Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Joost bows to YouTube, gives up consumer video | Digital Media - CNET News

A big day for Internet video news

Joost, the third major creation by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the duo that also founded Kazaa and Skype, announced Tuesday that it will dump its consumer-video service and will now focus on building "white label" video platforms for "cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators."

The move marks the end of Joost as a YouTube and Hulu competitor and also closes the book on the attempt to resuscitate the company overseen by former Cisco executive Mike Volpi. Joost announced that Volpi has stepped aside as CEO but will remain chairman.

Joost bows to YouTube, gives up consumer video | Digital Media - CNET News

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker

An outstanding review of Chris Anderson’s new book (Free: The Future of a Radical Price); read the full article

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

I’m still looking forward to reading the book, but I’m also glad to be a subscriber to The New Yorker for excellent journalism such as this review.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker

Yahoo expected to shut down Maven Networks - Mass High Tech Business News

More evidence Yahoo is focusing on fewer things

Less than 18 months after it was acquired by Yahoo Inc., online video hosting and distribution company Maven Networks Inc. is being shut down, according to online reports.
The Cambridge-based company’s products will no longer be supported by Yahoo after 2010, according to website TechCrunch, which cites an unnamed Maven customer.
Yahoo acquired Maven in February of 2008 for $160 million.

Yahoo expected to shut down Maven Networks - Mass High Tech Business News

Comcast to Offer Wireless Cards - WSJ.com

Hmm…

The broadband card will operate on network run by Clearwire Corp., which already offers a similar service in the region and in which Comcast invested $1 billion last year. The service will use so-called 4G technology capable of delivering download speeds of four megabits per second.

The Portland rollout marks the "first step" in a larger launch, said Cathy Avgiris, general manager for wireless and voice services at Comcast. Comcast will offer the new wireless service in a promotion that costs $49.95 a month for the first year and includes Comcast's Internet home service and a Wi-Fi router. The regular price is about $73 a month.

Comcast to Offer Wireless Cards - WSJ.com

Monday, June 29, 2009

Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet

Another article from the latest issue of Wired – except:

Google is a little like being heavyweight champion of the world—everyone wants a shot at your title. But over the past year, Facebook has gone from glass-jawed flyweight to legitimate contender. It has become one of the most popular online destinations. More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day. Facebook has stolen several well-known Google employees, from COO Sheryl Sandburg to chef Josef Desimone; at least 9 percent of its staff used to work for the search giant. And since last December, Facebook has launched a series of ambitious initiatives, designed to make the social graph an even more integral part of a user's online experience. Even some Googlers concede that Facebook represents a growing threat. "Eventually, we are going to collide," one executive says.

Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet

Google Makes a Case That It Isn’t So Big - NYTimes.com

Check the full article for a timely Google reality check

Google handles roughly two-thirds of all Internet searches. It owns the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. And last year, Google sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any media company in the world.

With all those riches and more, how is Google a relatively small company, one that is vulnerable to competition and whose luck could turn any day?

Dana Wagner is happy to explain.

Mr. Wagner, who is Google’s “senior competition counsel,” faces the Sisyphean task of convincing the world that his employer is not unassailable.

Google Makes a Case That It Isn’t So Big - NYTimes.com

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics

A couple timely reality-check articles in the latest issue of Wired – one on Nike + Apple:

Noone has joined the legion of people, from Olympic-level athletes to ordinary folks just hoping to lower their blood pressure, who are plugging into a data-driven revolution. And it goes way beyond Nike+. Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.

And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.

… and the second, Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365, on related themes.  Final paragraphs:

The basic idea of a macroscope is to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern. This means computers on one side and distributed data-gathering on the other. If you want to see the climate, you gather your data with hyperlocal weather stations maintained by amateurs. If you want to see traffic, you collect info from automatic sensors placed on roadways and cars. If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of countless observations of small incidents of change—incidents that used to vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population study.

The macroscope will be to our era of science what the telescope and the microscope were to earlier ones. Its power will be felt even more from the new questions it provokes than from the answers it delivers. The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge, using this tool we all build.

The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics

Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

An excerpt from Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, also reviewed in today’s Boston Globe

image

Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

Digital Domain - Aardvark’s Personal Touch to Online Advice - NYTimes.com

The future of Twitter … and/or part of the future of spam?

A new service offered by Aardvark (vark.com), however, provides specific recommendations. Its advice is always current, too, obtained on the fly from those we trust, like friends, but whose collective expertise far exceeds that of the relatively few people we happen to know personally.

[…]

Aardvark has devised ways to drastically narrow the search, asking only those who are most likely to have an answer, and asking only a few of them at a time, protecting your network of volunteers from being asked too often.

The Aardvark system assumes that no single answer will serve for everyone who poses the same question. It uses information about interests supplied by registrants and from outside social networking profiles to match interests, demographic characteristics, common affiliations and other factors. It also checks whether prospective advice-givers are presently signed into one of three instant-messaging services. (The company says an iPhone version is in the works, too.)

Digital Domain - Aardvark’s Personal Touch to Online Advice - NYTimes.com

Slipstream - Should RealNetworks, an Internet Pioneer, Switch Gears? - NYTimes.com

See the full article for a Real reality check

Real, based in Seattle, offers a profound example of how markedly fortunes can change in the technology business. In the field it pioneered in the 1990s, distributing and playing music and video online, the company has been largely eclipsed by rivals like Microsoft, Apple and YouTube from Google.

Though Real’s stock price rose slightly last week upon release of the new RealPlayer, it is still down by about half since the start of 2008. And the company’s market valuation of $419 million is only a little more than the $370 million in cash it has sitting in the bank.

Slipstream - Should RealNetworks, an Internet Pioneer, Switch Gears? - NYTimes.com

The future of ‘Free’ - The Boston Globe

Excerpt from an extensive review of Chris Anderson’s new book:

Bo Peabody, a venture capitalist and the founder of an early social networking site called Tripod, has since soured on the idea that they can make money. People won’t pay for any social-networking services, he believes, and ads don’t work. “Social networking is the most useful thing on the Web, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good business,” he says.

At the same time, while the explosion in computing power, storage, and connectivity has unquestionably cut marginal costs, some costs are proving more stubborn than others. Much of today’s online business involves people ordering things like shoes and books and microwave ovens, and those can never truly be free. And even online storage has its costs - Facebook has been struggling to find and pay for enough server space to fit all the information its voraciously networking users are uploading every day - it’s a problem that, for the foreseeable future, will grow worse, not better, as the network grows.

The future of ‘Free’ - The Boston Globe

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Q&A: Twitter And Clouds -- InformationWeek

A timely reality check

Dr. Dobb's: Does Twitter pose security-related problems?

McGraw: Twitter presents a perfect vector for malicious code and phishing, especially since most users use bit.ly or tinyurl to fit clickable URLs into their messages. Twitter allows dingbats to cash in their last remaining privacy chit with a coolness factor that often overrides common sense.

In fact, the last point applies equally well to Facebook and MySpace. The big problem is many users of these systems seem to have little understanding that postings, tweets, tequila drinking photos, and everything they post in the Web 2.0 world is public. Before Tweeting whatever occurs to you, think about whether you would want your mom to read it. Also note that the Tweet will be around basically forever! Will your future potential employers search Twitter? Why wouldn't they?

Q&A: Twitter And Clouds -- InformationWeek

Windows 7 pre-orders grab Amazon's top sales spots [Computerworld]

Order today, while “supplies last”…

Microsoft and online retailers today kicked off Windows 7 sales in the U.S., Canada and Japan, taking pre-orders at prices discounted by as much as 58%.

The upgrade for Windows 7 Home Premium, priced at $49.99, immediately stormed to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list. The $99.99 Windows 7 Professional Upgrade held the No. 2 spot in software, while Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade, a $219.99 package that has not been discounted, claimed No. 4 as of 1:30 p.m. ET Friday.

Windows 7 pre-orders grab Amazon's top sales spots

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Oracle hits glitch in Sun Micro deal

Hmm…

Oracle disclosed a potential glitch in its $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Micrososystems late on Friday as it revealed that it had failed to win regulatory clearance for the deal by the expected deadline.

Most investors and industry observers had assumed that anti-trust clearance for the acquisition, which would see the world’s second-largest independent software concern buy one of the largest computer systems companies, was a foregone conclusion since the companies are not big competitors in any markets.

[…]

Despite the unexpected twist, a lawyer for Oracle played down the significance of the delay and suggested the deal would not be thrown off track.

Oracle also disclosed that regulators were studying the licensing terms for Sun’s Java software. The Java programming language and development tools are used widely by technology companies that compete with Microsoft, and Java is an essential ingredient of the software at companies like IBM and Nokia.

See the full article for details (free FT registration likely required).  I expect the deal will close, albeit perhaps with some conditions on Java licensing etc.

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Oracle hits glitch in Sun Micro deal

And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is … - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Sign of the times

On Friday, a coalition of four teams calling itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos — made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from America, Austria, Canada and Israel — declared that it has produced a program that improves the accuracy of the predictions by 10.05 percent.

Under the rules of the contest, Netflix said that other contestants now have 30 days to try to do even better. If they cannot, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos will collect the $1 million.

The Netflix Prize contest has been hailed as prime example of “prize economics” and the crowdsourcing of innovation. Prize economics refers to running a contest to generate a new innovation at less cost than an in-house research and development effort, and crowd-sourcing refers to using the proverbial wisdom of crowds to accomplish a task. Netflix has said that $1 million would be a bargain price for an improved recommendation engine, which would increase customer satisfaction and generate more movie rental business.

And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is … - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Computer Failures Are Probed in Jet Crash - WSJ.com

Yikes

Relying on backup instruments, the Air France pilots apparently struggled to restart flight-management computers even as their plane may have begun breaking up from excessive speed, according to theories developed by investigators.

The investigators stress it is too early to pinpoint specific causes. But whatever the eventual findings, the crash already is prompting questions about how thoroughly aviators are trained to cope with widespread computer glitches midflight.

If such emergencies do occur on today's increasingly automated jetliners, many industry safety experts wonder how proficient the average crew may be in trying to rely on less-sophisticated backup systems.

Computer Failures Are Probed in Jet Crash - WSJ.com

Friday, June 26, 2009

Microsoft Defends Its Empire - BusinessWeek

BW cover story on Microsoft – excerpt:

The front line of the new Microsoft is its highly profitable business division. The group includes the Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the Outlook program, which lets users read and compose e-mails), as well as its SharePoint collaboration software and its Exchange e-mail server program. Microsoft in November began offering Exchange and SharePoint as a Web service for a monthly fee. For customers tired of maintaining these unwieldy programs on their own servers, the change is welcome: They usually end up paying less to subscribe to the software than they spent buying the program and paying for the staff and hardware to run it.

What's more, Microsoft has dramatically upgraded its Office applications. Microsoft Office 2010, scheduled to be released by the middle of next year, represents a radical departure from the past. For the first time, Microsoft will offer a free version of Office with limited functionality to customers who don't want to pay up for the whole shebang. Among other things, the free version, which will be supported in part by online advertising, will let users access any Word or Excel document remotely, via cell phone or a Web site.

Also see Microsoft: Beyond 'Software Plus Services'

Microsoft Defends Its Empire - BusinessWeek

Amazon patents electronic pen technology, mum on plans - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

Hmm…

Amazon.com launched two new Kindles in quick succession this year. So what will its next electronic reader look like? How about one that works with an electronic pen? Amazon recently received a patent for an "electronic input device such as an electronic pen" that can be used to annotate paper documents and locate the corresponding digital version.

Amazon patents electronic pen technology, mum on plans - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web slows after Jackson's death

Also crashed Twitter – see the full article for details

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web slows after Jackson's death

Google Voice, Available in the US

Now you can inform Google about all of the calls you make, along with the terms you search for, people with whom you email or IM, Web sites you visit, videos you watch, etc. Maybe Google will acquire the United States Postal Service next…

Two years after acquiring GrandCentral, Google is about to open an updated version of the service to all US users. Google Voice is a free service that provides one number for all your phones, so you can add some features that help you manage phone calls: blocking calls, recording calls, answering from any of your phones, transcribing voicemail and more.

Google Voice, Available in the US

Microsoft | Windows 7 to be cheaper than Vista | Seattle Times Newspaper

The free Windows 7 upgrade option for new Vista PC purchases also kicks in today

Retail prices for Windows 7 when it rolls out Oct. 22 will range from $119.99 to $319.99. The price points are 10 percent lower than Windows Vista, the version of Windows that 7 will replace.

From today through July 11, Microsoft is running a half-off special, with Windows XP and Vista users able to pre-order the new operating system for as little as $49.99.

Microsoft | Windows 7 to be cheaper than Vista | Seattle Times Newspaper

Michael Jackson's death roils Wikipedia | Digital Media - CNET News

Strange days indeed

But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson's demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word "was" instead of "is," while another edit called "Invincible" his "last studio album."

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"

Michael Jackson's death roils Wikipedia | Digital Media - CNET News

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Email Patterns Can Predict The Health Of Your Company | Bex Huff

Some intriguing analysis; see the full post 

As I mentioned previously and in my latest book, data mining your corporate email can yield some pretty interesting information... even if you don't read the contents. My angle is that by analyzing who emails whom and when, you can get a sense of who is "friends" with whom... and by doing so you can hit the ground running with any Enterprise 2.0 social software initiatives.

One nugget that I never thought of was how the emergence of email "cliques" can determine whether or not your company is in serious trouble... Two researchers -- Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes -- recently analyzed the email patters at Enron to see if there were any predictors of the impending doom. Initially, they thought they would find interesting changes immediately prior to a large crisis... However, what they found was that the biggest change in email patterns happened one full month prior to the crisis!

For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees... Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely [prior to a crisis].

Email Patterns Can Predict The Health Of Your Company | Bex Huff

A New Book on Facebook, Some of It Fact-Based - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Sign of the times

Hollywood is buzzing this week about plans for a movie, written by the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin and possibly to be directed by David Fincher, that will depict the conflict-filled rise of the social network Facebook.

Mr. Sorkin’s script is based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” by Ben Mezrich, to be published in mid-July by Doubleday, a division of Random House. A galley copy of the book was obtained by The New York Times and read in two sittings.

Doubleday has classified the book as nonfiction, but it has a novelistic gloss that tries to compensate for the absence of comprehensive reporting.

A New Book on Facebook, Some of It Fact-Based - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Why Google Wave makes Tim Bray nervous • The Register

See the full post for more details and an audio interview

Bray told The Reg during a chat that he felt a little uneasy about Google Wave, which could either become the next Twitter or the next Lotus Notes. Gulp.

"I tend to be a little bit nervous and suspicious of something that tries to do everything at once," Bray told us. "Some of the really big innovations on the internet have been things that solved one problem really well and didn't try to boil the ocean."

Why Google Wave makes Tim Bray nervous • The Register

WSJ.com: Rivals Move to Flag IBM as Anticompetitive in Mainframes

See the full story for details

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has pursued Big Blue for decades in an effort to rein in the technology giant's allegedly unfair behavior.

The CCIA now has added encouragement from a tiny firm backed by IBM rival Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which has lodged an antitrust complaint in Europe, while pressing a related lawsuit in federal court in New York and sounding out U.S. regulators. T3 Technologies Inc. argues that IBM unfairly has sewn up the market for mainframes, the powerful machines relied upon by virtually every Fortune 500 company to crunch data.

Ed Black, CCIA's chief executive, suggested that IBM's competitive behavior has worsened since it was freed from a Justice Department consent decree during President George W. Bush's first term. He's hopeful federal regulators will take a renewed interest.

"With the new administration, I think odds are pretty substantial," Black said. "They're doing the same stuff they were nailed for before, and very blatantly."

Article - WSJ.com

New website expects 10% to pay for news - The Boston Globe

So that’d be more about paying for searching/filtering/indexing/clipping than access?

Journalism Online thinks it can help by serving a smorgasbord of newspaper and magazine content that enables readers to pay one vendor for coverage pulled from multiple websites. Subscription packages, for instance, might cater to Web surfers willing to pay for the best stories about entertainment, business, or something more specialized, such as California politics. Publishers would share the revenue collected by Journalism Online, which believes subscribers will pay an average of $25 a month for professionally produced stories on the Web. The estimate was drawn from a survey last month.

New website expects 10% to pay for news - The Boston Globe

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Asked and answered, NY Times. Happy now?

FSJ is back and in top form :) (read the full post)

Katie swears this will satisfy the inquisitive minds at the New York Times, and basically get them to stop slandering me based on unfounded rumor and speculation. I wish it were so, but my bet is it won't work at all, and now the hacks will just move on to the next complaint, which goes like this: If Jobso had such a high MELD score, well then he must have been a lot sicker than Apple let on, which means Apple was misleading investors, which means all of Apple's board members should be fired and sent to prison and/or have their eyes held open and be forced to watch Al Gore's global warming movie over and over again for the rest of their lives. I'm sure that's where this is going. I just know it. The vultures will never leave me alone.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Asked and answered, NY Times. Happy now?

Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account hijacked, pushes Windows and Mac malware | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

Another Twitter milestone

The Twitter account belonging to venture capitalist and Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki was hijacked yesterday and used to push malware to some 140,000 Twitter users. The attack (screenshot above) included a link to what purported to be a “sex tape video free download” linked to Gossip Girls star Leighton Meester but, after a series of clicks, the end result was a malicious Trojan.

Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account hijacked, pushes Windows and Mac malware | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Oracle Operating Margin Tops 50%, Maintenance Bigger than License

Another timely snapshot from Dave Kellogg

Oracle reported its fourth quarter yesterday with several interesting highlights:

  • Non-GAAP operating margin was 51%, the highest in Oracle history
  • Fees for updates and support (aka, maintenance) were $3.1B, growing at 8%
  • Fees for license were $2.7B, decreasing at 13%
  • Oracle "beat expectations" despite both revenue and profit falling
  • Oracle headcount remains flat at about 85,500 people (roughly the size of Nashua, NH)
I would dare say that all this continues to validate my Oracle has become Computer Associates (without anybody noticing) hypothesis.

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Oracle Operating Margin Tops 50%, Maintenance Bigger than License

Microsoft dials Hohm to cut home energy use | Green Tech - CNET News

I look forward to using this service

It's a move that stands to shake up home-energy monitoring, a business that dozens of start-ups and IT industry heavyweights, including Google, Cisco, and Verizon, are moving into. There are already several advice Web sites that help consumers get tips on how to save money by providing guidance on weatherizing a home, for example.

But Microsoft designed Hohm as a cloud-computing application--built on the Azure online operating system and Bing search engine--so that users can tap into back-end data analytics for more tailored advice. Hohm provides tips based on models licensed from the Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which were developed with years of data, according to Microsoft.

The Hohm residential energy management application gives consumers ways to track energy use at home and offers advice on cutting bills.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft dials Hohm to cut home energy use | Green Tech - CNET News

The Choice Is Clear: Universities Worldwide Select Microsoft Live@edu

See the full press release for some recent wins

Momentum continues worldwide for Microsoft Live@edu: several new universities have recently signed on for the no-charge suite of communication and collaboration tools for students, faculty, staff and alumni. By signing up for Live@edu, the schools gain access to Microsoft Office Outlook Live for e-mail, Microsoft Office Live Workspace to share documents and collaborate, Windows Live Messenger for instant messaging, and Windows Live SkyDrive for 25 GB of online data storage space.

The Choice Is Clear: Universities Worldwide Select Microsoft Live@edu: Institutions of higher learning give Microsoft Live@edu top marks for providing students with a robust set of tools designed with the familiar Microsoft Office interface.

Amazon Lovers Let You ‘See a Kindle in Your City’ - Digits - WSJ

Sign of the times

Thinking about buying one of Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book readers but want to check one out in person first? Amazon, which only sells the devices online, has a solution: a legion of volunteer Kindle evangelists.

Getting paid nothing, thousands of these folks have signed up on an Amazon Web site to meet up with potential Kindle purchasers at coffee shops or elsewhere so prospective buyers can handle the goods. The site launched last year, but has found new popularity in recent weeks with the launch of Amazon’s letter-paper-sized Kindle DX.

Amazon Lovers Let You ‘See a Kindle in Your City’ - Digits - WSJ

Oracle CEO Ellison Changes Tack on Cloud Computing - WSJ.com

We’re all cloud-ians now…

On Tuesday, Mr. Ellison appeared to change his tune. During a call following Oracle's fourth-quarter results, Mr. Ellison said the company's Fusion products -- software that aims to tie together technology from many of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company's acquisitions -- would be "on-demand ready," suggesting they would be available on a pay-as-you-go basis. He added that a portion of Oracle's revenue from Fusion products could come from subscriptions in the future, rather than from one-off sales. Licenses to most Oracle products have a one-time fee, but can be augmented with maintenance and support, which would be charged separately.

The comment immediately provoked interest from analysts, one of whom asked if Oracle was now getting into cloud computing. Mr. Ellison admitted the company was getting "a little bit" into the space.

Oracle CEO Ellison Changes Tack on Cloud Computing - WSJ.com

IBM Lotus offers online virtual office world with Sametime 3D - The Boston Globe

Second Dilbert?…

Today, the computer giant is launching a new service at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Called Sametime 3D, this virtual world is mundane and workaday on purpose.

Instead of exotic islands and futuristic nightclubs, IBM’s digital universe features conference tables, a gigantic appointment calendar, and a flip chart. At least one of the avatars, the computer-created characters that stand in for real people using the service, is wearing a tie.

IBM Lotus offers online virtual office world with Sametime 3D - The Boston Globe

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple chief Jobs 'back at work'

Clearly Fake Steve has no shortage of material to work with

"Jobs is in the house!" declared CNBC's Jim Goldman, who is regarded as having close ties to Apple.

"Confirmed! Steve Jobs did report for work today, according to employees who have seen him on campus," wrote Mr Goldman in his TechCheck column.

Reuters news agency quoted sources saying Mr Jobs "was seen leaving the main Apple building in Cupertino and getting into a black car alone that was driven off by men in black suits with ear-pieces."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple chief Jobs 'back at work'

Barry Talks! : Fake Steve is Back!

I second that…

Woo-hoo!

If you're not familiar with the pre-eminent satire on the web, check it out!

Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

iCrack: The iPhone Is An Accident Magnet

See the full post for more details

If you’ve ever thought that your iPhone had the frictional coefficient of a Slip n’ Slide, you’re not alone. A new report from SquareTrade details the accident-prone nature of Apple’s line of smartphones, reporting that over 20% of iPhones have been damaged in the last 22 months. Cracked screens abound.

From a manufacturing standpoint, the iPhone wins higher marks than its competition by a significant margin. The report says that over the last 22 months, only 9.9% of iPhones have malfunctioned, versus 15.3% of BlackBerry and 19.9% of Treo phones.

iCrack: The iPhone Is An Accident Magnet

Apple’s Management Obsessed With Secrecy - NYTimes.com

Check the full article for insights into Apple’s paranoid modus operandi

Few companies, indeed, are more secretive than Apple, or as punitive to those who dare violate the company’s rules on keeping tight control over information. Employees have been fired for leaking news tidbits to outsiders, and the company has been known to spread disinformation about product plans to its own workers.

Apple’s Management Obsessed With Secrecy - NYTimes.com

Technology Review: Search Me

Cover story on Wolfram Alpha; see the full article 

To do these sorts of things, it would start with math and science data sets and formulas already held in Mathematica, and build from there. Some of the new information, such as government data on food, would just need minor reorganization. That's what Williams was doing. Other kinds, such as real-time stock data, required licensing. Still others, such as data on aircraft, would be gathered from open Web sources such as Wikipedia and Freebase, and cleaned up--curated.

Technology Review: Search Me

Monday, June 22, 2009

Paul Allen-backed Xiant looks to help manage email overload - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

Lots of activity in the reinventing-email zone lately

Paul Allen must be sick and tired of wading through email. First, the Microsoft co-founder incubated Gist, a Seattle startup that's trying to help people more effectively manage and consolidate personal messages flowing through Twitter, Facebook and email.

Now, the billionaire is launching Xiant, a Microsoft Outlook add-on designed to help people better organize email messages. In fact, Xiant -- a unit of Vulcan Technologies -- was a direct outgrowth of Allen's frustration trying to keep up with email.

Paul Allen-backed Xiant looks to help manage email overload - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

Share your favorite personal Windows Live Messenger story with the world! - Windows Live

Another 10th anniversary 

Wow, who would have thought that it has been almost 10 years since Messenger was launched. Windows Live Messenger (called MSN Messenger back then) was released to the public on a warm, sunny Seattle day on July 22nd 1999.

With more than 330 million active users every month, Windows Live Messenger has grown quite a bit over the last 10 years! But for a 10 year celebration it’s not all about the numbers – even more important is how Messenger enabled friendships, changed lives or just brought a lot of fun to a quick chat with a good friend or family member.

330 million active users – pretty amazing

Share your favorite personal Windows Live Messenger story with the world! - Windows Live

Official Google Blog: Blogger is turning 10

See the full post for more details.  My blog’s 10th anniversary (on Blogger the entire time) will be in late October (although the archive at this URL started in 2002, when I last switched publishing sites)

Google's about to have its second tenth birthday. In late August, Blogger will officially turn 10 years old. As our birthday draws near, we thought it would be interesting to share some fun facts about Blogger:

  • Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
  • Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
  • Almost two thirds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America (What's the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
  • The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that's football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball

Official Google Blog: Blogger is turning 10

Oracle tried to sell Sun hardware biz • The Register

See the full article for more speculation

A source close to Oracle has told The Reg that Oracle has continued to shop Sun's hardware business around to potential buyers after the official announcement of its intention to buy the whole of Sun - and after it moved to re-assure Sun employees of its love for their hardware.

The Register's source qualified the price Oracle was asking for Sun's hardware business as "unrealistic." Oracle declined to comment for this article.

Oracle tried to sell Sun hardware biz • The Register

At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com

Continuous partial attention and meeting etiquette

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com

Coverage of the protests: Twitter 1, CNN 0 | The Economist

Check the full article for context-setting and more details

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.

Coverage of the protests: Twitter 1, CNN 0 | The Economist

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Twitter on the Barricades - Six Lessons Learned - NYTimes.com

Read the full article and remember: information literacy is your friend…

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

Twitter on the Barricades - Six Lessons Learned - NYTimes.com

Get Smarter - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

Another timely reality check from The Atlantic – abstract:

Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?

Closing paragraph:

The good news, though, is that this diversity of thought can also be a strength. Coping with the various world-histori­cal dangers we face will require the greatest possible insight, creativity, and innovation. Our ability to build the future that we want—not just a future we can survive—depends on our capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world’s systems, to take advantage of the diversity of knowledge and experience our civilization embodies, and to fully appreciate the implications of our choices. Such an ability is increasingly within our grasp. The Nöocene awaits.

Read the full article.  Also check the “From the Archives” sidebar entries for the article, including the classic 1945 As We May Think

Get Smarter - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

Friday, June 19, 2009

Facebook Taps Privacy Hawk as Lobbyist - washingtonpost.com

Another sign of the times

As a prominent privacy advocate, Timothy Sparapani, former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that Internet companies have too much control over consumers' data. The self-described "privacy zealot" didn't join Facebook until seven months ago because he was uneasy about revealing personal information on the site.

Now Sparapani is responsible for shaping Washington's view of Facebook, the world's third-most-viewed site with more than 200 million users, and the privacy policies that will define its business. It's a sign that one of Silicon Valley's most influential companies wants to cultivate influence in Washington, and much earlier than its tech titan predecessors Google and Microsoft.

Facebook Taps Privacy Hawk as Lobbyist - washingtonpost.com

Twitter plays key role in DoS attacks in Iran

Strange days indeed

But a still developing and less benign use of Twitter in Iran has been its application in denial-of-service attacks against key government officials, including those affiliated with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Initially, the tweets directed users to online locations with links that users could click on to participate in a DoS attack against a particular Iranian Web site, said Richard Stiennon, founder of IT-Harvest, a Birmingham, Mich.-based consultancy.

Twitter plays key role in DoS attacks in Iran

Data show freefall may be over - The Boston Globe

Happy days are here again?   Also see Dr. Doom Has Some Good News.

The index of US leading economic indicators rose in May for a second consecutive month and a regional factory gauge climbed more than forecast in June, showing the worst recession in five decades may soon end.

The leading index increased 1.2 percent after a 1.1 percent gain in April, the best back-to-back performance since November-December 2001, the Conference Board reported yesterday. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s general economic index jumped to the highest level in nine months.

Data show freefall may be over - The Boston Globe

Thursday, June 18, 2009

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Facebook hit by privacy blow

Interesting times…

The European move marks the first attempt by regulators to address the “open” internet platforms that the social networks, led by Facebook, have rushed to create. By letting other applications ride on top of their systems, tapping into personal data about their members, the networks have sought both to tie in users for longer and create money-making opportunities.

However, regulators say tighter rules are needed to protect personal data given to these third-party developers. In particular, they believe developers should be subject to tough European Union privacy and data protection rules, even when the companies concerned are located far from Europe.

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Facebook hit by privacy blow

Google Warns of Issues with Its Outlook Sync Tool for Apps - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

I wonder if GAS will stay perma-beta, as is the case with other Google offerings

In a blog posting Tuesday, Google listed some popular Outlook add-ons and features that remain off-limits to Apps, even with the new sync tool.

"Unfortunately, some plug-ins don't yet work with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the more common ones: Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, Outlook Change Notifier," reads the Google posting.

To continue using any of these plug-ins, users have to uninstall the Google sync tool.

In addition, Apps Sync for Outlook doesn't play well with programs that interact directly with the Outlook data file, such as Windows Desktop Search and PGP.com's encryption plug-in.

Specifically, Windows Desktop Search will not properly index Google Apps Sync data files. "So in order to stop indexing from running indefinitely, the Google Apps Sync installer disables it. We recommend using the default Outlook search," Google said.

Google Warns of Issues with Its Outlook Sync Tool for Apps - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas at Home - WSJ.com

Interesting times at the Googleplex

Google can no longer afford to let promising ideas fall by the wayside. The Internet search giant's once-torrid growth has slowed. At the same time, it faces fresh competition from Microsoft Corp.'s new search engine, Bing, and start-ups such as Twitter Inc., which was founded by former Google employees.

In response, Google has recently started internal "innovation reviews," formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.

The meetings are designed to "force management to focus" on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.

Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas at Home - WSJ.com

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

U.S. Steps Gingerly Into Tumult in Iran - NYTimes.com

More details 

The Obama administration says it has tried to avoid words or deeds that could be portrayed as American meddling in Iran’s presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath.

Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

U.S. Steps Gingerly Into Tumult in Iran - NYTimes.com

Twitter Is a Player In Iran's Drama - washingtonpost.com

Check the full post for more details/context

The State Department asked social-networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday's reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The move illustrates the growing influence of online social-networking services as a communications media. Foreign news coverage of the unfolding drama, meanwhile, was limited by Iranian government restrictions barring journalists from "unauthorized" demonstrations.

Twitter Is a Player In Iran's Drama - washingtonpost.com

News Corp.’s MySpace Dismisses 400 Workers - NYTimes.com

Difficult times at MySpace

MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Mr. Murdoch, said it was laying off roughly 400 employees, or nearly 30 percent of its staff. After the layoffs, MySpace will have about 1,000 workers.

The company said the layoffs were an attempt to return to a “start-up culture.”

News Corp.’s MySpace Dismisses 400 Workers - NYTimes.com

The Newsweekly’s Last Stand - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

A somewhat snarky but interesting perspective on The Economist; check the full article 

Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. (The Economist’s revenues declined in the first quarter of this year, but so did almost every magazine’s.) Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.

Apparently I’m a bit unusual in routinely linking to Economist articles

[…]

While other publications whore themselves to Google, The Huffington Post, and the Drudge Report, almost no one links to The Economist. It sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web.

The Newsweekly’s Last Stand - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Maybe they needed the extra cash for exec “golden parachutes

Sun has been working on the Rock project for more than five years, hoping to create a chip with many cores that would trounce competing server chips from I.B.M. and Intel. The company has talked about Rock in the loftiest of terms and built it up as a game-changing product. In April 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of Sun, bragged about receiving the first test versions of Rock.

But the two people familiar with Sun’s plans say Rock has met with an unceremonious end. The people requested anonymity, as they are not authorized to speak with the press about Sun’s plans.

Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

More Kindle plans; see the full article for details

The latest Kindle model has better support for Adobe’s PDF file format, and he said that in the future, Kindle readers would support other formats as well. (He didn’t say anything about Adobe’s protected format, which competes more directly with the Kindle format.)

It would be a rare feat if Amazon could build two profitable businesses out of the Kindle. With the iPod, to which it the Kindle is often compared, Apple mainly profits from the hardware. It says the iTunes store is barely better than break-even. Cellphone companies, by contrast, subsidize the sale of phones but profit from monthly service charges.

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online - NYTimes.com

Sign of the times

As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

[…]

As each new home for this material becomes a new target for censorship, he said, a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole in blocking Internet address after Internet address carrying the subversive material.

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world,” Mr. Zittrain said. “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online - NYTimes.com

Monday, June 15, 2009

Outside Innovation: Google Wave: It’s My Design, but Will I Use It?

See the full post for more details on Patty Seybold’s Google Wave perspective

I'm pretty sure that I’m responsible for the design of Google's new Wave. I can't take full credit. There are millions of Gmail/Google Chat users like me who no doubt provided the pattern on which Google's new weird communications offering is based.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying out Wave. But thanks to early tester, Rafe Needleman's Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful, I recognized, right away that I was probably at least partly responsible for the breakthrough design pattern on which Wave is based.

Outside Innovation: Google Wave: It’s My Design, but Will I Use It?

Does Microsoft's Bing have Google running scared? | Microsoft - CNET News

Hmm…

Microsoft may have developed a contender that threatens Google's Web search dominance.

In a story headlined "Fear grips Google," the New York Post reports that the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine has so upset Google co-founder Sergey Brin that he has top engineers working on "urgent upgrades" to Google's service. Brin is said to be leading a team to determine how Microsoft's search algorithm differs from the closely guarded one Google employs. The tabloid also notes that it's rare for Google's co-founders to have such a hands-on involvement in the company's daily operations

Does Microsoft's Bing have Google running scared? | Microsoft - CNET News

Adobe makes Acrobat.com a business with paid accounts | Webware - CNET

tbd if this can become a big revenue source for Adobe

The "premium basic" plan allows for 10 PDF conversions per month, as well as up to five meeting participants though Adobe's ConnectNow tool. The "premium plus" plan dials that up to unlimited PDF conversions, and meetings with up to 20 users. Both premium plans also gain phone and Web support. In comparison, free users will only be able to convert five PDFs, and connect with two people at once in ConnectNow, which is just one less connection than users were able to have during Acrobat's beta period.

Adobe makes Acrobat.com a business with paid accounts | Webware - CNET

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Palm Pre: Nowhere To Go But Down | The Industry Standard

A stark Palm reality check

The problem with the Pre is not that it's a bad product so much as it's a bad idea. A business plan that begins with, "First, Apple or Research in Motion needs to screw-up royally," can't be a good one.

Yet, that is what has to happen for the Pre to gain serious traction.

Palm Pre: Nowhere To Go But Down | The Industry Standard

Friday, June 12, 2009

Watch out, Oracle: Google tests cloud-based database

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out

Data spaces as a concept has been around since the early 1990s, and Google, realizing its potential, has been developing it since it acquired Transformic, a pioneer of the technology, in 2005, Arnold said.

Data-spaces technology seeks to solve the problem of the multiple data types and data formats that reside in organizations, which have to scrub the data and make it uniform, often at great cost and effort, in order to store and analyze it in conventional databases.

Watch out, Oracle: Google tests cloud-based database

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Google's Approach May Doom the Effort

Bill Pray’s take on Google’s Outlook “sync” strategy; read the full post 

Google seems to be approaching it like IBM and Novell have… building a connector to make Gmail work in Outlook. It will be interesting to see if they can really make it successful.  As Guy pointed out, the initial release will be missing features – such as task management, rules, and delegation. This makes it questionable as to whether or not the connector can really permit enterprises to replace their Exchange servers on the backend. Having experienced it first hand, I believe users will be frustrated by the missing functionality. I expect the success of the connector for Google will be as limited as it has been for IBM and Novell. I agree with Larry that more competition would be healthy for this market, but I believe Google’s Outlook connector may struggle.

Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Google's Approach May Doom the Effort

Ex-Apple Executive Is Named Chief of Palm - NYTimes.com

More big changes for Palm

Jonathan Rubinstein, a former Apple executive behind its iPod, was named chief executive of the smartphone maker Palm on Wednesday.

Mr. Rubinstein will succeed Ed Colligan, who is stepping down after 16 years with Palm

Ex-Apple Executive Is Named Chief of Palm - NYTimes.com

Palm Pre good, but falls short of iPhone - The Boston Globe

An ominous perspective for Palm to ponder

That's a major weakness of Palm Inc.'s much-anticipated new gadget. The $199 Pre is a powerful, versatile smartphone, and in some ways better than Apple Inc.'s renowned iPhone 3G. But it falls short of the elegant simplicity that Apple has taught us to expect.

Besides, Apple's just cut the price of the basic iPhone to $99, half that of the Pre. And Apple is rolling out new, improved iPhones and upgraded software to boost capabilities. Throw in a desperate recession, and it's plainly a lousy time to launch the Pre, but it's the only time Palm's got.

Palm Pre good, but falls short of iPhone - The Boston Globe

Monday, June 08, 2009

Pattern Finder: June 9: Google Apps Announcements?

See the full post for some speculation about what the announcement could/should be

A rumor is floating around that on Tuesday, June 9, Google will host a get together in San Francisco to spotlight Google Apps. The company will make some Google Apps announcements and have some corporate customers talk about the product.

Hopefully, the company will do more than brag about the fact that GAPE recently began supporting Office 2007 documents. Given that the spec has been out for three years and some of the applicable code is open source, that recent announcement is one that underwhelms me.

Pattern Finder: June 9: Google Apps Announcements?

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Ping - Get the Tech Scuttlebutt! It Might Even Be True - NYTimes.com

Information literacy is your friend… especially when information quality is inconsistent; read the full article

TechCrunch, with about five million monthly visitors, dominates rival blogs, which Mr. Arrington disparages. (And they do the same to his.) But he doesn’t think of sites like Gawker or All Things Digital as competitors. He has his eyes set on The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. (And he disparages both.)

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Ping - Get the Tech Scuttlebutt! It Might Even Be True - NYTimes.com

When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone ... - NYTimes.com

A blogging reality check 

Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone ... - NYTimes.com

Google Says It's Actually Quite Small - washingtonpost.com

Nice spin…

As might be expected, Google's presentation highlights the company's many good works and "don't be evil" corporate philosophy. But there's another element at front and center of the presentation: According to Warner and Kovacevich, their company holds only a 2.66 percent share of its total market.

If that number seems low for the runaway success story of the Internet age, Google wants you to believe that it's just a question of market definition. Google rejects the idea that it's in the search advertising business, an industry in which it holds more than a 70 percent share of revenue. Instead, the company says that its competition is all advertising, a category broad enough to include newspaper, radio and highway billboards. Google's argument is not simply that it's not a big bully. If you believe the company, it's not even that big.

But, later in the article:

Many routine parts of the company's growth, such as buying small companies to stake out a position in search-related fields, could potentially be construed as anticompetitive if Google is already deemed to have market dominance.

"I think they're going to have trouble with damn near any acquisition, including acquiring your local dry cleaner," Reback said.

Google Says It's Actually Quite Small - washingtonpost.com

Friday, June 05, 2009

Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability

Read the entire post for a timely reality check on a topic that’s pivotal to the future of the Internet information model

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately in the blogosphere about various approaches to document format interoperability.  It’s great to see all of the interest in this topic, and in this post I’d like to outline how we look at interoperability and standards on the Office team.  Our approach is based on a few simple concepts:

  • Interoperability is best enabled by a multi-pronged approach based on open standards, proactive maintenance of standards, transparency of implementation, and a collaborative approach to interoperability testing.
  • Standards conformance is an important starting point, because when implementations deviate from the standard they erode its long-term value
  • Once implementers agree on the need  for conformance to the standard, interoperability can be improved through supporting activities such as shared stewardship of the standard, community engagement, transparency, and collaborative testing

Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability

Mobile phones: Sensors and sensitivity | The Economist

Another excellent and timely reality check from The Economist; read the full article 

IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

Mobile phones: Sensors and sensitivity | The Economist

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Apple to launch cut-price version of iPhone

Hmm – the post-Pre iPhone strategy?…

Apple plans to introduce a cheaper version of its popular iPhone as soon as Monday, in a move that could dramatically increase the company’s share of the market for web-surfing devices, people familiar with the initiative said on Thursday.

Analysts said that the company wanted to show off either a $149 phone or a $99 phone, down from the current low end of $199 and still subsidised in exchange for an AT&T communications service contract.

“It’s either a $50 or a $100 cut,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Kathryn Huberty.

FT.com / Companies / Technology - Apple to launch cut-price version of iPhone

Liveblogging Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on “The Potential Of Cloud Computing”

Another snapshot from last night’s Churchill Club interview:

Levy: What’s your competitive edge when it comes to cloud computing over other tech companies?

Ozzie. There are five reasons: 1. Technology-Microsoft Research has been doing tremendous things 2. Operating systems: 3. Storage investments because of search. 4. Developer edge-5-7 million developers working on Microsoft stack. It’s a great market opportunity. If we can prove to them that we have a great infrastructure for their software, they will deploy it. There’s also opportunity with partners-there are going to be lots of opportunity for partners, like hardware partners to make money. 5. Enterprise- Exchange and Sharepoint are great ways to save money.

Liveblogging Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on “The Potential Of Cloud Computing”

Advertising - Microsoft’s Plan to Unveil Bing on TV and Online - NYTimes.com

Read the full article for a snapshot of a multifaceted advertising campaign

Those Hulu users who watch the “Bing-a-thon” will receive a reward: the ability to watch TV shows or movies on hulu.com without commercial interruptions. (Yes, you have to watch a commercial to avoid watching other commercials.)

After that will come integrations of Bing into shows on networks that are part of NBC Universal as well as on cable channels that are units of the MTV Networks division of Viacom.

Advertising - Microsoft’s Plan to Unveil Bing on TV and Online - NYTimes.com

Ray Ozzie's cloud hangs over the Valley | Beyond Binary - CNET News

Sort of a weird title for this article, but check the second video clip in the source for some insights about Wave, Groove, and Mesh

In the question-and-answer period, Ozzie was asked for his thoughts on Google Wave, the company's recently introduced tool for combined collaboration and messaging.

He praised Google for taking on a big task, but also took issue with their approach saying it is "anti-Web."

"As a system, I think the complexity is an issue," Ozzie said. "The problem, the way the defined it is a complex one."

That said, it will offer insight into whether people want messaging that is distinct, such as e-mail or instant messaging, or whether there is demand for a more integrated product.

"I hope we learn, as an industry, an awful lot from Wave," Ozzie said.

Ray Ozzie's cloud hangs over the Valley | Beyond Binary - CNET News

PCI compliance requirements guide

Looks like a great (and free) resource, if you’re into PCI

Diana Kelley and Ed Moyle, co-founders of the consultancy Security Curve, know a thing or two about compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. In this series of instructional videos, Ed and Diana step through each of the 12 PCI compliance requirements, review common questions that they hear when doing assessments, then finally address possible compensating controls that can be used if you cannot meet a given requirement.

The speakers:

Diana Kelley is a partner with Amherst, N.H.-based consulting firm SecurityCurve. She formerly served as vice president and service director with research firm Burton Group. She has extensive experience creating secure network architectures and business solutions for large corporations and delivering strategic, competitive knowledge to security software vendors.

Ed Moyle is currently a manager with CTG's information security solutions practice, providing strategy, consulting and solutions to clients worldwide, as well as a founding partner of Security Curve. Ed was previously Vice President and Information Security Officer for Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM,) where he was responsible for coordinating all aspects of information security within the business unit. Ed is co-author of "Cryptographic Libraries for Developers", and a frequent contributor to the Information Security industry as author, public speaker, and analyst.

PCI compliance requirements guide

Microsoft Unveils Bing Travel

Competition is your friend – see the full press release for more details

Microsoft Corp. today announced consumer availability of a new search destination for travelers — Bing Travel — which will help consumers make smart travel decisions through a variety of innovative tools and features. Bing Travel is part of Bing, Microsoft’s new Decision Engine and consumer brand announced on May 28, designed to help people overcome search overload and make faster, more informed decisions when searching online. Bing Travel combines many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with rich news and editorial content from MSN Travel. Bing Travel is available for travelers today at http://www.bing.com/travel.

Microsoft Unveils Bing Travel: Bing Travel helps consumers make smart travel decisions with flight and hotel search, airfare price predictions, travel news and community, travel deals, and more.

Pressure Builds on Apple to Keep Its Market Lead - NYTimes.com

A timely Apple snapshot – excerpt:

Apple has actually set a high bar for itself. Unlike its rivals Google and Microsoft, which license their mobile operating systems to many phone makers, Apple builds its own hardware and software and carefully strikes exclusive relationships with wireless carriers that are willing to heavily subsidize its devices. The strategy depends on a constant flow of new products that people are willing to switch wireless companies and pay extra to use.

That same strategy — introducing expensive but elegant products with high switching costs — is showing signs of strain in other parts of Apple’s business. Although Apple has performed better lately than other American computer makers, its sales of Mac laptops and desktops declined by 3 percent in the first three months of the year. That was the first time in six years that sales in Apple’s personal computer business had a year-over-year decline.

My bet: Apple will introduce a super-sized iPod touch-style device next week.

Pressure Builds on Apple to Keep Its Market Lead - NYTimes.com

US adds Twitter to its media arsenal in Afghanistan - The Boston Globe

Sign of the times

US and Afghan forces killed four militants in Wardak Province, the US military tweeted on Monday.

That's right. The military "tweeted" the news, sending it worldwide on Twitter, the social networking site, hours before making the formal announcement to the media.

US adds Twitter to its media arsenal in Afghanistan - The Boston Globe

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Platformonomics - When is a Netbook Not a Netbook?

Excerpt from another classic charlesf post

  • Larry Ellison suggested Soracle might build netbooks (Ok, this is real). Soracle officials say they have what it takes to compete in low-cost, high volume consumer markets as evidenced by this clamshell-style prototype developed in Sun's labs which can be seen below:

image image

Platformonomics - When is a Netbook Not a Netbook?

north dakota cities - Google Squared

More fun with Google Squared (I couldn’t resist…). Who knew, for example:

  • The area around Grand Forks is hilly (oops, that’s British Columbia in the GF image below)
  • The city of Minot is 5’9 (just one inch shorter than the city of Bismarck, apparently -- and that's the other Bismarck (not shown in the screen shot below), not the same as "Bismarck, North Dakota")
  • Some cities in North Dakota have 3-digit Zip codes; others don’t rate a Zip code

image

north dakota cities - Google Squared

vowe dot net :: Funky search result on Google Squared

Check the full post… Information quality/integrity and information literacy are your friends :)

Google has started its new service Google Squared, which returns search results in tabular format. Here is what it returns for the search query "american vice presidents":

vowe dot net :: Funky search result on Google Squared

Oracle's Ellison gambles with OpenOffice's future • The Register

The plot thickens; see the full article for more details

Likely, Ellison's backing for JavaFX has two reasons. First, it potentially lets users of Oracle's Java middleware re-use their existing Java skills and technologies - that's the pitch Sun's been giving publicly and is likely to have given Ellison behind closed doors. It seems he took the bait.

More importantly, JavaFX is a Sun-owned technology, which - if the acquisition goes through - makes JavaFX an Oracle-owned technology.

Unlike the rest of the Java, JavaFX has not been submitted to the Java Community Process (JCP). Sun has never explained why, it's just dodged the subject saying it still believes in the JCP, which is like saying you believe communism is a good idea but that it's just not for you.

Oracle's Ellison gambles with OpenOffice's future • The Register

Sprint and Palm: Don’t Expect a Pre Frenzy - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Nice spin – I guess they couldn’t afford to hire people to stand in line, as Apple allegedly did in some locations, for the iPhone launch

“We’re actually trying to manage the exact opposite,” Mr. Elliott said.

He said smaller crowds would give new Pre buyers time to get in-store tutorials on how to use the device and its features, like the touch-screen gestures. “What we’re trying to do is not have people backed up waiting so customers feel rushed,” Mr. Elliott said. “We want each customer to get the experience.”

Success “is not about having a line out the door,” he said. “It’s about being able to treat each customer and make sure they’re happy with their decision.”

Sprint and Palm: Don’t Expect a Pre Frenzy - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Microsoft ads say search is sick, Bing is the cure - Boston.com

See the full article and this page for the first commercial video

The current events scenes are intended to tie the idea of saving money during the recession to using the new search engine to find travel and shopping deals, said Ty Montague, chief creative officer at JWT, the agency responsible for the TV ads.

"The world of excess is over," he said. "What people need is something that is more meaningful, gets to the point more quickly, gets them to what they want."

Microsoft ads say search is sick, Bing is the cure - Boston.com

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Oracle CEO, set to buy Sun, hails Java at conference | Languages And Standards - InfoWorld

Excerpt:

McNealy said he and Ellison first had a conversation about Oracle and Sun joining together 20 years ago.

Prior to Ellison's appearance, Gosling was lauded for his work in creating Java. In an interview on Tuesday, though, Gosling was noncommittal as far as what his plans were post-merger. Asked if he would stay on at Sun after the merger, he said, "I have no idea."

"It depends how things go," Gosling said.

I’m sure Gosling’s comments are reassuring to the Java community…

20 years ago – that was around the time when Sun was strong and Oracle was almost bankrupt (see description under “sales practices” here).  Funny how things change.

Oracle CEO, set to buy Sun, hails Java at conference | Languages And Standards - InfoWorld

Ellison Hints at Oracle's Java Priorities: JavaFX-based OpenOffice Apps and Mobile Devices - Devx Blog

More Larry Ellison tea leaves from JavaOne; this suggests Oracle-Sun is still intent on competing, e.g., with Flash and Silverlight

The new Sun boss put the OpenOffice and JavaFX groups on notice during the JavaOne opening keynote today: Produce some JavaFX libraries for the OpenOffice suite and do it quickly. Larry Ellison, head of the soon-to-be Oracle/Sun Java giant, said: "I've been meeting with different groups inside of Sun, and one of the things we're looking forward to is seeing libraries come out of the OpenOffice group that are JavaFX-based."

He offered spreadsheet and word-processing programs as the types of JavaFX application he expects. (Never mind that OpenOffice already has a spreadsheet program called Calc and a word processor called Writer.)

Ellison Hints at Oracle's Java Priorities: JavaFX-based OpenOffice Apps and Mobile Devices - Devx Blog

Business & Technology | Sources: Google, others now under antitrust review | Seattle Times Newspaper

Interesting times…

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation's largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review.

The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on the search-engine giant Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple, maker of the popular iPhone; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

(Where Genentech fits into the picture: former Genentech CEO Arthur D. Levinson is a board member at both Apple and Google)

Business & Technology | Sources: Google, others now under antitrust review | Seattle Times Newspaper