From the Red Herring article:

U.S. venture capital group Ignition Partners said Wednesday it would team up with other China investment specialists to create a new $200-million fund called Qiming aimed at making investments in the Middle Kingdom.

The venture will be based in Shanghai, and will be headed by two key executives from Seattle-based Ignition, including founding partner Rich Tong, and partner John Zagula. They will be joined by Gary Rieschel, founder of Mobius Venture Capital; Duane Kuang, former director of Intel Capital China; and Edward Zhou, who until recently was the senior manager of corporate business development for Cisco Systems.

The company expects investment size to run in the $3 million to $7 million range and will make six to eight investments per year. An announcement of the new company’s first funding effort is expected during the next few months.

Mr. Zagula, who is in the process of learning Mandarin and moving his family to Shanghai, said the investment approach would be a “natural extension of the team’s background” in software, telecommunications, and Internet companies.

It says something that partners at a company like Ignition consider China important enough to not only start a fund there but move to Shanghai and learn Mandarin.

It also says something that the Qiming web site is a blog rather than a traditional corporate web page. I know at Jobster we get at least as much value out of jobster.blogs.com as we do out www.jobster.com/corp at a fraction of the price.

John discusses the new venture and the choice of name:

One thing of note is the name. Those of you who look at this blog, know that we are a bit obsessed with naming. Well, we spent a bunch of time on this. One of the classic branding problems is taking your name into another language. Great bad examples abound, e.g. Microsoft translating as “soft and squishy.” In this case, finding the spirit of a brand and figuring out how to make it logical and relevant to the Chinese market was key. So rather than directly translating “Ignition” into characters that would mean “tiny spark” or “fire starter” we decided to go with Qi Ming which implies enlightenment and inspiration to begin something. Not the same as our name in the U.S. but all the better, this fund is meant to be integrated with us in the U.S. but also it’s own thing for a unique market. Anyway, it was a fun exercise.

Charles Nutter, one of the primary contributors to JRuby, reports promising progress in running Rails in JRuby. This could allow applications that blend J2EE and Rails functionality in interesting ways.

Another approach for deploying Rails in a Java/J2EE container is via the FastCGI interface. This forgoes some of the potential advantages of sharing a VM between Rails and Java, but it’s something you can do already, at least in Resin.

In the Rails discussion list, a user reports performance very close to Lighttpd using the Resin FastCGI servlet.

Unfortunately, the Caucho FastCGI servlet is closed source, and (I believe) Resin specific.

Does anyone have recommendations for an open source FCGI servlet for Tomcat and other servers?