Interesting times...
Amazon.com Inc. will buy digital audiobook provider Audible Inc. in a deal worth about $300 million that expands its push into digital content and ratchets up its rivalry with Apple Inc.
Audible, based in Newark, N.J., sells thousands of audiobooks from authors such as John Grishman and Stephen King that can be downloaded off the Internet and played on computers, iPods or MP3 devices. Audible supplies the audiobooks that are sold on Apple's online iTunes store.
Imho, this is a very pragmatic and customer-focused move on Adobe's part
We had all the noise last week about IBM supporting Open XML in a number of their products. Today I learned that Adobe's Buzzword, a web based wordprocessor, now supports reading and writing .docx files. Very cool: http://forum.buzzword.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&p=980
I think they also have plans on supporting ODF, but it's not clear when that will be available.
Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : Buzzword now supports reading and writing Open XML
A harsh Yahoo reality check
Listening to the droning, jargon-filled Yahoo conference call on Tuesday night, you could only think that Jerry Yang and Sue Decker were aiming their conversation only at analysts who needed to fill out their 2008 spreadsheets.
That strategy didn’t work. Yahoo shares are down 9 percent today to $19.01. The analysts have been busy reducing their target prices on the stock. Citigroup, Oppenheimer and Pacific Crest Securities dropped Yahoo from their recommendation lists. This is what Sandeep Aggarwal, of Oppenheimer, said in his note downgrading Yahoo shares and reducing his price target from $30 to $20 a share:
With margins in free-fall, and no clear revenue implication of the investment spending, we believe investors are likely to view the stock as a value trap.
Yahoo’s Vision-Goes-Here Strategy - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
Timely snapshot
Overall, the U.S. non-game PC software market at retail stores totaled $3.3 billion in 2007, a 15 percent increase over the $2.9 billion generated in 2006. The rise is even more notable, as sales had been essentially flat from 2000 through 2006.
But, a whole lot of that is due to Microsoft, largely because of Office, but also because of Vista's debut. According to NPD's Chris Swenson, 80 percent of the total growth in the market can be attributed to the release of those two products. Also of note, security software sales increased 55 percent compared with the prior year, Swenson said.
Office 2007 sales spur software market | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
An interesting case study in fault tolerance
Two undersea telecommunication cables were cut on Tuesday evening, knocking out Internet access to much of Egypt, disrupting the world’s back office in India and slowing down service for some Verizon customers.
One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France, telecommunications operators said. The two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged within hours of each other. Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can result from movement of geologic faults or possibly from the dragging anchor of a ship.
2 Communication Cables in the Mediterranean Are Cut - New York Times
Timely reality check, including details on how the MacBook Air supports multi-touch (even though it's not a touchscreen device)
We are now witnessing the emergence of a new user interface for digital devices, including laptop computers, advanced cellphones, wireless portable data gadgets and other types of computing products.
This interface is generally called “multitouch,” and it involves using one or more fingers on a screen or touchpad to perform special gestures that manipulate lists or objects on a screen — without moving a mouse, pressing buttons, turning scroll wheels or striking keys.
Scary case study -- read the full interview
But beyond the evident failure of internal control technologies lie wider vulnerabilities in the global financial system. It is possible that the deeds of 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel at Societe Generale triggered global stock sell-offs, says Andrew Lo, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering. And that points to widening systemic risk in ever more complex financial markets.
Update to my NYT article-related post this morning: Bill Gates is definitely familiar with the work of Muhammad Yunus, as this 2007 speech transcript indicates -- Gates, Craig Mundie, and Yunus co-presented at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum last April in Beijing.
To elaborate on the context for my post: I was intrigued by the "conspicuously missing" theme after reading about Gates' "creative capitalism" thinking and reading a review of the recent Yunus book last week.
Thanks to the folks at Microsoft (Waggener Edstrom, to be precise) who brought this to my attention. It's a very timely and important topic domain, and it's good to know the dots are all connected.
Bill Gates, Craig Mundie: Microsoft Government Leaders Forum -- Asia 2007
See the full post for details on Altova XMLSpy's Open XML capabilities
While Open XML may not yet be an ISO standard, it is already standardized by ECMA and - even more important - all documents created by Office 2007 are already stored in Open XML by default, so there is an abundance of documents whose content you can now reuse much more easily and productively than ever before. So instead of waiting for the ISO vote or paying too much attention to all the political battles being fought around it, I want to show you how you can already take advantage of Open XML (sometimes also called OOXML or Office Open XML) today.
This is the first article in a series of blog postings that I plan to write about practical Open XML tips & tricks, so I encourage you to subscribe to my XML Aficionado blog (via RSS or via e-mail), if you haven't already done so. This will ensure that you get future articles from this series automatically as soon as I post them.
Aiming high...
EnterpriseDB Corp. plans in March to start beta-testing an online version of its Oracle-compatible database that will leverage Amazon.com Inc.'s Web-based computing and storage services.
The EnterpriseDB Advanced Server Cloud Edition will be much more powerful than the SimpleDB Web database that Amazon itself plans to offer, claimed Bob Zurek, the Edison, N.J.-based software vendor's chief technology officer.
[...]
"What MySQL was for LAMP, we will be for the Cloud," he said, referring to the popular open-source technology stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and either Perl, PHP or Python.
Another Amazon 'cloud' database, but this one will be Oracle-compatible
Interesting times
The Wall Street Journal has just accepted Facebook's request to be online friends.
Hoping to tap into the growing buzz of online social networks, the Journal is adding a feature to its Web site that will allow readers to see which Journal stories are popular among that user's Facebook friends.
I've been wondering about that; see the full article for more context-setting
Conspicuously missing from the appeal, which asserted that human nature is not just driven by greed but also by concern for our fellow beings, was any reference to the work and thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
The microfinance innovator, who is known as the “banker for the poor,” recently wrote a book, “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism,” that foreshadows Mr. Gates’s newfound social philosophy.
Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gates's Vision - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
Joe Wilcox on the Microsoft/WSJ news
Google should start looking over its shoulder. Wall Street Journal Digital Network is only the beginning.
Today, Microsoft announced that it had reached an exclusive contextual and paid search advertising deal for Wall Street Journal Digital Network sites, including AllThingsD, Barrons, MarketWatch and Wall Street Journal.
While seemingly just another ad and search deal, it's the first sign that the winds are changing in the direction of Redmond, Wash. Microsoft's press release quotes Brian McAndrews, former aQuantive CEO and now senior vice president of Microsoft Advertiser and Publisher Solutions. Microsoft paid $6 billion for aQuantive for a reason.
Microsoft Watch - Web Services & Browser - Microsoft Scores Journal Ad Deal
A timely reality check; see the full article for more context
Mr. Malda said that Digg must move to deemphasize that vocal minority in the overall voting. But then it would inevitably alienate its core user base. “All these sites start with a nucleus of dedicated people. Then as the gawkers join in you see a dilution. People who were there originally feel alienated and feel that the thing they helped created is being perverted.”
“I try not to paint Digg as my arch-nemesis. The Digg method and Digg community are a wider audience than Slashdot,” he said. “But with sites like Digg, it’s the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you’re going to get.”
Slashdot Founder Questions Crowds Wisdom - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
See the full article for more on Yahoo's focus areas
Yahoo also said that as part of its plan to revive its fortunes, it would cut 1,000 jobs by mid-February to reduce costs and narrow its focus to its most important businesses.
The company, however, said it planned to invest aggressively in some areas, like advertising technology and selected portions of its Internet portal, as it tries to capture a larger share of online ad dollars. Since some laid-off employees could apply for new jobs at Yahoo, the net effect on the work force, which recently grew to 14,300, was not clear.
Yahoo to Cut 1,000 Jobs, and Warns on Growth - New York Times
Never underestimate (Clearwire founder) Craig McCaw...
In the last few weeks, newly installed Sprint Nextel Corp. Chief Executive Dan Hesse has moved quickly to impress investors with layoffs and an upper-management shake-up at the wireless carrier. Now there are signs he is teeing up a bold restructuring of the company's $5 billion plans to build a new high-speed wireless network using WiMax technology.
Sprint has revived serious discussions with WiMax start-up Clearwire Corp. to form a joint venture that would bring in outside funding from the likes of Google Inc., Intel Corp. and Best Buy Co., people familiar with the matter say. The plan could dramatically lower the price tag of Sprint's WiMax project and allow Mr. Hesse to focus on fixing the company's core cellphone business -- answering two concerns Sprint investors have had.
Or Jeff Bezos:
[...]
WiMax could be a sorely needed distinguishing point for Sprint, especially if new WiMax devices emerge that capture consumers' interest. Amazon.com Inc., whose Kindle e-reader works over Sprint's existing cellular network, has approached the carrier about building a separate WiMax mobile device that would be tailored more to Web surfing, multimedia downloads and e-commerce, according to a person familiar with the discussions. One issue in the talks is how much Amazon would have to pay Sprint for wireless access, the person said. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
Quite a roller coaster
VMware shares lost a third of their value yesterday, closing down $28.13 to $54.87. EMC, which owns about 86 percent of VMware, slumped $1.02, or 6 percent, to close at $15.89.
EMC chief executive Joe Tucci called the sharp drop in VMware shares "a hell of a reaction," and blamed it on a jittery market that's declined about 6 percent since the start of the year. "You've got a very fidgety market out there," said Tucci. He also noted that VMware only began trading last August, when EMC sold 10 percent of the company to the public. Originally priced at $29, VMware shares soared as high as $125 last fall, but drifted lower even before the earnings report. "It's a young company, it's only been trading for two quarters, and there'll be some volatility," Tucci said.
Supply and demand...
Owners of Apple's iPhone may have unlocked an "astounding" 1 million handsets to run on unauthorized wireless networks, depriving the company of lucrative monthly fees, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said.
That estimate represents 27 percent of about 3.75 million iPhones sold last year, Toni Sacconaghi, the top-ranked computer analyst by Institutional Investor magazine, said Monday in a note. His previous estimate was 750,000 unlocked phones.
Definitely not your average start-up...
In a statement Monday, CEO Diane Greene praised the company's position, even as it faces a stepped-up attack from Microsoft and other rivals.
"We begin 2008 with more than 100,000 customers, 500 technology and consulting partners, nearly 10,000 go-to-market partners, and more than 5,000 employees," Greene said. "As others begin to enter the market, VMware and our partners are continuing to broaden and deepen our highly reliable end-to-end virtualization solutions."
VMware's sales disappoint, shares plunge | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
Sign of the times
In the last two years, companies in the travel business including Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Marriott International, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines have introduced blogs to promote their products and brand images, as have business travelers who want to narrate experiences and share complaints.
One of the newest sites useful to business travelers is BoardingArea.com, a portal created by Randy Petersen, the frequent-flier program expert and founder of the online forum FlyerTalk. BoardingArea is essentially a directory to blogs that address issues of interest to business travelers.
Life in the fast lane...
VMWare Inc. reported that its fourth-quarter net income more than doubled on an 80% increase in revenue, but shares of the high-flying maker of virtualization software plunged more than 25% in after-hours trading because Wall Street was expecting more.
[...]
Expectations are so high for VMWare that even a relatively small miss, such as $5 million, can start a big stock selloff. The revenue miss also signals how more intense competition from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other companies is starting to take its toll on VMWare.
VMWare's Profit, Sales Surge But Shares Fall in Late Trading - WSJ.com
A timely and disconcerting reality check; see the full article for details
Electronic voting systems--introduced en masse following high-profile problems with traditional voting systems in the state of Florida during the 2000 presidential election--were designed to quell fears about accuracy. Unfortunately, those concerns continue to permeate political conversation. The Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, introduced recently by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), proposes government funding for jurisdictions that use electronic voting to switch to systems that produce a paper trail. But many experts say that a paper trail alone can't solve the problem.
Yow...
The switch, called the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest producer of network equipment, offered a range of examples to try to capture the significance of the increase in speed. It said the switch could transfer all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds or send a two-megapixel digital image to every human being on earth in 28 minutes.
Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data - New York Times
Sign of the times
Software, an anchor of the Boston-area technology scene, remains the largest recipient of venture capital nationally. But while venture outlays for energy, biotechnology, and medical devices have surged, the latest MoneyTree venture capital report shows that growth in software investments slowed noticeably in 2007.
"Software isn't the Wild West it was 10 years ago," said Sunil Dhaliwal, general partner at Battery Ventures, in Waltham. "Software is a mature industry. At the same time, 'clean tech' has captured everyone's imagination as the growth industry of the next decade. People believe that there are problems to be solved and money to be made."
Glad to see this
The service has become routine in airports and coffee shops, and is even appearing on airplanes. But commuter trains have taken longer to adapt.
"If we really want to try to boost commuter ridership, then the way to do that is to have a difference that gives a competitive advantage for people getting on a train rather than getting in their car," Grabauskas said in a phone interview.
Wi-Fi gets trial run on Worcester/Framingham commuter trains - The Boston Globe
Check the full article for more details
On Jan. 21, Agassi, Olmert, Peres, and Ghosn unveiled the novel project, under which Agassi's Silicon Valley company, Better Place, will sell electric cars and build a network of locations where drivers can charge and replace batteries. Olmert has done his part, too. Israel just boosted the sales tax on gasoline-powered cars to as much as 60% and pledged to buy up old gas cars to get them off the road.
Agassi contends that Israel is just the start. He hopes to expand his business into several other countries over the next few years, with China, France, and Britain among the potential markets. Ultimately, he believes that his company and others like it could shake two pillars of the global economy, the $1.5 trillion-a-year auto industry and the $1.5 trillion-a-year market for gasoline. "If what I'm saying is right, this would be the largest economic dislocation in the history of capitalism," says Agassi.
Interesting times...
Hoping to spice up its offerings to a discouraged consumer, Zillow recently recalculated the values on 67 million homes over a 12-year period, a database of figures that took up 4 terabytes of memory. The company figured it would need six months and millions of dollars to make it happen. Instead, Zillow ran the job over the Internet, on 500 computer servers rented from Amazon.com. It took only three weeks and cost less than $50,000.
"This is a computer-development playground," says Spencer Rascoff, chief financial officer of 165-employee Zillow.
An interesting roundup in the New York Review of Books
With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.
Is there really such a thing? A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic .com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?
Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?
Be sure to check the final paragraph of the full article :)
A timely Amazon Kindle reality check, including some useful data on the oft-referenced Steve Jobs quote in this context; read the full article
Yet, when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.
Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.
One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?
Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless - New York Times
Timely market segment snapshot
Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to Opus Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given its billions of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model for such services.
The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey - New York Times
Dave Kellogg's take on Metaweb/Freebase:
Metaweb, makers of the unfortunately named Freebase, recently announced that they have raised a whopping $42.5M venture round led by Goldman Sachs and Benchmark Capital.
Freebase is trying to create a database of knowledge with a collaborative Wiki-like approach. The differences are (1) there's much less in it today, (2) it leverages Wikipedia as a source, (3) it's far easier to edit entries in Freebase than in Wikipedia, and (4) it doesn't follow a strict encyclopedia-like entry per topic.[...]
I haven't spent that much time on GoogleBase, but I'm not all impressed with what I see when I go there. My take is that Freebase is what GoogleBase wanted to be.
eBay plans to evolve by more effectively exploiting search
Now the company is working on something far more ambitious: a system that will evaluate customer feedback, data from its PayPal payment system, shipping costs and so on to present the very best deals to shoppers.
“With eBay and PayPal, we have more closed transaction data than anyone else on the Internet,” Mr. Donahoe said. “There is a lot of talk about Google’s relevance-based search,” he said referring to Google’s system of showing ads based on how often users click on them. EBay can use more information to provide better results, he said.
John Donahoe’s Plan to Save eBay: Better Search - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. XForms is going to be a pivotal variable.
IBM this week quietly updated its Lotus Symphony desktop applications with a feature that hints at its broader strategy to use the Web and standards to up-end Microsoft's massive Office business.
Introduced last September, Lotus Symphony is a free suite of applications based on OpenOffice, an open-source alternative to Office. The fourth beta of Symphony, due for release next week, will add a module that will let IBM and other software companies add extensions to these applications.
Under a strategy called "Beyond Office," IBM is developing several technologies to make Symphony an extensible development platform for business applications and Web-based document editors.
IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps 'Beyond Office' | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Impressive momentum
Microsoft’s strong performance was led by its three major businesses: personal computer operating systems, office productivity programs and software that runs computers in corporate data centers. The company, the world’s largest software maker, continues to struggle and lose money as it battles Google in its new markets for Internet services and online advertising.
But for Microsoft, that is a financial challenge of the future, one overshadowed by the heft and continuing growth in its personal computer products, led by the Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007. Microsoft’s desktop software divisions accounted for 56 percent of the company’s revenue and more than 80 percent of the operating profit of its product groups.
Microsoft Delivers Strong Growth and Includes a Sunny Forecast - New York Times
Oops...
A French bank announced Thursday that it had lost $7.2 billion, not because of complex subprime loans, but the old-fashioned way — because a 31-year-old rogue trader made bad bets on stocks and then, in trying to cover up those losses, dug himself deeper into a hole.
French Bank Says Rogue Trader Lost $7 Billion - New York Times
Bummer -- not only will most of the site content not be free, the price is actually going up...
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."
The mix of free and paid content will continue to be tweaked, however, and a good portion of Wall Street Journal content increasingly is available free online. Free content includes the Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements. This month, the Journal began offering free access to all of its Opinion section.
If you've passed on the complimentary ODF/OOXML overview because of the registration page, you can now skip that step and download the pdf here. Please also consider skimming the responses we've been posting on the Burton Group Collaboration and Content Strategies blog, e.g., this response to the Ars Technica post on the overview.
Steven Levy's take on the Air (concluding paragraphs):
In one sense, this is a prescient look forward to the day when people will store their digital assets remotely, "in the cloud," as this concept is described. But since it's still a couple of years before my voluminous iTunes collection of movies and songs will be stashed in the ether, I need a computer with a standard-size drive, and the Macbook Air will work for me only as a second machine, a luxury item for on-the-go use.
While these omissions may be troubling -- especially to someone in a down-turning economy deciding whether to spend a premium sum for a computer with sub-premium storage -- the fact is that simply using the Macbook Air, as I'm doing right now in writing this review, is rather copacetic. Though I can quibble with a few of Apple's choices of what to take off, the product's dimensions and design definitely show that that the losses were not in vain. The things that Apple left on were the ingredients for a quality computer. And did I mention how thin it is?
Steven Levy - The Slimming of the MacBook - washingtonpost.com
Looks like Apple has created another artful but disposable device (e.g., no removable battery); see the full review for details.
Apple finally has entered the subnotebook market, introducing a lightweight laptop meant to please road warriors. But, typical of Apple, the company took a different approach from its competitors. The result is a beautiful, amazingly thin computer, but one whose unusual trade-offs may turn off some frequent travelers.
The new aluminum-clad MacBook Air, which I’ve been testing for several days, is billed as the world’s thinnest notebook computer. Its thickest point measures just three-quarters of an inch, which is slimmer than the thinnest point on some other subnotebooks. And it employs some innovative software features, such as fingertip gestures for its touchpad that are similar to those on Apple’s iPhone
An interesting application of database technology...
The Bush administration's warnings about prewar Iraq, from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" to Vice President Dick Cheney's statements on weapons of mass destruction, were released on Wednesday in a searchable online database.
The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington research group highly critical of U.S. policy in Iraq, put together 935 comments uttered by eight top administration officials including President George W. Bush in the run-up to the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Database assembles U.S. warnings of Saddam threat | Tech&Sci | Technology | Reuters.com
A timely ODF/Open XML reality check, including a summary of several government policy decisions in this context; see the full post for details. Via Doug Mahugh.
Looking at the list of current policy positions at the bottom of this p
