Playing for keeps
Microsoft Corp. is slashing the price of the high-end Xbox 360 console by $100, matching Sony's $100 price cut for the PlayStation 3 last week.
Now, both the Xbox 360 Elite and the PS3 will cost $299. The price cuts in both cases are world-wide, though the exact amounts vary by region depending on currencies.
This looks like it’s going to become an interesting case study in insider trading and/or the latest penny stock pump-and-dump techniques; the stock is up from ~$.50/share Monday, with no major news reports over the last few days.
Some useful tips
Bing has made quite an entrance in the Internet search world. This new way of searching provides quick and easy shortcuts that don’t always require reading through lists of websites and clicking on each one to find what you want. Check out the following tricks to see how Bing can help students and librarians find the information they need in a snap.
50 Fantastic Bing Tricks for Students & Librarians | Online Colleges
See the full post for more details and the link below for the Wired cover story
Wired writer Gary Wolf has done the best job ever of capturing the enigmatic, inspiring, yet clumsy personality of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. If you’ve ever met Craig at a party and found it hard to hold a conversation with him, don’t feel bad. Charlie Rose had the same problem on national TV.
Wolf’s assessment of Newmark’s business is that Craigslist has refused to evolve, in part because Newmark is happier replying to customer support email than managing product development. “Aside from his communication problems and an aversion to exerting authority,” Wolf writes, “he care[s] nothing for entrepreneurship.” As a result, Craigslist blooms with a thousand kinds of flowers, but also a lot of weeds
Wired takes on Craigslist founder, who promptly walks into a door | VentureBeat
Another timely IBM reality check – read the full post
The new reality at IBM is that if you’re brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class degree from a U.S. university, IBM may well have a job for you at one of its U.S. research sites working as a “complementary worker.” But don’t expect that job to last for long. Be prepared to ship out to India or China as a “long-term supplemental worker” after you’ve soaked up knowledge for 13 months.
Newsweek recently reported that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process).
“IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position,” Newsweek said.
This is the HR equivalent of a neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves structures unscathed. So all these companies will be leaner and meaner — mean enough that there may be nobody left to buy their products.
I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Neutron Bomb - Cringely on technology
A timely IBM Lotus reality check from Volker Weber (see the full post for more context-setting and comments)
But it's only a means to an end. Lotus said, they wanted ideas. And for those who have been hanging around for a while, many, many of those ideas were somewhat familiar. Actually, Lotus has been told these ideas for years on end. Don't do fluffy brand marketing, show the product, involve students and universities, make Lotus technology available for home users, etc. etc.
I have asked last week why there was so little attendance by the German community. I gave a few reasons, but the biggest ones came back in emails. "Why do I have to tell Lotus again?" - "NATO - No Action Talk Only", etc. etc.
So now it is time for action. There has been plenty of talk. Remember "yellow is the new black" from a past Lotusphere closing session? Ended up as mail footer. Or "air cover" from a more recent? Nothing happened. But, boy, is it going to happen. The ball is in IBM's court.
Social syndication
Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.
Official Google Blog: Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader
Seems reasonable to me; see the full post and related story for more details
There are many reasons that teenagers use Twitter less than adults do, including fundamental differences between what teenagers and adults want online and between Twitter and other sites like Facebook. (I take a deeper look at these reasons in a story in Wednesday’s paper).
But one big reason for the disparity is simple: When Twitter became popular, teenagers already had their favorite Web sites for communicating, so they were not interested in a new one. The people who discovered Twitter were adults who were new to social networking.
Why Adults Have Fueled Twitter’s Growth - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Sign of the times
When Heather McKibbon's bike was stolen in May, she didn't just get angry. She decided to get it back.
The 29-year-old project manager at a Toronto consulting firm alerted people to the theft through the social-networking site Facebook. Just hours later, a friend replied with a link to a bike for sale that looked like her own $1,300 Cannondale touring bike on eBay's Kijiji, an online classified-ads site. Ms. McKibbon recognized her bike and, posing as an interested buyer, arranged to meet the seller at a local subway station. She brought the police along as well, resulting in a small-scale sting operation.
Not just Novell’s – an excerpt:
IBM had bought SCO’s Unix software, but in 2003 SCO sued IBM saying it misappropriated SCO’s software by adding key portions of it to the free Linux operating system. SCO said IBM’s actions gave Linux many of the same advanced capabilities as SCO Unix, thus reducing SCO’s software sales.
But after the ruling in the Novell case, SCO lost its claim to ownership of Unix, and no longer had grounds to sue IBM. Shortly after the ruling, SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.
Now, the Appeals Court ruling has revived the IBM lawsuit, according to SCO chief executive Darl McBride. “It was two grueling, grinding years,’’ said McBride. “A lot of people predicted we would never make it to this point.’’
Novell’s claim to Linux copyright in jeopardy - The Boston Globe
John Fontana’s take on the latest UNIX lawyer full-employment-act development
Both SCO and Novell are anticipating their next day in court to settle who owns Unix copyrights after a judge Monday overturned a 2007 decision that favored Novell.
In a 54-page decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said it was reversing the 2007 summary judgment decision by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball of the District Court for the District of Utah that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights.
The case was sent back to trial.
Novell, SCO welcome return to court over Unix copyright | NetworkWorld.com Community
EMC tries to evolve eRoom-related concepts, with a new collaboration offering predicated on Documentum. In the meantime, EMC is also a Microsoft award-winning SharePoint service provider.
The face of enterprise content management is taking many forms today. The need for knowledge workers to leverage an ECM's capabilities while at the same time leverage Web 2.0 tools for better collaboration, has led to a number of new Enterprise 2.0 solutions from ECM vendors.
EMC's Lance Shaw, Group Product Marketing Manager, Knowledge Worker Applications, says that CenterStage, an enterprise collaboration tool, is not meant to be a direct competitor to SharePoint. But looking at what it is and what it does, one can easily draw the comparison and see why a organization would implement it instead of SharePoint.
An intriguing software + services scenario; see the full press release for more details and an overview video
Microsoft today is launching OneApp, a new software application that allows “feature phones” to run popular mobile phone applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger and Mobile Wallet.
Feature phones are mobile phones that are capable of running some apps but that lack the capabilities of smartphones.
Microsoft OneApp Connects Emerging Markets to Popular Mobile Phone Apps
This article is a disturbing example of recent WSJ trends, imho; it’s mostly a recap of Apple Tablet-related rumors, with little information value-add, and the author felt compelled to include the following:
Mr. Jobs, in an email, said "much of your information is incorrect," but didn't provide specifics. A spokesman for Apple, Cupertino, Calif., declined to comment.
… but ran with the article anyway.
Check the full article for more details on this Wikipedia milestone
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People - NYTimes.com
SCO lives another day – see the full article for details
A federal Appeals Court yesterday reversed a judge’s decision that granted the copyright of the Unix computer operating system to Novell Inc.
A three-judge panel of the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge erred in August 2007 by granting the copyright to Novell. The panel ordered a trial to determine ownership.
Check the full post for what appears to be the latest reality distortion field example
Apple and AT&T have officially responded to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) query about Apple's rejection of a Google Voice application on the iPhone. And contrary to weeks of widespread insinuations and accusations from the Apple-friendly press, AT&T has declared for a second time that it had absolutely nothing to do with the rejection. Apple, meanwhile, has issued a contradictory and damning statement to the FCC while explaining away the incident. Even considering Apple's hubris, this is a surprising move. Apple, you see, has apparently just lied to the FCC.
See the full article for more details, pictures, and a Nokia video. It will be interesting to see if RIM makes a similar play.
A week doesn't go by without another electronics giant deciding to hop on the overcrowded Netbook bandwagon. Still, it's unusual when a phone manufacturer decides to cross over. Nokia, long rumored to be getting into 3G mini-laptops or "smartbooks," has finally announced a very real 10-inch Netbook.
Called the Booklet 3G, it has a clear design relationship with its phone line, while still being an honest-to-goodness laptop (as opposed to some sort of smartphone hybrid). Running an Atom Z530 processor instead of the more common N270, it also has:
I suspect this will ultimately become another chapter in the “Dawn of the Stupid Network” story
The terms in AT&T’s exclusive US contract to provide connections for Apple’s iPhone give the telecommunications giant the power to veto online store applications that use AT&T to launch cheap calls through the Internet, the companies disclosed late Friday.
So far, the alliance has limited the use of approved Voice over Internet Protocol applications, including Skype’s, to WiFi hotspots, so as not to undercut AT&T’s model of charging for calls. But AT&T said “We plan to take a fresh look at possibly authorizing VoIP capabilities on the iPhone for use on AT&T’s 3G networks.”
FT.com / Companies - AT&T can block cheap net calls on iPhone
An interesting foray for Cisco
Cisco is extending its empire into pop culture with its new Eos social-entertainment platform of software tools for media companies to host their own networking sites for artists, actors and movies.
Cisco and entertainment executives say it has the potential to change the relationship between entertainers and fans. They also say it will help media companies capitalize on the digital era and restore revenue declines from piracy and changing consumer behavior, such as ditching higher-margin music CDs for single songs bought online.
Business & Technology | Cisco move extends empire | Seattle Times Newspaper
Hmm…
While some big European publishers, like the Oxford University Press and Bertelsmann (which owns Random House) and Georg von Holtzbrinck (the owner of Macmillan), support the agreement, there is widespread opposition among French publishers. The German government, supported by national collection societies in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain, plans to argue against it and encourage writers to pull out of the agreement.
A United States District Court has set a Sept. 4 deadline for submissions on the settlement and plans to hold a hearing Oct. 7.
Opposition Grows in Europe to Google Book Deal - NYTimes.com
A timely snapshot
The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.
An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet - NYTimes.com
See the full article for a timely reality check. p.s. I was on vacation last week but should get back to my normal post frequency starting tomorrow.
GOOGLE has an outsize image as the deft master of information. Its superior technology seems to pitilessly grind up its rivals. But Google’s domination in search has proved hard for it to match in some information domains. When serving financial news and information, for example, Yahoo draws 17.5 times the traffic of Google, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Digital Domain - In Its Finance Site, Yahoo Leaves Google in the Dust - NYTimes.com
A timely reality check; see the full post for more details
According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.
More Employers Use Social Networks to Check Out Applicants - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Another Wave perspective
If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, Google Wave is it. At first blush, I love the motivating concept behind it: What would e-mail look like if snail mail had never existed? But, in fact, regular e-mail already radically differs from the traditional kind: You can send to multiple recipients at once, use blind carbon copies, read and answer from anywhere, attach any kind of files, and instantly edit and format. What Google Wave really does is combine e-mail with instant messaging and real-time collaboration. It's really more a rich, recordable group chat. That's intriguing in itself, but Google Wave's real value may come when developers build on top of it using its open API.
Google Wave (Developer Preview) - Full Review - Reviews by PC Magazine
Stimulus/response…
Three technology heavyweights and some library associations are joining a coalition led by a prominent Silicon Valley lawyer to challenge Google Inc.'s settlement with authors and publishers.
Peter Brantley, a director at coalition co-founder Internet Archive said the group, whose members will be formally disclosed in the next couple of weeks, is being co-led by Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer involved in the Department of Justice's antitrust investigation against Microsoft Corp. last decade. Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to join the group. Mr. Reback did not reply to requests for comment.
Microsoft and Yahoo confirmed their participation. Amazon declined to comment.
A new opportunity to easily over-share…
Twitter, the social-networking service that delivers 140-character messages, will soon let users share their location when they post Tweets.
The feature, which relies on the global positioning system, will require users’ permission to show locations, said Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter Inc. “It records location along with every Tweet,’’ he said. “It allows for some really interesting context.’’
An impressive free service expands
Personal finance site Mint.com is moving into retirement savings and adding richer analytics to track your net worth as part of a push into higher-ticket items and long-term financial goals.
Launched two years ago, the Mountain View-based company started as a place to sync your bank accounts and watch credit card spending. Since then, it’s attracted 1.4 million users, added mortgage and investment tracking and raised $31 million in funding in three rounds. That includes a $14 million Series C-round last week.
Mint Moves Into Retirement Savings, Adds Richer Analytics - NYTimes.com
See the full article for more details
In an indictment, the Justice Department said that Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami and two unnamed Russian conspirators made off with more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers from late 2006 to early 2008.
Prosecutors called it the largest case of computer crime and identity theft ever prosecuted. According to the government, the culprits infiltrated the computer networks of Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processor in Princeton, N.J.; 7-Eleven Inc.; Hannaford Brothers, a regional supermarket chain; and two unnamed national retailers.
Three Indicted in Largest Card Theft Ring to Be Prosecuted - NYTimes.com
Sign of the times… It looks like I’ll be getting most of my news from The Economist…
“It was pretty lonely out there for a while in paid land,” he said last week. “But it has become pretty clear that advertising alone is not going to sustain online business models. Quality journalism has to be paid for.”
Now The Financial Times is adding to its paid-content strategy with a plan to accept micropayments for individual articles, as an alternative to a subscription.
And one by one, other publishers are starting to see wisdom in the paper’s ways. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the News Corporation, said this month that the company intended to charge for all its news Web sites. That plan would have the company’s major newspapers in the United States, Britain and Australia joining their sister newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which already charges for access to most of its site.
See the full article for a timely snapshot
Students have been howling that school e-mail accounts are too small to handle their daily deluge of mail and attachments. To address that problem, a growing number of colleges and universities are outsourcing their e-mail. The companies swooping in to manage student accounts for free? Google and Microsoft. Like search, software and operating systems, campuses are a burgeoning battleground for the tech titans.
See the full article for more details
Facebook's purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It's a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.
The goal is to make automatic that which is all too annoying to do manually.
Facebook's Purchase Is Bid to Own Social Media - washingtonpost.com
I suppose regulations for information quality are out of the question…
Turner’s case will probably test the limits of political speech at a time when incendiary talk is proliferating on broadcast outlets and the Internet, from the microphones of well-known commentators to the keyboards of anonymous webizens. President Obama has been depicted as a Nazi and slain Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller as “Tiller the killer.’’ On guns and abortion, war and torture, taxes and now health care, the commentary feeds off pools of anger that ebb and flow with the zeitgeist.
Case against blogger may test limits of free speech - The Boston Globe
Another chapter in the disastrous history of IBM’s former (non-server) PC business
IT WAS once seen as a model for Chinese firms eager to take on the world, but is now considered more of a cautionary tale. When Lenovo bought IBM’s ailing personal-computer (PC) division for $1.75 billion in 2005, it transformed itself from the biggest maker of PCs in China into the third-biggest PC-maker in the world and one of the most ubiquitous Chinese brands. But earlier this month the firm reported its third quarterly loss in a row, of $16m. It had lost a total of $361m in the previous two quarters. It is also losing market share: Taiwan’s Acer has surpassed it to become the world’s third-biggest computer-maker. Success in China, it seems, is no guarantee of success abroad.
A timely snapshot, via Sim Simeonov
There's a cultural revolution afoot in the Boston innovation economy.
One culture is dying out, and another kind of culture is emerging.
The old culture was clubby and insular. To get funding, you had to know someone who knew someone at one of the venture capital firms perched high atop Mount Money in Waltham. To get anywhere, it helped if you'd already had one or two successes on your résumé.
[…]
The new culture is open, fast-paced, and encouraging of first-time entrepreneurs. It's about blogging and tweeting and digitized networks of people sharing information about what they're interested in, and where they're investing. It's about informal "unconferences" popping up to discuss the latest tech trend. It's populated by people who see the value in having broad networks of friends and acquaintances across lots of companies.
See Sim’s post and the full article for more
The Cultural Revolution: Which Side Are You On? - Innovation Economy - Boston.com
Check out the full post for a video link
The Onion News Network has posted a video that should go down as a classic for all Google Watchers: the 22-acre Google Opt-Out Village is for users concerned about Google collecting too much data from their searches and other Web services.
The video pokes fun at how reliant we as a society have gotten on Google.
Once you opt-out of Google, you get picked up and whisked away to a remote mountain village. You house is burned down to eliminate any record of your residence on Google Maps and Street View.
There are no hospitals or banks (because they are also monitored by Google) so people have to be entirely self-reliant, growing food, suturing wounds and burying their dead.
The opt-out village also includes 30-foot walls and is completely enclosed by metal to avoid satellite snooping.
Google Watch - Privacy - Onion News Network: Google Opt-Out Village
Check the full article for details
As the Aug. 20 deadline nears to apply for $4.7 billion in broadband grants, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are unlikely to go for the stimulus money, sources close to the companies said.
Their reasons are varied. All three say they are flush with cash, enough to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say taking money could draw unwanted scrutiny of business practices and compensation, as seen with automakers and banks that have taken government bailouts. And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule that they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want.
I wonder if this qualifies as the start of Bubble 3.0. See the full article for more deeply nested details.
Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch. Now a prominent Silicon Valley financier, Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment.
“We have backed a really good team,” Mr. Andreessen said in an interview earlier this summer. A moment later, Mr. Andreessen appeared to regret his comment, saying he was not ready to talk about any aspect of the company.
More Zune HD details
Expected to hit stores Sept. 15, the new Zune HD model features an iPhone-like touch screen, Internet browser and high-definition video.
The 16-gigabyte model is making its debut at $219.99, compared with $299 for the 16-gigabyte iPod touch. The Zune's 32-gigabyte model is set at $289.99, while the comparable iPod touch is priced at $399.
And while the earliest iterations of the Zune were mocked in some quarters for their relatively bulky design, the newest Zune will boast a sleeker, edgier aspect, according to images posted on a company Web site.
Check the full post for more details
We’ve known for a while that Google’s Knol
is no Wikipedia killer, but now the knowledge-sharing site is being reduced to a sad Craigslist wannabe. The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Well, that model doesn’t work so well if nobody bothers to read the articles on Knol no matter how much search karma Google gives them. Quantcast estimates
[…]
Sadly, Knol just never panned out.
Poor Google Knol Has Gone From A Wikipedia Killer To A Craigslist Wannabe
IANAL, but I can’t believe this patent is going to hold up
"XML is clearly in the public domain," said i4i's Chairman Loudon Owen. "What we have developed at i4i is what's customarily referred to as 'customer-centric' or 'custom XML,' which is allowing people to create customer-driven schema -- we'll call it templates or forms. So, while XML is used to tag and to mark the data that's created, our technology is used to create the whole schema and the management of the data."
The invention goes beyond XML, according to Owen.
"XML in and of itself -- just like the letters in the alphabet -- is not terribly useful," he said. "This implementation leverages XML."
The dispute concerned Microsoft Word, but Owen suggested that other applications using the technology might be next.
See the full press release for more details
Zune HD, the next generation of Microsoft Corp.’s portable digital media player, is available now for pre-order and is set to hit store shelves on Sept. 15. The player, available in 16GB and 32GB capacities, is the first touch-screen Zune and includes powerful playback technology to give you a different way to experience media on the go. Combined with unparalleled PC software and online services such as Zune Pass, Zune provides a rich and meaningful connection to music, videos, podcasts and more.
I suspect this won’t shift the competitive dynamics between Sony and Amazon -- or Sony and Apple
On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.
Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.
It’ll be interesting to see the price elasticity curve on this capability
Verizon Wireless has selected Boston and Seattle as the first two US cities to test its new wireless data service, with speeds five to 10 times faster than the service used today by such popular handsets as Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
The new network could mean big changes in the ways people use their smartphones or laptop computers, at home and on the road. Today’s networks, known as 3G, are good enough for checking e-mail or visiting websites, but they’re too slow for high-quality video or real-time video gaming. They can’t match the speed of the hard-wired Internet services offered by telephone and cable TV companies.
In test of 4G network, Hub to get early look at next-level Web link - The Boston Globe
Check the full post for more insights from Altova CEO Alex Falk
It is interesting to note that the patent appears to deal primarily with representing any document in XML, which appears to be slightly ludicrous given the long history of SGML prior to 1998. Also interesting is that the injunction doesn't just talk about XML, but rather specifically mentions .DOCX (i.e. Open Office XML), which is used by Word 2007 as its default storage format.
XML Aficionado: Injunction to prevent Microsoft from selling Word due to XML
This site is a timely case study of using information technology to combat special interest disinformation campaigns.
Action Center
1. Get the facts and share them with your friends.
2. Declare your support for Health Insurance Reform and take action at the Health Care: ER Action Center >>
Have you heard a health care myth you'd like us to check out? Send it to our Health Care Rapid Response Team >>
Health Care Fact Check.com -- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)
Sign of the times…
There have been tweets from the Tour de France, Twittering from the White House and even tweets from outer space.
And today, the wife of the CEO of Twitter Inc. was Twittering from the hospital where she was in labor. That's right ... tweeting during the childbirth process.
A scary snapshot
The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories. But now, with the light-speed and reach of the Web, “entire virtual crank communities,” as the conservative writer David Frum called them, have sprung up. They are fed, in the case of Sarah Palin, by people who should know better.
For a democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry to balance a permanent lobbying class, this is poison. And it’s one reason why town hall forums on health care, which should be sharp debates about something that affects all of us, have turned into town mauls.
Another helpful case study in email policy management
Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.
Documents Point to Bush Aides’ Involvement in Prosecutor Firings - NYTimes.com
Interesting times at the Googleplex
Google’s rule as search sovereign is in no immediate danger, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. The pending Microsoft-Yahoo deal promises a stronger, if still distant, second-place competitor in Google’s core search and ad business. And now, with its acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook looks to be arming for a fight over the untapped riches that real-time social search is believed to hold.
Google knows well what weight to give to this challenge. The four principles of FriendFeed are all Google vets who played key roles in products like Gmail and Maps, and while FriendFeed never gained much mainstream traction, it drew a passionate following of savvy early adopters for its versatile and powerful approach to social media aggregation and particularly its real-time search.
Another interesting co-opetition development
Microsoft Corp. has reached an agreement with Nokia Corp. to make a mobile version of Microsoft's Office suite of software that works on Nokia cellphones, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal with Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, could help Microsoft play a broader role in mobile devices while fortifying its Office business in the face of competition from free Web-based word processors, spreadsheets and other applications from Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others. Microsoft, too, is testing a Web-based version of Office.
Hmm…
The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with "cookies" and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.
A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a "compelling need."
Obama Web-Tracking Proposal Raises Privacy Concerns - washingtonpost.com
A great example of terse information value-add from Forrester’s John Rymer – getting the point across in a tweet with 40 characters to spare (assuming spaces count as characters in Twitter)…
VMWare bought SpringSource. No doubt now about VMWare's intentions to provide application platforms.
Or would it be more like Twitscape (Twitter + Google as Netscape 2.0)?… See the full post for more analysis.
MicroHoo. Check! FaceFeed. Check!
And Twoogle? Let’s check!
Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) have finally partnered. Microsoft is already a big investor in Facebook. And today, the huge social networking site just picked up online content-sharing site FriendFeed, which is chock-a-block full of ex-Google execs.
Now, one has to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier if Google (GOOG), the cash machine of a search giant, finally ponied up and bought the most recent star of Web 2.0?
Google and Twitter: An Inevitable Match? | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
More market consolidation and shifting “co-opetition” dynamics
"VMware has stated its intention to move up the stack and provide a platform," Rymer added. "And here they are. These technologies are disconnected right now, but there’s no doubt that this acquisition provides the missing piece of a complete platform. The trick is bringing those two things together without diluting the value that they have separately."
The acquisition also strengthens the open source alternatives for Java developers, Rymer said. "It has been just JBoss and Sun," he said. "Sun has probably gone away with the Oracle acquisition. This raises the profile of SpringSource significantly in the Java world."
Another take on the FriendFeed deal
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.
Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it's not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point. Facebook acquired it for its talent; prior to FriendFeed, Taylor was part of the team that helped launch Google Maps. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don't know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers. FriendFeed's co-founders "will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams," according to the release, and the rest of the company's 12 employees will also join Facebook.
Facebook buys FriendFeed: Is this a big deal? | The Social - CNET News
See the full article for more details
BLOGGERS, be warned. Advertisers, you too.
Two of the National Advertising Review Council’s investigative units plan to announce Tuesday their first decisions involving blogs. Their recommendations call for clear disclosure when a company is sponsoring a site or paying for product reviews.
Advertising - Notice Those Ads on Blogs? Regulators Do, Too - NYTimes.com
Social software market consolidation
Facebook paid nearly $50 million for the company, in a combination cash and stock offer, according to people familiar with the matter. The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be worth roughly $32.5 million based on the $6.5 billion common valuation an investor recently placed on the company. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.
FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four former Google Inc. software engineers as a way for users to keep track of their friends' activities across social-media services -- like Facebook and Twitter -- at the same time. But it never expanded far beyond a core group of Internet professionals, particularly as other services like Facebook made it easier for users to share their articles, photos and notes across multiple social-media services.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple tries to find a way to block this pattern as well
Even though Apple prevented it from listing Google Voice on the iPhone App Store, Google is planning on retooling the application as a Web-based app, according to The New York Times.
In David Pogue's Friday column regarding the ongoing saga of Apple and Google Voice, he reveals that Google has already found a loophole:
Already, Google says it is readying a replacement for the Google Voice app that will offer exactly the same features as the rejected app--except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped Web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have; you can even install it as an icon on your Home screen.
Google Voice to be retooled as Web app for iPhone | Apple - CNET News
Sign of the times
The three-wheeler is quite a sight with its long pole holding nine cameras, a GPS, a computer and a generator. But the contraption tooling around the French capital needs all that gear to do its job — adding three-dimensional images to Google's Street View Maps.
The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas to take thousands of digital photos.
"The idea is to be able to offer 360-degree images of places that were inaccessible before," Google spokeswoman Anne-Gabrielle Dauba-Pantanacce said.
Business & Technology | Tricycles comb streets for Google images | Seattle Times Newspaper
A timely Google Wave reality check; read the full post
Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I've played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it's definitely too complex to live up to the "this will replace email!" hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
See the full article for more details
While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.
Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use Sharepoint.
Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Strange days indeed
During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.
The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”
Perhaps some timely information about … information overload. Check the overview/agenda for details. If you’re interested, check the first comment on this post for complimentary registration codes.
A day of high-level interaction, knowledge sharing, and learning about the problem of Information Overload - all without leaving your office.
You'll learn
- What are the smartest managers doing today to combat Information Overload?
- What does the problem of Information Overload cost companies?
- What are possible solutions?
It’ll be interesting to see when comparable Windows 7 devices are released
BoomTown is certainly going to be one of the many-so-many who will immediately fork over whatever it takes to get my mitts on the upcoming tablet device from Apple.
And that’s why, according to a new report from Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster–who is monk-like in his devotion to writing down every scrap of information he can scrape up about whatever Apple HQ in Cupertino, Ca. deigns to release–it’s going to be raining money down on the company, just like manna from heaven.
See the full post for more details.
Another Michael Stonebraker start-up out of stealth mode
Software made by two of Stonebraker’s prior companies, Vertica Systems Inc. and Streambase Systems Inc., is part of that advantage. The new company, VoltDB, is out of stealth mode with another tool high-frequency traders can use to gain an edge. High-frequency trading desks use Streambase to run algorithms and execute trades in real time. Vertica is used to test traders’ theories, back-testing algorithms against historical market data. VoltDB, still in alpha testing mode, may be used by firms to hedge exposure during the millisecond when 100 trading desks all take the same position on a security.
“Instead of getting market tics, you’re simply getting a list of trades that every desk in your company makes — and you just want to assemble the complete position of the entire company and then ask questions about it,” Stonebraker said.
Stonebraker, a 2008 Mass High Tech All-Star who is known as the “father of the relational database,” for his role on the Postgres project at the University of California Berkeley in the 1980s, explained VoltDB’s innovation. It is startlingly simple. The product is an online transaction-processing system that, unlike legacy systems, pays no attention to concurrency control, resource contention locking, recovery logs, queues or disk management. “We just get rid of all that stuff,” Stonebraker said. “That allows us to go wildly faster.”
Stonebraker startups trade in the blink of an eye - Mass High Tech Business News
Hmm…
A quick scan of T-Mobile USA’s second-quarter earnings report, released earlier this morning, makes clear why the company has been banging that marketing drum around the new Google Phone (aka MyTouch) and its 3G data services so loudly these days. It’s seeing its growth stall, its revenues slow to a crawl and — most importantly — its average revenue per user decline.
See the full post for more on this scenario
Open source means different things to different people. It can be a software development methodology, a distribution technique, or a marketing gimmick. Could it also be a way to minimize patent infringement damages?
Brian Prentice, a research vice president with Gartner's Emerging Trends and Technologies Group, speculates that it just might be. Google has been actively developing open-source alternatives to leading proprietary products, like Google Wave to compete with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. As Prentice indicates, Google has also been publicly advocating passage of the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which might have a lot to do with its open-source strategy.
Is Google's open-source advocacy a patent-busting scheme? | The Open Road - CNET News
A timely Google Wave reality check
Put plainly, Wave is a message board in a constant state of self-editing flux. To put it another way, it's a collaborative text editor on steroids -- as our mobile editor Chris Ziegler quipped, "I think Wave's capabilities actually exceed human capacity to interact." There's a lot of great ideas here, many we'd love to see find their way into other Google apps, but we're still trying to figure out just how this will fit into an online world already dominated by numerous social networks, messaging clients, forums, and microblogging services -- something that'll proper render itself more clear as it moves from dev build to public beta. It's not that we don't think Wave will be successful -- and make no mistake, we are enthused -- but calling it "revolutionary" might be setting the bar a bit too high. Those 100,000 spaces opening up September 30th got filled just hours after the I/O conference, so if you signed up any time in the aftermath, you're gonna have to hold off a bit longer. In the meantime, it's probably best to pare down those exorbitant expectations while you wait.
See the full article for more details
The Internet is already a difficult place to maintain privacy, and now two security researchers have revealed new ways to spy on Web users via the browser. At a presentation at DEFCON 17, a hacking conference held in Las Vegas last week, the researchers showed a variety of ways to snoop on people online, despite the privacy tools employed by most browsers.
Robert Hansen, CEO and founder of the Internet security company SecTheory, and Joshua Abraham, a security consultant for the security company Rapid7, demonstrated how to do everything from obtain details of the software running on a user's system to gain complete control of a computer. If the attacker can convince the user to visit a website he controls, perhaps through a link in an e-mail, a number of attacks on the user's browser become possible.
The attacks worked with minimal participation from the user and, in one case, none at all.
More on Google’s latest acquisition
On2's technologies have long been a part of the web video infrastructure, and analysts consider its newest compression technologies among the best. The company's client list includes Skype, Sony and Sun Microsystems.
"But it wasn't after them for the revenue opportunity," said Peter Bell, a partner with Highland Capital Partners, which invests in video technology companies. "It was about the core technology." On2 lost $51m last year.
[…]
Google is also expected to make On2's technology open source, releasing it to the public and essentially making it free.
"Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video-compression technology should be a part of the web platform," Google said in a blog post discussing the acquisition.
FT.com / Media - Deal on On2 set to shake up video platforms
Strange days indeed
Most computer security analysts did not cite a specific source of the attack on Twitter.
But Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said the attack was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia.
It was not clear who initiated the attack, Mr. Woodcock said, but it was likely that “one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them.” He said he found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia.
Hmm…
When he first heard Twitter wasn't working, Carson Daly, the host of a late-night show on NBC, thought, just for a second, that it may be the end of the service for good. And he was relieved. "Thank God it is all over now," he says. "It drives me crazy. It is nonstop. It is just the world's biggest office, and everybody 'replies all.' I don't want to be involved in these conversations, but I got sucked in."
Twitter, a Service of Few Words And Many Followers, Goes Silent - WSJ.com
Check the full post for more details
The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).
See the full post (and comments) for more details
The worst part, however has been a share decline in company’s core business — switches. The Wall Street Journal reports that the sales for Internet switches declines 11 percent to $12 billion its its fiscal year – hurt primarily due to competition from rivals such as Hewlett-Packard. Check out this little tidbit from this great Journal story on Cisco:
In addition to the recession, Cisco faced increased competition from rival Hewlett-Packard Co. The company’s new management structure has at times slowed its response to rivals’ moves, according to people familiar with the matter. In late 2007, for instance, H-P started promoting a warranty for its switches that provides free upgrades and support. Under Cisco’s new structure, a decision about how to respond to H-P’s offering was delayed as it worked its way through multiple committees, these people said. Cisco didn’t match H-P’s promotion until this April, and during that period Cisco’s market share fell.
Interesting times…
Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.
For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word - Statistics - NYTimes.com
Seeing a pattern? Read the full post.
This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software. The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free? It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.
I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Google Taketh Away - Cringely on technology
Another insightful snapshot from Dave Kellogg – actually two; see the full post for his take on the Software Equity Group report as well as the update on his blogging/tweeting strategy.
I'm not sure which better explains my recent decrease in blog post frequency: bit.ly or being out of the office. Either way, I wasn't kidding a few weeks ago when I said I'm changing my sharing pattern. Much as popular business authors take one good idea and inflate it into a book, I now realize (thanks to bit.ly) that I have been taking what could have been one good tweet and inflating it into a blog post. While I've not drawn any definitive conclusions, thus far I'd say I'm sharing many more articles with significantly less effort than before.
I’m intrigued with Dave’s perspective on tweets and blog posts – when to use Twitter and when to use a blog. I think it’s useful to consider a sort of information value-add (IVA) index for this type of scenario, and also reader convenience – if you can see quote + commentary in-line in a blog, that’s simpler than having to open multiple windows. More on IVA and activity value-add (AVA) in a future post…
Mark Logic CEO Blog: Highlights from 2Q09 Software Equity Group Report
Strange days indeed; see the full article
The Linux community tends to talk about Microsoft as if the company were the spawn of the devil, if not the devil itself. But Linux creator Linus Torvalds has a completely different perspective: He welcomes Microsoft's recent release of open source code, and berates those in the Linux community who focus on "exclusion and hatred" in their approach to technology.
Linux creator: "Microsoft hatred is a disease" - Computerworld Blogs
Hmm – maybe no immediate impact, as an IBMer quoted later in the article asserted, but if 400+ Yahoo! employees focused on search are going to move to Microsoft, if the deal wins regulatory approval, that may have implications for future IBM/Yahoo! search endeavors.
Yahoo's decision to use Microsoft's Bing search engine could cause a "strange bedfellows" competitive conflict between Microsoft and IBM in the enterprise search market.
Yahoo and IBM have offered since late 2006 a free, entry-level enterprise search product called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, for which Yahoo provides a user interface component as well as Web search. That IBM-Yahoo product competes directly against the also-free Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.
Interesting perspectives, but I disagree – I think the timing is now right for tablet and slate PC designs. Don’t think keyboard-less laptop; think super-sized iPod touch-class device.
Rumors have it Apple is a month away from announcing a tablet computer. Another tablet, the Crunchpad, is also due for imminent release. These and other fine keyboardless computers get great play on gadget blogs (including our own Crave), but in the real world, I believe this whole category is a nonstarter. Why we keep waiting for the killer tablet computer is beyond me. Few people really want one, especially at the prices that they will have to sell for.
See the full article for more details
The Brussels-based EC said Aug.3 that it has scheduled an antitrust review date of Sep. 3 to discuss the multinational companies' proposed deal. It will look closely at two main areas of concern: Sun's Java networking software franchise and the enterprise parallel database market.
EC Now Will Take a Legal Look at Oracle's Acquisition of Sun
Sign of the times
The confusion has given rise to a number of resources that provide English translations for terms like WRUD (“What are you doing?”) and TTYL (“Talk to you later”)—among them independent Web sites like NetLingo.com and UrbanDictionary.com and corporate ones like LG Mobile Phones’ DTXTR.com. Textapedia, a pocket guide to texting terms released last year, is sold in over 4,000 stores nationwide. NetLingo reports a 391% increase in the number of unique visitors over the past five years, while UrbanDictionary says it saw a 40% jump in its unique visitors last June from June 2008.
Learning to Text: Don’t LOL at Death, and Other Tips - WSJ.com
See the full article for more details. My $.02 follows the excerpt below.
Google is the standard-bearer for a wide-open world of Web standards in which programmers should be able to run nearly any software on almost any computing device. From Google's perspective, the more the merrier—so long as those programs, devices, and Web sites create places for Google to sell online ads.
Open World vs. Tight Control
Apple's view is sharply different. The company keeps its ecosystem of software developers carefully manicured and maintains tight control over what software can be sold for its iPhone. The reasons range from filtering out schlock applications to what some observers say is putting the kibosh on applications that compete with Apple's own offerings or those of iPhone wireless carrier AT&T (T). That may have been why Apple blocked Web-calling software Google Voice from the iPhone last month.
My $.02: much of the press and blogosphere commentary in this context over the last couple days (primary triggering events: Schmidt’s exit from the Apple board and the controversy about Apple blocking Google Voice on the iPhone) is only looking at part of the story – e.g., Apple happens to make some very popular Internet-centric devices and services, even though it also takes a 30% cut on its app store.
I think the bigger question is why Google feels compelled to make big shifts in its “co-opetition” continuum relationships with Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla.org, Palm, and many others. Apparently the mainstream Internet simply isn’t evolving fast enough for Google, and/or in ways Google would prefer, when it comes to customers, content, and specific (real or de facto) standards etc. that Google can control.
We’ve seen this pattern before, in several respects – with Netscape, in bubble 1.0.
Another timely reality check from Paul Thurrott
Expect Apple to continue its self-serving practices until it grows powerful enough that a regulatory body steps in. "As we've said before, newer versions of iTunes software may no longer provide synching functionality with unsupported digital media players," an Apple spokesperson reiterated this week. This kind of pettiness is typical for Apple—after all, Pre customers would likely use iTunes to purchase music from Apple's online store—and it underscores a corporate mentality that is both isolationist and extreme. But it may eventually get the company in trouble, now that it has finally come under the watchful eye of regulators. Sometimes, hubris really does get in the way.
See the full article for more details
Industry watchers said Mr Schmidt's resignation will allow Google to take the gloves off and compete more openly with Apple. The danger warned one top blog is that it could also turn the company into public enemy number one.
"If nothing else it does mark a shift in where power resides in Silicon Valley and who is the perceived enemy," said TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld.
See the full post for more details. This seems a bit like cheating… but I’ll do it anyway.
Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through Twitterfeed, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:
The saga continues…
Now Palm is calling foul and is trying to rally the consumer electronics industry to its defense. Palm says that Apple, which allows only its own devices to connect directly with iTunes software, is misusing the standards put in place to foster interoperability between computers and devices using a U.S.B. connection.
Palm has filed a complaint with the U.S.B. Implementers Forum, an industry group established by technology companies that developed the technology that links computers to other electronic devices, claiming Apple is restraining trade. Predicting the outcome of this particular filing is tricky, said Mike Abramsky, an analyst with the investment firm RBC Capital Markets.
Palm and Apple Squabble Over iTunes Access on the Pre - NYTimes.com
Better late than never…
Twitter quietly started checking the URLs that its users post, a security measure aimed at weeding out links to known malware sites.
As online security firm F-Secure points out, the microblogging service “is increasingly targeted by worms, spam and account hijacking” and can easily filter links posted through it.
A timely perspective
Schmidt had to go. Not just because of the dust-up with the FCC and the Google Voice app. But because Google has a different set of agendas which already are putting strains on the relationship. Google wants to diminish the importance of any single computing device in favor of Web apps which sit in the cloud and are accessible from all devices: mobile phones, Macbooks, Dell laptops, or whatever. As much as is physically possible, it wants to replace the operating system with the Web.
Ultimately, that is a bigger threat to Apple than Microsoft ever was.
A significant Google milestone
"Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest," Mr. Jobs said in a press statement.
"Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's board," Mr. Jobs said.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Resigns From Apple's Board - WSJ.com
An interesting perspective on the Kindle – check the full article
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.
See the full post for more details. Via Dave Kellogg.
Google's vision for Google Books obviously goes far beyond the controversial Google Book Search settlement with the Authors Guild and the AAP. The Google Books settlement mostly dealt with the past and out-of-print books. In a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last night, however, Google Books' engineering director Dan Clancy laid out a clearer vision of the company's plans for Google Books for the first time. Among other things, the company hopes to create its own electronic bookstore for in-print books. In Google's vision, publishers would partner with the company and offer all of their books through Google and through traditional retailers.
Google's Vision for the Future of Google Books: EBook Store, Google Editions
Interesting times
YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more.
Think different…
The Federal Communications Commission has launched an inquiry into why Apple Inc. rejected Google Inc.'s Internet-telephony software for the popular iPhone, another sign of the Obama administration's stepped-up scrutiny of competitive practices in the technology industry.
In letters sent late Friday to the two companies and AT&T Inc., the FCC asked why Apple rejected the Google Voice application for the iPhone and removed related applications from its App Store. The letter also seeks information on how AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier, was consulted in the decision, if at all.
