A BlackBerry Tablet, but Where Are the Apps?- David Pogue - NYTimes.com

This is not going to be a pleasant day at RIM

BlackBerry Bridge is supposed to appeal to the corporate network administrators who are R.I.M.’s bread and butter, because they can deploy PlayBooks without having to worry about security breaches. Everything they’ve worked so hard to secure on your BlackBerry — e-mail, calendar and so on — stays there. It only appears to be on the PlayBook.

But — are you sitting down? — at the moment, BlackBerry Bridge is the only way to do e-mail, calendar, address book and BlackBerry Messenger on the PlayBook. The PlayBook does not have e-mail, calendar or address book apps of its own. You read that right. R.I.M. has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do e-mail. It must be skating season in hell. (R.I.M. says that those missing apps will come this summer.)

A BlackBerry Tablet, but Where Are the Apps?- David Pogue - NYTimes.com

PlayBook: A Tablet With a Case Of Codependency | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD

RIM rushes the PlayBook to market and ends up delivering something akin to the ill-fated Palm Foleo

But that isn’t the biggest distinction between the PlayBook and the other tablets. This first edition of the PlayBook has no built-in cellular data connection and lacks such basic built-in apps as an email program, a contacts program, a calendar, a memo pad and even RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger chat system.

To get these features with your $500 PlayBook, you must use it with a nearby BlackBerry phone connected to it wirelessly over a short-range Bluetooth connection. Once this link is made, these critical applications pop up on the PlayBook’s screen, via a system called Bridge.

PlayBook: A Tablet With a Case Of Codependency | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD

Big three Web browsers deliver the goods — fast - The Boston Globe

Check the article link below for the full browser market review

Writing about Internet browsers used to be a lot easier. You could crank out a few hundred words of praise for the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser, sneer for a while at the stodgy performance of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer, and shrug at the admirable but rarely used Chrome browser from Google Inc. And you’d be all done. Simple.

These days, it’s a bit more complicated. Firefox is still excellent, especially in its latest incarnation, Firefox 4, which made its debut a few weeks ago. But the latest from Microsoft — Internet Explorer 9 — is an impressive upgrade that easily holds its own. And the major improvements in both browsers were largely inspired by Chrome from Google Inc., which has quietly become the world’s third most popular browser, and deservedly so.

Big three Web browsers deliver the goods — fast - The Boston Globe

VMware open sources Microsoft Azure killer • The Register

Check the article post below and the Cloud Foundry FAQ for more details

VMware has open sourced a new platform for building application development services along the lines of Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine, hoping to spawn an army of so-called "platform clouds" that aren't run by Microsoft or Google.

These sky-high services can be run behind the firewall ("private clouds" in the nomenclature of the day), or on the public net ("public clouds"), and they're meant to play nicely with myriad programming languages, other cloud services, and, well, each other.

Some slide snapshots from the VMware Cloud Foundry event yesterday follow below.  Apparently VMware agrees with Microsoft that the world would be better off without traditional Java application servers…

From the problem statement:

The initial Cloud Foundry solution:

VMware open sources Microsoft Azure killer • The Register

Official Google Blog: Pagination comes to Google Docs

Updates to the increasingly tightly-coupled Google Docs/Google Chrome

Pagination also changes what’s possible with printing in modern browsers. We’ve worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard so we can support a feature called native printing. Before, if you wanted to print your document we’d need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself. With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen.
For now, native printing is only available in Google Chrome, but we’re hoping other browsers will implement the same web standard so everyone can have the best possible printing experience with Docs.

Official Google Blog: Pagination comes to Google Docs

Evernote for Windows Now With Facebook, Twitter and Notebook Sharing, And Much More « Evernote Blogcast

Check the post link below for more details on a major Evernote for Windows update

Today, Evernote for Windows got its most significant update in months. The big news is sharing. For the first time, Windows users will be able to take selected portions of their Evernote memories and share them with friends, colleagues and classmates–all without ever leaving the application. That’s not all. We’ve also added a number of other much-requested features and improvements. Let’s take a closer look.

[…]

Evernote for Windows Now With Facebook, Twitter and Notebook Sharing, And Much More « Evernote Blogcast

Native HTML5: First IE10 Platform Preview Available for Download - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Excerpt from an update by Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer

Many of us share the goal of a more powerful, native, and robust Web. We want actual progress, not just iteration and activity, toward that goal.

The Web makes progress when

• developers can take advantage of new technology
• to build sites that feel and run more like native applications than Web pages
• across production-quality browsers
• using the same markup consistently.

Native HTML5: First IE10 Platform Preview Available for Download - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

So This Is How It Ends For the Flip Video Camera? | Arik Hesseldahl | NewEnterprise | AllThingsD

More Flip analysis

This “other revenue” totaled $2.6 billion in Cisco’s fiscal 2010, up from $1.6 billion in fiscal 2009. The biggest single factor for that billion-dollar boost was $317 million in Flip camera sales. You read that right: Cisco just shut down a business that brought in $317 million in sales in its last fiscal year.

And yes, that amounts to less than one percent of Cisco’s overall sales. But it had to be a profitable business. I submit as Exhibit B a teardown analysis of the Flip Mino HD camera conducted by the market research firm IHS iSuppli shortly after Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of Pure Digital in March of that year.

[…]

It wasn’t necessarily the wrong vision (well maybe Umi was, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). It may be that Cisco was simply the wrong owner. Cisco’s purchase was puzzling in 2009 and still seems puzzling now. But more puzzling is why Cisco seems to have gone to no effort whatsoever to find the Flip–and the several hundred people responsible for making it–a suitable home.

So This Is How It Ends For the Flip Video Camera? | Arik Hesseldahl | NewEnterprise | AllThingsD

Kyocera Echo Smartphone Review | Katherine Boehret | The Digital Solution | AllThingsD

Back to the drawing board…

The Kyocera Echo has some useful capability and its combined screens create a roomy display for scrolling through websites, reading emails or looking at maps. But unfolding the phone to reveal its second screen isn’t a smooth step, and the limited number of apps that can take advantage of the dual-screen functionality will frustrate people. For now, one-screen phones will do just fine.

Kyocera Echo Smartphone Review | Katherine Boehret | The Digital Solution | AllThingsD

Nokia sees deep cuts with Microsoft deal - The Boston Globe

Painful transitions at Nokia

A reduction in research and development activities is set to be announced by the end of the month, with as many as 6,000 jobs under threat, said Antti Rinne of Pro, Finland’s biggest private-sector office-worker union. That would be equivalent to 38 percent of the Finnish company’s global devices R&D workforce. Nokia declined to comment on the numbers.

[…]

At $4.3 billion, Nokia’s 2010 research budget for devices, which include products ranging from basic handsets to smartphones that can edit documents and show movies, is more than twice Apple Inc.’s entire $1.78 billion R&D budget.

Nokia sees deep cuts with Microsoft deal - The Boston Globe

Once wildly popular Flip camera will fade away; 550 to lose jobs - The Boston Globe

Definitely redoubling its focus on enterprise opportunities

Apart from killing off the Flip, Cisco will re-target its new Umi teleconferencing product as a product for business use, abandoning efforts to sell it to consumers. The company will continue to sell its line of Linksys home networking equipment, but will focus on marketing it as a service for delivering Internet video to the home.

Cisco expects to take a $300 million charge during the third and fourth quarters of 2011 to cover costs of the restructuring.

Once wildly popular Flip camera will fade away; 550 to lose jobs - The Boston Globe

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle

Some insightful analysis (via Louis Gray)

Most online analysis of the announcement doesn't really explain what happened.  The consensus is that Flip was doomed by competition with smartphones, but that says more about the mindset of the tech media than it does about Cisco's actual decisions.  I think the reality is that Cisco just doesn't know how to manage a consumer business.
There are important lessons in that for all tech companies.

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle

Amazon.com Bestsellers: The most popular items in Electronics

Lucky #13 in Amazon’s most popular electronics items list at the moment

(20110413 update: up to #12…)

Amazon.com Bestsellers: The most popular items in Electronics

Cisco Shuts Down Flip, Its Video Camera Unit - NYTimes.com

A time for big decisions at Cisco; check the article link below for info on how Flip was undone by smartphones

Cisco, the computer-networking giant, announced Tuesday that part of its restructuring plan will including shutting down the company’s Flip video camera division that it bought just two years ago for $590 million.

The decision marks a retreat from the consumer market for Cisco, which purchased Pure Digital Technologies, Flip’s parent company, in March of 2009 in a stock transaction.

Cisco Shuts Down Flip, Its Video Camera Unit - NYTimes.com

The New Yorker Hides New Jonathan Franzen Story Behind Facebook Wall - Nicholas Jackson - Technology - The Atlantic

More content via Facebook

Jonathan Franzen has a new, 12,000-word piece in the current issue of The New Yorker, but it's only available to subscribers and, for a limited time, those who "Like" the magazine on Facebook. The celebrated Conde Nast title has built a special page on their Facebook account where the full text of Franzen's story, "Farther Away," lives. Once a visitor "Likes" the magazine, the text is displayed, but it can only be read on the social network.

The New Yorker Hides New Jonathan Franzen Story Behind Facebook Wall - Nicholas Jackson - Technology - The Atlantic

Microsoft Bing Controls 30% Of Search Market, Google Slowly Sinking [Mashable]

Some handy stats for Microsoft as it kicks off MIX 2011 today

Microsoft has secured 30% of the search market, largely at Google’s expense, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

The new March numbers claim that Microsoft achieved 30.01% of the U.S. search market share in March — 14.32% from Bing.com and 15.69% from Yahoo Search, which Bing now powers. The growth was pretty evenly distributed as well: Bing.com’s search market share grew by 6% from February while Yahoo search grew by 5%.

[…]

One of the reasons why Yahoo and Bing may be gaining on Google is that users are apparently achieving more success out of Bing-powered search: 81.14% of Yahoo Search users and 80.32% of Bing.com users clicked on a search result and visited a website. Google, on the other hand, only achieves a 65.91% success rate, according to Experian Hitwise’s numbers.

Microsoft Bing Controls 30% Of Search Market, Google Slowly Sinking [STATS]

Facebook Settlement With Twins Upheld by Court Panel - NYTimes.com

And yet they will apparently find other ways to pursue their case

Judge Kozinski wrote: “The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. With the help of a team of lawyers and a financial adviser, they made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity.”

Judge Kozinski added: “For whatever reason, they now want to back out. Like the district court, we see no basis for allowing them to do so. At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.”

Facebook Settlement With Twins Upheld by Court Panel - NYTimes.com

Amazon Drops the Price on Kindle, But Ads or No Ads, Don't Get Your Hopes Up for Free | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD

Check the article link below for more on Amazon’s new ad-supported Kindle

Three years ago, the first Kindle went on sale for $399, and each subsequent price drop led to a spike in sales.

Last year, when Amazon dropped the price to $139 for the Wi-Fi model and $189 for 3G, it became the company’s bestselling product in history. What’s more, robust sales helped catapult Kindle books to become the most popular format on the giant bookseller’s site, surpassing hardback and even paperback books.

The new Kindle introduced today will cost $114 when it comes out on May 3. That’s roughly the same price as 10 paperbacks. It will be sold by Amazon, Best Buy and Target.

Amazon Drops the Price on Kindle, But Ads or No Ads, Don't Get Your Hopes Up for Free | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD

Apple’s Jobs Biography to Be Released Next Year, Publisher Says - Businessweek

Coming to a 2012 best-seller list

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs’s biography, drawn from three years of interviews with the executive, will be published early next year, according to CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster.

The book, called “iSteve: The Book of Jobs,” will be based on interviews that author Walter Isaacson has held with Jobs and his family, the publishing company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. Isaacson, who’s written biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, also interviewed colleagues at Apple and competitors, it said.

Apple’s Jobs Biography to Be Released Next Year, Publisher Says - Businessweek

Maker of BlackBerry Hopes PlayBook Tablet Will Revive Brand - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from a RIM reality check

Some analysts suggest that R.I.M. has lost its momentum and may now be heading downward, much like Palm, which in better days was expected to rub out the then-fledgling R.I.M. Current BlackBerrys are hobbled with an aging operating system, and the company’s market growth last year seems less impressive when contrasted with Apple’s 93 percent rise in iPhone shipments.

In a world where applications have become a major selling point for mobile devices, the number of apps available for BlackBerry phones is in the tens of thousands, compared with the hundreds of thousands for Android and Apple devices. BlackBerrys are still prized for their e-mail capabilities, particularly among government and corporate customers who rely on the devices’ tight security. But it is increasingly common to find people who carry a BlackBerry for e-mail and an iPhone for everything else.

Maker of BlackBerry Hopes PlayBook Tablet Will Revive Brand - NYTimes.com

The New Gatekeepers of Media - NYTimes.com

An encouraging information quality/literacy development

As we all know, a major consequence of technology over the last many years has been to erode institutions of authority and shelter us in bubbles of personal truths. But now a contrary trend is forming: a number of groups working to bring back some of the authority and trust that has been lost.

A prominent attempt is SwiftRiver, which is affiliated with Ushahidi, an Internet platform of Kenyan origin that allows users to crowd-source real-time testimony during crises and then mounts the bits of testimony on a Google map.

The New Gatekeepers of Media - NYTimes.com

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

How long until we start tracking the virtual unemployment index?

According to the World Bank’s research, gaming-for-hire services alone—such as earning WoW gold to sell on to rich, busy foreigners—was a market worth $3 billion in 2009. As a comparison, the study notes that all the coffee growers in the developing world combined earned just $5.5 billion for their labours. Another growing source of cyberwork is crowdsourcing: for instance, Amazon farmed out the job of eliminating duplicate pages on its e-commerce site to large numbers of casual workers, who got paid a few cents each time they spotted one.

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

Federal Employees Could Face Jail Time for Using BlackBerrys [Gawker]

Good thing the shut-down was averted…

The law [the 1884 Antideficiency Act] prevents federal employees deemed "non-essential" from working when no budget is in place. This used to be simple; you just wouldn't show up. But since the last government shutdown in 1995, government-issued smart phones have become critical tools for many federal employees. Some departments say they'll simply take away the devices all together. Workers, however, would have to return to their offices on Monday to physically hand over the devices, another technical violation of the law. And if they aren't confiscated, who's to say employees aren't checking them?

Federal Employees Could Face Jail Time for Using BlackBerrys

Google Acquires PushLife Syncing Service as it Prepares to Launch its New Streaming Music Service — NewsGrange

Making all of your digital music accessible and useful (via Louis Gray)

PushLife, a Toronto-based startup that allows users to sync their iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries with Android and BlackBerry smartphones, has been acquired by Google. The company, which was founded in 2008, describes its mission as helping users to “play, organize, share and purchase digital content across multiple devices” and calls itself “the best upgrade to your BlackBerry and Android media player.”  The PushLife team will join Google’s engineering team in Canada.

Google Acquires PushLife Syncing Service as it Prepares to Launch its New Streaming Music Service — NewsGrange

Google Survey Reveals How We Use Our iPads - NYTimes.com [ReadWriteWeb]

Check the article link for the source data

The most notable findings of the survey of more than 1,400 respondents include:

• 43% of respondents spend more time with their tablet than with their desktop/laptop
• One in three respondents spend more time with their tablet than they do watching TV. (That was the most notable finding for the Huffington Post's Bianca Bosker, from whom I found the survey.)
• While some people in other fora have reported growing bored with their tablets, less than 4% of respondents to this survey said they used their tablets on average 15 minutes per day or less.
• 68% said they used them for one hour or more per day, 38% for two or more hours.

Google Survey Reveals How We Use Our iPads - NYTimes.com

Bing Touch and Decide: Introducing Bing for iPad - Search Blog - Site Blogs - Bing Community

An impressive iPad app from Microsoft; see the post link below for more details

From the outset, our goal with Bing has been to help you stop searching and start deciding. Whether it’s on your computer, smartphone, tablet or the form-factor of tomorrow, we’re constantly exploring new ways to optimize Bing to ensure you’re getting the most from your search experience.

Today, we are pleased to introduce a brand new way to interact with Bing: Bing for iPad. Available for free download through the Apple App store, Bing for iPad goes beyond the traditional search experience, offering a unique and visually rich way to search the Web. The app is designed from the ground up for touch. You can quickly browse news, movies, Bing homepage images, local business listings and much more – all with the swipe of your finger.

Bing Touch and Decide: Introducing Bing for iPad - Search Blog - Site Blogs - Bing Community

Star Trek series coming to Netflix Watch Instantly in July and October -- Engadget

Back to the future

TrekMovie has confirmed it [Netflix] will have every episode of all five live action series -- US only, sorry Canada, enjoy that Iron Man 2 -- with the original Star Trek (in HD), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise (in HD) available July 1st, followed by Star Trek: Deep Space 9 on October 1st.

Star Trek series coming to Netflix Watch Instantly in July and October -- Engadget

Perspectives - Open Compute Project

James Hamilton on Open Compute Project

Facebook is a big business operating at high scale and they also have elected to invest in advanced infrastructure designs. Jonathan Heiliger and the Facebook infrastructure team have hired an excellent group of engineers over the past couple of years and are now bringing these designs to life in their new Prineville Oregon facility. I had the opportunity to visit this datacenter 6 weeks back just before it started taking production load. I had an excellent visit, got to catch up with some old friends, meet some new ones, and tour an impressive facility. I saw an unusually large number of elegant designs ranging from one of the cleanest mechanical systems I’ve come across, three phase 480VAC directly to the rack,  a low voltage direct current distributed uninterruptable power supply system, all the way through to custom server designs. But, what made this trip really unusual is that I’m actually able to talk about what I saw.

In fact, more than allowing me to talk about it, Facebook has decided to release most of the technical details surrounding these designs publically. In the past, I’ve seen some super interesting but top secret facilities and I’ve seen some public but not particularly advanced data centers. To my knowledge, this is the first time an industry leading design has been documented in detail and released publically.

Perspectives - Open Compute Project

BBC News - Russia's President Medvedev denounces cyber-attack

Sign of the times

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has condemned as "outrageous and illegal" a cyber-attack on a popular social networking website that hosts his blog.

The LiveJournal site was hit by a denial-of-service attack on Wednesday.

The site crashed after being bombarded with messages from thousands of infected computers, an expert from the Kaspersky Labs computer company said.

BBC News - Russia's President Medvedev denounces cyber-attack

Google speech recognition software for your cellphone actually works. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

The data will set you free – or at least help you find the nearest McDonald’s, using voice input on your smartphone

How does Android's speech system work so well? The magic of data. Speech recognition is one of a handful of Google's artificial intelligence programs—the others are language translation and image search—that get their power by analyzing impossibly huge troves of information. For the speech system, the data are a large number of voice recordings. If you've used Android's speech recognition system, Google Voice's e-mail transcription service, Goog411 (a now-defunct information service), or some other Google speech-related service, there's a good chance that the company has your voice somewhere on its servers. And it's only because Google has your voice—and millions of others—that it can recognize mine.

Unless you've turned on Android's "personalized voice recognition" system, your recordings are stored anonymously—that is, Google can't tie your voice to your name. Still, the privacy implications in building a huge database of millions of peoples' utterances are fascinating—so fascinating that I'll devote my next column to discussing them.

Google speech recognition software for your cellphone actually works. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine#p2#p2

Google Paid Two Employees Tens Of Millions Dollars Not To Take Jobs At Twitter [Business Insider]

A sign of the Googleplex times; check the Arrington link below for scenarios that would make for a popular TV mini-series…

This news also means that people don't think joining Twitter is going to make them mega-rich. Interesting.

The other lesson from this story? Arrington puts it best: “If you’re a Google employee and you aren’t out interviewing at Facebook, Twitter or Zynga you are a moron.”

Google Paid Two Employees Tens Of Millions Dollars Not To Take Jobs At Twitter

FT.com / Business books - From inside the Google bubble

Final paragraphs of a review of Steven Levy’s new book, which will be published next week

It is in its final chapters – dealing with Google’s struggles to keep up with the shifting and often contradictory expectations of on­line privacy, its agonising over China and its internal efforts to catch up with Facebook – that In the Plex breaks out of history to give a more nuanced account.

With the hugely ambitious Page taking over this week as CEO, it also serves as a timely rem­inder of the outsized advan­ces – or hubristic episodes of over-reach – that undoubtedly lie ahead.

FT.com / Business books - From inside the Google bubble

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: April 8

Twenty years ago today – and “write once, run anywhere” has nearly come to fruition (in HTML5)…

April 8, 1991

Java development begins in earnest

On this day, Sun's Java team moves from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on its "Oak" development project (later re-named "Java.")

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: April 8

Google, U.S. Near Deal on ITA Acquisition - WSJ.com

Embracing and accelerating the inevitable

The proposed agreement isn't final, and could fall apart. But if Google and Justice clinch the deal, it would mark a turning point for the company in its rapid growth from a Silicon Valley start-up to a digital giant so powerful that it is drawing the sort of government scrutiny accorded AT&T Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in earlier decades.

The proposed agreement would for the first time allow government antitrust monitoring of a part of Google's operations to assure that the company doesn't unfairly use its control of ITA's airline data to put rivals at a disadvantage, people familiar with the discussions said.

Google, among the most active buyers of small technology companies, has never formally agreed to government conditions as part of an acquisition.

Spokespeople for Google, ITA and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Google, U.S. Near Deal on ITA Acquisition - WSJ.com

Aurasma Enhances Search With Images and Videos - NYTimes.com

Autonomy aims high with augmented reality

Today so-called augmented reality is already widely available on both iPhones and Android phones through software applications like Google Goggles. Hundreds of other apps overlay geographical information on smartphone displays.

But Autonomy embeds moving imagery within the display of images of the real world in a way that’s visually convincing. For instance, a game maker might use it so that a person holding a camera phone up to a building would see the building’s image on the screen with a dragon entwined around it.

Called Aurasma, the software is based on the company’s IDOL pattern recognizer, which has been stripped down to run on an iPhone 4.

Aurasma Enhances Search With Images and Videos - NYTimes.com

When Journalism 2.0 Kills - Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Forbes

Excerpt from a stark realty check (via All Things Digital)

The basic structure of how news gets made is changing. Institutions, experience and credentials are less important than they used to be; networks, individual enterprise and personal “brands” are far more so. To new-media utopians like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, this shift — away from journalism schools and newsroom hierarchies, toward empowered citizen bloggers and crowdsourced reporting — is an unmitigated good. And sometimes it is good.

But sometimes it’s tragically bad. Here’s one example.

Twenty-four people in Afghanistan, including seven U.N. staffers, have been killed in riots sparked by Florida pastor Terry Jones’s public burning of a Quran. Poynter.org’s Steve Myers looked into how the rioters even knew of Jones’s stunt given a widespread and mostly effective media blackout meant to avert violence. The answer: A college student at the University of Florida filed a report for the wire service Agence France-Presse, which syndicated it all over the world.

When Journalism 2.0 Kills - Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Forbes

Facebook shares its server secrets - The Boston Globe

Facebook goes “open hardware;” see http://opencompute.org/ for more details.

Facebook won’t make any money from the Open Compute Project announced yesterday. Rather, by making the blueprints and mechanical designs of its servers available to everyone through a model known as open source, the company hopes others will improve them. Facebook can then incorporate those advances into its own servers.

“Being able to design more efficient servers . . . is a big part of being able to build the things we build,’’ said Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook.

Facebook shares its server secrets - The Boston Globe

Borders Restructuring Plan Is Said to Meet Skepticism - NYTimes.com

In other B-company bankruptcy news, Blockbuster was acquired by Dish Network Corp. in a bankruptcy auction for $320M

Borders presented a restructuring plan to its creditors on Wednesday that promised publishers and landlords a sleeker, more efficient company poised to emerge successfully from bankruptcy through increased online sales and revamped stores.

But publishers characterized the plan as unrealistic and said they were more convinced than ever that Borders would be forced to sell itself or liquidate.

Borders Restructuring Plan Is Said to Meet Skepticism - NYTimes.com

Apple 'orders 12 petabytes of storage' from EMC • The Register

Buying in bulk

Apple has ordered a gargantuan 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon – the recent EMC acquisition – to support its iTunes video service, according to report citing an "inside source".

According to to StorageNewsletter.com, Apple is "probably" the largest of Isilon's 1,500 customers as of the end of December. That may be an understatement.

Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC last November for $2.25bn, and is self-described as "the global leader in scale-out storage".

Apple 'orders 12 petabytes of storage' from EMC • The Register

The Surge in Data Processing - NYTimes.com

Check the article link below for more details

A new study finds there has been an explosion in the amount of data being processed by computer servers used by companies, organizations and governments. In computer speak, these powerful computers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008. In plainer terms, that is the equivalent of stacking a Stephen King book to Neptune 20 times.

That figure is rising 30 to 40 percent a year, according to the study’s researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

The Surge in Data Processing - NYTimes.com

Apple's iAds app found to bend App Store rules | Apple - CNET News

Think different

As pointed out by Business Insider, the free iAd Gallery app breaks the 13th item in Apple's functionality rules, which stipulates that "apps that are primarily marketing materials or advertisements will be rejected." The app itself is made up entirely of advertisements that users can interact with as if they saw them inside of an application. Based on a section in Apple's iAds guidelines, the app could also be considered as violating the rule that says "apps that are designed predominantly for the display of ads will be rejected."

Apple's iAds app found to bend App Store rules | Apple - CNET News

Google to Revamp YouTube With 'Channels' - WSJ.com

Trying new channels at Facebook and Netflix

Google Inc. is working on a major overhaul of YouTubeas it tries to position itself for the rise of televisions that let people watch online video in their living rooms, according to people familiar with the matter.

YouTube is looking to compete with broadcast and cable television, some of these people said, a goal that requires it to entice users to stay on the website longer, and to convince advertisers that it will reach desirable consumers.

[…]

YouTube's move comes as streaming video services are growing stronger, upending the way people watch TV shows. Netflix Inc. is building up a cache of TV content and movies, recently securing rights to stream the hit series "Mad Men." Amazon.com Inc. and Hulu LLC are making a similar grab. Hulu's investors include Wall Street Journal owner News Corp.

Google to Revamp YouTube With 'Channels' - WSJ.com

Worries About Phishing Attacks Rise As Epsilon Data Breach Mess Goes On | Arik Hesseldahl | NewEnterprise | AllThingsD

Interesting times

Meanwhile, shares in Epsilon’s parent company, Allied Data Systems, don’t seem to be feeling any further ill effects from all the negative attention. Its shares finished the day up 38 cents to close at $84.12, and the stock is up about 16 percent since the start of the year. The company was in damage control mode today, saying that it was working with federal authorities and outside computer forensics experts to investigate how the breach happened and who did it and to ensure that additional security measures are put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

And even though Epsilon represented about 22 percent of Allied Data’s revenues last year, the company said that it expects the incident to have “minimal if any impact” on its overall financial performance for the foreseeable future, and that the breach affects only about two percent of Epsilon’s total client base.

Worries About Phishing Attacks Rise As Epsilon Data Breach Mess Goes On | Arik Hesseldahl | NewEnterprise | AllThingsD

Google faces new rules in ITA deal - The Boston Globe

A time for big decisions

Antitrust officials are pushing Google Inc. to accept limits on its behavior in exchange for government approval of the search giant’s purchase of travel software firm ITA Software Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. Such an agreement would require ongoing monitoring by government antitrust officials — a first for Google.

Google could still walk away from the deal for the Cambridge, Mass., company altogether, or fight the government in court. A decision from Justice could come within a week or so, but some sources cautioned that negotiations could drag out longer.

Google faces new rules in ITA deal - The Boston Globe

BBC News - Twitter predicts future of stocks

Also see “Wealthy Turn to Social Media for Investment Help” (NYT)

Twitter may not yet have found a way to make money for itself but it is doing a good job of generating cash for its users, research suggests.

A study conducted by a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich found that investors following stock market tweets could have achieved an average return rate of 15%.

BBC News - Twitter predicts future of stocks

Microsoft tries plan B with Hohm energy app | Green Tech - CNET News

Heading to the garage

Microsoft launched Hohm almost two years ago as a free application for consumers to monitor energy use and get tips on how to improve efficiency. It has signed on fewer than 10 utilities which use Hohm to provide consumers with electricity data online and it has partnered to provide electricity monitoring using a home's Wi-Fi connection.

But despite those efforts, the reception from utilities and consumers has not been what Microsoft had hoped originally, Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference here. In response, Microsoft is increasing the focus of Hohm on a partnership with Ford to manage electric-vehicle charging at home, he said.

"We aren't seeing the level of traction in home monitoring than we had hoped for so we're increasing our focus on EVs and making them more connected," Bernard said, adding that Microsoft intends to learn from its experience so far.

Microsoft tries plan B with Hohm energy app | Green Tech - CNET News

Happy Birthday SharePoint! [Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog]

A SharePoint tenth anniversary snapshot by Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate VP, SharePoint

This week is the 10th anniversary of the first release of SharePoint Portal and Team Services. As I was digging through my closet to find the first SharePoint T-Shirt to wear to work, I reflected on how timely it was to both look back at the progress as well as look forward to the next chapter where SharePoint Online will help even more people and organizations as part of the upcoming release of Office 365.

Happy Birthday SharePoint!

Cisco CEO Chambers Plans Changes to Fix Lost Credibility - Businessweek

More on the Cisco recalc

“We have disappointed our investors and we have confused our employees,” Chambers, 61, said in the memo. “Bottom line, we have lost some of the credibility that is foundational to Cisco’s success -- and we must earn it back.”

The changes may include selling or spinning off Cisco’s consumer business, Ehud Gelblum, an analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York, said in a report. That unit includes Pure Digital Technologies Inc., the maker of the Flip video camera.

The company also might move more marketing dollars and employees to its main routing, switching, data-center video and collaboration business, while decreasing the focus on side businesses, he said.

Cisco CEO Chambers Plans Changes to Fix Lost Credibility - Businessweek

Cisco: What Went Wrong and What Needs to Be Fixed: Cloud Computing News « [GigaOM]

Excerpt from a Cisco snapshot (it’s not at the burning platform phase yet)

Cisco is in trouble. It screwed up and John Chambers acknowledged as much in his memo to employees Monday, which was later published on the company’s blog. Chambers didn’t go into the details of what has gone down, but after years of following the network giant we can say straight up that Cisco let its eyes stray from the ball. By not staying true to its core networking focus, Cisco managed to let its market share come under pressure from incubent players and upstarts. It also allowed rivals to set the agenda for the next big trend in networking: the idea of one unified network.

Cisco: What Went Wrong and What Needs to Be Fixed: Cloud Computing News «

With a New CEO, MarkLogic Eyes Big Data IPO: Cloud Computing News « [GigaOM]

A new chapter for MarkLogic

[New CEO Ken] Bado says the goal going forward is to add about 150 employees and keep revenue growth around its 45-percent-per-year level before ultimately filing for an IPO when it reaches a certain, but undisclosed, revenue mark. Before that happens, Bado said, MarkLogic will have to “move from the children’s table to the adult table,” a process that will require expanding its geographic presence and attracting more developers to drive bottom-up adoption of MarkLogic Server in even more businesses. He said he’s surprised MarkLogic is still relatively unknown despite its stellar reputation and customer base, and that it beats out Oracle in some situations.

To meet its growth goals, Bado said the company will step up its aggressiveness in touting MarkLogic Server for “big data” applications, a term that has caught fire lately, and that pretty accurately describes what MarkLogic does. Avnur says it will do more than just talk about big data, though, and actually is working to further improve its story by creating a Hadoop connector that lets customers run MapReduce jobs on unstructured data stored in MarkLogic Server.

With a New CEO, MarkLogic Eyes Big Data IPO: Cloud Computing News «

Apple Launches iAd Ad App | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

If you need more advertising in your life, there’s an app for that

But some of you are actually sort of interested in looking at ads. And lots of you like things that Apple makes. So: Here’s iAd Gallery, from Steve Jobs and company.

The free app is just what it sounds like–a highlight reel of ads created using Apple’s own in-app advertising system. That is, it’s an ad itself, for iAds.

Apple Launches iAd Ad App | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Online storage company Mozy joins forces with VMware [TechFlash]

Getting kind of deeply nested…

Seattle-based Mozy, a data storage service owned by EMC, has been 'acquired' by VMware, a provider of virtualization software.

The deal is a little complex, given that Mozy and VMware are both essentially owned by parent company EMC (Mozy is wholly owned by EMC, which also owns 80 percent of VMware's shares). VMware said that it has hired the Mozy team and acquired the assets behind Mozy's cloud-based data protection service. The Palo Alto-based company said it will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption to Mozy customers.

Online storage company Mozy joins forces with VMware

Bing chief: it’s time to reorganize the web - Next at Microsoft - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Excerpt from a Qi Lu presentation summary (via Richard Eckel)

Things then started to get really interesting as Qi talked about the structure of the web (stick with me…). He pointed out that the web of today is a topical graph which is good, but not good enough. Fortunately, he then went on to explain that by topical graph he meant that the web of today is one of nouns and phrases - topical labels. His point being that a topical web as fine 10 years ago but things have changed. We’ve changed as a society in how we interact with the web and technology has moved on.

The web is evolving in to a full blown digital society. Today were seeing the beginning of that world coming together. Increasingly, when you perform a search on Bing , the results are presented with social information embedded in the form of contextual Facebook results woven in. This trend said Qi moves us to a world where we can make decisions based on 3 types of opinion: Popular opinion, trusted opinion and expert opinion. Think about buying something in the real world today, or going to a restaurant and you very often tap in to one or more of those opinions. The web should be the same way.

Bing chief: it’s time to reorganize the web - Next at Microsoft - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Landmark Public Online Information Act Jointly Reintroduced In House And Senate - Sunlight Foundation

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and also an energy source for innovative new information value-add business opportunities

Today Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) reintroduced the landmark Public Online Information Act. If enacted, POIA would bring the government into the 21st century by requiring the government to embrace the presumption that government-held information, already required to be public, must be available online. Data should be free from the shadows of obscurity and brought into the sunlight of the Internet.

The current way information is often made accessible in Washington is that you often must show up in person at a musty repository and photocopy information page by page -- or try your luck at freeing information through a FOIA request and endure countless (and possibly politicized) bureaucratic business days. The public demands better; it looks online for information.

Amid immediate concerns over government transparency projects losing funding, it is important to push for the sweeping, cultural shift that Washington desperately needs. That's why we continue to advocate for the information government produces to be available online, in user friendly formats, and available to the public at no cost.

Landmark Public Online Information Act Jointly Reintroduced In House And Senate - Sunlight Foundation

BBC News - Google goes shopping for patents

tbd how much Google discounts the value due to Microsoft’s perpetual and worldwide rights to the Nortel patent portfolio

Google has admitted that it is lagging behind other industry players such as Apple and Microsoft in terms of the number of patents it holds.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office lists Google patents at 630, while Apple has over 3,800 and Microsoft has about 18,000.

"Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories," said Google's Mr Walker.

BBC News - Google goes shopping for patents

Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Music Player [SuperSite for Windows]

Excerpt from a Paul Thurrott perspective

[…] That it beat both Apple and Google to this point--both are racing to complete their own similar offerings--is, perhaps, the most incredible bit of all.

Well, not quite. The most incredible bit of all is that when you combine all of the previously mentioned Amazon offerings and view them as an increasingly cohesive whole, you can suddenly see why Amazon is one of the top-tier players in the cloud today. This is a company that has the means and desire to compete in many markets which it can then link in very interesting ways, creating what is in effect a new ecosystem of its own, one that treads very neatly between a number of competing platforms. Amazon is, in effect, out-doing the major platform makers of our day--again, Apple, Google, and Microsoft--while generally not excluding the users that have bet on those platforms. This is an amazing accomplishment, one which few people seem to even realize is happening all around them.

With that bit of perspective out of the way, let's see what they've done with Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, see where the Amazon offerings excel, and, of course, where they fall short.

Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Music Player

The Antitrust Noose Is Tightening Around Google's Neck [Business Insider]

Day 2 for CEO Larry Page (2.0)

The only thing the FTC is waiting for is for the DoJ to decide whether to block Google's acquisition of flight software company ITA, which might threaten travel search engines like Kayak. There's an element of jostling between the FTC and DoJ, which oversee antitrust investigations.

There have been noises for a while about a potential antitrust investigation against Google in the US, but this is the first indication that an antitrust authority is seriously planning a deep and broad investigation of Google on antitrust grounds.

The Antitrust Noose Is Tightening Around Google's Neck

Apple Escapes $625.5 Million Patent Damage Ruling - TNW Apple

Apple has another good day in court

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis agreed with the computing giant, writing:

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law.”

Davis also said that “the evidentiary record is insufficient to support the jury’s damage awards” even after the infringement finding had been upheld.

Despite huge revenues in the past year, $625.5 million is a massive amount, even for Apple. The company will be glad to have weathered this patent storm, but it is still engaged in disputes in various courts across the U.S and Europe.

Apple Escapes $625.5 Million Patent Damage Ruling - TNW Apple

Google Executive Says Goodbye as Page Says Hello - NYTimes.com

Larry Page will be a bit lonelier as a product planner

Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, will soon leave the company, Google said Monday.

[…]

Mr. Rosenberg told The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported his departure, that the timing was not coincidental, and that Mr. Page needed to be able to build his own executive team.

He plans to spend his time writing a book with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, on the company’s management culture, according to The Mercury News.

Google Executive Says Goodbye as Page Says Hello - NYTimes.com

HP Loses VP of Product Management for webOS to Numenta | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

A big hire for Numenta

The brain drain at Hewlett-Packard’s Palm unit continues with another departure. This one is particularly high profile, though it seems to have gone unnoticed.

Joe Hayashi, VP of product management for webOS, left the company in March for the VP of marketing gig at Numenta, a machine learning start-up led by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins and former Palm CEO Donna Dubinsky.

HP Loses VP of Product Management for webOS to Numenta | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Obama’s Re-election Campaign Puts Facebook Front And Center … Literally [TechCrunch]

Meanwhile, while Crossroads GPS explores wikis as a means of crowdsourcing Karl Rove-style modus operandi…

U.S. President’s Barack Obama’s re-election campaign just kicked off, and it – again – makes clever use of Facebook as a tool for spreading the word and amass supporters.

When you connect to your Facebook account on the campaign website, an interactive banner will appear on the top of the website that shows you which of your friends aren’t “in” yet. You’re invited to put something up on your friends’ walls to prompt them to click the ‘Are You In?’ application and enable them to spread the word to their own friends.

Obama’s Re-election Campaign Puts Facebook Front And Center … Literally

The Google Books Settlement, R.I.P. | James Gleick

Another perspective on Google Books

Many people, including some I greatly respect, are gleeful about the demise of the arduously worked out settlement of the lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and book publishers against Google. Not me.

It certainly wasn’t perfect. It involved some messy compromises, as settlements tend to do. It couldn’t satisfy everyone.

[…]

We’re back to a messy real world now. Perhaps the stars are finally aligned for Congress to create a National Digital Library, assembling and preserving all these books, making them searchable, and sharing them with readers in a way that fairly compensates the rightsholders. This Congress seems pretty dysfunctional, but who knows? The settlement, now defunct, at least provides a well thought-out framework for how it might be done—with or without Google.

The Google Books Settlement, R.I.P. | James Gleick

The iPad 2 is so popular it sold out even in the afterlife - TNW Shareables

Interesting times

During the Qingming festival, also known as the tomb sweeping festival, Chinese communities in Asia honor their ancestors by burning fake money or replicas of luxury items. Chinese families in Malaysia, however, rush to buy paper replicas of the popular, new iPad 2 to burn for their dead relatives as part of an old rite.

In a Reuters report, Jeffrey Te, a prayer item shopkeeper, seems to face the same supply problem as Apple.

The iPad 2 is so popular it sold out even in the afterlife - TNW Shareables

Business & Technology | Google co-founder hopes to prove he's ready to be CEO | Seattle Times Newspaper

Day 1 for Larry Page, Google CEO, chapter two

Page, though, has left little doubt about his top priority: to dissolve the bureaucracy and complacency that accompanied the company's rapid transformation into a 21st-century empire. Google is expected to end the year with more than 30,000 employees and $35 billion in annual revenue.

Uncertainty about whether Page will be as interested as Schmidt in appeasing Wall Street has contributed to a 6 percent drop in Google's stock price since the CEO change was announced. .

Business & Technology | Google co-founder hopes to prove he's ready to be CEO | Seattle Times Newspaper

Ruling Spurs Effort to Form Digital Public Library - NYTimes.com

tbd if/when this will come to fruition

The lofty effort, the Digital Public Library of America, counts a long list of heavyweights among its supporters, including librarians from major universities and officials from the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Some of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations have said they were interested in financing the project, though its total cost has not been determined.

The various backers of the library, and a number of interested parties, met in October at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which is coordinating the project. Representatives from technology companies like Google and Apple attended.

Ruling Spurs Effort to Form Digital Public Library - NYTimes.com

Wikicountability Site Takes Aim at Obama - NYTimes.com

It’ll be interesting to see how “open” and accountable the site sponsors will be

Many companies and organizations, including the United States Army, have seized on the Wikipedia model to encourage their members to build up information collaboratively. This seems to be an early effort to use the idea behind WikiLeaks, a repository of secretive or difficult-to-obtain documents, for a specific political end.

In much the same way news outlets have tried to harness social networking tools to improve their reports and then popularize them, Crossroads GPS is experimenting with a system of distributed accountability (or distributed opposition research, if you prefer).

Wikicountability Site Takes Aim at Obama - NYTimes.com

Que: OneNote Mobile for iPhone: OneNote Mobile Goes Multi-platform > An Introduction to OneNote Mobile for iPhone

An excerpt from my latest OneNote article (see this page for an index to the full series)

Microsoft OneNote has become a broadly successful personal information management and collaboration tool since its introduction in 2003. As one indication of how popular OneNote has become, a recent Microsoft blog post noted that 78 million PCs in the United States alone have OneNote installed (although it's not clear how many of those copies are actively used at this time).

However, there has been a longstanding request in the OneNote user community for Microsoft to support OneNote on non-Microsoft client platforms. The lack of OneNote clients for popular non-Microsoft platforms has been a key issue in the competitive landscape between OneNote and Evernote, a topic I discussed in my previous article ("Evernote and Microsoft OneNote: Comparing Two Noteworthy Tools/Services").

Microsoft took a big step toward addressing the request on January 18, 2011, when it announced and released a new OneNote Mobile for iPhone client. The rest of this article includes an introduction to the new client, an overview of how it may change the competitive landscape, and some comments on ways in which the OneNote Mobile for iPhone client is a hopeful leading indicator of other potential Microsoft plans for OneNote.

Que: OneNote Mobile for iPhone: OneNote Mobile Goes Multi-platform > An Introduction to OneNote Mobile for iPhone

Epsilon data breach results in a huge loss of customer data | VentureBeat

It’ll be interesting to see the ramifications for parent company Alliance Data

Epsilon, the world’s largest provider of permission-based email marketing, has suffered a huge data breach. That means hackers may have swiped customer data belonging to the world’s biggest brands.

Epsilon sends more than 40 billion emails a year on behalf of 2,500 brands. Security Week said the breach has affected a number of those brands, including grocery retailer Kroger, TiVo, Marriott Rewards, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Citi, McKinsey & Company, New York & Company, Brookstone, and Walgreens.

Epsilon data breach results in a huge loss of customer data | VentureBeat

Dr Dobbs | NoSQL Speed Bumps

Concluding paragraphs of a timely NoSQL reality check

There's a certain irony in the critics' claim that SQL platforms are not scalable. Operating on a 132 GB database is not beyond the capability of popular open source and commercial SQL DBMS products.

As the NoSQL and cloud computing trends converge, it will be interesting to see what database technology emerges as the clear winner for developing the next generation of applications. Economics is one issue that's forcing a move to the cloud. This could produce a scenario where organizations are deploying more applications to fit within the scope of a multi-tenant architecture. Multi-tenancy can produce database design constraints that are not congruent with the feature set of current NoSQL implementations (authentication, authorization, load balancing, sharding, and schema separation).

Dr Dobbs | NoSQL Speed Bumps

Asymmetrical Online War - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from another timely snapshot

Hardly a week passes when there isn’t some new incident underscoring the fundamental imbalance of power in cyberspace between attacker and defender, where a highly motivated and reasonably skilled intruder, operating in secrecy from almost anywhere in the world, can with apparent ease unravel digital fortifications intended to offer banking-grade security.

In February, an executive at HBGary, a Sacramento, Calif., security software and consulting firm, made the mistake of publicly boasting that he had unmasked the identities of the members of Anonymous, a secretive collection of cyber-vigilantes who had attracted attention by launching Internet denial-of-service attacks in defense of Wikileaks. The security company, which was engaged in a series dubious business propositions, soon found that the details of its business were exposed to the world.

Asymmetrical Online War - NYTimes.com

Erasing Individual’s Digital Past - NYTimes.com

Maybe Eric Schmidt won’t have to periodically change his name after all…

The company he used, Reputation.com, is among a growing corps of online reputation managers that promise to make clients look better online. In an age when a person’s reputation is increasingly defined by Google, Facebook and Twitter, these services offer what is essentially an online makeover, improving how someone appears on the Internet, usually by spotlighting flattering features and concealing negative ones.

“The Internet has become the go-to resources to destroy someone’s life online, which in turn means their offline life gets turned upside, too,” said Michael Fertik, the chief executive of Reputation.com, which is in Redwood City, Calif., and is among the largest in this field. “We’ve reached a point where the Internet has become so complicated, vast and fast-paced, that people can’t control it by themselves anymore. They now need an army of technologists to back them up online.”

Erasing Individual’s Digital Past - NYTimes.com

For Activists, Tips in Safer Use of Social Media - Noticed - NYTimes.com

Check Access for more details

Security isn’t just a concern in Middle East autocracies, or for would-be revolutionaries. Mobile phone surveillance, for example, is tough to escape for cellphone users anywhere, said Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a founder of Global Voices, a worldwide group of bloggers and interpreters that has produced similarly themed guides.

Mr. Zuckerman regularly advises Access, as do Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founders; the rock musician Peter Gabriel, and the MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser.

For Activists, Tips in Safer Use of Social Media - Noticed - NYTimes.com

The RSA Hack: How They Did It - NYTimes.com

Check the article link for more details

But on Friday RSA shed some light on the nature of the attack. In a blog post titled “Anatomy of an Attack,” the company’s head of new technologies, Uri Rivner, described a three-stage operation that was similar to several other recent prominent attacks on technology companies, including a 2009 attack on Google that it said originated in China.

In the attack on RSA, the attacker sent “phishing” e-mails with the subject line “2011 Recruitment Plan” to two small groups of employees over the course of two days. Unfortunately, one was interested enough to retrieve one of these messages from his or her junk mail and open the attached Excel file. The spreadsheet contained malware that used a previously unknown, or “zero-day,” flaw in Adobe’s Flash software to install a backdoor. RSA said that Adobe had since released a patch to fix that hole.

The RSA Hack: How They Did It - NYTimes.com

Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM -- iPhone Dead In Water [Business Insider]

A mobile platform competition snapshot

Google's Android OS has gained an astonishing 7 points of market share in the US smartphone market in the past three months, Comscore says.

RIM's market share over the same period collapsed, dropping almost 5 points.

[…]

Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought--and lost--in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are "better," but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s, Android now).

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/android-iphone-market-share-2011-4#ixzz1IPOvSEhe

Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM -- iPhone Dead In Water

Lessons from the “Samsung Keylogger” « Steve Wildstrom on Tech

Check the post link below for a timely journalism 2.0 reality check

On March 30, NetworkWorld.com published a report with the breathless headline: “Samsung installs keylogger on its laptop computers.” The next day, the story evaporated with an Emily Litella-style “never mind..” Along the way, though,  Samsung’s reputation was besmirched and NetworkWorld ended up looking foolish. Therte’s a lot we can learn from this sorry episode.

Lessons from the “Samsung Keylogger” « Steve Wildstrom on Tech

The Onion Uses HTML5 in New iPad App - NYTimes.com

Another productivity-enhancing mobile Web app

For example, when creating the new iPad application, developers chose to build the experience primarily using HTML5, the new Web programming language that allows for full interactivity online. ”We chose to build the iPad app in HTML5 so we could avoid having to learn a new programming language,” said Mr. Greer. “We are a small company and we wanted to keep the development as simple as possible as we’re now managing a number of other apps.”

Mr. Greer said the company is waiting until more Google Android tablets appear in the marketplace before building apps for other platforms. The Onion currently offers a free mobile app for Android mobile phones.

The Onion Uses HTML5 in New iPad App - NYTimes.com

In-Car Cameras Protect Teenage Drivers, Study Finds - NYTimes.com

How long until there’s a reality TV show based on this technology?

“Teens are notorious for rationalizing their behavior,” Mr. McGehee said. “But they can’t argue with what the video is showing.” (Click here to watch video from a mounted camera.)

Mr. McGehee found that the worst teenage drivers have 88 percent fewer safety events when they have a camera in the car. The teenagers are called out when they, say, take a curve too quickly or text through a stop light, and they also get to see the video themselves.

Already at least one major insurance company provides the technology free to its customers, Mr. McGehee said, and several companies sell the cameras.

In-Car Cameras Protect Teenage Drivers, Study Finds - NYTimes.com

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: April 2

A snapshot from 1980

Microsoft Corporation announces the Z80 SoftCard--their first and (for many years) only hardware product--a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II personal computer. It retailed for $349.00. The SoftCard allowed programs running under the CP/M operating system (included with the card, as was Microsoft BASIC) to run on the 6502-based Apple II with only minor modifications. In particular, the word processor WordStar was so popular that people bought the SoftCard and a companion "80-column card" just to run it. At one time, SoftCard brought in about half of Microsoft's total revenue. It was discontinued in 1986.

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: April 2

MTV Woos Facebook Generation With TV Episode and Social Media Outreach | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

I’m old enough to remember when MTV actually used to show music videos…

Twenty years after “the MTV Generation,” the TV network is now wooing the Facebook generation.

MTV this week aired a behind-the-scenes episode of its show “Diary” about employees at Facebook that was basically a half-hour recruiting video in the style of reality television. If you want to check it out, the full show is now online:

MTV Woos Facebook Generation With TV Episode and Social Media Outreach | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

Some websites can make it fun, even a social event, to reach financial goals - The Boston Globe

Check the full article for some example sites/services

Collectively, people spend 927 million hours a month playing casual games on Facebook. Is it possible for a website to make setting and achieving financial goals as fun, easy, and even as social as playing Farmville or Words with Friends?

Let’s take a common goal: saving. Most people know that it’s important to have six months’ worth of expenses on hand, ideally earning interest, such as a savings account, checking, or money market account. But how much do you need to put away each month to get to that finish line? Some popular websites can help.

Some websites can make it fun, even a social event, to reach financial goals - The Boston Globe

The iPad 2 Has Been a Boon to eBay - NYTimes.com

A snapshot of the iPad secondary market

The Apple iPad 2, which is still very difficult to acquire at Apple retail stores, is creating a robust and healthy resale market online.

EBay, the online marketplace, released numbers and an infographic on Thursday showing just how popular the iPad 2 had become on its Web site.

[…]

The most sought-after models of the iPad 2 are on the low and high end. The basic 16-gigabyte Wi-fi-only version and the 64-gigabyte with 3G data connection account for a majority of iPad 2 sales on eBay. They also net a healthy profit for sellers. EBay said the the low-end iPad 2 was selling for $198 over the $500 retail price and the $830 high-end model was selling for an astounding $406 more.

The least desired iPad 2 is the 16-gigabyte 3G model, making up only 7 percent of iPad 2 sales.

The eBay summary graphic:

The iPad 2 Has Been a Boon to eBay - NYTimes.com

Sunlight Foundation - Stop Transparency Cutbacks

For background info, see Data.gov and Wired’s Open Up Government Data wiki

Some of the most important technology programs that keep Washington accountable are in danger of being eliminated. Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Dashboard and other federal data transparency and government accountability programs are facing a massive budget cut, despite only being a tiny fraction of the national budget. Help save the data and make sure that Congress doesn’t leave the American people in the dark.

Sunlight Foundation - Stop Transparency Cutbacks

Will Amazon's Cloud Music Service Fly? - BusinessWeek

A skeptical perspective, apparently from someone who has never used iTunes on a PC (and thus evidently doesn’t realize that loading previously-purchased music into iTunes isn’t exactly fun, and that the iTunes app can overheat even high-end PCs, etc.)

Welcome to the awkward stage of the digital music revolution. Online song sales have stagnated, depriving the endangered music industry of one of its last remaining lifelines. Yet digital music continues to be a vital battleground for Google (GOOG), Apple, and Amazon to try to lure users to their other devices and online offerings. Now, Jeff Bezos & Co. have boldly tried to leapfrog Google and Apple in the quest to liberate consumers from the decade-old practice of buying and downloading digital songs to a computer and then manually transferring them between devices.

The idea behind "cloud music" is to let people stream their music collections from the Web to any computer or device. Analysts believe such services are inevitable—even if Amazon stumbles. "Having access to your music on all your devices has to be the starting point of any next-generation music service and product," says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Will Amazon's Cloud Music Service Fly? - BusinessWeek

George Lucas Says Converting 'Star Wars' to 3-D Has Cost More Than Original Movie - Speakeasy - WSJ

Interesting times in Hollywood

Directors James Cameron and George Lucas, and DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg told a packed CinemaCon ballroom Wednesday that digital filmmaking is only in its infancy. “Where we are in digital is like 1900,” said Lucas. “We’re just scratching the surface.”

Lucas also said that it’s cost more money so far to convert “Star Wars” to 3-D than it took to make the original film.

George Lucas Says Converting 'Star Wars' to 3-D Has Cost More Than Original Movie - Speakeasy - WSJ

Gmail Motion BETA

I suppose this year’s Google April Fool’s prank would be funnier, if Swype weren’t actually building a similar capability

A new way to communicate

The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body.

Also coming soon to Google docs…

Gmail Motion BETA

Swype receives new funding | Ina Fried | Mobilized | AllThingsD

A Swype snapshot; check this page for more details, including a beta of Swype for the Wii

From McSherry’s way of thinking, the keyboard can be a starting point rather than just the last step in navigating a cell phone or other device. Why not, he suggests, start typing and then make a gesture to send the entered text as an email or to search the Web. McSherry said he can imagine even being on televisions and having a direct connection to a cloud service.

McSherry said that the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft could open things up on the Windows Phone front, given that Nokia is a big backer of Swype, with CEO Stephen Elop tweeting in December about Swype as the best means to enter text.

Swype receives new funding | Ina Fried | Mobilized | AllThingsD

Facebook Unites Mobile Web Development Efforts | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

Facebook focuses on mobile and HTML5

The company has said that in order to be maximally accessible it will favor mobile Web development over native app development. “We are internalizing our own strategies around HTML5 to prove out that this emphasis on the mobile Web can actually work,” [Erick Tseng, Facebook’s head of mobile] said.

“Yes, there is going to be a day when the majority of folks have something that looks more like an Android,” Tseng said, “but I don’t believe that’s going to happen in the next year, probably not the next two years.”

Tseng was previously lead product manager for Android before he joined Facebook last May.

Facebook Unites Mobile Web Development Efforts | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

Future of social networks: Will Facebook remain the one network to rule them all? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Excerpt from a timely Facebook reality check

But Facebook seems to have hit a critical mass. Not only does it have a huge number of users (more than any previous social network), but its audience is spread across every demographic (which wasn't true of MySpace), and they're ferociously committed to the site (nearly half log in every day). It also shows no signs of slowing its growth—and the bigger Facebook gets, the harder it becomes to switch to a new platform. If a storm of criticism surrounding its privacy practices and its frequent, confusing redesigns haven't done anything to stem its growth (and those controversies haven't), I'm not sure what could push Facebook off the main stage in the near term.

The big question for the future of social networking isn't whether Facebook will be the largest and most influential site five years from now. It's whether it will be the only one. Will Facebook be the exclusive catalog of our interests and relationships, or will it coexist with several others?

Future of social networks: Will Facebook remain the one network to rule them all? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Amazon may offer mobile wallet, too - The Boston Globe

More potential Amazon mobile aspirations

Amazon.com Inc. is considering the introduction of a service that would let consumers pay for goods in brick-and-mortar stores using their mobile phones, according to two people with knowledge of the project.

The company’s Amazon Payments unit is exploring whether to start a service based on so-called near-field-communication technology, said the people, who asked not to be named because the project isn’t public. NFC lets devices transmit data such as payment information, loyalty points, and coupons by tapping them against specially equipped cash registers.

Amazon may offer mobile wallet, too - The Boston Globe