Interesting times, but the signal-to-noise ratio in the wave isn’t encouraging
Apparently, like everyone else, the Seattle Times is very interested in trying to figure out what to actually use Google Wave for. But while most are trying to use it for either fun, realtime chats, movie reenactments, or inner-business workings, the Seattle Times have tasked Wave with a larger goal: Catching a killer.
Some interesting Kindle stat-speculation
The lack of a numeric figure hasn’t deterred analysts from speculating on Kindle sales and the health of the e-reader market overall. In October, Forrester said it sees Kindle sales of 900,000 during the holiday season and 3 million for the year — up from an earlier estimate of 2 million. Piper Jaffray is expecting 750,000 Kindles to be sold in the fourth quarter, citing Amazon’s advertising and “fading” competition.
Goldman Sachs said that its holiday spending survey found that 6% of U.S. consumers plan to give an e-reader as a gift this year, and Nomura said it sees U.S. e-reader sales reaching $20 million by 2014.
How Many Kindles Does It Take to Top Amazon Sales? - Digits - WSJ
Sign of the times – see the full article for tips on controlling personal content. Perhaps the “slave flash” will be a hot holiday gift category…
However, the best way to avoid compromising situations online is to avoid compromising situations in real life. We're not saying not to have any fun, but until you are able to keep people from taking digital photos of you, you're stuck behaving properly in public. Look on the bright side, your online self is keeping you honest, right?
There is one bit of technology that will help you control what pictures are taken of you in the future: A slave flash. It's not state-of-the-art, photographers have been using slave flashes for years to get light in angles a regular flash won't. A slave flash will see the flash being directed at you by the paparazzi and instantly trigger its own flash. If the cameras pointed at you just so happen to also be pointed at the slave flash, the photo is ruined.
See this page for the site
One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.
The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.
Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.
A timely commercial open source reality check
Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.
Open Source Proves Elusive as a Business Model - NYTimes.com
See the full article for a timely appliance reality check
Aside from the iPhone-like Touch, iPods are another example of specialized devices whose era may be ending because they cannot maintain their edge of excellence. Many smartphones now equal the iPod as music players and are better at showing photos and videos. Adding a mediocre video camera to the iPod Nano just isn't enough.
The lesson is that for a specialized device to cut it against more versatile competition, it must hit a high bar for excellence. A decade ago, the PalmPilot crushed the Apple Newton: While it did less, it did it much better. Eventually the Palm, too, was vanquished as smartphones subsumed its functions. Someday e-book readers and cameras may go the way of the PDA and the dedicated word processor. But at least for now, they can depend on the loyalty of delighted users.
Interesting times
Officer Michael Charbonnier, who oversees the program, said people who live in high-crime neighborhoods are often afraid that if they talk to police, they could be hurt or even killed by gang members, drug dealers, or other criminals.
“So when they have this option of texting us - knowing no one will know who they are - well, now, people give us license plate numbers, they give us names,’’ Charbonnier said.
People feared retaliation for talking to police, but with texting programs, police never see the tipster’s name or phone number.
The text messages are sent to a separate, third-party server, where identifying information is stripped out and they are assigned an encrypted alias before being sent to police.
Anonymous texts aid police, weary tipsters - The Boston Globe
Sign of the times
Once upon a time, people mailed their holiday wishes to the North Pole and hoped for a reply on Christmas Day. Nowadays they are sending their wishes into cyberspace and are apt to get a reply in minutes.
America’s first Twitter Christmas got under way in earnest on Friday. Across the land, retailers and their customers used the social networking site to talk to one another about bargains, problems, purchases and shopping strategies.
Sign of the times – a $.99 Kindle ebook. I continue to be very impressed with the Kindle device/service, overall.
The Kindle 2 Cookbook provides stey-by-step recipes to do everything the Kindle 2 User's Guide doesn't tell you about--for free. Learn the Kindle's hidden secrets and follow clear, convenient instructions to unlock them. The Kindle Cookbook's handy reference format will make this one book that is always loaded on your Kindle! This edition includes support for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Macintosh OS X users.
See the full post for more Kindle feature highlights
Thank you for the one-week return policy on e-books
This is another thing they don’t have to do. Sure, it’s probably good business…but Sony and Barnes and Noble don’t do it. It’s possible you’ll order the wrong book, or just get one that’s poorly formatted (although they are working on that issue). You can just tell Amazon you want to “return it” (within seven days of purchase), and they’ll credit you and remove the book.
See the full story for more details
The pair said that the numbers of people contributing to Wikipedia hit a high in early 2007, declined slightly and have since stabilised.
"Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people," they wrote.
The confusion arose over the differing definitions of what constitutes an editor. Dr Ortega counted everyone who made one change as an editor giving a total population of three million people.
By contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation counts only people who make five edits or more as an editor. This gives an editing population of about one million people across all languages. Of that total, the English edition of Wikipedia has about 40,000 editors.
An interesting retrospective
I began using Linux as a desktop operating system around 1993, two years after Linux was created. Countless developers, engineers and hackers were doing the same. But at that point, it wasn't what most people would recognize as a desktop OS. The credit for creating and marketing the first Linux desktop designed for ordinary users goes to Corel Corp., which launched Corel Linux OS 10 years ago, in November 1999.
Things didn’t work out so well for Corel; e.g., see this NY Times article: Corel Says Takeover Needed to Prevent Collapse
An interesting pattern
Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News may pull some of their stories from Google Inc.’s news site, a move that would emulate News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch.
News Corp. is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about displaying stories on its Bing site, people familiar with the situation said yesterday.
News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block (Update2) - Bloomberg.com
I hope the buyers read the fine print, given eBay’s experience with Skype…
Joost, the struggling video Web site, said on Tuesday that it was selling most of the company to the Adconion Media Group, an online advertising and marketing company, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition ends a long sales process that at one point was thought to involve possible interest from the cable television operators like Time Warner Cable and Comcast.
Joost Sells Its Name and Most of Its Assets - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com
Twitter advertising is coming next year
Twitter, the social internet firm that tracks trends through individuals' updates of events around them, may eventually go to the stock market for funding if necessary, its co-founder Biz Stone said.
The three-year-old company was already making some revenue and would concentrate on that next year. "2010 is really going to be the revenue year. I don't know if we're going to be profitable, but we have plenty of time," Stone said on Monday.
Twitter’s Stone Could Go Public, but No Interest in Selling - NYTimes.com
More connected in more places
Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, has said he wants the site to be the hub of all conversations about business on the Web. LinkedIn’s recent partnership with Twitter was one step in that direction, and this is another. As more businesses use Web-based applications for professional communication, LinkedIn wants to be there, Mr. Nash said.
A few developers have already been experimenting with LinkedIn’s new platform. Microsoft is integrating LinkedIn into its 2010 version of Outlook e-mail. TweetDeck, the Web-based Twitter application, will let people do things like view other Twitter users’ LinkedIn profiles and post and reply to LinkedIn updates from TweetDeck.
LinkedIn has let some companies build applications on its Web site. Amazon.com, for example, shows LinkedIn users which books others in their professional network are reading and lets users post a list of recommended books.
LinkedIn Aims to Show Up in More Places Online - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Not bad, especially for a system that’s keyboard-less for most users
According to Microsoft spokesman David Dennis, the first-week figures show that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook, and that half a million Last.fm accounts were created in the first 24 hours of availability. Dennis didn't address how many Xbox Live users have used the service's Twitter feature, except to say that there have been "tweets from nearly every market where we have Xbox Live."
So, based on the data Dennis provided, the Facebook integration with Xbox Live has had the most adoption. And while 2 million people logging into Facebook is far short of the 20 million total Xbox Live users, it is notable that fully one tenth of the service's users have tried the Facebook feature in just the first week.
Millions using social media on Xbox Live | Geek Gestalt - CNET News
Sign of the times
Ali had Frazier. Coke has Pepsi. The Yankees have the Red Sox.
Now Wal-Mart, the mightiest retail giant in history, may have met its own worthy adversary: Amazon.com.
In what is emerging as one of the main story lines of the 2009 post-recession shopping season, the two heavyweight retailers are waging an online price war that is spreading through product areas like books, movies, toys and electronics.
For Wal-Mart and Amazon, the First Round of a Price Fight - NYTimes.com
Sign of the times…
A Canadian woman claims she has lost her health benefits after her insurance company used her Facebook pictures as evidence that she was no longer depressed.
Nathalie Blanchard had been on sick leave for a year from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, after being diagnosed with severe depression. The 29-year old was receiving sick pay from insurer Manulife.
Depressed Woman Loses Health Benefits for Happy Pics on Facebook
An Open XML ecosystem update
One of the more interesting aspects of my job is meeting people who are developing software that interoperates with Office through the various formats that we support. It’s exciting to hear their plans, work with them on the details of how our products can collaborate or share data, and then see the final solutions, whether they’re released in shrink-wrapped packages, available for download on the web, or delivered as a custom solution for a specific organization.
Three of the more innovative firms I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with over the last few years are Altova, Datawatch, and PSC. Here’s an overview of the latest work each of them has been doing with the Open XML formats.
Doug Mahugh : Open XML support in new tools, apps, and custom solutions
Check the full post for tips on single-click access and Instapaper
Whether you have a Kindle or are using the Kindle for PC App or, soon, the Kindle for Mac App, there's nothing not to like about a new website called FreeKindleBooks.org that offers thousands of free books for seamless automatic download to your Kindle or Kindle App. FreeKindleBooks.org was created by Jim Adcock, who is also the developer of the Project Gutenberg Magic Catalog, but FreeKindleBooks.org is organized in a much more user-friendly way. Thanks to David Rothman of Teleread for a heads up about the newer site.
Hmm…
A new brand identity to be adopted by AOL next month, when it is spun off from Time Warner, ditches the odd-looking triangle that has long served as the brand symbol and replaces the letters AOL with “Aol.” — complete with a period.
Advertising - AOL Revamping Its Logo, in Hopes of Reviving the Brand - NYTimes.com
An interesting shift for Wikipedia
Wikipedia's struggles raise questions about the evolution of "crowdsourcing," one of the Internet era's most cherished principles. Crowdsourcing posits that there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations.
IBM – and other market dynamics – threaten SAS’s utopian employment model
The competitive thrust that really grabbed SAS’s attention came in late July, when I.B.M. announced that it planned to pay $1.2 billion for SPSS, a maker of predictive modeling software. I.B.M. has placed SPSS and Cognos into a new business analytics and optimization group. That business will be supported by 200 scientists, and the company has said it will retrain or hire 4,000 consultants and analysts to work in the group.
“This is the big growth strategy for I.B.M., the company’s next big play for this decade,” says Ambuj Goyal, a computer scientist who is general manager of I.B.M’s business analytics software unit. “SAS comes from the legacy world of statisticians and programmers. The real opportunity is in deploying this technology broadly in corporations.”
An unhappy milestone for Adobe
Now Adobe is attracting the unwanted attention of hackers—and security experts are concerned the company isn't doing enough to repel assaults. So far this year, Adobe has released nine security updates for the current version of its Acrobat Reader software, up from four in 2008, says Moscow security firm Kaspersky Lab. Adobe appears to have replaced Microsoft (MSFT) as the primary means by which hackers try to infect or take control of PCs. "Adobe at the moment is the main target," says Roel Schouwenberg, a Kasperky senior antivirus researcher in Woburn, Mass.
Excerpt from a timely Cisco snapshot
Chambers may have more to lose than his rivals. As he moves into the computer server market led by HP, Chambers has provoked a counterattack on his core business of routers and switches, which direct traffic around the Internet. HP said on Nov. 12 it would buy networking equipment provider 3Com (COMS) to step up its assault. The trouble for Chambers is that gross margins in the server business are around 20%, compared with 65% for routers. As Cisco gets more revenue from servers, its overall margins will likely fall, while HP will probably see margins rise as it sells networking gear. "I'd rather be HP than Cisco right now," says Steve Deplessie, founder of the research firm Enterprise Strategy Group.
A useful comparison – see the full post for more details
I understand Silverlight is not an operating system. But some Google watchers are questioning whether the Chrome OS is actually an operating system, either, or just a glorified browser. Unlike Silverlight, which can run on a variety of PCs and soon, phones, Google OS is going to be a dedicated Linux-based netbook OS that will only work with certain predesignated peripherals. Microsoft already offers a netbook OS — Windows — which doesn’t force you to run all apps inside your browser — and which works with lots of different devices.
Would you go so far as to say the Chrome OS is going to be more of a Silverlight competitor than a WIndows one? I’m thinking right now that may seem a bit far-fetched, but as more and more apps are designed to run in Silverlight, maybe not….?
Will Microsoft's Silverlight dampen the appeal of Google's Chrome OS? All about Microsoft ZDNet.com
A timely reality check
Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going.
Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn't plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.
More Google Chrome OS details
Will you be able to run any program?
Technically, any Web-based application will work, so long as it's able to operate in a standards-compliant browser. Even Microsoft's Office Live will run on a Chrome OS computer -- in fact, it's the software's default program for opening files such as Excel documents.
Does that mean you couldn't install your own browser, like Firefox?
More or less. Chrome is the default browser in the Chrome OS, and you can't install software onto a Chrome OS system. The only way around it would be if a developer such as Mozilla were to take Google's open source code, create its own version of the Chrome operating system, and then sell its own Chrome OS devices with the Firefox browser built in.
Hmm…
Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, have downplayed the conflict ever since, asking for time to let the projects evolve. And a few days after Chrome OS was revealed, Android chief Andy Rubin said device makers "need different technology for different products," explaining that Android has a lot of unique code that makes it suitable for use in a phone and Chrome has unique benefits of its own.
But Brin, speaking informally to reporters after the company's Chrome OS presentation on Thursday, said "Android and Chrome will likely converge over time," citing among other things the common Linux and Webkit code base present in both projects.
Brin: Google's OSes likely to converge | Relevant Results - CNET News
Excerpt from the second page of the article:
The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you'll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won't be able to do equally well with Windows, there are literally millions of things that you can do with Windows today that you'll likely never be able to do with the Chrome OS.
So don't be surprised when you start hearing about early Chrome OS adopters trying to reformat their systems with Windows 7 Starter Edition. After all, people are easily distracted, and the Chrome OS already bores me to death.
Why Chrome OS will fail -- big time | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld
A timely TV reality check
In the NBC Universal deal, in which General Electric is negotiating to sell a majority stake of its media business to Comcast, it is the cable channels — USA, Bravo, SyFy, MSNBC and CNBC — that are seen as the most valuable, not the NBC broadcast network, which is mired in fourth place in the ratings among the four major networks.
Most analysts and many executives agree that the economic model of broadcast television — which relies much more heavily on advertising than cable — is severely fractured. What they are wondering now is if it is irreparably broken.
The Future of Broadcast TV’s Unsteady as Cable Strengthens - NYTimes.com
A couple clarifications: it won’t be available “for about a year” and those “servers across the Internet” will be Google servers; imagine how that could expand what Google already knows about you and your digital activities/stuff
But with the Chrome operating system, Google is not trying to build a better version of Windows. Instead, it is aiming to shift users toward its vision of “cloud computing,” a model in which programs are not installed on a PC but rather are used over the Internet and accessed through a Web browser. In Google’s approach, a user’s data will also reside on servers across the Internet, rather than on their PC.
Google Offers a Peek at the Chrome Operating System - NYTimes.com
I suspect the workforce buyout offer will be over-subscribed
In recent years, amid the fallout from its audacious merger with Time Warner, AOL Inc. has steadily become smaller through subscriber desertions and rounds and rounds of layoffs.
It is becoming smaller still.
On Thursday, AOL announced it would cut its work force by one-third by eliminating close to 2,500 workers. The move comes as the company prepares to be spun off from its parent company, Time Warner, into an independent, publicly traded company.
A mainstream media milestone
Oprah Winfrey is giving network television one of her trademark aha moments.
Ms. Winfrey, the billionaire queen of daytime television, is planning to announce on Friday that she will step down from her daily pulpit, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in two years in order to concentrate on the forthcoming cable channel that will bear her name.
Oprah, Daytime Network Franchise, Bets on Future With Cable - NYTimes.com
I’m guessing this is more a “Hail Mary pass” move than a leading indicator of broader pricing trends
Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Co. have slashed the price of Palm Inc.’s newest smart phone, the Pixi, by 75% to $24.99 after only a few days on the market.
The Pixi is the sister phone to the Pre, which has been positioned by Sprint Nextel Corp. as its flagship device for much of the second half of the year. Palm hoped the lower-cost device would attract younger users, much like the older, slim-sized Centro two years ago.
In addition to slashing the price on the Pixi, Amazon is selling the Palm Pre for $79. Both offers require a two-year contract with Sprint, which sells the Pixi for $99 and the Pre for $149.
A speech recognition milestone, if it works robustly
Soon you’ll be able to understand thousands of Internet videos even if the sound is turned down. With an assist from Boston public TV station WGBH, Google Inc. has developed technology that will automatically add on-screen captions to video streams on its popular YouTube website.
New software will make YouTube videos accessible for hearing-impaired viewers - The Boston Globe
Excerpt from an Office/SharePoint 2010 update overview
As you look across the spectrum of capability for Office and SharePoint 2010, you'll see that there is a tremendous amount of capability for developers building solutions. Office is frequently used as the front end to line of business processes and applications. And let's face it, if you're an information worker in an enterprise environments, and you are asked to use several of the 50 (on average) line of business systems present in an enterprise, it makes A LOT of sense to surface those things in Office. For end users, Office is an environment that is familiar. For Developers, Office is a way to accelerate the end user learning curve by a substantial amount. Multiplying that across the number of users in and systems / processes in play, the math points to giant savings for business applications.
Gray Matter : Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 PDC Keynote in Depth
See the full post for early IE9 details
We’re just about a month after the Windows 7 launch, and wanted to show an early look at some of the work underway on Internet Explorer 9.
At the PDC today, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable standards, we showed how IE and Windows will make the power of PC hardware available to web developers in the browser. Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today. Web site developers will see performance gains and other benefits without having to re-write their sites.
Unwired…
Condé Nast Publications Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are building a digital version of Condé Nast’s Wired magazine for electronic reading devices.
The Wired e-reader application will be available by the middle of next year and will kick off similar efforts across Condé Nast’s magazines, which include Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Condé Nast declined to say how much money it was spending on the effort.
Excerpt from a timely WSJ Amazon snapshot:
More than a million Kindles have been sold and there’s little question that million more Kindles will be sold in coming quarters. That’s what we call secular growth — it’s a brand new industry and while the “cycles” of the economy and/or seasons might influence the growth of the industry, the industry itself will grow independent of the broader economy as it penetrates the market.
Meanwhile, Apple’s sold more than 50 million devices that can run the Kindle iPhone app. So there’s another market for Amazon to experience secular growth in. There’s 50 million potential ebook readers that Amazon hopes to sell digital books to.
And here’s where Amazon’s really smart with this strategy — the Kindle and Kindle iPhone app work together to open your digital book to the page you were last on whether you were reading it from your Kindle reader or your iPhone last. That’s a tiny part of Amazon’s bigger strategy of wanting the Kindle and its reader software/apps to become the de facto standard of ereading. They’re obviously hoping that Kindle does for Amazon what iTunes did for Apple.
And there are also Windows and (soon) Mac Kindle apps as well…
Ain’t no Kindle Killer in sight, so here’s an AMZN trading idea - The Cody Word - MarketWatch
This guide will introduce you to the many features of your customized notebook including descriptions of the hardware features along with some useful information concerning the software that has been pre-loaded.
See the full post for more PDC 2009 news. Wow – I thought it was cool when last year’s PDC attendees received a 150 gig portable hard disk; now external terabyte hard disks are less than $100, and it’s cost-effective to give away touchscreen laptops to showcase new software…
In a stunning announcement, Sinofsky told the audience that paid PDC attendees would receive a free thin-and-light laptop that Microsoft designed with Acer. Microsoft designed the laptop with features and baseline hardware for which developers should create their applications. Touchscreen is among the capabilities.
More details, from an MSDN post:
Built upon the Acer Aspire 1420P chassis, this convertible TabletPC has a Core2 Duo U2300 processor, Mobile Intel GS45 video, 2GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory (supports up to 8GB), an 11.6" 1366x768 multitouch screen, webcam/mic, 3G WWAN, WLAN (supporting up to Draft-N), S/PDIF for digital speakers, 3 USB, 250GB HDD, card reader, and even an HDMI port.
Microsoft gives free laptop to PDC 2009 attendees | Betanews
Sign of the times
Each year Oxford University Press tracks how the English language is changing and chooses a word that best reflects the mood of the year.
Oxford lexicographer Christine Lindberg says unfriend has "real lex appeal."
Finalists for 2009 also included netbook, which is a small laptop, and sexting, which is sending sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone.
Unfriend is US dictionary's 2009 word of the year - Boston.com
An unfortunate data security case study for T-Mobile
A employee of mobile phone operator T-Mobile is facing prosecution after selling personal details of thousands of British customers to rival companies in an alleged major breach of data protection laws.
In a statement, T-Mobile UK, part of Deutsche Telekom AG, said it had contacted the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after discovering an employee was passing on the information and it believed the investigation would result in a prosecution.
T-Mobile admits employee sold private data by Reuters: Yahoo! Tech
Education 2.0?…
Other universities say that limited resources, copyright concerns or the reluctance of old-fashioned professors are keeping them from recording and uploading lectures. But Mr. Bean challenges his peers around the world who are not participating in iTunes U at all, or who are making lectures available only to registered students who sign in with a password.
“There are still a lot of universities in the world that define the value of their experience as somehow locking up their content and only giving people access to the content when they enroll in the program,” Mr. Bean said. “The courage comes from taking the next leap of faith. Universities no longer define themselves by their content but the overall experience: the concept, the student support, the tutoring and mentoring, the teaching and learning they get and the quality of the assessment.”
The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
See the full post for more details
Microsoft this week made the beta version of its Office 2010 productivity suite available to IT pros via MSDN and TechNet, but fear not if you're not a member: This release will soon be issued to the public as well. The Office 2010 beta is notable for two reasons. In addition to its broad availability—the previous public release, a Community Technical Preview, saw only limited distribution—the beta is also essentially feature-complete. So it offers a near-complete preview of the final product.
Another leading indicator of the emerging multi-screen harmony; it’s not an either-or scenario.
Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.
“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”
Choosing the Small Screen of a Smartphone for E-Reading - NYTimes.com
Interesting “co-opetition” times…
As tech companies expand into one another’s turf, rivalries are often created or intensify. So it should come as no surprise to see some deals that can be summed up as the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
SAP and Microsoft, which dominate different segments of the software industry, are set to announce the latest such partnership on Wednesday. Under the agreement, Microsoft will name the German software maker the “preferred provider” to its customers of software for budgeting, planning and forecasting.
Microsoft and SAP Again Team Up Against Oracle - Digits - WSJ
A timely reality check
Google's migration into the operating system business has been so gradual that many industry watchers have shrugged it off. When the company announced its Android OS for phones, it looked interesting. There was nothing new about the idea of using Linux on a handset, and (apart from Google's involvement) little reason to expect it would carve out substantial market share in the competitive smartphone arena. But, with about
20 distinct Android handsets in the hands of more than three million users worldwide--and about 30 more devices expected to roll out in 2010--Google's mobile OS is now looking like a force to be reckoned with.
An interesting form of volunteerism
Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.
Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.
Full circle (radically downsized…)
The media conglomerate Time Warner said on Monday that it would spin off its AOL unit to shareholders on Dec. 9, almost nine tumultuous years after one of the most disastrous corporate mergers in history.
Time Warner shareholders of record on Nov. 27 will receive a dividend in the form of one AOL share for every 11 shares of Time Warner common stock they hold, valuing the company at around $3.5 billion.
Time Warner to Spin Off AOL in Share Distribution - NYTimes.com
Bonus
Last week, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta launched his new book on the search giant: “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”
But one final chapter was actually cut from the book, which Auletta posted this past weekend on his Web site.
Ken Auletta's 25 Media Maxims (Cut From His Google Book) | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
A key player in the “freemium” zone
Evernote is the popular note-taking service that works across any platform: desktop, web, or mobile.
On Monday morning, the always evolving service is announcing that they’ve raised $10 million in Series B funding, which follows their Series A round of $6 million. This round included participation from prior investors, but was led by Morgenthaler Ventures.
Check the full post for PowerPoint Web App details
Looking beyond viewing and giving presentations, we knew that people would want to be able to make changes to their presentations from anywhere. Our primary goal is to provide you with a fast and streamlined editing experience, optimized for simple changes on the run. Most importantly, however, we made sure that no matter what changes you make, the fidelity of your document will be preserved.
The latter point is by far the most critical one. The PowerPoint desktop app has been in development for over 20 years. It supports hundreds of features. In the first version of the web app, we knew that we would not be able to support all of them. So we focused on building a foundation for the editing experience that would ensure that even if the web app doesn’t support direct editing of a particular feature, the feature would be perfectly preserved in the document for later editing in the desktop app.
A timely Internet TV/content reality check from Nicholas Carr
In the end, and whether they gobble up content producers or not, network operators like Comcast may be fated to be in the plumbing business. They’ll turn tidy profits by maintaining the pipes through which we get Internet service, even if we use those pipes to bypass their pay-TV offerings. We’ll go on gorging ourselves on free Internet video. We, the viewers, will be the winners.
Or will we?
The smartest, most creative TV shows, from “Deadwood” to “Mad Men” to NBC’s own “30 Rock,” tend to be the most expensive to produce. They have large, talented casts, top-notch writers and directors, elaborate sets and generally high production values. If the changes in our viewing habits stanch the flow of money back to studios, producing those kinds of programs may no longer be possible. In their place, we’ll get more junk: dopey reality shows, cookie-cutter police dramas, inane gab fests. The vast wasteland will become even vaster.
Even “free” has a price.
A timely Palm reality check
While no one expected Palm’s sales would rival the sales of iPhones or BlackBerrys — and they have not — developers have not rushed to write applications for the phone as they have for the iPhone and Android phones.
A lack of traction could prove important. If the market will have room only for a few smartphone standards, Palm, as the smallest company, could well find itself struggling as the perpetual also-ran.
Little Palm Takes On the Big Boys in Smartphones - NYTimes.com
Fake Steve interprets the Apple advertising patent implications; read the full post…
Thus Apple now becomes the cable company. And the cable company dies. Yes, friends, another enormous, ridiculous, old-fashioned, greedy, fat, slow-moving, change-averse, stupid industry falls before the power of Steve. Or, as we call it, “Internet + Steve = you’re dead.” We did it to music retailers. Doing it now to mobile phone companies. Why not cable TV? These guys are ripe for a takedown.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Re: our patent application for an evil advertising scheme
See the full article for an advertising reality check
“SOME of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description.
But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.
Digital Domain - Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over an Ad Gimmick, Would It? - NYTimes.com
It’ll be interesting to see how this aligns with other organizations already focused on the same challenges
Only about a quarter of the 6.5 billion people on Earth are using the World Wide Web. But even in poor countries, most people have access to Web-enabled devices - cellphones, mostly. So the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is launching a foundation to deliver online information to the developing world.
Web’s inventor aims to improve access in developing nations - The Boston Globe
See the full article for more details on the proposed settlement
Google, the Internet’s search leader, is hoping to keep the deal alive with a series of new provisions. Among other things, the modified agreement provides more flexibility to offer discounts on electronics books and promises to make it easier for others to resell access to a digital index of books covered in the settlement.
Copyright holders would have to be given more explicit permission to sell digital book copies if another version is being sold anywhere else in the world.
Google’s digital book plans riding on legal settlement - The Boston Globe
Another timely reality check from The Economist. My $.02 follows the excerpt below.
The facts appear to be on Oracle’s side. It is hard to find anyone in the technology business who is prepared to argue that MySQL and Oracle really compete—or ever will. The commission is on firmer ground when it argues that the way MySQL is licensed would allow Oracle some control over commercial use of the program. Although MySQL and its underlying recipe are available free, any added code built around the open-source product must also be made open source. Most firms that develop products on top of MySQL prefer to buy a commercial licence that does not come with this obligation. This they obtain from the copyright holder, which would be Oracle. Because of the success of this “dual-licensing” set-up, a strong alternative to MySQL is unlikely to emerge.
My view:
1. I believe most organizations that use MySQL pay for it (or should be paying for it). Database developers who want truly free DBMSs have other options, e.g., PostgreSQL and the emerging forks of MySQL, such as MariaDB.
2. While MySQL remains relatively lightweight, feature/function-wise, relative to the leading commercial DBMSs (from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, in politically-neutral alphabetical sequence…), I believe MySQL actually is directly competitive with the commercial DBMS leaders for several database-centric application scenarios, especially relatively database-simple, volume-complex Web-oriented apps. MySQL can’t compete for heavy-duty database scenarios such as full-blown ERP applications, however.
3. There is a reasonable argument, imho, that even people making DBMS purchasing decisions for the relatively DBMS-lightweight Web-centric apps would be better served with a leading commercial DBMS (including free “express” DBMS versions from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle) rather than MySQL, but the decision process is often made more on political convictions than objective total-cost-of-ownership assessments.
4. The MySQL market momentum is likely to continue dissipating – yes, there’s a large MySQL installed base and a loyal community, but many of the key people who created MySQL in the first place are now happily focused elsewhere (e.g., MariaDB), and it’s unlikely, no matter what Oracle asserts publicly, that it sincerely wants MySQL to prosper, after it completes its Sun acquisition – no more than, for example, IBM wanted Geronimo to prosper after it acquired Gluecode.
So ultimately I agree with the conclusions of the Economist article, but for different reasons; I believe MySQL is a fading mirage, and that its best days are far behind it at this point, with or without Oracle at the helm. As such, I frankly don’t think it would matter much if Oracle did agree to spin-out MySQL as a precondition of gaining approval to acquire Sun.
Oracle and Sun Microsystems: Merger interruptus | The Economist
Check the full post for some timely Kindle (device and service) snapshots
If there was any doubt about how popular Amazon's new FREE Kindle for PC App would be after it was launched early Tuesday morning, the proof is in the pudding on Amazon's Kindle Store bestseller list. Even if it requires some work with tea leaves.
The Kindle for PC App is free, and people who are trying it out are taking advantage of the opportunity to fill their PC hard drives with dozens of titles from among the 19,890 free book listings in the Kindle Store. Why wouldn't they? (Of course, they can also use the Kindle for PC app to download thousands of other free books from several other third-party sources, thanks to a new "we play well with others" approach from Amazon).
It’ll be interesting to see which company is building the phones for Dell
Dell Inc. is officially jumping into the "smart" phone market this month in a deal with China's biggest wireless carrier, China Mobile Ltd.
The Dell Mini 3, a keyboardless touch-screen phone that runs Google Inc.'s Android operating system, will also be available in Brazil later this year. The computer maker, based in Round Rock, Texas, would not say when the phone would reach the U.S.
Friday's announcement ends more than two years of speculation that Dell, now the world's third-largest PC company by unit shipments, would expand into the phone business.
Dell smart phone to debut in China, Brazil by AP: Yahoo! Tech
Hmm… See the full article for some Facebook and MySpace stats as well.
The number of Americans using Twitter dropped 7.9 percent in October from September, marking the second monthly decline for the social networking site this year, according to research firm ComScore Inc.
Twitter Inc., the number three social networking site in the United States, had 19.2 million users in October, ComScore said yesterday. The company had growth of less than 1 percent in September and declined in August. October’s number was still up more than thirteenfold from the year-earlier period.
Another fascinating sign of the times
Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.
The legal fight pits German privacy law against the American First Amendment. German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he has paid his debt to society, noted Alexander H. Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, who are now out of prison.
(This instance seems a bit recursive, somehow…)
Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent - NYTimes.com
Next up: Google will find a way to improve on 0 and 1…
Google is apparently in the early stages of a research project that appears to aim as high as perhaps replacing the HTTP protocol, the fundamental technology that essentially makes the World Wide Web possible.
In a somewhat obscure post on the Chromium blog, the development branch of their Chrome(
) browser, Google(
) reveals they’ve been working on a new protocol dubbed SPDY for “SPeeDY” for its goal of making the web faster.
Busy times at Google
Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process.
Seriously.
Google has reportedly spent $30 million to buy Gizmo5, an online phone company. The service is akin to Skype — but based on open protocols and with a lot fewer users.
[…]
It’s a potent recipe — take Gizmo5’s open standards-based online calling system. Add to it the new ability to route calls on Google’s massive network of cheap fiber. Toss in Google Voice’s free phone number, which will ring your mobile phone, your home phone and your Gizmo5 client on your laptop.
Google Poised to Become Your Phone Company | Epicenter | Wired.com
Somehow I suspect this AIR app/service is not going to be a huge success. The Kindle version of the Boston Globe, FYI, is $9.99/month (but is missing some features, including crossword puzzles)
The Boston Globe is launching a new electronic version of the newspaper for which it will charge $4.98 a week, the company said yesterday.
The product, known as GlobeReader, resembles the look of the print edition while offering electronic features that make it easy to search and scan. It can be downloaded to desktops, laptops, and netbooks, and read offline or online.
Another sign of the TV times
A Twitter feed featuring pearls of wisdom from a 73-year-old father could become a family comedy on US TV.
Justin Halpern, 29, has become an internet star with more than 700,000 followers since he began posting his father's often profane words of wisdom.
An example “pearl” (see the full article for more):
"Don't touch the bacon, it's not done yet. You let me handle the bacon, and I'll let you handle... whatever it is you do. I guess nothing."
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Comedy Twitter feed lands TV deal
Sign of the times
His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the words had been typed from a computer at an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mr. Bradford’s father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.
“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John G. Browning, a lawyer in Dallas who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”
With Facebook as Alibi, Brooklyn Robbery Charge Is Dropped - NYTimes.com
See the full article for additional Bing updates
On Wednesday, the company said it will begin to integrate some results from Wolfram Alpha, a powerful service that can answer a broad range of questions. The limited collaboration will bring certain results, like nutritional information and mathematical calculations, from Wolfram Alpha to Bing.
For instance, when users type a food item like “chicken breast” into Bing, the results will include a box showing the nutritional information for it. Bing users will also be able to have access to a body-mass index calculator or to plot certain formulas on a graph.
Bing Adds Features, Including Results From Wolfram Alpha - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Interesting times
Seeing all that I’ve shared with Google laid out on a single page got me thinking seriously about privacy for the first time in quite awhile. That’s the genius of Dashboard, and the creation of this tool gives me confidence Google respects my right to privacy. But what about everybody else? We pass around chunks of personal data to hundreds of other websites. Think about what Amazon.com knows about you, or Facebook, or even Boston.com. Then there are the Internet advertising networks that follow you as you browse from one site to another, tracking everything you read in an effort to send you the most enticing ads.
“I think if we could lay out everything we’ve disclosed online, we’d be stunned,’’ Conti said. And even if each individual site follows Google’s lead and creates its own Dashboard, nobody has the time or patience to scour them all.
Google Dashboard paints the story of your life as data points - The Boston Globe
An expansionist era at HP
The 3Com purchase lets HP fill holes in its product mix far quicker than it could by developing its own product line from scratch. Although it is one of the world’s leading makers of computer servers for big business, HP has offered only a limited range of networking hardware. Most of that has been at the “edge’’ of the network, like the switches that connect a roomful of PCs and printers to a corporate system. Cisco dominates the “core’’ market - switches and routers that distribute the massive amounts of data streaming into the network. With 3Com, HP gets a ready-made line of core network products to sell.
Buying 3Com “gives us critical mass in a very important market,’’ said David Donatelli, a former top EMC executive who made a surprise move to HP in April. Donatelli will oversee 3Com in his new role as HP’s executive vice president of enterprise servers and networking, and is slated to take over HP’s storage operations in April, when his noncompete agreement with EMC expires. That will put him on the frontline of HP’s rivalry with the Cisco-EMC joint venture.
More on HP/3Com (you don’t have to pay Rupert Murdoch – have a wsj.com subscription – for access to this article…)
In an interview, Ann Livermore, an executive vice president of H.P., described computer networking as a $40 billion market with high profit margins that is growing briskly and dominated by one company that has so far had little head-to-head competition.
“H.P. is eager and now positioned to disrupt the networking industry,” Ms. Livermore said
Hewlett-Packard Will Acquire 3Com for $2.7 Billion - NYTimes.com
An interesting week for Cisco, so far…
Hewlett-Packard Co. said it agreed to buy networking-gear maker 3Com Corp. for $2.7 billion in cash, the latest move by H-P to bulk up its product line amid a broader push by the few remaining technology giants to turn themselves into one-stop shops for corporate customers.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company—the world's largest tech company by revenue—also preannounced positive fiscal fourth quarter results. It posted an 11% jump in operating earnings and an 8% decline in revenue from a year ago, beating analyst estimates. In a sign the tech industry is leaving the recession behind, it also raised its revenue forecast for the fiscal year.
By buying 3Com, a onetime leading tech company that has fallen on tougher times this decade, H-P is aiming to goose its growth. The move also puts H-P more squarely on the turf of Cisco Systems Inc.
Hmm… Also see New Free Kindle for PC App Beta - What It (or You, Using It) Can and Cannot Do
The popular MobileRead Mobipocket Guide and interactive download catalog for the Kindle works seamlessly with the Kindle for PC App. Just click here on http://www.mobileread.com/mobiguide, and your browser will prepare to download the guide and catalog, and your browser will prompt you with an "Open with Amazon Kindle for PC Application (default)," which is very intriguing because it suggests both that Amazon has been playing nice with these third parties in advance of the Kindle for PC launch and, perhaps, that it may be getting a little chilly out there for some other Amazon competitors.
A timely reality check
Activists claimed to have seized control of nearly 300 Facebook community groups in a self-proclaimed effort to expose how vulnerable online reputations are to tampering.
A contingent that identified itself as Control Your Info (CYI) claimed credit for commandeering 289 Facebook Groups, saying it was simple to get into poorly protected administrative settings at the website.
"This is just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media," said a blog post at controlyour.info.
Hmm – more Cisco-related news (in terms of competition with Cisco’s high-end conferencing systems)
In a move to break into the videoconferencing market, Logitech International has agreed to buy LifeSize Communications, a start-up that makes high-definition videoconferencing equipment, for $405 million in cash.
LifeSize, which is based in Austin, Tex., sells videoconferencing tools that cost less than most other products on the market. The high-definition video is so clear that viewers can see scribbles on Post-it notes.
Logitech Buying LifeSize to Break Into Videoconferencing - NYTimes.com
More on Google’s sense of its manifest destiny…
But Go has some assets most languages don't.
First, the project is at Google, which has a powerful incentive to make something useful in order to get more out of its hundreds of thousands of servers and its countless in-house programmers. An experiment at Google could have more commercial relevance than many other company's actual products, and Go is already graduated from a 20 percent time project to one with formal support.
"We don't intend it to be experimental forever," Pike said. "We really want to build stuff for real with this."
Second, there's the Go team's pedigree. Among them:
• Thompson, the winner of the 1983 Turing Award and 1998 National Medal of Technology, who, along with Dennis Ritchie, was an original creator of Unix. Thompson also came up with the B programming language that led to the widely used C from Ritchie.
• Pike, a principal software engineer who was a member of Bell Labs' Unix team and a later operating-system project called Plan 9. He's worked with Thompson for years and with him created the widely used UTF-8 character-encoding scheme.
• Robert Griesemer, who helped write Java's HotSpot compiler and V8, the Chrome browser's JavaScript engine; Russ Cox, a Plan 9 developer; and Ian Taylor, who has worked on improving the widely used open-source GCC compiler.
Google hopes to remake programming with Go | Deep Tech - CNET News
An interesting twist
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the trans-Atlantic “megawar” over open-source software was not surprising.
“It makes sense that the Europeans come to the defense of open-source companies because the big proprietary companies are nearly all American,” he said. (The exception is SAP, the large German maker of business management software.)
European governments have long viewed open-source software as a potential tool of economic development and independence.
Cultural Bent Hangs Over Oracle’s Battle for Sun - NYTimes.com
A timely snapshot
A new research report says Windows 7 on Saturday surpassed 4% of all devices visiting Web sites that day, a little over two weeks after the commercial launch of the product. It took Windows Vista, in contrast, about seven months to pass 4% after it was introduced to businesses in November 2006, according to the report from Net Applications, a firm that tracks online usage.
[…]
While all versions of Windows accounted for 92.43% of Web usage, Windows 7 by itself has come within striking distance of the Mac’s share in just over a fortnight since it went on sale.
Microsoft's Windows 7 Usage Outpaces Vista, Closes In on Apple's Mac - Digits - WSJ
If you have any doubts about the scope of Google’s ambition, read this interview
IDG News Service: What is the perfect search engine? If you had a magic wand and could create it, what would it look like? What would it do?
Marissa Mayer: It would be a machine that could answer that question, really. It would be one that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you're talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world's information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.
Google VP Mayer Describes the Perfect Search Engine by PC World: Yahoo! Tech
Maybe this will all become a TV mini-series someday…
The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, replied Tuesday that such criticism was "facile and superficial."
EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said regulators were obliged to investigate "a whole series of complaints from customers of these companies expressing their concerns" that Oracle's purchase of open-source database software MySQL could eliminate a crucial rival.
[…]
Just because MySQL is open source, does not mean that if you want to apply it in the commercial context, that you can do what you like with it," Todd said.
Todd said EU regulators did not want to return shots with the U.S. over a Department of Justice statement Monday that described the takeover as "unlikely to be anticompetitive" and said it was hopeful that the EU commission would reach "a speedy resolution."
He said such a statement was "unusual" and hinted that it was inappropriate for the U.S. to comment on EU antitrust issues.
EU calls Oracle's criticism of antitrust probe 'facile,' 'superficial' - San Jose Mercury News
A very detailed and insightful assessment of the Cisco news, from Mike Gotta.
A first take on Cisco's broad collaboration announcements:
Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Cisco's Collaboration Strategy - First Look
A timely Droid (Motorola and HTC) reality check
The Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris, both available via Verizon Wireless in the United States, proved to be surprisingly good phones in my initial tests. I was surprised that the consumer-oriented Droid Eris is a better smartphone in many key respects than the Motorola Droid, thanks to better UI choices.
But the two new Google Android phones lack basic security capabilities that make them unusable in many business environments, and their utter lack of management features mean that even where businesses can acept their security limitations, they won't be able to deploy them in large numbers. Worse, it appears that the Droids don't support Exchange ActiveSync policies, so many Exchange servers won't grant them access. When it comes to Exchange, Droid doesn't.
First look: Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris are risky for business
To clarify: it’s a beta release
Amazon.com today announced the availability of "Kindle for PC," the free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers (PC). The U.S. Kindle Store currently offers more than 360,000 books, including New Releases and 101 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically $9.99 or less. The Kindle Store is the only place to find some of today’s most popular books in digital format. Kindle books can now be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch and PC. Kindle for PC is now available as a free download to readers in over 100 countries at www.amazon.com/KindleforPC.
Do you suppose the Oracle spokesperson quoted below actually believes the assertion about vendors being unable to control open source software products?
A formal objection is the first step towards possible action to block a deal, though few disputes get this far and most are resolved by the companies either modifying their plans or scrapping their proposals.
[…]
In a statement on Monday, however, Oracle claimed the case was founded on a misunderstanding. “It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone,” it said. “That is the whole point of open source.”
The case has led to a rare difference of opinion between anti-trust regulators on either side of the Atlantic, with the US Department of Justice clearing the transaction in August.
In an unusual move, the Department of Justice issued its own statement on Monday reiterating its view that the proposed deal does not give rise to anti-trust concerns.
But will the EC object to the Justice Department’s objection to the EC’s objection to the Oracle/Sun deal?…
While the statement of objections puts pressure on Oracle to offer concessions to the European Union, it does not guarantee the regulator will block the deal. The United States Justice Department’s antitrust division approved the deal in August. In a statement on Monday, Molly Boast, the deputy assistant attorney general, said “consumer harm is unlikely because customers would continue to have choices from a variety of well established and widely accepted database products.”
U.S. and Europe Disagree on Oracle’s Bid to Buy Sun Microsystems - NYTimes.com
Sign of the times
Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.
"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.
Twitter, LinkedIn team up for self-promotion free-for-all | The Social - CNET News
Some rumors and speculation about Google making the Wave user experience consistent across multiple services; see the full post for (purported) screen shots
Regardless, we can not independently confirm the authenticity of these images. Having said that, the pics demonstrate a more unified apps interface based on Google's Wave and accessible from any browser (as they are now). Specifically, we're told that "the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.)." Something that certainly makes sense to us based on what we know about Google's tender approach to its Chrome browser and its future "lightweight" Chrome OS. If true then this "work in progress" also hints at the importance of Wave to the future of Google. Then again, it could be just one of many possible interface concepts from Google's burgeoning developer's sandbox.
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