congratulations are in order for Adrian Scott. In an early social networking panel we participated in, Adrian struck me as being the most cerebral and least arrogant entrepreneur on the panel.  Among his many accomplishments, he’d received his Math PhD at 20, and managed to live in the Bahamas full-time.

UPDATE:  In the comments, Scott Allen reports from Adrian that this is just a rumor.

I am not a software developer.  I am, however, interested in software engineering as a science.  I recently ran into an IBM article that makes the following claim:

The argument against wild productivity claims usually goes something
like this: If I’ve got a decent hammer, I’d be hard-pressed to find
another hammer to make me twice as productive, let alone 5 to 10 times
more productive, because hammers have evolved over thousands of years.
But people who compare Ruby on Rails with a mix of general-purpose Java
frameworks are missing the point. You can be 10 times more productive for some problems
by radically changing the nature of the tool. Professional framers now
use nail guns that can drive in dozens of nails in the time it takes to
hammer in one nail. Like nail guns, Rails is specialized. It’s a
framework written with a laser focus on a single niche: new database-backed Web applications.

For our new web-based project, my partner Cagan picked RoR as the development framework.  We are also very happy about our choice, although, I don’t know that he would claim a 10X producitivity gain.

I love maps – old and new – so I am ecstatic over the news that Google Earth has added historic maps of some cities and regions.

Mark Cuban relays an insiders’ account of the YouTube – Google deal, originally posted anonymously to a media board.  For those who have been thinking on the deal’s economics, it may be interesting.

UPDATE: Nick Carr does not think it’s very credible.