This is going to be a very significant offering from Microsoft. See the article for two additional screen shots.
Microsoft last month announced plans for Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing Microsoft Office documents. On Wednesday, Microsoft shared a few screenshots of what the service will look like when it goes into beta later this year.
Interesting "co-opetition" case study, since SharePoint includes wiki features as well as pervasive XML syndication (although in neither case with features as extensive as Atlassian or Newsgator)
Atlassian Software Systems Pty. Ltd., one of the top wiki providers, and NewsGator Technologies Inc., a leader in RSS technologies, have joined forces with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, creating additional Web 2.0-based community-building capacity and expanding social computing opportunities in the workplace.
“Social computing and its inclusion in SharePoint Server 2007 are changing the way businesses work and enabling organizations to harness the power of their social networks,” said Derek Burney, general manager of SharePoint at Microsoft Corp. “This has exponentially increased the communication and collaboration among employees, partners, clients and other key stakeholders. Microsoft’s relationships with Atlassian and NewsGator represent dynamic new opportunities for integrating social computing technology into a company’s business productivity infrastructure.”
Personally, I don't remember email ever being "sexy", but I agree there is potential at the intersection of email and "social" features
The Internet portals have failed to achieve breakout success with their homegrown social networks -- which let individuals create profile pages, communicate with friends and share photos and other digital content -- at a time when consumers' social-networking use is booming. Yahoo, for one, released a social-networking and blogging service in early 2005 dubbed Yahoo 360 that fell short of expectations. Now the email providers are betting that they'll have more success by adding social-networking features to their email services, which millions of people are already using.
In August, there were 542.9 million users of email that is accessed primarily via Web browsers. That compared with 483.7 million social-networking users world-wide, according to comScore Inc.
iPhone competition is expanding -- perhaps in part explaining Apple's turn-around on an iPhone SDK.
It's official: touch screens are the big new thing in cell phones this holiday season.
Sprint Nextel Corp. announced Wednesday it is jumping on the bandwagon with the Touch by HTC. Like Apple Inc.'s iPhone, this smart phone has only a few buttons and is designed to be controlled by touching the screen.
The Touch will go on sale Nov. 4 for $250 with a two-year contract.
The announcement makes Sprint the third of the three largest U.S. wireless carriers to introduce a cell phone with a large touch screen designed to be controlled with fingers rather than a stylus. The iPhone, which launched this summer, is exclusive to AT&T Inc. Verizon Wireless said two weeks ago that it would introduce the LG Voyager in time for Thanksgiving.
Technology Review: Sprint to introduce own iPhone-like touch-screen cell phone for holidays
Extensive Technology Review article about Evan Williams and Twitter
But Twitter seems to be it. The idea behind the service is simple: people compose 140-character updates about themselves, ostensibly answering the question "What are you doing?" Users can post their updates by text-messaging from cell phones, by logging on to the Twitter website, or by using desktop software such as instant-messaging tools. Messages (also known as twitters, twits, and tweets) can be private, sent only to friends or groups of friends, or they can appear on Twitter's home page for all to see. Twitter has been so successful that last April, Williams spun it out into its own company.
A major item off the iPhone if-only list
In an apparent about-face, Apple Inc. will allow third-party applications to work directly on the iPhone, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a posting on the company's Web site Wednesday.
Apple infuriated developers and some iPhone users when it issued a software update Sept. 27 that disabled unofficial programs installed on the handsets.
Until Wednesday, Apple had tried to control which applications consumers had on their iPhones.
Somehow I suspect this isn't going to help Sony leapfrog Xbox or Wii
Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.
Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.
Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s
Depressing reality check
Government repression in some countries has shifted from journalists to bloggers, with the vitality of the Internet triggering a more focused crackdown as blogs increasingly take the place of mainstream news media, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington director of the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
"Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case in Egypt and Jordan," she said yesterday as the group released its sixth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Egypt ranked 146th and Jordan 122nd in press freedom among the 169 countries for which data were available.
Crackdowns On Bloggers Increasing, Survey Finds - washingtonpost.com
Hmm
The BBC must deliver an online TV catch-up service that lets users of all computers download programmes, the corporation's regulators have said.
It comes after the BBC said a download service for Mac and Linux users was not 100% definite and would depend on cost.
[...]
All downloaded video content from the BBC contains digital rights management (DRM) technology to prevent the programmes being copied and to ensure the content is only available for 30 days.
The BBC says the DRM offered by Microsoft - which is not available for Linux and has not been licensed from Microsoft by Apple for Macs - is the only solution at present.
Perhaps the BBC will consider Adobe's DRM solution, since iPlayer is going to be rebuilt in Flash
Strange days indeed
Microsoft was awarded an official Open Source Initiative (OSI) approval for the two Shared Source licenses it submitted for consideration in August — but not without agreeing to some OSI-requested changes first.
On October 16, Microsoft officials announced that the Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) — which is now known as the Microsoft Public License (MSP) — and Microsoft Community License (MS-CL) — now designated as the Microsoft Reciprocal License (MSL) had gotten the OSI Board’s nod. Microsoft did not submit its Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) for OSI consideration.
» Microsoft gets the open-source licensing nod from the OSI | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com
Blast from the past
The ability to use the personal computer as an "intelligent" phone has been viewed largely as a curiosity by the computer and telecommunications industries, not to mention by consumers. Internet telephony has mostly not been high quality, and conversations are frequently plagued with static and delays. It has also been difficult for computer telephone callers to find each other without inconvenient and sometimes costly third-party directory services.
That is likely to change rapidly as Microsoft's new software prepares to exploit the next generation of the Internet, offering computer-based telephony with better-quality voice than before and with more powerful features than the traditional phone.
FWIW this John Markoff article in the NYT was published June 12, 2001 -- on the launch of Windows XP (with Windows Messenger)
Aiming high...
It would be hard to overstate the magnitude of the changes that are coming. Standardized, software-powered communications technologies will be the catalyst for the convergence of voice, video, text, applications, information, and transactions, making it possible to create a seamless communications continuum that extends across people’s work and home lives. This will provide the foundation for new products, services, and capabilities that will change the world in profound and often unexpected ways.
This will happen not only in developed countries where access to digital technology is the norm, but also in emerging economies around the world. Currently, about 1 billion of us have a PC, just a fraction of the world’s 6 billion people. As we make technology more accessible and simpler to use—often in the form of affordable mobile devices—we can extend new social and economic opportunities to hundreds of millions of people who have never been able to participate in the global knowledge economy. And as more and more of the world’s people are empowered to use their ideas, talents, and hard work to the fullest, the results will be new innovations that make everyone’s lives richer, more productive, and more fulfilling.
Noteworthy in part because there are so few MySpace headlines these days...
“We are interconnecting the world’s largest voice network and the world’s largest video and social network,” said Michael van Swaaij, interim chief executive of Skype. “It feels like an obvious fit.”
The companies hope that the combination will accelerate the growth of two already robust online networks. MySpace has 110 million active users around the world, but its members are mostly concentrated in the United States. Skype has 220 million users, most of them outside of this country. There is little overlap, particularly in the United States, where, according to Nielsen NetRatings, only 6.7 percent of Skype users are also users of MySpace’s instant-messenger software.
A timely reality check
“There’s definitely a lot of betting going on, and it’s not rational,” said Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter and book publisher.
Mr. O’Reilly is credited with coining the phrase “Web 2.0,” which refers to a new generation of Web sites that encourage users to contribute material. His Web 2.0 conference, which begins Wednesday in San Francisco, has become a nexus for the optimism around the latest set of society-changing online tools. But that has not stopped Mr. O’Reilly from worrying that the industry is minting too many copycat companies, half-baked business plans and overpriced buyouts.
When the bubble inevitably pops, he said, “there are going to be a lot of people out of work again.”
Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again - New York Times
One down...
SAP (NYSE: SAP) said it will not make a counterbid to acquire BEA Systems.
The United Kingdom's Financial Times reported Monday that SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said in an interview SAP would not make a counteroffer for BEA following Oracle's bid last week to buy the company for $6.7 billion. An SAP spokesman told InformationWeek later Monday: "Yes, this statement is true and confirmed. SAP is not planning a counterbid for BEA."
SAP Says It Won't Make A Counterbid For BEA Systems -- SAP -- InformationWeek
With this sort of Adobe win, it's unclear to me where specialists such as Brightcove and Maven fit into the broader landscape.
Adobe Systems Inc <ADBE.O> said on Monday the BBC will use its Flash software to broadcast video and audio from its Web site, giving the Web content software company another high-profile customer.
The BBC will use Flash as the technological underpinning for its free iPlayer streaming media service by the end of 2008, complementing its existing download service that offers about 400 hours of shows at a time, Adobe said in a statement.
Pretty harsh; skim the full post. This type of writing explains why I was convinced Kara Swisher was Fake Steve Jobs...
Sure, we’ve asked for the obligatory on-the-record interview with CEO Randy Falco (pictured here), who made the announcement of the layoffs. But while we’re waiting by the phone, we need to get busy.
Thus, to continue in our ongoing quest to clarify the muddy-waters situation at the long-struggling Internet portal, we are going to decode the memo Falco sent out to AOL’s troops.
Having written the book on AOL during Bubble v1, Kara Swisher is perhaps astounded at its plight during Bubble v2.
Timely snapshot of the XML file format debate
Why is there so much passion in a debate about something as esoteric as XML-based file formats? In a word: Microsoft. The software giant in September failed to get its OOXML format ratified as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The run up to that vote -- and to a second vote slated for February 2008 -- has ignited a passionate debate about file formats and suspicions about Microsoft's intentions as it pushes OOXML.
High Stakes
At issue is the way organizations will store, access and manipulate files created by productivity applications like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Today's binary files are often opaque to third-party applications, meaning companies can't process these files anywhere but on the client. Moving to open, XML-based file formats radically changes that, says Alexander Falk, CEO of XML tools vendor Altova Inc.
Read the full cover story article for more context-setting and projections
Unhappy times for AOL...
AOL said yesterday that it would eliminate 2,000 of its 10,000 jobs as it continues its move away from the Internet access business.
[...]
AOL has stumbled badly since it dominated the early days of the consumer Internet, growing so valuable that it was able to buy Time Warner. (The Internet operations are now a unit of Time Warner.) After the latest round of cuts, AOL will have fewer than half of the 18,000 employees it had at the time of that merger.
AOL to Trim 2,000 Jobs in a Continuing Overhaul - New York Times
Read the full article for more details. Also see this News.com page for a photo collection.
Twelve private “suites” created by the French yacht designer, Jean-Jacques Coste, occupy the front half of the plane’s lower deck. Designed to maximize privacy, these partitioned nooks are each fitted with fully adjustable leather seats and a separate bed that folds out with a full-sized mattress, draped in crisp cream-colored linens designed by Givenchy.
A 23-inch L.C.D. video screen hangs on one wall, where passengers can view a selection of up to 100 different movies and more than 180 television channels. The same entertainment system includes a word processor and spreadsheet programs as well as multiplayer 3-D video games.
