Hmm...
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Web 2.0 fails to produce cash
Another long-running debate
A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said.
Google's lawyers made the claim in papers filed in US District Court in Manhattan as the company responded to Viacom Inc.'s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by YouTube and others.
Suit vs. YouTube threatens Net activities of public, Google says - The Boston Globe
This just in: real-world peer pressure still exists and can have positive or negative consequences, despite the advent of sites such as Facebook (read the full article for details on recent research)
Facebook, MySpace and other Web sites have unleashed a potent new phenomenon of social networking in cyberspace. But at the same time, a growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.
Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated - washingtonpost.com
Hmm -- a timely snapshot
Microsoft TV hasn't crested the hill yet, but it's getting a boost as TVs become more like computers, content goes digital and broadband ties it all together.Last week the group released a tool kit for its "Mediaroom" TV software platform, and later this year its software will appear in Xbox 360s that British Telecom will offer as set-top boxes.
Not dead yet -- but soon, apparently...
Troubled online news site RedHerring.com was inaccessible Friday for more than an hour.
In the same week that the publication was booted from its offices in Belmont, Calif., Red Herring's Web site suffered a glitch Friday and didn't go back up until about 1:30 p.m., according to a source, who asked for anonymity.
Red Herring is on at least one tech pub's "Death Watch" and the site outage might have led some to believe the company had finally packed it in.
Red Herring down but not out | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Somehow I got a jumped-the-shark (i.e., blogs have, at least in terms of the hype:reality index) sense from this article
So here goes. Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one. We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg's economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood. But despite the importance of blogs, only a minority of us participates. Chances are, you don't. According to a recent study from Forrester Research (FORR), only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.
This just in, on BBC news: BBC-sponsored research finds BBC virtual worlds are "useful" for children
Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life, reveals research.
They are also a "powerful and engaging" alternative to more passive pursuits such as watching TV, said the BBC-sponsored study.
The research was done with children using the BBC's Adventure Rock virtual world, aimed at those aged 6-12.
From the Microsoft blog post announcing the change in plan:
We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a catalyst for more sustainable strategies. To that end, we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.
Hmm...
Microsoft's Live Search Team is ending its book search efforts, according to a blog post Friday. Its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic sites will be discontinued next week, and books and academic publishings will show up in regular search results rather than separate sites.
"We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users," read the blog post by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal, and advertising.
Microsoft's Live Search scraps book digitization project | The Social - CNET News.com
Excerpt from an insightful essay about, among other things, Google's book digitization strategy:
When strung out in this manner, the pace of change seems breathtaking: from writing to the codex, 4,300 years; from the codex to movable type, 1,150 years; from movable type to the Internet, 524 years; from the Internet to search engines, nineteen years; from search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years; and who knows what is just around the corner or coming out the pipeline?
Closing paragraph:
Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
Okay, this is non-techie, but it's still timely and interesting, if you don't consider economics "the dismal science"
If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he? One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics. Although its intellectual roots go back more than thirty years, to the pioneering work of two Israeli psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economics took off only about ten years ago, and many of its leading lights, among them David Laibson and Andrei Shleifer, of Harvard; Matt Rabin, of Berkeley; and Colin Camerer, of Caltech, are still in their thirties or forties. One of the reasons this approach has proved so popular is that it appears to provide a center ground between the Friedmanites and the Keynesians, whose intellectual jousting dominated economics for most of the twentieth century.
Economics: Which Way for Obama? - The New York Review of Books
Guess who fiercely opposes this scenario (see the full article for details)
The group also includes Microsoft Corp, Dell Inc, Intel Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and the north American unit of Philips Electronics.
The idea is fiercely opposed
The white-space airwaves could become available in February 2009, when TV broadcasters switch from analog to more efficient digital signals.
Proponents of the mew class of Wi-Fi devices say the airwaves could eventually offer data transmission speeds of billions of bits per second -- far faster than the millions of bits per second available on most current broadband networks. Consumers could watch movies on wireless devices and do other things that are currently difficult on slower networks.
Google co-founder pushes TV "white space" plan - Yahoo! News
SSDS is now in a broader beta
This primer provides an overview of the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS, codename "Sitka"). It describes the SSDS data model and provides examples of using the data service.
I'm wondering if something got lost in translation with this story
Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) CEO Steve Ballmer said on Friday the acquisition of Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) was never viewed as strategic and added the company had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions.
"Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing," he told a technology conference in Moscow.
Microsoft CEO says Yahoo buy was never strategic | Technology | Reuters
Okay, I promise I won't plug the DMS blog on a daily basis, but FYI my Burton Group Data Management Strategies (DMS) colleagues and I are now regularly blogging on data-stuff there
Is it the end of the road for RDBMSs as we've known them for the last ~25 years? Time to sell your SQL books on eBay, before they become worthless? To sign up for a distance-learning XML management course, in order to invest in your future career potential? Perhaps some of the "legacy" database models, such as hierarchical and object-oriented DBMSs, will finally start to gain (regain, for hierarchical) meaningful market momentum, with the market shift to XML for content and data? Is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at risk of being bumped off the short list of the richest people on the planet (he's already down to #14 on this year's Forbes "The World's Billionaires" list...)?
I suspect this was somewhere on Microsoft's priority list as well :)...
"... the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (Open Document Format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice," it said in a statement.
EU says to study Microsoft's open-source step | Technology | Reuters
This sort of spin was inevitable, but it's very far off-track, imho. For example, it's impossible for Microsoft to support ISO OOXML until the standard specification has been published, and that's still in the future -- perhaps a year into the future -- so no smoking gun there... And, in the meantime, lots of enterprises and independent software vendors are already exploiting the (ISO OOXML precursor) ECMA OOXML standard that's supported in Office 2007 today.
As for Microsoft supporting ODF in Office 2007 SP2, it's a pragmatic and, imho, politically astute move (as is Microsoft joining the OASIS ODF TC), but it hardly implies Microsoft favors ODF or is hedging on OOXML, and of course the PDF support was already there, albeit a mouse-click and download away (as is ODF support, albeit also a download away, and not officially supported by Microsoft today, and not as seamlessly integrated as it will be in Office 2007 SP2).
Good news for those of you who have been following the XML office document standards battle. Microsoft today announced that Office 2007 will support ODF (Open Document Format), the document standard used by OpenOffice.org and other open source productivity suites, with the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, due sometime in early 2009.
Even more surprising, however, was the corollary to the announcement. While the Office programmer bees are busy buzzing away at ODF, OOXML (Office Open XML) is being put on the back burner. Don't expect Office to support a fully ISO-compliant version of OOXML until the next major release of the suite, currently codenamed Office 14, release date unknown.
The final part of the article:
Any way you slice it, this is a big step toward shaking off Microsoft's dominance of the office software market and ensuring that we can all preserve our files for years to come.
Yes on the latter; not likely, on the former.
Microsoft prepares to enter the MDM space (via Barry Briggs)
It is nearly a year now since Microsoft acquired Stratature, so it seems timely to reflect on what Microsoft is planning for its entry into the master data management (MDM) market. Microsoft's MDM product, code-named "Bulldog", is based on the Stratature technology, but is much more ambitious. The Stratature technology (the catchily named +EDM) was an inherently multi-domain MDM hub which was mainly aimed at the "analytic" MDM market, which is populated by the likes of Kalido and Hyperion DRM from Oracle.
A handy summary
There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.
The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats - including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.
In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.
Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.
More Interop for Microsoft Office (ODF, PDF, PDF/A, XPS) : Oliver Bell’s weblog
I'm surprised there hasn't been more press coverage of this aspect:
As part of the program, Microsoft is also unveiling a new business model that allows search marketers to pay for ads only when people buy a product, rather than when they simply click on an ad.
Microsoft said this so-called cost-per-action model would give advertisers more precise returns on their marketing budgets. Google already offers a program that allows advertisers to tailor their bids on keywords based on the number of actions, or conversions, they get.
Microsoft also said that it had integrated Farecast, a travel Web site that Microsoft acquired in April, into Live Search cashback. The Live Search cashback service was built on technology developed by Jellyfish, a start-up that Microsoft acquired in 2007.
Microsoft Offers Rebates to Shoppers Using Its Search - New York Times
A timely reality check -- see the full article for details
The printer industry, they [People involved in shaping Google’s approach] say, is a perfect example. Canon supplies printer engines to about 80 percent of the laser printer market, including its rival Hewlett-Packard. They point to many others, including Whirlpool’s making appliances for Sears, AT&T’s licensing its mobile network to Virgin Atlantic and other small carriers, Toyota’s selling hybrid engines to General Motors and Microsoft’s tailoring its Office software for Apple computers.
But some antitrust experts say the planned partnership does raise concerns. Whether this pact is completed or not, they add, it points to the kind of antitrust issues that will increasingly surround Google as a dominant company in the Internet economy, which can quickly magnify the market power of corporate winners.
Google Says It Will Defend Competitive Rationale of a Yahoo Deal - New York Times
No doubt this will provide lots of conspiracy theory fodder for anti-Microsoft types worldwide, but imho this is another example of how Microsoft is doing some surprisingly pragmatic and customer-focused things these days. Read the full press release and think about the implications.
Microsoft Corp. is offering customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite.
The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.
A $75 dual-screen Windows-based (maybe the Windows option would raise the price to, say, $100 :)...) ebook reader/tablet/laptop?
"This laptop comes from a different point of view." he said.
The new version loses the green rubbery keyboard, sporting instead a single square display hinged at its centre.
This allows the device to be split into two touch screens that can either mimic a laptop with keyboard or the pages of a book.
"Over the last couple of years we've learned the book experience is key," he said.
The idea is for several children to use the device at once, combining the functions of a laptop, electronic book and electronic board.
That would be pretty cool. But in the meantime, who is going to pay ~$200 for one of these?
An anti-social networking reality check; see the full post for more details
The Internet is seeing a stark rise in the number of hate and terror sites and Web postings, according to a Congressional briefing last week entitled “Hate in the Information Age.”
At the briefing, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles, presented the organization’s annual study of online terror and hate. He said the group had identified some 8,000 problematic sites in the last 12 months, a 30 percent spike over last year.
Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
Not a (Yahoo!) all-or-nothing scenario for Microsoft, in terms of Internet advertising...
The aQuantive combination has gone well thus far, executives and analysts said. But there's more work to be done, particularly in uniting the advertising platforms that underpin the company's play in the $22 billion online advertising industry.
And compared with the daunting task of swallowing Yahoo, with its dramatically larger size, hostile management, incompatible back-end technology and different corporate culture, aQuantive is a relative snack.
A snapshot of the reason Google, Microsoft, and others are so intently focused on this domain:
Business & Technology | Instead of Yahoo, Microsoft spotlights aQuantive | Seattle Times Newspaper
Interesting times...
The software maker plans on Wednesday to launch a cash back program to those who buy things after using its search.
Microsoft has details of the program up on its Web site, including a list of frequently asked questions.
"We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping," Microsoft said. "We are 'The Search That Pays You Back!' "
Microsoft looks to buy way into search (again) | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
More details on the ($100 - $25) laptop. I sense strong potential for the Osborne effect here -- who is going to buy $200 "$100" laptops when much-improved $75 versions will be available in 2010?
With its hinged dual display, the new version could be used as a book, as a laptop with a touch-screen keypad, or as one continuous display when folded flat. "The display is going to get better and better, and it's key to the next generation," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, said yesterday at a launch event at the MIT Media Lab.
More unhappy news for Yahoo's exec mgmt...
Mr. Pickens in an interview on CNBC Tuesday said he had bought 10 million shares of Yahoo, or a roughly 0.75% stake, after Mr. Icahn launched his proxy effort. "I'll jump in with Carl. He goes in first, I jump in behind him," Mr. Pickens said during the interview. A spokesman for Mr. Pickens declined to comment further. Mr. Icahn couldn't be reached for comment.
Mr. Icahn last week disclosed he had bought 10 million Yahoo shares and acquired options to purchase 49 million more, which together would represent a roughly 4.3% stake in the company. Other Icahn supporters include hedge-fund investor John Paulson, whose Paulson & Co. firm, held 50 million Yahoo shares, or a 3.7% stake, as of the first quarter. Mr. Paulson in a statement last week said he intended to vote for Mr. Icahn's nominees but hoped Microsoft would reach an agreement to buy Yahoo before then.
I'm still not understanding the math in this context -- .86 * (VMW mkt cap) = ~$22.5B, while the mkt cap of EMC = $35.7B
EMC Corp. will keep its 86 percent stake in software maker VMware Inc., chief executive Joseph Tucci said, quashing speculation that the company will unload more of its shares. "Honestly, from the board, there is no interest in spinning off VMware," Tucci said, reiterating a pledge made last month. Hopkinton-based EMC posted its biggest weekly gain in three years last week in New York trading on predictions the company would spin off the remainder of the business. (Bloomberg)
EMC CEO reaffirms vow not to sell stake in VMware - The Boston Globe
Target price: $75
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, revealed plans for the new computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab yesterday. Due for release in 2010, the new machine will be smaller and lighter than the foundation's current XO laptop, which went on sale last year.
But the new device will feature two video display screens, one of them replacing the keyboard found in other laptops. The screens will be touch-sensitive, and can be configured to act as a traditional keyboard. But the screens can also serve as a single large viewing area.
Another XML guru -- Micah Dubinko -- joins Mark Logic, from Yahoo! Research, in this case (via xml.com)
You probably noticed the byline on my recent Yahoo! developer network posting. It, and a few more posts still in the pipe, list me as a “SearchMonkey Team Alumnus”. So yeah, it’s official, I’ve hung up my exclamation point and moved on to something else.
Specifically, Mark Logic, where a group of impressively talented people reside, recently including Norm Walsh. My first day there is tomorrow, so I don’t fully know what I’ll be working on, though it does involve the core server, and taking it from it current state of awesome raw bare-metal power into something more akin to a application development platform.
This is just my speculation -- I have no info from Microsoft on this scenario -- but I'm expecting Windows 7 and Office 14 will be the main themes at PDC 2008.
When is Microsoft finally going to start sharing information on Windows 7?
After all, if the Redmondians stick to their own oft-quoted ship target of 2010 for the operating system, that is just two years away. For developers two years isn’t a whole lot of time when trying to make decisions about whether or not to build a new product that will be designed specifically to take advantage of new features and functionality in a new Windows release. And for IT managers struggling with deployment plans (as in deploy Vista now or wait two more years for Windows 7), that window on the next version of Windows isn’t overly wide, either.
Windows 7: The information lockdown continues | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com
An example of OOXML generation from Altova -- see the full post for screen shots etc.
As Office Open XML (OOXML) gains more wide-spread adoption and popularity - and since it is now an ISO standard - developers will be interested in how easy it is to create Open XML documents directly in their applications, e.g. spreadsheet documents that are compatible with Excel 2007. Most approaches require quite a bit of hand-coding and worrying about the actual OpenXML specifications, but what I want to show you today on the XML Aficionado blog is a way to use MapForce to auto-generate all the source-code (for example in C#) that will produce the desired .xlsx document so that you can integrate it into your applications (and use it royalty-free within your organization).
XML Aficionado: Creating Open XML (OOXML) Spreadsheet Documents
One take-away from this article: it's now likely up to Google or Microsoft, winner takes all (of Yahoo), and of course there's a very low probability, given Google's already dominant search market share, that it would be allowed to acquire Yahoo. Press F9, and the answer is... a very risky scenario for Carl Icahn, if Microsoft opts to not put an offer back on the table.
Whatever the case, his role in Yahoo is not just like any other shareholder. He’s gambling that Microsoft will inevitably come back to buy Yahoo — and if it doesn’t, that he will be able to use his special brand of influence to make it.
Understanding Mr. Icahn’s thinking is not that complicated: “I’m a pragmatic guy,” he told me during our dinner, about the way he invests. “I believe in rationality,” he added. Unlike Warren Buffett, he’s not looking to make 10-year bets. He’s looking for a catalyst — something that will move the stock price. And he doesn’t care about understanding the intricacies of the business. His great talent is for smelling blood in the water first. “I used to be a poker player,” he said. “I play the odds.”
Interesting times...
Google's top executives have said they'd like to offer Yahoo a helping hand in their travails to fend off Microsoft, then activist shareholder Carl Icahn, and now Microsoft again. And Brin went one step further, saying he'd give Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang refuge within Google if he's ousted from the Internet pioneer, according to press accounts.
"Jerry is very talented, and if he wants to work at Google, we'd be very excited to have him, but I don't think that's going to happen," Brin said, according to the BBC
Google execs stew over Microsoft response | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that any price Google might pay for a similar deal with Yahoo just went up -- way up... If the unofficial accounts quoted below are accurate, I also can't imagine why Yahoo would opt to disassemble itself.
Under its latest proposal to Yahoo, Microsoft would buy its search business and take a stake in the company, people briefed on the negotiations said Monday.
As part of a complicated deal, Yahoo would spin off its Asian assets, which include a stake in the Alibaba Group, a Chinese Internet company, these people added.
The proposal, which is subject to change, is an effort by Microsoft to scuttle a search-related advertising deal between Yahoo and Google, and could expand into a full-scale takeover.
I remember an exchange between Bill Gates and Jim Manzi, back in the early 1990s, when the PC software business was still relatively young, and the productivity application suite market was taking off (e.g., Microsoft Office versus Lotus SmartSuite). Bill Gates commented, when asked about a price war phase in the suite competition, "It's not a good idea to get into price competition with someone who has more money than you do."
Very different market dynamics today, of course, but Yahoo is in the fray between the two players with the biggest bank accounts...
Cool, but I'd prefer to use my Xbox 360 in this context
Working with a small Silicon Valley company, Netflix will begin marketing a $99 device on Tuesday that will allow customers to play thousands of movies and shows on their televisions instantly, for no charge beyond their normal subscription fee.
The size of a paperback book, the set-top box is made by Roku, a Saratoga, Calif., start-up known for its Internet music players. Netflix, based in nearby Los Gatos, owns a small stake in the company.
Netflix to Sell a Device for Instantly Watching Movies on TV Sets - New York Times
Hmm...
After a year and half of development, Google began offering online personal health records to the public on Monday.
The Internet search giant’s service, Google Health, at google.com/health, is the latest entrant in the growing field of companies offering personal health records on the Web. Their ranks range from longtime online health services like WebMD to the software powerhouse Microsoft to start-ups like Revolution Health.
Google Offers Personal Health Records on the Web - New York Times
Yikes -- see the full article for more context
In plainer language: after a week of analysis, we now know that two changed lines of code have created profound security vulnerabilities in at least four different open-source operating systems, 25 different application programs, and millions of individual computer systems on the Internet. And even though the vulnerability was discovered on May 13 and a patch has been distributed, installing the patch doesn't repair the damage to the compromised systems. What's even more alarming is that some computers may be compromised even though they aren't running the suspect code.
14 minutes from internal Microsoft distribution to WSJ blog publication; I doubt that was unintentional...
Just prior to Microsoft’s annual advertising conference advance08, Kevin Johnson, president of the company’s Platforms & Services division, sent the following strategy update to PSD employees:
Microsoft on Yahoo: Internal Memo From Kevin Johnson | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
