Gregarius &#187; BetaNews.Com &#187; février 2010

There may not be a real investigation of Google's business practices from the European Commission, at least not yet. But judging from the waves of hyperbole emanating from the usual suspects, along with a few new entrants, in the wake of the EC's admission that it forwarded Google some negative mail earlier this month, there may as well have been one. It appears that if enough people on the Internet share a topic with one another, it must be true.

The complaint among three of Google's competitors is that it leverages its hugely popular, all-purpose search engine as a platform for promoting its own exclusive shopping services. In a way, there's almost no contesting the complaint -- that's exactly what Google does. The question is whether that's wrong. As Betanews noted yesterday, the answers may differ depending on the continent they apply to. Depending on the country, the legal standards (and the suppositions behind them) vary.

But late Friday, the other major company whose name was invoked in the course of the complaint -- Microsoft -- issued a response. Instantly, the hyperbolic headlines roared, the empire strikes back. Microsoft fires back a salvo, a shot across the bow, an interceptor missile.

Then it came time to actually read the response. If you think this article buried the lede way down in paragraph 3, you'll be astonished in your search for the main point of the blog post late Friday afternoon from Dave Heiner, the usually well-spoken deputy general counsel for Microsoft.

After stating that the EC has begun an investigation of Google -- a fact which the EC itself flatly contradicted on Wednesday -- Heiner appears to make the case that since so many service providers and advocacy firms have invoked the word "Google" in juxtaposition with "antitrust" in recent weeks, there must be cause for suspicion.

"In this instance, there has been no shortage of affected voices," writes Heiner. Referring first to the three subjects of the EC inquiry, he continued, "A quick Internet search will surface the growing concerns that have been raised by upstart innovators such as Ciao (owned by Microsoft), Foundem and, ejustice.fr, as well as from industry groups such as the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers and The Association of German Magazine Publishers. Publishers, advertisers, advertising agencies and others want to see real competition in search and online advertising. As Google's power has grown in recent years, we've increasingly heard complaints from a range of firms -- large and small -- about a wide variety of Google business practices. Some of the complaints just reflect aggressive business stances taken by Google. Some reflect the secrecy with which Google operates in many areas. Some appear to raise serious antitrust issues. As you might expect, many concerned companies have come to us and asked us for our reaction and even for advice. When their antitrust concerns appear to be substantial, we suggest that firms talk to the competition law agencies."

In summary, complaints...exist. And those complaints suggest, says Heiner, that "Google practices...may be harming publishers, advertisers, and competition in search and online advertising."

Unable to escape the unavoidable comparison between bundling of search and network services and the other major example of service bundling in the history of computing, Heiner acknowledged that bundling can have negative effects on competitive players. That may force competitors to partner, and here, Heiner explicitly referenced Microsoft's forthcoming search partnership with Yahoo. But finally, Heiner closed by saying, as far as the question of true harm to consumers is concerned...who knows?

"Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success. Nor should firms be punished just because a particular business practice may harm a rival -- competition on the merits can do that, too. That is a position that Microsoft has long espoused, and we're sticking to it. Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly," the company's deputy general counsel wrote. "Ultimately the competition law agencies will have to decide whether or not Google's practices should be seen as illegal."

In a way, Heiner's retort is brilliant. He and Microsoft are being given credit this evening for standing up to Google, and even scoring some points in favor of fairness -- this message from Microsoft, rarely perceived by enthusiasts as the voice of fairness -- all without having really said all that much of substance.

Background ribbon (small)

Yesterday, in response to our story whose headline began "Define 'monopoly,'" some of our regular readers asked for more information and references for some of the main premises of our story: specifically, the thresholds for a "monopoly" in the United States and a "dominant player" in the European Union. It's a wonderful request, and I only apologize for being tied up with other matters, though here is our readers' much deserved response:

It is not really the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 that designates the threshold of dominant market share in the US, even though case law that references Sherman tends to also refer to the 75% threshold. Recent precedent was established by the 2002 ruling in one of the long-standing antitrust battles in American history, R.J. Reynolds v. Philip Morris -- the battle of the tobacco titans. US District Court in North Carolina essentially determined that previous interpretations of Sherman up to that point effectively evened out to a threshold of 75%, or thereabouts.

Specifically, Reynolds accused Morris of an unfair business practice: paying retailers for shelf space for their products. Those payments effectively came in the way of discounts on purchases, though they may be accounted for more like rebates. Morris' plan was such that it allowed competitors to set any price they wanted to for competitors' cartons, such as Reynolds' -- sell the other guy's product however you want, said Philip Morris, as long as you give us a set amount of shelf space. Part of Reynolds' complaint was that it was not in a position to offer retailers a plan that made a similar grant -- it literally could not offer a plan where retailers could sell Morris' brands for whatever prices they wanted.

The exact threshold for the European market share threshold is open to some dispute. Sometimes the nature or degree of that dispute depends on convenience. For example, in situations where the European Commission defers to member states for establishing precedent, some of those states then lean right back on EC competition law -- and cite 50% as that threshold.

In cases where the EC reviews a potential merger, under the Merger Regulation of 2004, it uses a different metric -- one which determines whether a market share number even below 50% would be considered dominant given the number of other competitors in the remaining market.

And in a very famous statement to Reuters in September 2007, then-Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes celebrated Microsoft's loss in its appeal of the EC's antitrust ruling against it, saying she hoped this would start knocking Microsoft down a few pegs. How much would that be, asked Reuters? "A market level of much less than 95% would be a way of measuring success...You can't draw a line and say exactly fifty [percent] is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see."

BETACHECK

For more:

"United States Antitrust Law Related to Bundling, Loyalty Discounts and Slotting Allowances" by Barbara T. Sicalides. From the blog of Sicalides' law firm, Pepper Hamilton LLP, October 5, 2007.
"The Development of Antitrust Enforcement" (PDF available here). From the producers of the documentary film Fair Fight in the Marketplace, narrated by NPR legal correspondent Mara Liasson.
Antitrust Law and Economics of Product Distribution. American Bar Association, 2006. See the Google Books citation, page 312.

Market Power Handbook: Competition Law and Economic Foundations. American Bar Association, 2005. See the Google Books citation, "Market Share as a Predictor of Market Power," page 82.

2002 Annual Review of Antitrust Law Developments. Section of Antitrust Law, American Bar Association, 2002. See the Google Books citation, "Market Share as Indicator of Market Power," page 53.

"A Simple Guide to the EC Merger Regulation of 2004" (PDF available here). Published by The Antitrust Source, January 2005.
"DG Competition Discussion Paper on the Application of Article 82 of the Treaty to Exclusionary Abuses: Public Consultation" (PDF available here). Published by The Antitrust Alliance, an independent forum on antitrust practices.
"EU Competition Policy and the Consumer" (PDF available here). A brochure published in 2004 by the European Commission for Competition. This brochure is not exactly the record of European law, but it's notable for the initially broad definition it set for the phrase Dominant Player: "A company is a dominant player in a market if it can change, for example, the price or quality of its product in that market independently of its competitors, customers and suppliers without significantly affecting its sales."
"Regulatory Reform in Finland: The Role of Competition Policy in Regulatory Reform" (PDF available here). Published by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2003. Note in particular page 13, which explains the concept of "Abuse of Dominance," and clearly defines dominance as "presumed" to imply 50% market share or greater.

Is Opera 10.5 ready for the March 1 'choice screen?'

Publié: février 26, 2010, 9:57pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Download Opera 10.5 Beta 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

One of the more brilliant coups in the history of Web browsers, were it feasible, would be for Opera Software to seize Google's key argument -- that the best Web browser that European Windows users should switch to next month, is the fastest one -- and make it its own. Those users will get that opportunity starting March 1, when Microsoft's rollout of its browser "choice screen" through Windows Update, begins in earnest.

That's next Monday, however, and the acceleration of Opera's next-generation Web browser project from 10.2 Alpha 1 status in mid-December, to 10.5 "pre-alpha" status just 10 weeks ago to 10.5 Beta 2 status on Wednesday, is not making time go by any more slowly. As Betanews tests since December until now have revealed, test builds of Opera 10.5 provide an unbelievable 452% the performance of Opera's final 10.2 alpha daily build. With the ongoing replacement of Opera's JavaScript engine, Opera's engineers have made astonishing progress in a very short period of time.

Actual Beta News feature banner But unless Opera truly plans to pawn off its rapidly advancing browser as a finished application in just a few days' time, like the crew of the Enterprise at the start of the first Star Trek movie, users switching from Internet Explorer 6 could find themselves in a wormhole. Betanews tests of the public build of 10.5 Beta 2 in Windows 7 show evidence of the kind of problems a tester encounters in an alpha or, at best, an early beta. Usually a build dubbed "Beta 2" looks and feels closer to a release candidate.

A heavily customized Opera 10.5 Beta 2 reveals little aesthetic 'splinters' that could be sanded down.

A heavily customized Opera 10.5 Beta 2 reveals little aesthetic 'splinters' that could be sanded down.

In fairness, I'll start by saying that Beta 2 was much more cooperative with us with regard to folding, stretching, and mutilating the browser frame, than Beta 1. I've always liked Opera's optional panels along the left side, for instance. The screenshot above shows what 10.5 looks like with the "Sand" skin applied (an attractive and unobtrusive tan shade), with "wrapping" turned on for the Tab bar (enabling multiple lines of tabs), with the left side panel selector engaged, and with the Personal bar (Opera's counterpart to Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar) moved to the bottom of the window.

One of the space-saving features in the 10.5 build is the elimination of the window's title bar. Since the title of the active window appears in the active tab anyway, there's a good argument that the title bar is redundant. However, for some peculiar reason, whenever the Personal bar is attached to the top frame of the window, the title bar returns, thereby extending the width consumed by the top of the frame. Move the Personal bar to the bottom, like in the screenshot above, and the title bar disappears again.

Though the 10.5 skin is quite innovative, there's a number of unfinished features about it that I call "splinters" -- little problematic visual elements that detract from the aesthetic flow of the program:

When the Tab bar is set for "wrapping," thus enabling multiple rows of tabs, the width of each tab becomes fixed. As a result, you can end up with a lot of wasted space on the right side of the Tab bar.
Also with wrapping turned on in the Tab bar, the Opera button (where the menu bar contents are absorbed) mysteriously floats to the bottom of the bar. It doesn't do this when thumbnails are turned on -- a feature that can consume as much, if not more, width.
When the arrangement of the window is heavily customized, tabs tend to dovetail into open space. The currently active tab in a multi-line tab bar is one example, as is the floating Opera button. Also, the Panels selector on the lower status bar can dovetail to nothing if the Personal bar is scooted to the bottom.

Some users, especially longtime Opera fans, will say this is nitpicking. They're right. But that's what beta testing is. While experienced users have built up a tolerance for features that look wrong but aren't, novice users who see dovetails and unfinished borders will wonder if something's wrong -- more accurately, if they have done something wrong.

To drag or not to drag

In Betanews tests since Wednesday's release, we encountered a series of related, and perhaps obvious, functional anomalies. Opera has its own mouse movement interpreter, created so that users can make "mouse gestures" without the use of on-screen buttons or gadgets. The browser can interpret a special gesture as a command. But when trying to do ordinary things, like move imported bookmarks to a toolbar, we noticed several inconsistencies.

Historically, we've noted that applications that manage their own mouse movements may have problems with specific mouse drivers, so it may be notable here that our test system uses a standard Logitech mouse. It's important to note here: These behavioral problems persisted up until the point where Opera recognized a mouse movement we attempted with the right button held down as a gesture, and put up a dialog box asking us if we wanted to accept mouse gestures as commands. This happened a half-hour or so into our tests; we responded "Yes." At that point, the behaviors listed below vanished. When we disabled mouse gestures from the Settings > Preferences menu, the behavior returned. Thereafter, we notice the symptoms listed below from time to time when mouse gestures are turned off. However, none of these behaviors caused Opera to crash.

Opera 10.5 Beta 2 puts its bookmarks in a separate tab, like Chrome, rather than a separate window like Firefox.

Opera 10.5 Beta 2 puts its bookmarks in a separate tab, like Chrome, rather than a separate window like Firefox.

In any event, we ran into several instances of awkward or unexpected behavior, including the following:

Dragging an imported bookmark from Opera's Bookmarks tab onto the Personal bar either did not result in the bookmark ending up there, or triggered a rearrangement of the entire contents of the Personal bar, shuffling all the bookmarks that had appeared there before, and adding one other that was not the one being dragged.
The toolbar being customized sometimes does not accept the dragged object, even though the separator that pops up during the operation clearly shows the toolbar should be receptive.
Clicking on an item the first time in the Bookmarks tab, just after it's opened, accomplishes nothing, but clicking on it a second time selects it. Clicking on any other single item afterwards will select it.
"Lasso" drags around a group of items doesn't work in the Bookmarks tab, and perhaps that's by design but it's a bit unexpected.
Dragging multiple items to a folder (a bookmarks category) does not work the first time, though it will work on successive tries.
If you click on an item in the Bookmarks tab and then click and hold on some other item, thinking you're dragging it, you might find yourself having dragged the item you clicked on first instead.
A warning dialog will sometimes appear saying that to add an item to a toolbar, we need to hold the Shift key down. We might see that warning even if we don't have to hold down Shift to successfully alter the arrangement of a toolbar. For the panel selector, you do have to hold down Shift when adding an object to that particular device, and we noted this behavior was consistent throughout.

These are behavioral anomalies consistent with a program that tries to take care of Windows housekeeping for itself; we saw the same level of anomalies with the earlier builds of Google Chrome at the very beginning of its development cycle. But those early builds were classified as such. The problem with Opera 10.5 Beta 2 so far may not be slipshod development (in fact, judged on a timeline, it's actually coming along quite nicely). It's that its readiness for public release and consumption may be somewhat overestimated. These aren't problems that are going to fix themselves over the weekend.

Next: The potential hazards of subdividing the ecosystem...

Download Opera 10.5 Beta 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

The potential hazards of subdividing the ecosystem

Up until now, one of the strengths that have sustained Opera through the rough periods has been its customizability and extensibility. For the most part, Opera can be made to function the way that users want it to function, and that customizability comes as part of the package. By comparison, Firefox's strength to this point has been that a very strong community of developers, fostered and nurtured by Mozilla, have been able to craft extensions and add-ins to Firefox that enable professional users such as myself to practically reconstruct the browser into the tool they need it to be.

Opera has also nurtured a development community, but the model Opera has promoted revolves around widgets -- mini applications that are executed by Opera's JavaScript interpreter. Since Firefox is a JavaScript app in itself, extensions can run in the context of the browser and modify it. Now, Opera is becoming more strict about its development model. With version 10.5, widgets will be restricted to applets that run outside the browser context, such as weather applets, e-mail checkers, and sidebar-like games.

In Opera 10.5 Beta 2, widgets are supposed to be stand-alone applets. Tell that to the developers who display their wares in Opera's gallery.

The new model for Opera 10.5 widgets is supposed to be based on stand-alone applets. But some of Opera's select widgets in its own gallery, are not.

Fair enough, especially since Opera doesn't need a lot of add-ons (like Firefox does) to be customizable. But when European Web browser users see the Opera brand for the first time, by virtue of its prominent placement on Microsoft's new browser "choice screen," whether 10.5 is ready for public consumption or not, Opera will likely lead new users to the place where they can download the fastest browser the company produces. After they do, users will want to experiment with how far they can stretch it...or, they may happen upon the Widgets panel while simply playing around with new and shiny buttons. Once they're taken to Opera's widgets gallery, they'll see add-ons like the homemade version of Google Toolbar (whose listing is shown in the screenshot above).

These users may not know old-style extension widgets won't work in the 10.5 context until installing them and seeing that nothing happens. Users may take that to be a bug in the program, when really it's a change in the architecture that hasn't been passed on to the proprietors of Opera's Widgets gallery. And that may become a problem.

Working with Opera in the performance department

In our report last Tuesday on Opera 10.5 Beta 1's relative performance, we noted that there appeared to be a continuing bug in the way the browser was executing one of our tests. Opera's engineers wondered whether the bug was in the test we were using -- which is actually fairly old, as benchmarks go: the Testnet.World JS JavaScript instruction test.

We've encountered situations before where Opera's and Safari's counters were synched with their respective JavaScript interpreters in such a way that they tended to report that no time was expended whatsoever ("0 ms"). Whether that's actually a defect or an architectural symptom may depend on where one stands (and who signs his paycheck while he's standing there). Nevertheless, two of Opera's architects suggested improvements to the Testnet.World battery that they said would avoid this perception problem.

Giving Opera the benefit of the doubt, we implemented their suggestions. What we discovered made us satisfied that we were given good advice. Essentially, the old benchmark tested the time expended, but when it came up 0, it assumed the test never started running, so it maintained the loop. Our new test battery no longer trusts the expended time indicator, but rather, triggers a binary "done" flag for each test. In order to better measure events that used to take tenths of seconds but now take fractions of milliseconds, we increased the workload for each test by a factor of 10, for a million iterations rather than 100,000.

It was in ten-tupling the workload that we made several interesting discoveries:

Internet Explorer 7 wasn't such a slouch.. At 100,000 iterations, yes, IE7 on Vista SP2 (our slow index browser, for purposes of comparison) is pretty darned slow. Frankly, I was afraid that increasing the workload would make IE7 slow down exponentially. It did not; in fact, it scaled up the workload rather well, in some cases handling each iteration of the larger workload faster than for the smaller one. As a result, as the workload scales up, the comparative scores for other browsers measured against IE7 go down. That helped reset our overall scores by about 12% across the board.
For some very repetitious workloads, Firefox is twice as fast as Chrome. No, that's not a typo. It could be argued that real-world Web pages are not going to repeat a million conditional statements. However, if we treat this test battery not in terms of how well browsers repeat statements but of how well they scale large (if artificial) workloads, Firefox is actually the champion here. The stable Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7 scored a 4.45 (445% the speed of IE7 in Vista SP2) on the corrected Testnet.World battery. By comparison, the latest daily build of WebKit/Safari 4 scored a 3.91, while Google Chrome 5 Dev build 335.0 scored a 2.26. The latest stable Chrome 4 scored 2.09. What difference does that make? On our old (uncorrected) Testnet.World battery, using one-tenth the workload, Firefox 3.6 scored a 31.88, while Chrome 5 scored 43.18.
Opera's developers are pretty decent folk. Their suggested changes eradicated the appearance of the "0 ms" anomaly, but it did not result in Opera 10.5 Beta 2 receiving favorable treatment. It only scored a 3.32 on our corrected battery.

Compensating for the anomaly did, as we predicted, improve Opera 10.5 Beta 2's scores relative to Chrome. Though the revised Testnet.World numbers scaled everyone back (IE8 and Firefox least among them), there's now a three-point performance gap between Opera's and Google's most recent development builds. Chrome 5's scores on the other batteries in our Windows 7 test suite were generally lower once again. The latest dev build, among other adjustments, changed the way that browser interprets the source of locally stored HTML files -- each one is now considered within its own individual domain, rather than in the shared domain of the computer. That's a very important safety adjustment that security-minded users should welcome.

Relative performance of Windows-based Web browsers in Windows 7, February 26, 2010.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

After resetting our numbers, Opera 10.5 is now the only browser that scores above a 20 in our Windows 7 index, with a 21.50 versus 18.51 for Chrome 5. In the latest builds, Chrome 5 opened up a bit more of a lead against Opera 10.5 in the all-important SunSpider battery. But Opera gained back quite a bit of performance in the table element rendering category, which has historically been a strong point for Opera anyway.

Does Opera feel ready?

As Microsoft would probably tell us at this point, performance gains only matter if users can feel them. "Splinters" such as skin elements that don't line up can lend to perception problems that the browser feels unfinished, and that perception can become a lens that magnifies any other problems the browser has.

One such problem we encountered with Opera 10.5 Beta 2 concerns hesitancy. From time to time, after clicking on a bookmark or a hyperlink, or even during our performance tests, we noticed that the browser can go into a state of limbo for as long as a second, before our network meter validated that it has started loading the page. And when a page contains a long <TABLE> element -- for instance, of items pulled up from an SQL database -- reloading or refreshing the page, or loading a page with a different <TABLE> element, causes the entire plotting area of the window to go white for a noticeable period of time.

There appear to be lots of little issues like this in the latest public beta of Opera 10.5 -- enough for us to suggest there should be at least a Beta 3 cycle before a final public release. If the aim is to move users off of Internet Explorer, it should be noted that IE8 does not have lots of little issues like this. It's slow as a jar of molasses buried under a glacier, but many users don't care because, to them, it feels finished, usable, drivable, like a '76 Cadillac Eldorado.

Opera has come a very long way in a very short period of time. But as Vista proved, perception in this business is everything. If its engineers take the time they need to sand off all the splinters, this browser has all the ingredients it needs to dethrone Firefox, Chrome, and even IE in their respective categories of strength. This is the one that could actually do it. But if it's rushed, and it premieres to the general public looking unfinished and cobbled together, those ingredients may go unnoticed.

Developers, save us from the Microsoft undead

Publié: février 26, 2010, 9:17pm CET par Joe Wilcox

More software developers should follow the lead of Adobe and Skype, which have abandoned Windows Mobile -- what Microsoft now calls Windows Phone Classic. The mobile operating system already was brain dead, even with, according to Gartner, 15 million unit sales in 2009. The heart pumped out licenses, but there was no brain activity to keep the platform going. Windows Mobile flatlined, and it's about time that some Microsoft developers admit it. Others should get over the denial and do the same. Microsoft doesn't have the courage to pull the plug. But smart developers can.

Skype's move was quite audacious -- pulling the Windows Mobile version of the telephony software from download. Those WinMo users with Skype can continue using it. Adobe is doing something different. It's shifting Flash 10.1 development to Windows Phone 7 Series, sidelining any Windows Phone Classic version. Both developers acted wisely. Microsoft may have kept Windows Mobile on life support by the Classic renaming, but the operating system has no real future. There's little reason for hardware manufacturers to release new Windows Phone Classic handsets or for anyone to buy them -- with Windows Phone 7 Series phones coming late in the second half of the year.

Adobe and Skype have set an example not just for other developers but for Microsoft and its customers. Microsoft has for too long made backward compatibility a top development priority, and the approach holds back platform development. Microsoft's willingness to prioritize backward compatibility makes it too easy for large enterprises to run older software versions seemingly forever.

That's why I'm proud of Google and other developers that are saying no to Internet Explorer 6. The browser is ancient by computing years. I calculate computing years as actual years divided 1.5 (Moore's Law) times 7 (dog years), which makes the browser more than 44 years old. By just dog years, IE6 would be a rickety nearly 70 years old. Antiquated software like IE6 has no place on computers anywhere, particularly considering how different the Internet is today than in 2001. Nine years ago, malware making was still more malicious than criminal. Now it's a bloodsport. IE6 isn't young enough or tough enough.

Enabling Bad Customer Behavior

Then there's Windows 2000. In this era of massive layoffs, someone's head should roll in organization running Windows 2000 anywhere. But, of course, Microsoft enabled the bad behavior by backward compatibility and nearly endless life support -- eh, lifecycle support. But Microsoft plans some massive life support plug pulling this year -- although not nearly enough of it, I assert. Windows Vista gold code support ends on April 13. Support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 end on July 13. I wish these operating systems well in the afterlife, if that were possible. They will linger still, as ghosts, and for that Microsoft bears some responsibility.

Microsoft's approach to fighting piracy includes preventing presumed pirated Windows copies from downloading important updates. Legitimate Windows XP or Vista customers can apply a service pack and let their aged operating systems live another day. But those expired, pirated versions will became the Windows undead. Malware writers can use the Windows undead to haunt the Internet with phishing email or, among other nefarious activities, to use Trojans to control living Windows. Call them the possessed.

Perhaps it's telling that the Honeynet Project uses unpatched Windows 2000 and XP systems to bait botnets: "This system is thus very vulnerable to attacks and normally it takes only a couple of minutes before it is successfully compromised." Microsoft's own data (see chart) shows that older Windows versions are more vulnerable to exploit than newer ones or those older ones with newer service packs. How strange, or perhaps revealing, that Microsoft's twice-yearly Security Intelligence Report ignoresthe topic of unpatched pirated Windows versions.

But older, unpatched operating systems are only part of the problem. There is client software, like the aforementioned IE6, or Office. Microsoft anti-piracy tactics can prevent these products from updating, too. Last year, SANS identified to two serious "cyber security risks," one related to client software. Even when updates are available to legitimate customers, they're too slow to apply them. According to SANS: "On average, major organizations take at least twice as long to patch client-side vulnerabilities as they take to patch operating system vulnerabilities. In other words the highest priority risk is getting less attention than the lower priority risk."

But all of this would matter less if more businesses or consumers used newer software -- and if Microsoft enabled good behavior by shortening lifecycle and backward compatibility support.

Developers: The Undead Slayers

Developers have the power to change Microsoft's behavior. They demonstrated this with Windows Vista, which launched without broad application or hardware driver support. By holding back on Vista, developers contributed to early customer bad experiences using the software. Developers should use this power differently -- to get businesses and consumers off older Microsoft software versions. Adobe and Skype (with Windows Phone Classic) and Google (with IE6) show the way for other developers. If Microsoft can't pull the plug. They should.

Microsoft is ready to be helped by developers. The company seems near acceptance that prolonged life support is bad business. The Windows XP-to-Windows 7 upgrade process is example. For once, Microsoft put the experience of the newer thing before compatibility with the older thing, by making XP customers do a clean install to Windows 7. Yes, the approach caused customer migration headaches, but Microsoft's priority was in the right place.

Developers also can help kill off the Windows undead, by removing applications -- particularly Web browsers -- for older operating systems. Sure, there are too many torrents to feed the Windows undead with older software, but developers can make a start by officially yanking their stuff.

Security is one consideration. Usability is another. If there's a Moore's Law for software, it's coming from the Internet. New connected Web services and applications pop up every week. Is the better (and safer) experience going to come from IE6 running on Windows 2000 or IE8 (Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari) running on Windows 7? The answer isn't rocket science. The scourge of older software creates barriers to innovation.

Look at how Apple handles iTunes or iPhone OS. The upgrades are forced during X time period. For iTunes, users are prodded to upgrade until at some future time they can no longer access the music store without a newer software version. For Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard), Apple encouraged Leopard users to upgrade by $29 pricing -- or $100 less than previous versions. Microsoft does some of this forced upgrading with connected apps like Windows Live Messenger. But, overall, the company's approach favors backward compatibility until the software atrophies on life support.

Pull the plug, developers! Because Microsoft won't do it soon enough otherwise.

Possible delay of Casio, Hitachi, and NEC merger in mobile space

Publié: février 26, 2010, 7:08pm CET par Tim Conneally

In September, Japanese joint venture Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications (CHMC) announced it would be merging with NEC's mobile division into an even bigger joint venture that will be called NEC Casio Mobile Communications Ltd.

The merger was to be completed in April 2010, but today the companies announced that getting regulatory approval is taking longer than anticipated (PDF available here). They hope the merger will only be delayed by about one month, but it remains in the hands of international antitrust regulators.

CHMC sells a number of CDMA handsets to KDDI Corporation and SoftBank Mobile in Japan which include the Exilim-branded line of 12-megapixel camera phones; LG Telecom in Korea, and Verizon Wireless in the US, which include the ruggedized G'Zone line of phones.

While the joint venture's strength comes from Casio's compact imaging and water/shockproofing technology, and Hitachi's wireless communications offerings, the partnership with NEC will extend its focus to include UMTS and LTE development and improve its efforts in Linux-based environments.

The Japanese wireless business is going through a generational shift right now and the addition of NEC to CHMC's business will prove advantageous as the country shuffles its wireless spectrum. For example, one of Casio Hitachi's major Japanese partners, Softbank Mobile, will be discontinuing its 2G service entirely at the end of March. Softbank first announced the sunset in July 2008, and now the major carrier is just weeks away from being all 3G and up.

Last week, the world's biggest 2G PHS network operator Willcom filed for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo, reporting liabilities of over $2.2 billion. This amounts to the biggest bankruptcy in Japan's telecommunications history, and the Nikkei business daily reported that Willcom will spin off its next-generation PHS data network (called XGP, similar to WiMAX) to Softbank and Advantage Partners LLP.

Hitachi and NEC Infrontia (NEC and Nitsuko Corporation's POS and digital telephone business) are supporters of the technology, and are both members of the XGP Forum.

Google's big Italian adventure

Publié: février 26, 2010, 12:16am CET par Carmi Levy

That sound you heard coming from the general direction of Italy earlier this week was the sound the Internet makes when it becomes just a little bit less free.

When an Italian court convicted three senior Google executives for breach of privacy, sentencing them yesterday to a six-month suspended sentence, it set a dangerous precedent. Unless the case is turned over on appeal, such a precedent could force every Web services provider on the planet -- including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft -- to be completely accountable for every piece of text, audio, and video that any Average Joe decides to upload to his servers.

Four bullies, many victims

The case revolved around footage uploaded to Google Video in September 2006 that depicted a group of four teenagers beating up a Down Syndrome child. It was the site's most-viewed video before Google received complaints and removed it two months later. Prosecutors said the video violated the victim's privacy and that Google should have moved more quickly to remove it from its servers. They originally charged four executives with violating Italy's privacy laws and with defamation. They convicted three of them -- chief legal officer David Carl Drummond, ex-CFO George De Los Reyes, and privacy director Peter Fleischer -- on the privacy counts and acquitted them of defamation. The fourth defendant, Arvind Desikan, was cleared of all charges. (The four bullies were convicted in youth court.)

The executives are expected to appeal -- not to avoid jail, because the judge imposed suspended sentences on all of them, but to ensure the outcome doesn't force monumentally impossible data and content management rules onto every Web services operator on the planet. Such legislative-imposed oversight, unthinkable at first and every blush, would be akin to asking AT&T to vet every phone call made by every landline and mobile subscriber. "Ridiculous" only begins to describe the prospect.

It's all in the definition

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) In assessing the merits of the case against Google, the court chose to define Google as an Internet content provider and not an Internet service provider. We all know that the average ISP simply doesn't have the cycles to actively monitor and respond to everything its users do online. The Italian justice system gets that, too. And in defining Google as a content provider, instead, it chose to lump the company into the same boat as newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters and other conventional media outfits.

Which would be lovely and workable if, like the average newspaper, Google exclusively published its own material. But it doesn't. It facilitates the publishing of material submitted by millions of subscribers. It's one thing to be the gatekeeper of material submitted by a hundred or so reporters and editors, and quite another to run infrastructure that manages an endless torrent of material submitted by countless, usually anonymous, end users. It's massively shocking and more than a little disappointing that the judge in this case allowed such a definition to stand, and serves as yet another reminder that the court system, in Italy and elsewhere, continues to lag the rapid evolution of technology and its impact on common behaviors in society.

When a ruling can't stand

I believe this case will be turned over on appeal because the standard of care for publishers of their own content is necessarily different -- by virtue of the much lower, controllable level of content -- than the standard of care of providers who host sites that publish user-provided content.

If, however, my worst nightmare comes true and the ruling stands, then the climate within which services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and YouTube (which Google bought soon after the offending Italian video was posted to Google Video) will become very chilly, very quickly. Believers in the Apocalypse could easily conclude that these services would all cease to exist after being shuttered by owners freaked out by the daunting prospect of actively monitoring so much content in real-time.

The rest of us know, of course, that this won't ever happen, but that doesn't mean the Italian judiciary's message hasn't resonated deeply in communities around the world. We've gotten the message, Italy, that services like Google need to do a better job policing what goes on in their own backyard. We've also learned, again thanks to the Italian court, that it's time to get back to reality and figure out workable frameworks within which that can actually happen. Convicting their senior leaders using legislation designed for the dinosaur media age isn't the answer. Instead, nations interested in protecting their Internet-using citizens need to leverage appropriate government or quasi-government bodies to put partner with them to enhance end user privacy and balance individual protections against the risk of heavy-handed censorship.

Ask a Canuck for advice

Canada got the message and, as a result, is now seen as a global leader in the drive to balance individual and collective rights in the Internet Age. Its Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, played hardball with Facebook last year, forcing the social media darling to tighten its privacy policies and procedures. Facebook's penance in Canada has since been deployed globally. More recently, Comm. Stoddart took notice following the Google Buzz launch earlier this month, and is currently looking into the new offering in light of complaints that it plays fast and loose with users' private data.

Notice Canada didn't sue either company's senior leaders. It chose a more direct, and ultimately more successful, route to ensure the services took reasonable care on behalf of their subscribers.

Shocking as it is, the Italian ruling does serve a somewhat beneficial purpose in that it focuses attention on an issue -- online privacy and service provider and end user accountability -- that's long been shunted off to the side in the rush to release the next coolest thing. We've been so focused on the technology of social media that we've forgotten that all these great tools can significantly accelerate the rate at which innocent people can be victimized by those who choose to do harm. In the old days, transgressions like the Italian video wouldn't have gone much beyond the inner circle of victimizers and victims. Today, they can go viral in no time flat. Symbolically punishing the guys who wear suits won't fix anything.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

TSMC deal with Intel on hold, Atom on smartphones may have to wait

Publié: février 25, 2010, 9:37pm CET par Tim Conneally

Last year, Intel agreed to share its Atom microprocessor design with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), so that third parties wishing to create their own systems-on-a-chip under TSMC's Technology Platform could integrate Intel Atom processors into the design without additional steps.

The partnership came on the same day that Intel announced the embedded edition of its Z5xx series of Atom processors for multimedia smartphones, and other such applications.

Apparently, not enough people are interested in creating Atom-based embedded devices, The New York Times recently reported, and the partnership between Intel and TSMC is now on a temporary hiatus.

Intel has been talking about bringing the Atom platform to smartphones for years, and after a few false starts, it has finally showed off the world's first Atom-based smartphone, the GW990 from South Korea's LG.

The device is another of LG's attempts at a "panoramic" profile, with a 4.8" screen in an odd 2.13:1 aspect ratio. Intel actually showed off a prototype of this design in late 2008 when unveiling the Moorestown mobile platform. The GW990 is expected to come to market in mid-2010 with a price tag over $1000.

Intel's prototype mockup of a Moorestown-based MID device

The steep price could be an indication of why manufacturers aren't exactly flocking to the x86-based smartphone idea, when there's already a wealth of ARM-based options out there.

As Insight64 principal analyst Nathan Brookwood told me last month, "OEMs can often get chip suppliers like Samsung to roll a custom ARM design for them, with the CPU cores, DSP cores, and peripherals they want. Intel has a bunch of standard SOCs they've designed, which they hope to sell to OEMs. There's little evidence (other than LG) that this strategy is working. Intel announced a 'have it your way' strategy that involved Atom cores at TSMC about a year ago, but there's little evidence that strategy is working either."

Apple should ban freebees from the iPad App Store

Publié: février 25, 2010, 9:17pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Apple shouldn't treat iPad like iPhone or iPod touch. The iPad App Store should be stocked full of premium content, meaning no freebees. It's the right way to help establish iPad as a premium product, as something special like the Macintosh. Unfortunately, Apple has little incentive to take this right approach benefiting its developers (because they make more money), customers (because they get better quality apps) and the iPad brand (because it comes be to viewed as a more premium product).

Apple's business is about selling hardware, using software and services as differentiators. Sure, Apple sold its 10 billionth song at iTunes yesterday, but the company's business isn't about selling content. The content is a means to selling more high-margin hardware. From that perspective, paid apps only marginally benefit Apple. Free is better, because there can be more applications, which is good for building out the App Store/iPhone OS device platform.

The question: Is the platform already big enough? I say, "Yes!" -- for a few reasons:

1) At the end of first fiscal quarter 2010, Apple had shipped 75 million iPhone OS-capable devices. The iPod touch may already be outselling iPhone, something often not factored into industry smartphone sales data. Apple's mobile platform is much bigger than iPhone.

2) Apple boasts more than 140,000 applications at its App Store, or about 7 times more than the Android Marketplace.

3) The majority of App Store applications -- 75 percent -- already are paid ones, according to analytics firm Distimo. By comparison, 57 percent of apps at Android Marketplace are free. Nokia's Ovi Store has highest percentage of paid apps -- 85 percent.

If three-quarters of the apps are paid ones already, why not 100 percent on iPad? Sure some people will balk, but, hell, they're the early adopters paying somewhere between $499 and $829 for iPad. What should they expect? It's a new product category for Apple and one where competitors have repeatedly failed. If Apple is going to try and breakthrough with tablets, why not freshen the approach: Make the product even more chic by making it more exclusive -- even at $499. Paid apps, and only paid apps, is one way to do it.

Paid vs Free Mobile Applications

The approach also would better differentiate iPad from iPhone and iPod touch. The differences would then become something more than the applications, gaming and Web experience benefits coming from the larger screen size and processing power. Apple could pitch the iPad as the better App Store platform because the applications are better. They're not just better because of the hardware but investment developers make for something they get paid for.

Free isn't just about monetary value. It's about perceived value. People inherently value something more they paid for than what they get for free. That difference can be huge for developers and content providers trying to build brand loyalty. Free apps are throwaways. People are more likely to keep stuff they pay for. Brand loyalty is important for generating future applications sales, too.

The iPad is a unique opportunity for Apple to change the rules and take a paid-app only approach. Publishers will love it, especially content providers seeking to build audience as well as make money. If I were a news content provider, my iPad app wouldn't be free. There would be some fee attached to it. Better still: Apple should work with publishers on a news aggregation application. The iPad user spends, say, $120 a year and gets access to content from Economist, Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal -- or any other combination of five to 10 news sources.

Mobile Paid Apps

Apple's risk is low, from my perspective, although company execs might balk at any strategy that could hurt early iPad sales. The people who are going to buy have already decided to do so. According to a report released today by AdMob, 16 percent of iPhone users and 24 percent of iPod touch users plan to buy an iPad within six months.

But there is concern, for and against paid-only apps, revealed by the AdMob report. The good: 50 percent of iPhone users and 35 percent of iPod touch users buy at least one app a month, compared to 21 percent for Android. However, while the majority App Store applications are paid and Android Marketplace apps free, the monthly averages are similar: iPhone users download an average 8.8 apps a month compared to 8.7 for Android users. Among these apps, on iPhone 7 are free and 1.8 paid. For Android: 7.6 free and 1.1 paid. Considering the huge differences in number of paid-versus-free apps between the two stores, the similarities in customer download habits are surprising.

For Apple, this data cuts two ways, therefore. Firstly, there is risk of alienating customers used to free apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Secondly, if Apple does nothing, iPad will be yet another hardware device for distributing free applications.

Free Mobile Apps

Developers need to make money; the value of free apps is often something else: brand exposure, upsell to paid apps, upsell to paid extras or advertising revenue, among other things. But I contend those same benefits could be available by charging at least 99 cents for applications. Apple should make 99 cents the new free on iPad.

Would you pay a buck for better mobile apps -- or is free the right price for you? Please respond in comments.

Baidu: Register.com replaced its DNS credentials for some guy in a chat room

Publié: février 25, 2010, 8:17pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Last month, Baidu, the leading search engine in China, filed suit against US-based Internet registrar Register.com, in a legal event that took place at the height of the debate over Google's continued business dealings with China. Baidu accused the registrar of changing its DNS records, so that customers were redirected to a completely different site purporting to represent the "Iranian Cyber Army." But that original suit was heavily redacted, so we didn't know the specifics of the alleged defacement. This week, US District Court in New York released the unredacted version of Baidu's complaint, and now, as the man once said, we know the rest of the story.

The basis for Baidu's allegation that Register.com knowingly and willfully damaged Baidu's property, and thereby its reputation, is that one of its customer support agents changed Baidu's DNS records literally on the request of a guy who showed up in Register.com's support chat room. Supposedly, he pretended to be Baidu ("Mr. Baidu," perhaps?). And although records show the support personnel asked him to verify his identity by sending back the security code that was just sent to the e-mail address on record as Baidu's authoritative address, the fellow instead responded with a made-up bunch of numbers...which the agent then accepted as valid.

What happened next, by Baidu's account, could be the subject of a reality show about the world's most flagrant acts of fraud...assuming, of course, the registrar's support agent wasn't in on the deal from the beginning.

"Incredibly, Defendant [Register.com] thus changed the e-mail address on file from one that was clearly a business address and contained the name of the account owner, to an e-mail address that conveyed a highly politically charged message ("antiwahabi"), with the domain name ("gmail.com") of a competitor of Baidu, at the request of an individual who not only could not produce the correct security verification, but actually produced false information twice during the verification process."

The search engine's lawyers then go on to say that Register.com's personnel (perhaps the same person) actually refused to speak with representatives from the real Baidu (whose e-mail address probably includes "baidu.com" or "baidu.cn"), either via online chat or telephone, throughout the two-day period that service was redirected to the "Iranian" site.

No reason has been publicly given for the release of the unredacted complaint, or why it was redacted to begin with. However, one possible reason could concern national and international security. If government agencies were investigating the ties of the "Cyber Army" to the real government of Iran, then perhaps the release of the unredacted version indicates that no such ties were discovered.

Define 'monopoly:' Foundem's argument against Google linking to Google

Publié: février 25, 2010, 6:35pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Yesterday, after the European Commission announced it had sent Google earlier in the month copies of complaints it had received from three search providers that Google refused to rank their search results highly in its index, the company Google had the least to say about was Foundem. That's a British shopping site that aggregates the results from UK online retailers' catalogs. As the EC said yesterday, the inquiry has not yet triggered an investigation.

Although the EC keeps private the contents of complaints it forwards on to the subjects of inquiries, there's a very good chance that Foundem's complaint may echo the public comment it filed with the US Federal Communications Commission, ostensibly with respect to its request for ideas for "Preserving the Open Internet." In that document (PDF available here), Foundem alleges that Google threatens the desired state of the Internet -- something commissioners have referred to as "search neutrality" -- by giving prominent placement to Google services in search results, under the label, "Universal Search."

Borrowing a very key term from the Microsoft antitrust proceedings, Foundem explains the situation thus: "Crucially, Google determines the exact placement of its own services independently of the ranking algorithms it uses to determine the relative placement of all other results. The degree of favoritism -- whether they appear first or third, for example -- is therefore entirely at Google's discretion. Google calls this process of merging its own services with actual search results 'blending' (others have justifiably called it 'bundling')."

The bundling system, as Foundem describes it, converts a generic search platform that's the overwhelming choice of a majority of Web users, from which Google does not derive income, into a huge promotional platform for Google services from which it does derive income. That has the effect of reducing the incentive for Web users to locate specialized sites, not only such as Foundem, but also mapping services such as Streetmap.co.uk and MultiMap.

As is commonly known, Google's formula for page rank uses a formula that combines the relevance of indexed content with popularity. As data throughout the last decade has made clear, popular services are made even more popular though better placement in Google search results.

A chart from Foundem's complaint to the FCC depicting the prominence that Google gives itself in product search results.

A chart from Foundem's complaint to the FCC depicting the prominence that Google gives itself in product search results.

So Google's automatic placement of its own services on its search results pages, Foundem illustrates, seeds that formula with enhanced popularity. Sidestepping the fact that Google's services were not relatively popular in previous years -- Google Product Search, formerly Froogle, being the most prominent example -- Foundem alleges Google was able to give itself the benefit that would normally be afforded independent services that achieved high page rank through popularity.

Foundem demonstrates how much more popular Google Product Search became after it gave itself prominence.

Foundem demonstrates how much more popular Google Product Search became after it gave itself prominence.

"Through Universal Search, Google can divert traffic from its competitors to its own services largely at will," writes Foundem to the FCC. "The rollout of Universal Search has been gradual, and, to a large extent, unnoticed by users. Google already gives preferential placement to its own Map, News, YouTube, Book, and Product Search services, and it has made it clear that it plans to continue expanding this practice into new services."

While Foundem's document clearly presents facts, it refrains from offering suggestions to the FCC as to how government should respond...or whether government can, or even should, respond. The question faced by regulators on both continents now is, is the fairness of the content of a publication (which is what, at one level, Google is) favored by a majority of its readers, worthy of government regulation? In this instance, Foundem's arguments more closely resemble those of publishers of competing telephone directories in the 1970s and '80s, that argued against the telephone company's monopoly over phone books -- even though, when the playing field was leveled, customers chose the phone company's books.

According to comScore's assessment of US-based general searches from home, workplace, and university locations last month, Google was responsible for processing 65.4% of Americans' searches. US #2 Yahoo handled 17% of searches, and #3 Microsoft (Bing) 11.3% (a 0.6% gain month-to-month, biting off some search share from the other two).

In general legal studies over the centuries, the term "monopoly" is used to define a market in which there is only one available producer of goods or services. Under US law -- particularly the Sherman Antitrust Act -- the term has been adapted to pertain to the degree of dominance a company has in a market where there are other players -- for example, Microsoft's dominance in office applications versus Corel, or Intel's dominance in processors versus AMD. The current borderline under US law is 75% market share. Even so, there remains a major question as to whether "market share" applies with respect to Google Search. If we assume that companies doing business on the Web are online publishers, then Google Search becomes a publication; and there may be no precedent in US law for mandating the content of a publication once it becomes very popular.

The same questions, however, may not be applicable to European law. There, Google is more clearly interpreted as a service, and the nature of such services that take place on European territory are considered business transactions. Also, EU antitrust law makes reference to a concept of the dominant player, mandating that it is the responsibility of any player deemed to be dominant, to play more fairly. Recently, the EC declared Intel a dominant player in its market, for having 70% or better market share -- below the US standard for a monopoly. So the possibility exists that, while the US may determine that Foundem's allegations may not necessarily trigger a more pro-active regulatory approach toward Web publication, the EU may come to a more final conclusion.

But how would that conclusion work? Specifically, should Google be obligated to provide other search engines' specialized results, among its own? And in the interest of fairness, should Foundem, Ciao, and their brethren also include search results from Google, Yahoo, and the other major players? Or should they be excluded from such obligations because they are specialist sites, while Google and Yahoo are not? If we expect government, of any country, anywhere, to take action in consumers' interests -- if we invite the proverbial elephant into the room -- then we must fully discuss, debate, and respond to all of these questions.

Background ribbon (small)

The court in this case ruled in favor of defendant Morris' petition for summary judgment, on the grounds that Philip Morris may be dominant, but it's not a monopoly. As the judges found, Morris' ascertained 51% national market share was "far below the generally accepted 70 to 75 percent minimum share necessary to support a finding of monopoly power." This while citing the Sherman Antitrust Act, which doesn't actually set this threshold on its own. The exact threshold for the European market share threshold is open to some dispute. Sometimes the nature or degree of that dispute depends on convenience. For example, in situations where the European Commission defers to member states for establishing precedent, some of those states then lean right back on EC competition law -- and cite 50% as that threshold.

BETACHECK

For more:

"United States Antitrust Law Related to Bundling, Loyalty Discounts and Slotting Allowances" by Barbara T. Sicalides. From the blog of Sicalides' law firm, Pepper Hamilton LLP, October 5, 2007.
"The Development of Antitrust Enforcement" (PDF available here). From the producers of the documentary film Fair Fight in the Marketplace, narrated by NPR legal correspondent Mara Liasson.
Antitrust Law and Economics of Product Distribution. American Bar Association, 2006. See the Google Books citation, page 312.

Market Power Handbook: Competition Law and Economic Foundations. American Bar Association, 2005. See the Google Books citation, "Market Share as a Predictor of Market Power," page 82.

2002 Annual Review of Antitrust Law Developments. Section of Antitrust Law, American Bar Association, 2002. See the Google Books citation, "Market Share as Indicator of Market Power," page 53.

"A Simple Guide to the EC Merger Regulation of 2004" (PDF available here). Published by The Antitrust Source, January 2005.
"DG Competition Discussion Paper on the Application of Article 82 of the Treaty to Exclusionary Abuses: Public Consultation" (PDF available here). Published by The Antitrust Alliance, an independent forum on antitrust practices.
"EU Competition Policy and the Consumer" (PDF available here). A brochure published in 2004 by the European Commission for Competition. This brochure is not exactly the record of European law, but it's notable for the initially broad definition it set for the phrase Dominant Player: "A company is a dominant player in a market if it can change, for example, the price or quality of its product in that market independently of its competitors, customers and suppliers without significantly affecting its sales."
"Regulatory Reform in Finland: The Role of Competition Policy in Regulatory Reform" (PDF available here). Published by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2003. Note in particular page 13, which explains the concept of "Abuse of Dominance," and clearly defines dominance as "presumed" to imply 50% market share or greater.

Skype gives up on Microsoft, will work with operators on Windows Mobile

Publié: février 25, 2010, 5:33pm CET par Tim Conneally

Popular instant messaging, voice chat, and video conferencing client Skype and Skype Lite are no longer available on Windows Mobile devices.

The company says, "We've chosen to withdraw Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile because we want to offer our new customers an improved mobile experience -- much like the version that has proved so popular on the iPhone, and which is now available on Symbian phones. Our focus is on providing a rich user experience that allows you to enjoy free Skype-to-Skype and low cost calls as easily on the move as you do at your desktop. We felt that Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile were not offering the best possible Skype experience."

Replying to a commenter on WMPoweruser who said Skype was canceled because hardware manufacturers all have different methods of utilizing the earphones and speakers, Skype's Peter Parkes said, "[The] comment above pretty much nails it. It's been very difficult for us to make the experience consistent across a wide range of Windows devices. However, we have a partnership in place with China Unicom to deliver a new beta version to their WM handsets -- where we can work with mobile operators, we'll be able to deliver a Skype experience on the current WM platform which lives up to expectations."

This news comes just over a week after Skype and Verizon Wireless jointly announced that unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G will be allowed on certain BlackBerry and Android devices.

Demand for Palm devices is weaker than anticipated, fanboys wanted

Publié: février 25, 2010, 5:10pm CET par Tim Conneally

Palm Despite the critical acclaim Palm has won for its webOS devices (Pre, Pixi, Pre Plus and Pixi Plus), the public hasn't been snatching them up by the armload like Palm was expecting. In a financial guidance announcement this morning, the company said its revenues for the full year are going to be "well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion," because of slower-than-expected consumer adoption.

That isn't to say Palm's devices haven't been selling, it's just that the company was expecting a quicker turnaround.

"Driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated," said Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein in a statement this morning.

This disappointing demand has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. The precise impact this has had on Palm's revenue was not specified, but the company will go into greater detail at the third quarter earnings call on March 18.

Today, soon to be Google-owned mobile advertising company AdMob released its January 2010 Mobile Metrics Report, which attempts to profile webOS users based on a six-month survey. 58% of webOS users are male (73% for Android, 57% for iPhone) 24% are under the age of 25, and 69% would recommend their device to another user.

Specifically, AdMob says that webOS users are 3.4 times more likely to not recommend their device when compared to iPhone OS users.

Looks like Palm's problem is that there is just not enough fanatical evangelism going on.

Google's bad news deluge: Execs held responsible for posting of hate video

Publié: février 25, 2010, 12:47am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

There's precedent throughout the European Union protecting the rights of ISPs when Web sites they host end up streaming defamatory, libelous, or injurious content. Despite that, a Milan judge today sentenced three of four Google executives convicted last November of violating the privacy of a boy victimized in a briefly-posted YouTube video, to six months' suspension.

The sentencing came even though the original plaintiff in the lawsuit -- representatives of a boy with Down's Syndrome, who unwillingly appeared in a YouTube video showing classmates tormenting him -- reportedly withdrew from the case last week, as first reported by IDG's Philip Willan last Sunday. In an American court, this would normally lead to a dismissal; but Judge Oscar Magi took the not-unprecedented step of assuming the role of the plaintiff, effectively trying the case on behalf of state prosecutors.

In the absence of legislative action, Italian courts have worked to establish precedent that Internet service providers are responsible for the data that moves through their pipelines. Earlier this month, the country's Supreme Court reinstated an overturned block on the IP address of file trafficking site The Pirate Bay. This despite a ruling the same week from a court in Norway, near the site's native Sweden, that one of that country's largest ISPs, Telenor, would not have to block access to TPB for its customers.

Up to now, Italian lawmakers and judges have perceived it difficult to hold uploaders of content to Internet video services like YouTube, and the hosts of that content such as YouTube itself, to the same level of civic responsibility as the country's broadcasters. But a fix may be in the works. Last month, IDG's Willan also reported on the issuance of a decree from Italy's communications ministry, that effectively declares the posting of video to the Internet the same as broadcasting over the public airwaves. Thus, anyone posting a video would require a license from the Ministry.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continues to own some of that country's largest publishing and broadcasting institutions, including Mediaset. That corporation filed a half-billion euro lawsuit against YouTube in July 2008, ordering it to remove all instances of copyrighted content that allegedly infringe upon Mediaset's portfolio -- including clips from soccer games and the reality show "Big Brother." Each hour someone watches Il Grande Fratello on YouTube is one less hour of watching it on Canale 5. Last December, a Rome court ruled in Mediaset's favor.

The Communications Ministry is answerable to the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Mediaset has taken an investment interest in Endemol, the Holland-based creator of the "Big Brother" franchise...which, ironically, is all about the lack of privacy.

Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter noted, reports in the Italian press stated Mediaset was preparing to settle with YouTube. The deal, reports said, would involve the publisher dropping the €500 million claim against YouTube, in exchange for dropping its own parent company, Google, as its advertising supplier in Italy in exchange for Publitalia, the television advertising agency at the center of Berlusconi's holdings since the 1970s.

Google's Deputy General Counsel for Europe, Matt Sucherman, responded to the news of the sentencing of his company's executives this morning: "We are deeply troubled by this conviction...[because] it attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube, and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them -- every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video -- then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear."

From the perspective of those in power in Italy, that might not be such a bad thing.

Global Foundries gets its second major partnership for 28 nm chips: ARM

Publié: février 25, 2010, 12:22am CET par Tim Conneally

In late 2008, AMD spun off a major portion of its chip fabrication business into a new company called GlobalFoundries, a joint venture with Abu Dhabi investment firm ATIC. At the time, AMD said the new venture would "join the IBM joint development alliance for both silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and bulk silicon through the 22 nanometer generation. The alliance consists of a group of leading semiconductor companies collaborating on next generation silicon technologies."

So as the chips have worked their way from 45 nm in size down to 28, Global Foundries has teamed up with ARM Holdings and is working on a new System-on-a-Chip based on the ARM Cortex A9 processor and GlobalFoundries' High-K Metal Gate 28 nm fabrication process.

ARM says the new platform is expected to enable a 40% increase in computing performance, a 30% decrease in power consumption, and a 100% increase in standby battery life over 40/45 nm.

There will be two variants of the new 28 nm process: one for mobile and consumer applications (SLP), and one for higher performance applications (HP).

ARM expects production of these SoCs to begin in the second half of 2010 in the Dresden, Germany facility -- at one time, the crown jewel of AMD's system of foundries.

This is the second major partnership GlobalFoundries has announced this year that will result in new products coming out of Dresden. In January, Qualcomm announced it intended to collaborate with GlobalFoundries on wireless technology CDMA2000, WCDMA and 4G/LTE cellular standards, and the smartbook device segment.

Google's bad news deluge: Xerox sues, claims it borrowed query methods

Publié: février 24, 2010, 10:12pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Xerox logo (newly unveiled) For any other company besides Google, a week like this would be interpreted by some in the press as the beginning of the end, and it's only Wednesday. However, an individual breakdown of every bad story, element by element, reveals the company may not be deluged so much by a hailstorm of controversy as a cavalcade of unfortunately simultaneous snowballs, none of which may end up leaving any lasting damage.

Last Friday, Xerox filed suit in US District Court in Delaware, claiming two counts of patent infringement against Google and Yahoo, and one count against Google's YouTube division. A scan of the complaint reveals an almost "boilerplate" document, making no arguments other than that its two patents cover types of functionality that the three named defendants willfully employed without negotiating with Xerox first.

The patents themselves are very explicit, and appear to deal with the very specific application of methods and even software, some of it bearing Xerox trademarks. Theoretically, such methods could be used in the dissemination of live repositories of information -- meta-documents comprised of information gleaned from multiple sources, as those sources are being published and indexed. Certainly, generating live pages of meta-documents are among the features that Google's AdSense platform and YouTube video platform, and Yahoo's contextual search and advertising platforms, perform. So in a very general sense, one could conclude there was a connection, and maybe someone should have looked up Xerox in Google's patent search.

But had that someone done so, she may also have discovered that the apparatus Xerox researchers described bears close resemblance to the type of document management system the patent was designed to protect, and the methods Xerox did not want to see other competitors lay claims on first.

"One aspect of the invention is based on the discovery that data on the use of documents stored in an enterprise document management system (EDMS) provides insight into the flow of knowledge within the enterprise," reads US Patent #6,236,994, which all three parties are accused of infringing upon. "This discovery avoids problems that arise in conventional document or knowledge management systems, where the flow of information must be rigorously characterized before or at the time the document is stored into the EDMS."

For decades, Xerox has been heavily involved in developing an exclusive method for quantifying aggregate data about how the information included in documents is used, and how that use evolves over time. That research is what has made Xerox' document management software so valuable over the years, and is one of the under-appreciated qualities of that company's hard work.

But it may be harder work for Xerox' attorneys to prove that YouTube, for example, produces aggregate data on how its videos are used, compiles workflow analyses, and generates new aggregate documents based on the results of those analyses. The precise pseudocode for that methodology comprises about four pages of the '994 patent; Xerox may need to demonstrate that YouTube, among others, followed essentially that same flowchart to do...whatever it is YouTube is supposed to have done with it.

The way Xerox' attorneys described YouTube's infringement upon the '994 patent sounds a lot more generalized: "YouTube makes and uses YouTube.com, a Web site for video hosting and sharing that integrates information related to videos with data from user reviews and ratings. YouTube performs all elements of the infringed claims of the '994 Patent by making and using YouTube.com."

The other patent under contention, #6,778,979, issued in 2004, covers a method for the automatic generation of queries -- essentially, ways in which information gleaned from a database can be compiled into a query that is then run to obtain more information. This patent is extraordinarily well illustrated, with 69 diagrams, most of which illustrate specific use-cases of Xerox' automatic query generation system put to use.

"Google AdSense and AdWords software automatically generate queries based on the content of Web pages to retrieve related advertisements," reads Xerox' complaint. Assuming that's correct, it may be difficult to prove that AdWords was specifically altered to utilize Xerox' 2004 methodology, especially since AdWords was launched in 2000.

Google has responded to various press sources today with a single sentence, saying Xerox' claims are without merit and the company will vigorously defend itself against them.

New analytics software specifically targets software developers, beta testers

Publié: février 24, 2010, 9:00pm CET par Tim Conneally

Download Concerity Analytics Free 1.0 Beta from Fileforum now.

Just Announced

Web developers have access to all sorts of information about the visitors to their sites: IP address, operating system, browser type, and so forth. With solutions like Omniture's SiteCatalyst, for example, developers have access to an even greater depth of information about visitor behavior that they can use to improve their product.

For desktop software developers, however, these kind of analytics are not as readily available, and are frequently limited to crash reports for the purpose of fixing bugs.

Actual Beta News feature banner Last month, Utah-based software company Concerity launched its own Analytics Platform, directed toward software developers. The toolkit provides software vendors with a more granular look at how their software is being used by embedding an analytics runtime into it. The end user can opt in to anonymously share his information with the developer, and then the developer can see how the software is being used, what type of machines it's being used on, see which features are the highest priority, and so forth.

Today Betanews proudly announces that our Fileforum is the exclusive host of Concerity Analytics Free, the freeware version targeted at independent software vendors. The beta of version 1.0 is available now.

Implementing the tracker in your software only takes a couple of lines of code, and then information coming from users is sent to the cloud-based Concerity Analytics Results Dashboard, where the data are available as graphs, charts, and tag clouds.

What can users of the free version expect to track in their software? Concerity Analytics Free grabs a profile of the user which includes his CPU, graphics processor, RAM, storage, operating system, and screen resolution, where he is geographically located, when the application is used, and whether it was closed nicely by the user or it crashed.

Screenshot of a beta of Concerity Analytics Free software

Matt Cupal, CEO of Concerity shared some of the inspiration behind the product: "One year ago, I ran a company called Sorenson Media, which makes desktop video compression apps. When we'd try to come up with new feature sets, we'd get pretty frustrated. We'd do surveys of customers and sales guys, then we'd do a traditional beta model where 300 people would test the new version. But we weren't getting tons of useful feedback, we needed more analytic information to base feature sets upon."

"Beta testing is certainly different today than it was in the past," Cupal continued. "There's better recognition, and users are more open to supplying their information. Ten years ago, it would be a hard issue to fly because of privacy concerns. People would be more likely to say 'Of course you can't see what I'm doing!' But now, we do it a lot more because the products improve more when you share more data."

We spoke yesterday with one of Concerity Analytics' beta testers, 3D machining software company FeatureCAM. Vice President of Engineering, Tom McCollough.

"Like a lot of other software companies, we release an annual version of our product and support it with monthly updates. Since the annual versions have the most changes, they also invariably have the most crashes," McCollough told us. "We're using Concerity as a way to measure the reliability of each version, and we're shooting to have crashes go down with each service pack release."

Pricing for the final release of Concerity Analytics will be made available when the product is generally released next month. A beta of the commercial edition, released last month, is available from Concerity's Web site.

[FULL SEC DISCLOSURE: Betanews operates Fileforum, which is the exclusive host of Concerity Analytics Free software.]

EU denies Google is under investigation, early evidence appears weak

Publié: février 24, 2010, 7:03pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

This morning, despite clearly and pointedly phrased headlines such as this one proclaiming that the European Commission had opened an antitrust investigation into Google, the Commission released a statement this morning saying no such investigation was launched.

"The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being," reads this morning's EC statement. "As is usual when the Commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations." No further information is being provided to the press on this matter -- again, as per protocol, because no investigation has begun.

Instead, according to the EC, the Commission received three formal complaints about the company's conduct, and as per protocol, forwarded the complaints to Google. The difference between an investigation and an inquiry, in this context, is that an investigation seeks information to build a specific case against its subject. No such case exists against Google, although it is possible that Google's response to the EU could trigger the launch of a formal investigation. That has not happened yet.

Google was under no obligation to come forward with details of the allegations against it, but it did so anyway: Two of the complaints come from firms with either direct Microsoft backing or ties to organizations funded by Microsoft, and both operate shopping sites. Ciao, a German-based (not Italian) shopping service recently purchased by Microsoft and integrated into its British and German Bing services; and Foundem, the proprietor of a British-based shopping site and the member of an organization called Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace that claims funding by Microsoft, have both issued formal complaints that Google downplays search results that lead to their sites, in Google results. This according to Google's assessment of the complaints in its blog post this morning; no other statements on the matter have been released by the parties involved.

Foundem's situation first came to light last August, when an article in the UK publication The Guardian profiled its founder, Richard Wray. In that article, Wray claimed that its service was being virtually ignored by Google. Foundem is essentially an aggregator of price comparisons for computers, appliances, other consumer market items, and real estate; as is Ciao, whose British service now bears some resemblance to Bing Shopping in the US.

Typically, search engines that have their own shopping services do not feature the aggregate pricing assessments of other search engines with their own shopping services; for example, Bing Shopping does not feature results from Google Product Search. For competitors to Google Product Search, this may be a problem.

Google did not say much about the complaint from French-based legal research firm eJustice.fr, other than to say its complaint paralleled that of Foundem. That site describes itself as a professionally researched search engine that performs its own assessment of the relevance of legal material it has indexed based not on popularity, like other (unnamed) search engines, but upon direct relevance to the case or subject of law being studied. The site prides itself on providing fewer, better, search results, indexed over 100 sites, in an effort led by Dominique Barella, former president of France's union of magistrates, and a deciding judge in many technology-related cases there over the years. For example, in 2005, Judge Barella was under the opinion that unauthorized sharing of MP3 files may not be a criminal offense on the same order as theft.

In an interview published today by the French news site Eco89, Barella stated he provided the European Commission with a 40-page complaint, complete with technical documentation and evidence, which he says proves that Google blatantly and willfully delisted eJustice from its search results, not in terms of searching for "eJustice" but specifically with respect to results that point to eJustice's index. As an example for Eco89, he stated that Google doesn't point to eJustice in searches for rental contract cases. He complained that Google told him, not in writing but verbally, that Google would index eJustice's search results if eJustice could provide them in a manner accessible via Google's algorithms.

Making eJustice comply with Google's pattern, Barella argued, is unfair because the two sites are search engines, and are therefore competitors.

It is not impossible for Google to index search results of other Web sites' search results. But typically, Google is only able to find the queries themselves through links to those sites on the pages it indexes. Those links tend not to reside on the most popular pages, and Google ranks pages -- as eJustice's own "About Us" page notes -- by popularity as well as relevance. If, by eJustice's own account, it indexes less popular, more relevant, sources, then by Google's publicly known formula for assessing page rank, it may not score enough points by its own design.

The mistaken assessment of this morning's inquiry as an investigation may have been exacerbated by Google's own account of the affair this morning. First, senior competition counsel Julia Holtz referred to the matter as "scrutiny" -- a term often applied to investigations. Later, she mentioned that Ciao's complaints were originally handled by the German competition authority, referring to the matter as a "case" that was now "transferred to Brussels," the seat of the EC. The EC is denying that this is a case in the formal sense. Since there is no investigation taking place after all by the EC, there's no timetable for the next step in this inquiry.

Americans don't give a damn about MIDs

Publié: février 24, 2010, 4:49pm CET par Tim Conneally

Analysis

We have a problem understanding devices that live outside of the commonly accepted "three screens" model. It's the model that has been pushed by big companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Nielsen, and Microsoft which says that our main windows into content consumption are the TV, PC, and mobile device.

If a device's functionality falls somewhere between one of these three screens, it gets marginalized and written off as something that doesn't address a specific need.

That's actually one of the first criticisms from US consumers reacting to the Apple iPad.

iPad slanted It is a device that we "don't need," and is simply another way to sell iTunes content, some said. People could not look at the iPad and instantly state its principal, core functionality like they could for the rest of Apple's product line. They could say, for example, that the iPod is a music player, the iPhone is a mobile phone, and AppleTV is a connected set-top box.

And while all of those devices offer a lot more than those basic descriptions tell you, at their heart, they have a single purpose, an identity. The iPad didn't immediately click with that identity.

Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs marginalized the iPad as "something between a laptop and a smartphone," which focuses on functionality already delivered by the other devices like browsing the Web and consuming streaming media. "It's going to have to be better at these kind of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone, otherwise, it has no reason for being," Jobs said in January.

That's a pretty damning set of guidelines. But it may be better to wedge a new device in between two of our three screens than to give it a vague, almost purposeless description like Intel has done with the Mobile Internet Device profile and Microsoft has done with the Origami/Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) profile.

When these device classes premiered in 2006, Microsoft didn't even tell us what made something an Origami device, much less how they were supposed to fit into our lives. The Origami campaign slogan was literally "What is Origami?" and it actually tried to make its case on the premise that there was no case to make -- you fill in the blank.

An early prototype Origami UMPC device running Windows XP, believed to have been manufactured by Samsung. [Photo credit: Wolfgang Gruener for TG Daily, 2006]

An early prototype Origami UMPC device running Windows XP, believed to have been manufactured by Samsung. [Photo credit: Wolfgang Gruener for TG Daily, 2006]

A 2006 mockup by Microsoft of an Origami device being used beside a PC to watch videos (as opposed to using the PC to watch videos). But Microsoft's description of Origami PCs is familiar: a device with "a powerful processor, a big, bright display, easy-to-use input options, and support for the latest connectivity standards...The UMPC offers a display of 4-7 inches and touch capabilities, all in a package that weighs less than 2 pounds." All this was expected in a package that cost between $599-$799.

Why, that sounds just like the iPad, doesn't it?

So what, exactly, made Origami the crashing failure that it was, dubbed by one publication, "The biggest flop since Windows ME?"

The problem was not simply that Origami, or UMPC, or whatever you want to call it, didn't have a clear purpose (or even a clear name). It was too heavy, too resource-constrained to run a desktop OS, its battery life was too short, and its input method was weak.

Things haven't fared any better for the device category dubbed MID by Intel. Instead of being declared a total flop, manufacturers have gradually converged that platform with mobile phones, while Intel -- which at one time actively avoided the term 'netbook' -- has now actively abandoned it altogether. Intel is now not only free, but content, to embrace MID's successor, complete with its own device architecture (Atom) and operating system (MeeGo, formerly Moblin).

Back in 2008, comScore said that smartphones were actually cutting into the low-cost computing segment populated by netbooks and MIDs.

"Smartphones, and the iPhone in particular, are appealing to a new demographic and satisfying demand for a single device for communication and entertainment, even as consumers weather the economy by cutting back on gadgets," comScore said.

The very things that were supposed to make MIDs stand out -- their lower cost and easy Web browsing experience -- were being squeezed out by smartphones that were cheaper, more versatile, and just as enjoyable to browse with. Why would a consumer pay the the same price for a MID with only Wi-Fi that they would for an unlocked top-of-the-line smartphone?

Major mobile phone maker Nokia, which has been dabbling in MIDs for more than five years, has nearly drawn its efforts in MIDs to a close. In 2005, the company launched the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, with a 4.1" touchscreen and and the Linux-based maemo MID platform (which was merged into Moblin earlier this month). Looking at it now, the 770 (pictured right) isn't really not that far off from a smartphone, except that it's a bit chunky around the middle.

Four years later, Nokia slimmed down its MID profile, shrunk the touchscreen to just under 4 inches, and equipped it with cellular radios. The N900, which will be the last device to run on the maemo MID platform, is for all intents and purposes a smartphone. Screen shot from Intel's Moblin operating system, which will cede the stage to make way for MeeGo.

When maemo is finally merged with (read: "consumed by") Moblin (pictured above) in the new MeeGo platform, the result will be an open, Linux-based operating system designed for a number of device classes, like smartphones, netbooks, notebooks, and embedded environments. Nokia's MID-centric operating system is marked for death.

And yet, just when it looks like the MID is dying, there are some who argue that it's only just now reaching the point where it could break through in the Americas.

Inbrics has made $170 million selling mobile devices in its home country of South Korea, and it has made impressive appearances both at CES and GSMA Mobile World Congress this year, showing off a device that looks exactly like an Android superphone, but without a cellular voice module. Just like Nokia's N900, the Inbrics M1 Identity is a MID in function but a smartphone in form.

Inbrics Identity M1 MID device "We expect the demand for MIDs in North America to rise at the end of 2010 and into 2011," Inbrics' chief marketing officer Bobby Cha told Betanews. "All of the major wireless carriers have a plan that includes a MID separate from their phones."

The M1 Identity is an iPod-thin device that looks pretty much like a high-end mobile phone, with a 3.7" capacitive AMOLED touchscreen, a full QWERTY keyboard, 800MHz applications processor, 16GB of memory, running Android 1.5 with its own custom UI that includes an in-depth home media controller poetically called the "3 Screens Manager."

Cha says the key to MID adoption will come as Americans change the way they interact with their phones. "In Asia, the typical user doesn't hold their phone up to their ear. They hold it in front of their face...We have the innate ability to change the way the consumer interacts with their content."

Laptop Magazine ran an article last week called "Do Americans Really Care About MIDs?" which examined a crop of Mobile Internet Devices that are expected this year.

I was honestly taken aback. I thought the answer was pretty clear by now. The only MIDs Americans care about are smartphones.

Google is a dangerous monopoly -- more than Microsoft ever was

Publié: février 24, 2010, 8:09am CET par Joe Wilcox

The European Union's preliminary antitrust investigation of Google isn't the least surprising. But the timing is shockingly foreshadowing.

In December 2007, when Google announced the DoubleClick acquisition, I blogged: "The Google Monopoly Begins." I asserted that the acquisition would change everything about Google's search and advertising dominance and perceptions about the company's growing status as gatekeeper to all online information. The preliminary antitrust investigation comes as Google makes major changes to DoubleClick with hopes of boosting its display advertising business. The changes mark the final Googlefication of DoubleClick -- or the realistic, final integration of the acquisition into Google.

I don't believe in coincidence. More than two years ago, I asserted that DoubleClick marked the real beginning of the Google monopoly. The same week Google begins to flex that monopoly, the European Union starts informally investigating the information company. The European Competition Commission is taking seriously three competitor complaints, made by, according to a Google blog post: "UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing."

For clarification, after I posted, the European Commission released statement: "The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being." Right. It's preliminary, subject first to Google's response about the three complaints. In the Google blog post, Julia Holtz, senior competition counsel, asserted: "We will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints," presumably to the European Commission. Microsoft's antitrust problems in Europe started in the late 1990s from a single complaint made by Sun Microsystems (now absorbed into Oracle).

Coincidence or not, the European Union is starting too late. Too much has changed in Google's favor since December 2007. The acquisition should never have been approved by European regulators. The mess they'll be cleaning up is one they helped create. I blogged 26 months ago:

The Google monopoly could be prevented, just as the Microsoft monopoly could have been. To be fair, monopolies aren't necessarily bad, and they certainly aren't illegal in the United States. But Google is positioned to fulfill the decade-old predictions made about Microsoft but as a more dangerous and consumer harming monopoly. Google's monopoly would be over information, and there is just too much opportunity for abuse. DoubleClick significantly cranks up the potential volume of abuse.

Much has changed; since the DoubleClick acquisition was announced, Google:

Released the Chrome Web browser, which in less than 18 months reached version 5 beta.
Launched the Android mobile operating system, which sales rose 961 percent year over year in 2009.
Announced development of a new operating system -- Chrome OS -- for mobile devices, including netbooks.
Negotiated a deal (now being scrutinized) for making millions of books freely available online via Google search.
Increased search share on mobile devices, bolstered by new location-based search, local search, mapping and other services.
Erected a mobile applications stack, by leveraging together Android, Chrome, disparate Google Web applications and search services.

That's a short, condensed list. But their meaning simply stated:

1) Google is expanding a monopoly over Web search and arguably trying to extend it into several adjacent markets, including display advertising, desktop operating systems, mobile operating systems, mobile Web applications and Web browsers. Microsoft's antitrust problems started with leveraging its Intel-based desktop operating system monopoly into the market for Web browsers.

2) Google's free business model is disrupting many, major established informational industries by reducing their contents' value to zero -- subsidized by search and adjacent services from which Google profits. While analyst estimates vary, the most reliable put Google's online advertising share at about 90 percent in the European Union.

3) Recent Google activities raise serious questions about trust, such as Buzz privacy settings. Can Google be trusted with all this information? Buzz demonstrates Google's increased willingness to put its interests ahead of customers. Likewise, ongoing tweaks to the search and keyword business model, technology or terms of agreement put Google's interests before partners.

A Monopoly Matures

In my December 2007 post declaring the Google monopoly, I gave five reasons it matters. I'll reiterate four of them here:

Google is the information gatekeeper. The US Justice Department went after Microsoft in May 1998 partly out of fear the company would become the Internet's gatekeeper. That never happened with Microsoft, but it most certainly is occurring with Google. Its business is all about profiting from information. For years, I've argued that Google is not a search company. Google is an information company, with search being a means to an end -- the end being information around which the company sells keywords and advertising. Google's search share reaches 70-80 percent or more in some geographies, according to combined analyst reports.

Google's business is rife with conflict-of-interest. Google provides through search the road leading to a destination, then profits from many of the businesses established around it. Additionally, as I explained 26 months ago:

Google doesn't just offer search, but advertising, keyword search and demographic services around information and businesses pay for this stuff. DoubleClick will greatly enhance the latter activity. Marketers are hungry for demographic information, and they're willing to pay for it. Google provides the door, checks who's coming inside and can pass that information onto marketing paparazzi. The temptation to mine the information will be huge, and that temptation will increase as Google matures, its growth slows and its stock falls to earth.

Google leaches off the good work of others -- for free. As I explained 26 months ago:

Google produces nothing. Shall I repeat that statement? The company's core business is about search and advertising, which relies on the content of other people and businesses. Google doesn't own the information from which it makes nearly all its revenue. Google is the middleman of the information, which it takes for free. At least Microsoft produces software and makes money off the licensing. Microsoft owns what it sells, but not Google.

Google abuses the intellectual property rights of others. "Google's information grubbing ways come without any asking permission," I wrote in December 2007. "In one sense, people want their Web sites to be found, for information to be mined. But they're not compensated for something for which Google makes oodles."

Much has changed -- for the worse -- since Google announced the DoubleClick acquisition. A late-2009 Fair Syndication Consortium study found that over one 30-day period 75,195 Websites published unlicensed content lifted from newspapers. Additionally, 112,000 unlicensed "full copies of U.S. newspaper articles were found on sites across the Internet." The profit motive: Search-driven revenue, with Google accounting for "53 percent of the total monetization." Interestingly, "38 percent of the sites were ranked in the top 100,000 most trafficked sites." Google's business model essentially allows -- and even encourages -- further intellectual property abuse.Better stated: Stealing.

Wrapping up, Google is a dangerous monopoly. Being a monopoly isn't illegal in the United States, although in Europe it seemingly is so (because of weight given to competitor complaints). Being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean acting dangerously. But the potential is there. How dangerous a company do you see Google -- or not? Please answer in comments.

Some related posts putting the Google monopoly in context:

Google Chrome 5 loses points, wins categories, against Opera 10.5 beta

Publié: février 23, 2010, 10:58pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Download Opera 10.5 Beta 1 Build 3271 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

Two weeks ago, we warned the new leader in the Windows Web browser, Opera 10.5 Beta 1, that it would have to paddle fast to stay ahead of the ever-improving Google Chrome 5. Apparently only one side of that battle was listening: Opera did paddle fast, pulling nicely above 26 in our latest Windows 7 relative performance index tests. The newest Chrome 5, meanwhile, took a performance hit that sent it back the other direction.

As a result, Opera's lead over Chrome is no longer a narrow gap. The latest build 3271, released just today, scored a 26.17 on Betanews' Windows 7 RPI, representing over 26 times the performance posted by Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, on 70 different data points in 10 independently-developed test categories, using the same hardware. The previously tested build on February 11 scored a 25.83. Developers' build 5.0.322.2 of Chrome, released late last week, posted a Win7 RPI score 23.90, way down from 24.60 the week before for build 5.0.317.2.

What does this mean? As developers at Google scramble to make version 5 of its Web browser -- whose development track began just weeks ago -- more stable, that usually takes points away from performance. We usually see this happen at the very beginning of a development cycle, after the first obvious bugs are pointed out and eradicated, and toward the very end just prior to a product's release. But Opera hasn't had this kind of performance lead in years, literally coming out of the blue with performance better than triple its current stable release. Opera's developers may be riding the waves while they can.

So here's a message for anyone working on the Opera beta: A continuing bug in the beta's nested conditional statement handling remains responsible for as much as half a point of performance loss on our tests.

When you break down the test results by category, the news looks somewhat better for Chrome. The latest developer build actually regained the performance lead in the SunSpider computational test battery, with a 68.39 score versus Opera's 67.75. Mysteriously, the latest WebKit development build of Apple Safari 4 suffered terribly on this test. If you want proof that WebKit's own SunSpider battery is honest with its results, look at the result build 55138 of WebKit/Safari 4 posted today: a 38.92. Betanews retested and verified this result. The latest stable Chrome 4 posted the third best SunSpider score today with 58.55.

Relative performance of Windows-based Web browsers in Windows 7, February 23, 2010.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

The Opera beta took a performance hit in CSS rendering as well, which is usually Opera's strength, with a 6.73 score on the Nontroppo CSS rendering battery versus 15.09 for the latest stable Safari 4, and 14.18 for the WebKit/Safari 4 daily build. Chrome 5 crawls toward the podium here with 12.38. Opera 10.5 hangs on to third place in the SlickSpeed CSS selector test, which compares the browsers' performance in handling 10 different development libraries for referencing complex page elements using CSS. Chrome 5 has the best score here with a 13.29, compared to 12.43 for WebKit/Safari 4 and 11.68 for Opera 10.5. In the Testnet.world JavaScript math operators' test, Opera continues hanging on to second place (it might be first were it not for the bug), with an 18.31 score versus 19.19 for Chrome 5.

So wait a minute...I thought Opera was in the lead here. What's going on?

In two of the three categories where Opera 10.5 does lead, it's by a breathtaking margin -- so much that, in the average, Opera ends up winning out overall, despite having second- or third-place performance elsewhere. In the old-style Web page loading test (which judges the handling of pages that would probably be considered tailor-made for IE6), Opera 10.5 scores a phenomenal 9.86. The next highest score in that category is posted by the stable Opera 10.1 with 8.57 (the stable build doesn't score very well elsewhere), followed by the stable Chrome 4 at 7.05.

And in the Canvas element test, which judges graphics performance in a Web app environment, Opera 10.5's lead here has only increased: to 69.00, more than double WebKit/Safari 4's next highest score of 31.81. Sadly, Chrome 5 posts a 22.76 in the Canvas battery.

For the Chrome dev track to retake the lead from the Opera beta, conceivably, it only requires radical improvement in just two departments. One is page loading, something Google thought it had the lead in at one time. On the standard page load test, Chrome processes bits at about 3200 KB/sec, while Opera 10.5's speed is just over 5000 KB/sec (that's processing speed excluding the speed of the network). And during the load process for the same test page, Opera 10.5 fires its DOM loaded event (signaling scripts that they can start referencing the Document Object Model) in 24 ms, while Safari 4 fires it in 34 ms, and both Chrome 4 and 5 in 39 ms. That's not an indicator of how fast the page has loaded (as some have mistaken it to mean in the past), but rather how soon certain elements of the script can start executing.

The other department is graphics performance, another former Chrome stronghold. Our Testcube 3D battery examines not only how fast the browser rotates two sizes of cubes in memory and re-plots them, but how consistent each iteration is compared to the next. If it costs cycles in the middle to get fast in the beginning, that's not good performance. For the large cube half of the test, Chrome 5 lost consistency points, with iterations as fast as 12 ms but as slow as 24 ms. That led to a 2.55 score for Chrome 5 here. Meanwhile, the Opera beta rotated the large cube as fast as 9 ms per iteration and as slow as 14 ms -- more consistency, better control, better performance. Opera has the overall lead here at 3.30.

With the browser choice screen being rolled out to Europe March 1, look for Google to make up some ground, particularly so it can roll out its campaign that the fastest browser is the best browser, without Betanews blaring a big neon pointer in the direction of Opera.

Download Google Chrome for Windows Dev build 5.0.322.2 from Fileforum now.

Die-Fi: Communications company unveils wireless tombstones

Publié: février 23, 2010, 9:55pm CET par Tim Conneally

Near Field Headstone

Arizona company Objecs announced today that it has developed "enhanced memorial products" that add Near Field Communications tags to cemetery markers, which allow text and photos to be "embedded" in a headstone and retrieved whenever a cell phone is touched against its surface.

It's the same inductive coupling technology used in wallet phones that allows complex information sharing at the expense of practically no electrical energy.

Objecs, which specializes in "object hyperlinking," or assigning a Web-based presence to real world objects, sells two products. One is called RosettaStone, which is a palm-sized stone tablet; the other is Data Tag, which adheres directly to headstones. In good outdoor conditions, the company says the Personal RosettaStone should be readable for as much as 300 years.

While it does conjure up fantastical images of Jor-el's parting messages to Superman, this sort of tagging can actually be incorporated into the extremely popular (and lucrative) genealogy business.

"Each tag has a unique ID number that serves the same purpose as a database primary key," John Bottorff, Objecs Founder said in a statement today. "This unique ID number creates a common reference between the physical world and the digital world in ways that first and last name by itself can not."

Lenovo launches notebooks, tablet, and sub-$400 Windows server

Publié: février 23, 2010, 8:16pm CET par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

Lenovo With its latest announced systems on Monday, Lenovo is following up on a series of PCs unveiled just over a month ago that included AMD-powered Edge notebooks for SMBs. The global #3 PC maker's new entries include two ultraportable notebooks, a tablet PC, and two mobile workstations -- one of them outfitted with Lenovo's trademark secondary display -- and a low-cost server aimed at the smallest of businesses.

With these new products, Lenovo is adhering to a "protect and attack" strategy versus rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, said Mika Majapuro, a Lenovo product marketing manager, in a meeting with Betanews during a New York City press tour.

Lenovo, he elaborated, wants to safeguard its core business of enterprise PCs for the North American, European, and Japanese markets while at the same time branching more into the SMB and consumer spaces as well as emerging markets such as Latin America.

The five Lenovo notebooks launched this week are geared mostly to enterprises, according to Majapuro. Lenovo is officially addressing consumers through its IdeaPad line-up. But on the other hand, ThinkPads are also popular with some consumers, particularly students, because ThinkPads are designed to provide "best value," he said.

"With a ThinkPad, you know it will last at least three years," Betanews was told. Majaupuro contended that Lenovo's PCs are so durable that he can stand on a ThinkPad notebook without breaking it.

Lenovo ThinkPad X201s super-lightweight portable powerhouse. Lenovo's new X201 and X201s ultramobile notebooks come with 12.1-inch, WVGA + LED backlit displays; multiple choices for HDD or SDD storage; Intel HD GPUs; built-in Bluetooth; and a 4- to 9-volt battery. WiMax and external optical drives are optionally available. Pricing starts at $1,199 for the X201 and $1,599 for the slightly lighter X201s (pictured right).

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 convertible notebook/tablet

Lenovo also unveiled a convertible tablet edition of the X201 (above). Features include a 12-inch capacitive multitouch screen; a wide angle screen for views of up to 185 degrees; a 2 megapixel camera; a fingerprint reader; dual microphones for canceling out background noise; and WiMAX, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The X201 Tablet is also expandable through up to 8 GB of memory, multiple USB ports; and a 54mm Express Card Slot for smart card readers, TV tuners, Firewire and other devices. Options for the convertible tablet include a super-bright outdoor screen and a DVD drive connection through Ultrabase or USB port.

Lenovo ThinkPad W701 portable workstation

Lenovo ThinkPad W701ds portable workstation Majapuro said that Lenovo's new W701 (above) and W701ds (left) 17-inch mobile workstations are tailored to engineers and other users of graphics-intensive application looking for desktop replacement machines that are portable between rooms in an office, or between the office and home. Both machines sport X-rite color calibration for color accuracy and Intel Core i7 processors with NVidia Quadro FX 2800 and 3800 Series GPUs.

Pointing to the W701ds, Majapuro showed a secondary, slideout 10.6-inch WXGA resolution screen for supplementary viewing.

Options available for both machines include X-rite color calibration for color accuracy and a built-in Wacom digitizer and pen, he said. Pricing begins at $2,199 for the W701 and $3,799 for the W701ds.

Lenovo's new low-cost TS200v server with Intel Core i3 processor. Although also very suitable for home networking, Lenovo's new T3200v ThinkServer is really aimed at small business, a target the PC maker expects to pursue some more with additional products over the next couple of years. The company's new TS200v server -- meant mainly for SMBs -- offers a choice of four 32 nm Intel Core CPUs including the new 2.13 GHz Core i3-350 with integrated graphics.

Small enough to fit under a desktop, the new server comes with a DVD drive; a single Gigabit Ethernet port; x16 and x1 PCI slots; ten USB ports; dual PCI slots; and VGA out. Equipped with space for two HDDs supporting RAID 0/1, the server supports unregistered DDR3 RAM through four expansion slots. The TS200v also comes with Intel Active Management Technology, for remote management whether the server is situated in a home office or a medical building, for instance. Pricing starts at under $400.

In the future, Lenovo plans to announce additional servers for SMBs, along with an all-in-one PC geared to enterprises, Majapuro told Betanews.

Android and iPhone smack down Windows Mobile

Publié: février 23, 2010, 6:12pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Worldwide, Windows Mobile smartphone operating system market share declined in 2009 to 8.7 percent from 11.8 percent a year later. Windows Phone 7 Series couldn't come soon enough -- if holiday 2009 could even be enough to hold back Apple's iPhone OS and Google Android.

The smartphone data comes from Gartner, which measures actual sales to customers rather than to carriers or dealers. By that reckoning, Windows Mobile sales only declined by 1.47 million units to around 15 million units year over year. By comparison, iPhone OS sales more than doubled -- to nearly 25 million units -- with share rise to 14.4 percent from 8.2 percent year over year. Android made significant gains -- and at the expense of other Linux-based smartphone operating systems, too -- with share rising from 0.5 percent in 2008 to 3.9 percent in 2009 on 6.8 million units shipped. Android made its biggest gains of the year during fourth quarter.

"Android's success experienced in the fourth quarter of 2009 should continue into 2010 as more manufacturers launch Android products," Roberta Cozza, Gartner principal research analyst, said in a statement.

Between 2008 and 2009, Android's smartphone market share increased by 680 percent, while unit sales rose by 961.4 percent. By comparison, Windows Mobile market share decreased by 26.27 percent and units sales fell by 8.9 percent. iPhone OS: 75.6 percent increase for share and 118 percent increase for unit sales. BlackBerry OS: 19.9 increase in market share and 48.4 percent for unit sales. Symbian: Market share declined by 10.5 percent, while unit sales rose by 10.9 percent.

Mobile phone sales reached 1.21 billion last year, 380 million during fourth quarter. Device sales were strongest at at the fringes -- smartphones and lower-cost handsets. Apple, Google and Research in Motion benefited from smartphone sales, while Nokia gained from cheaper and mid-tier handsets, particularly those selling into emerging markets.

"Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totaling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008," Carolina Milanesi, Gartner research director, said in a statment. "In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008." Milanesi noted that "smartphone-focused vendors" captured "market share from other larger device producers."

The only really good news for Microsoft is that Windows Mobile share stank but sales didn't reek. As aforementioned, Windows Mobile dramatically lost more market share than number of units shipped. Windows Mobile fell to No. 4 position from No. 3, replaced by iPhone, for smartphone OS share. Microsoft still has some footing for recovery, particularly as it up to Windows Phone 7 Series device releases. That said, Android and iPhone OS are rapidly rise stars, even as Windows Mobile's shine dims.

Mobiles 2009

Nokia remains the market share force for all other handset competitors to reckon with. While Nokia lost market share in 2009, prospects are much better for 2010. Symbian OS smartphone share dropped from 52.4 percent to 46.9 percent on an increase of about 8 million more handsets sold than 2008.

"Symbian had become uncompetitive in recent years, but its market share, particularly on Nokia devices, is still strong," Cozza said in a statement. "If Symbian can use this momentum, it could return to positive growth." Much depends on the operating system's first, truly open-source version, Symbian^3, which the Symbian Foundation announced during Mobile World Congress.

"Nokia will face a tough first half of 2010 as improvement to Symbian and new products based on the Meego platform will not reach the market well before the second half of 2010," Milanesi warned. "Its very strong mid-tier portfolio will help it hold market share, but its ongoing weakness at the high end of the portfolio will hurt its share of market value."

Smartphone OS 2009

Nokia stood out from nearly all other handset manufacturers during Mobile World Congress by not announcing a slew of new handsets. Still, Symbian^4 is expected to release by end of year. Both new Symbian versions will add functionality as much to mid-tier handsets as smartphones. Nokia sales may be weak in the United States, but they're strong in nearly every other region and across nearly every handset category.

I take a moment to focus on Nokia because of American blogger and journalist obsession with smartphones, particularly iPhone. In many regions of the wolrd, the cell phone is the first connected device that people own -- not a PC. In emerging markets, services like mobile money (and mobile banking) are transforming peoples' lives in meaningful ways. Application stores and touch-feely touchscreen features American bloggers and journalists coo so much about matter much less to people in emerging markets with more basic needs that a Symbian -- or even Android or Windows Mobile -- handset might better serve.

[Editor's Note: Paragraph inserted with percent change in smartphone OS market share and unit sales.]

Federal cybersecurity authority awaits break in Senate logjam

Publié: février 23, 2010, 5:57pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

One of President Obama's first priorities upon taking office was a comprehensive review, then considered urgent, of federal policies for maintaining Internet security. The report on that review, released last May, recommended further empowering the role of what was then being called the "cybersecurity czar," including the delegation of authority to lead emergency responses in case of an attack on Internet resources that threatened the national security.

Inactivity in enacting those recommendations was blamed for the resignation of Mr. Obama's first czar, Melissa Hathaway, last August. In December, a former security advisor to Pres. George W. Bush, Howard Schmidt, was confirmed to fill Hathaway's post.

That's assuming the post actually means anything or has any authority whatsoever. Last February 4, the House voted overwhelmingly 422 - 5 to pass its version of the cybersecurity act that would give Schmidt the authority recommended in the review that Hathaway led.

But this morning, the Congressional news service The Hill reports, the Senate's version of the same bill -- despite bipartisan sponsorship from Sen. John Rockefeller (D - W.V.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R - Maine) -- now appears on a list of 290 House-originated bills stalled in the Senate.

The reason: An ongoing showdown over health care legislation has apparently created a situation not only where Senate Republicans are unwilling to publicly show support for any administration-backed proposal, or even judicial nomination, but also where Senate Democrats are unwilling to show signs of compromise for fear of empowering the opposition.

Now, The Hill cites House Democratic leaders as blaming Senate Democratic leaders for the logjam. For instance, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D - S.C.) likened Senate leadership (indirectly including Harry Reid (D - Nevada), the Senate Majority Leader), fairly or unfairly, to the British House of Lords -- a legislative body that is perennially seen as out of touch with the common person.

Signs of a possible thaw came yesterday as the Senate voted 62-30 in favor of legislation for creating and protecting jobs, believed to have been the President's #2 legislative priority this year. Voting in favor, ironically, was newly minted Sen. Scott Brown (R - Mass.), the man who campaigned for Ted Kennedy's old seat by declaring himself "#41" -- the one Republican vote necessary to stop cloture votes and maintain debate indefinitely.

Still, whether an authoritative federal agency in charge of cybersecurity -- a concept not only currently supported by House Republicans, but even created by some of them during their leadership of that body years ago -- can be established this year may depend on how the Senate handles the proceedings in the publicly televised health care reform debate, currently slated to begin Thursday.

In the meantime, it has been left to the Federal Trade Commission to send letters to several dozen organizations this month, the FTC announced yesterday, that their private documents were discovered in an investigation of files publicly shared through P2P file trading networks. The names of organizations contacted have not been released, however, the FTC says that private entities, including local governments, were among those notified. Normally, the FTC -- the "T" in whose name stands for "Trade" -- would not be notifying a school or municipal authority about its public conduct; and in fact, the FTC may have no authority in enforcing any of the recommendations it gave to non-private entities.

A sample of the version of the letter the Commission sent to schools and public agencies (PDF available here) reads in part, "The FTC recommends that you identify the students, employees, and others whose information has been exposed by taking appropriate steps to determine which of your files have been shared to P2P networks. You should also consider whether to notify them -- and any law enforcement agencies and credit bureaus -- about the exposure."

PGP security gets Linux and Win7 support, plus more encryption

Publié: février 23, 2010, 12:59am CET par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

PGP logo After rolling out the first Linux edition of its desktop encryption security software last month -- together with new support for the latest versions of Windows and Mac -- PGP Corp. on Monday announced major server updates that will let PGP be managed alongside myriad other approaches to encryption.

Released on January 19, the new PGP Desktop 10.0 product brings new support for Windows 7, MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and two flavors of Linux: Ubuntu and Red Hat. The software also works on Windows Vista, XP, and 2000, earlier editions of Mac OS, and Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones, said Karthik Krishnan, senior director of product management, in a briefing for Betanews.

Version 10 also adds greater ease of use and new capabilities not provided by the Bitlocker feature in Windows 7 and Vista, for instance, according to Krishnan. For example, if you lose your encryption password, you can now retrieve it by successfully answering Q&A challenges incorporated into the desktop software.

PGP 10 can be used either with or without two new server products -- PGP Universal Server 3 and PGP Key Management Server 3 -- slated for availability from PGP Corp. on March 3.

PGP Corp. bought the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) code base and name from Network Associates back in 2002. Initially written in 1991, PGP was available as freeware, and widely used on bulletin boards, prior to its productization.

Beyond adding support for PGP 10's new platforms and feature, the new Universal Server 3 adds the ability to manage encryption policies while users are offline.

In addition, for purposes of regulatory compliance, administrators can now give Encrypt and Sign buttons to business users who need to prove that they've digitally signed documents.

New in the Key Management Server is centralized support for PGP, along with other encryption technologies such as KMIP, OPAL, IEEE 1619.3, and PKCS 11 -- and security certificates for SSL, VPNs, and wireless networks, according to Brian Tokuyoshi, product marketing management.

The development of Key Management Server 3 comes hot on the heels of PGP Corp.'s acquisition of TC Trust Center -- a specialist in PKI (Public Key Infrastructure encryption -- and its parent company Chosen Security on February 2.

Krishnan acknowledged that PGP and PKI were once seen by many as competing encryption technologies. But, he added, PGP Corp. views the two as complementary, with PGP working under a peer-to-peer trust model and PKI supporting a "hierarchical, infrastructure-based model."

By and large, PGP's server software is geared to large enterprises rather than small to medium businesses, according to Krishnan. But smaller businesses can purchase full-scale cloud-based encryption services either through PGP Corp.'s partners or through TC Trust Center directly.

What does Google gain from having purchased On2?

Publié: février 23, 2010, 12:48am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

At the end of business last Friday, Google announced it had completed the transaction to acquire On2 Technologies, the maker of Web video encoding software and codecs, for a deal that was finally valued at $124.6 million. On2 was a small company that was, in recent quarters, losing small amounts of money. It was attempting to become lucrative at some point through the licensing of a new generation of its VPx codec platform, called VP8 announced way back in the fall of 2008. Customers were supposed to have included Move Networks and Skype.

It's the type of business model that only a small startup company could profit from to any significant degree; and it's the type of model that normally a huge company the size of Google would only purchase in order to shut down, perhaps to disable a competitor. But none of the usually suspected motives for a major player acquiring a minor provider make immediate sense when applied to Google and On2.

Perhaps that's why when the Free Software Foundation on Friday posted an open letter to Google urging the company to completely give away the crown jewel of On2's portfolio, VP8, to the free and open source community, that solution seemed about as plausible as anything else on the table. Why would Google make such a move? As the FSF describes it, to promote a single, ubiquitous standard that could end the Web's reliance upon Flash, Adobe's proprietary streaming platform that powers Google's YouTube.

"Because patent-encumbered formats were costly to incorporate into browsers, a bloated, ill-suited piece of proprietary software (Flash) became the de facto standard for online video. Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation -- including you," writes the FSF. "You can use your purchase of On2 merely as a bargaining chip to achieve your own private solution to the problem, but that's both a cop-out and a strategic mistake. Without making VP8 a free format, it's just another video codec. And what use is another video format with patent-limited browser support?"

On2 Technologies created this comparison between its own VP8 codec and H.264.

On2 Technologies created this comparison between its own VP8 codec and H.264.

The problem is, it's of some use. Although Flash is a technology that does belong to Adobe, Google is actually in a good position to continue using it for some time to come, with all the benefits coming to it directly. Reportedly Google has already paid Adobe a one-time license fee for perpetual rights to the encoding; and since YouTube uses HTTP progressive streaming rather than the RTMP streaming protocol maintained by the Open Screen Project, it doesn't owe a license fee for using a Web standard. Meanwhile, one of the leading manufacturers of Flix encoding software for VP6 -- one of the codecs Flash has supported since version 8 -- is On2, so conceivably there's a little revenue to be made from perpetuating the VPx platform just as it is.

Back in August 2008, just as On2 was announcing VP8 for the first time, its executives convened a conference call with analysts (transcribed by Seeking Alpha). It was there that the company offered the first clues as to what it was really trying to build, going beyond the relatively low-profit licensing model of its chief competitor, the MPEG Licensing Authority, which manages H.264.

As acting CEO Matt Frost told analysts at the time, "We have licensing flexibility that the MPEG LA doesn't. If you want to license H.264, there's one licensing model and if you try to negotiate for a different licensing model, you're not going to get it. With On2, we are partnered with many different people using video applications and we're very open to different licensing structures with them, and it's something that many of our biggest customers have found particularly attractive about us."

On2 expected VP8 to compete against H.264 for the rest of its existence, Frost went on, but the company would not limit itself to licensing on a typical, annual basis as does MPEG LA. Frost wasn't looking to advance Web standards here: He was making a play for video systems manufacturers, companies like Vizio and Panasonic that are integrating Internet video into HDTVs. It doesn't make sense to apply an annual royalty model to a more wholesale business.

So when Broadcasting & Cable found On2 the very next month demonstrating at a major video manufacturers' conference, it wasn't with the idea of competing with Flash on YouTube. On2, remember, had an interest in Flash on YouTube. Instead, it was demonstrating a service, along with Move Networks, for potential customers such as Disney and NBC Universal to stream not-so-high-definition content onto set-top boxes and built-in program guides -- a way for content studios to advertise their content directly in TV sets.

Maybe On2 as a company wasn't going anywhere in the past few years, but that doesn't necessarily mean On2's technology was a bad idea. Anyone who's noticed Vizio's Forge product line commercial during NBC's Olympics coverage in recent days (you know, the one your wife or girlfriend warns you about because it starts with Beyoncé in a short, red dress) knows that the selling point for high-end HDTVs these days is functionality. Internet apps are delivering a new class of functionality to HDTVs, and there's a lucrative new market in the platforms for that functionality.

So maybe giving away VP8 would help Google score some points with Web browser fans; but we may be looking in the wrong category for clues as to Google's reasoning here. It may not care about VP8 as a PC/netbook/smartphone Web codec at all, and could conceivably continue to promote H.264 as the HTML5 codec of choice as long as it wishes. Google's chance at a platform play could have nothing to do with the Web at all. Problem is, giving away VP8 to the Web would mean giving it away everywhere, and that's something that looks less and less likely, the more you consider the viability of VP8 outside the Web.

Overcast, or, How I learned to stop whining and embrace the cloud

Publié: février 23, 2010, 12:46am CET par Carmi Levy

It's one of the most predictable responses in all of tech: Every time there's a blowup over some online service's privacy or data security lapses, if you stick your head out the window and focus yourself just so, you can hear the rumble in the distance as naysayers happily share their told-you-so stories of woe.

Without your even asking, they'll go into excruciating detail over how cloud-based services aren't ready for prime time and probably never will be. They'll tell you how distrustful Web services vendors are, how they view our confidential data as means to a profitable end, and how only an idiot would move off of conventional network-controlled infrastructure and throw every shred of personally identifiable data into the nebulous clutches of an unseen service provider.

By the time they get to the part where they swear they'll never run anything that isn't installed on a server that they physically control, I'm just about ready to run for the exits.

There's no going back

I've been hearing a lot of this over the last few months. First when Facebook's latest privacy faux-pas earned it the undying attention of Canada's Privacy Commissioner, and last week following the firestorm of disapproval that followed the Google Buzz launch. And as much as I believe companies like Facebook and Google need to be held accountable for their too-loose interpretations of confidentiality and privacy, I'm similarly adamant that the cloud don't-wanna-bes are howling senselessly at the moon.

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) A little history might help make this a little easier to take. A cloud-free existence is as impossible to imagine today as a phone-free one was in the '70s, a PC or fax-free one in the '90s, or an Internet-free life for much of the past 15 years. Like it or not, the cloud -- or Web-based services, or software-as-a-service, or whatever else you want to call it -- is here to stay, and anyone who sanctimoniously opts out amid claims of never, ever moving over is in for a rude awakening.

That's because, despite the still-significant issues surrounding the transition of applications from locally installed, owned, and administered infrastructure to a decentralized model that's controlled by a provider other than you or your company, the cat is already out of the bag and it won't be getting back in anytime soon. Make that at all. When we go online in any capacity -- even reading a site like Betanews and leaving a comment -- we're buying into the cloud-based paradigm where we leave footprints far outside our firewall and far beyond our own ability to control them.

If only it were so simple that anyone who wanted to opt out of a cloudy existence could flip a switch and make it happen. Sadly for these Luddites of the Web Age, it isn't. If they were to successfully take their opposition to all things cloud-based to its ultimate conclusion, they'd miss out on pretty much every form of online interaction that increasingly drives our personal and professional lives.

With that in mind, if you find yourself among the cloud-hating minority, here's what you'd miss out if you decide to fully cut the Web services chord and revert to a locally-hosted and controlled way of life:

E-mail. That message you just sent your mom? As soon as it leaves your cozy network, it's in the cloud, touching servers near and far, going places you couldn't even begin to imagine. E-mail was the first and still is arguably most widely used cloud-based app. I'd like to suggest dusting off that old fax machine and calling a paper supplier.
Web browsing. When we go online, we leave traces of ourselves virtually everywhere we go. We don't even have to deliberately leave a comment, either. That pesky little IP address of yours gets logged into every Web site you visit. With it, the server owner can find out a whole lot about you. The cloud strikes again, apparently. I hear broadcast television (which you're going to be watching extensively after you remove all traces of Web activity from your day-to-day existence) is still somewhat interesting once the infomercials are over.
Text messaging. That cell phone in your pocket isn't immune to the influence of the cloud, either. Few online services are as easy for carriers to track as SMS-based messages. So when you fling your girlfriend a text that you're picking milk up on the way home, you're buying into the cloud. Now that I think of it, even a voice call kind of qualifies, so you may as well pitch your cell phone or smartphone entirely. To ensure you're not out of touch, stock up on quarters and hope Ma Bell doesn't yank every last pay phone from your favorite haunts.

Thunder cloud (Photo credit: Carmi Levy)

Insert tongue firmly in cheek

I realize I'm being more than a little ridiculous. But sometimes it takes one form of silliness to expose another. Our interconnected online economy practically compels us all to give up some personal information to a third party at some point in time. No, we don't all have to join Facebook, and we can buy and install Outlook and Exchange on our own machines instead of farming our messaging service out to Google. But at some point, the strategy of limiting exposure to online services and holding on to as much physical ownership of applications and data as possible simply runs out of steam. Eventually, your data's going to have to leave the nest, venture outside the firewall, and land on a server that you do not own.

Taking the high (and mighty) road of cloud-refusal ignores the growing reality that standalone solutions relegate those who use them to a standalone existence. While it's entirely possible that someone could unplug and live an idyllic life off the grid, it's infinitely more likely that this is little more than a pipe dream for most of us. The Internet as a whole is one giant cloud-based service. We can no more easily turn it off than we can learn to live without telephones. The world relies too heavily on this interconnected technology, and our ability to build careers and connect with the people who matter most increasingly relies on it, too.

Photo credit: Carmi Levy

Email phishes for Windows Live IDs and passwords

Publié: février 22, 2010, 10:32pm CET par Joe Wilcox

The flu pretty much wiped out most of last week, which is just a blur to me. This morning, I started catching up on email and found a real frakker in my Windows Live Hotmail inbox. Someone wants to steal my Windows Live ID and password -- and probably yours, too. The message is dated Feb. 22, 2010.

The email caught my attention for several reasons: 1) Windows Live Hotmail didn't flag the message as junk or suspicious; 2) The apparent originating address -- "communications@microsoft.windowslive.com" -- seems legit enough; 3) Sender is "Windows Live Team"; 4) The email effectively uses threats and cajoling.

I know that phishing emails are common enough for me not to single this one out. But, hey, I'm catch-up blogging and concerned someone else will get suckered to cough up their credentials. The email might have slipped through Windows Live Hotmail security checks because there cleverly are no links. It's an old school phishing attack. Instead of sending the user to a Website to enter in credentials -- surely something Microsoft would catch -- the information is given via reply email.

By the way, you don't want to lose your Windows Live ID. Have you ever tried to cancel one? It's not desperately difficult for one simply attached to Hotmail. But once Microsoft has your credit card on file and attached to several paid services, the process gets tough. Last time I tried to cancel a Windows Live ID, three different Microsoft reps insisted I independently cancel Xbox Live and Zune subscription services first because a credit card number was attached to them. Imagine criminals controlling your ID and perhaps purchasing "points" at your expense -- among other nefarious activities -- all while you struggle to cancel or suspend the account. If faced with that situation, I would report a terms of service violation, which might get faster response.

Having been sick with the flu, I laughed at the phishing email's "We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail/Live accounts" as justification for demanding ID and password. Full text of the email:

Are you protected?
Dear Account User,
This Email is from Hotmail/Live Customer Care and we are sending it to every Email User Accounts Owner for safety. We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail/Live accounts so we are shutting down some Hotmail/Live accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.
We also noticed a violation use of your account and if you think you have not violated the Terms and Condition of Hotmail/Live, please verify below with information requested
You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 48 hours for security reasons.
Username: ...............................

Password: ................................

Date of Birth: ............................

Country Or Territory: .................
After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.
Warning: Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Sincerely,
The Windows Live Hotmail/Live Team.

Just a reminder: Microsoft will never ask for your password in an email, nor would just about any other responsible service. Passwords should never be sent by email. I would have to check with Microsoft about whether information sent via Windows Live Hotmail is in the clear -- another reason not to send any confidential information via email. Windows Live log-in is https but my Hotmail page link is http, suggesting no encrypted connection. By comparison, Gmail is now https, a change Google made after the recent Chinese hacks.

I have to ask: Anyone else out there get this e-mail or something like it?

Technologist accused of spreading Vista, Win7 FUD wasn't a real person

Publié: février 22, 2010, 9:54pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Normally, Betanews doesn't like to do "inside baseball" stories, that deal with the individuals in the technology journalism business and all the insights as to "how the sausage is made." I'll try to make this one as painless as possible, but it needs to be done, because the individual involved had been cited by me in Betanews stories in the past.

Yesterday morning, ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan revealed the results of research showing that a blogger for IDG publications, and the CTO of a testing and research firm cited by that blogger, were actually the same person. Blogger Randall C. Kennedy, a trusted InfoWorld contributor up until yesterday, was Devil Mountain Software Chief Technology Officer "Craig Barth," the author of reports over the years claiming that Windows Vista performance was slower than Windows XP, and recently that Windows 7 performance was slower than Windows Vista.

The admission was admirably acknowledged on InfoWorld yesterday by its editor-in-chief, Eric Knorr: "Integrity and honesty are core to InfoWorld's mission of service to IT professionals, and we view Kennedy's actions as a serious breach of trust." Though Knorr states Kennedy's blog was removed from the site, past posts including a handful to which Dignan linked were left visible for public scrutiny. They show Kennedy referring to Barth, Devil Mountain, or Devil Mountain's "laboratory" exo.performance.network as though it were an outside source.

In his blog post, Dignan states that his research was only able to turn up a quote from Barth in one other publication besides IDG's. That publication was probably us, and the guy citing him was probably me.

You should know that the Betanews article in question, published November 27, 2007, was a critical examination of "Barth's" research methodology. His report purportedly showed that Microsoft Office performance was much slower under Windows Vista than Windows XP. In examining the research, I discovered that "Barth" was using Office 2007 on Vista, versus Office 2003 on XP. Amid an outpouring of complaints (which actually began prior to Betanews' report), "Barth" re-tested Office performance using Office 2003 on both operating systems, and admitted the performance gap was not as wide as originally claimed.

That was the subject of that November 2007 story; and as long-time Betanews readers should recall, I've often disassembled research reports that draw an extremely favorable or extremely unfavorable conclusion about a product or service.

Betanews' second run-in with Kennedy (which we only realized was the second incident just this morning) came just last August. In our story about a CHKDSK- triggered memory leak in Windows 7 discovered by an independent researcher (not Kennedy, not "Barth"), it was Kennedy who grabbed attention by characterizing the bug as a "showstopper," and saying it threatened to postpone the then-pending launch of Windows 7.

"Oh boy!" Kennedy's post began, as though he were licking his lips. "It appears that Microsoft's glowing track record with Windows 7 is about to come to an abrupt and unceremonious end."

As I and many of my colleagues know from experience, even late-discovered bugs in Windows and other major software can be addressed by way of hot-fixes downloaded during the setup process. Microsoft confirmed my prediction that this is how it would handle the problem, and then pointed me to a blog post by company president Steven Sinofsky, who sufficiently diffused the issue. As it turned out, no show was stopped whatsoever, the CHKDSK bug was addressed in time, and few other people were ever bothered by it.

Among the first to spot deficiencies in Devil Mountain Software's research were Betanews readers. As reader HBX, a beta tester of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, wrote in December 2007, "I'm running SP1, and I agree it's a substantial improvement across the board. Everything seems much quicker, and transitions are faster within vista. I've also tested SP3 for XP and I can tell you this: I don't know where Devil Mountain got [its] numbers, but I've test both SP1 and SP3 against each other on the same hardware, and sorry to say it, but Devil Mountain is spreading FUD."

Unfortunately, over the past three years, Kennedy used both of his identities simultaneously, apparently leveraging his Kennedy identity to substantiate his "Barth" identity. In so doing, he successfully duped a handful of reputable and honorable journalists and editors. Only a few hours after Dignan's expose did Kennedy change his story in an e-mail to a frequent contact of his, ComputerWorld reporter Gregg Keizer.

As Keizer cited from Kennedy's e-mail: "The individual Craig Barth doesn't exist. It's a pseudonym I created a decade ago while writing news copy for Windows NT Magazine. I resurrected it a few years back in an effort to separate my sometimes controversial editorial contributions to InfoWorld from the hard research content I was developing as part of Devil Mountain Software."

In the latest and perhaps saddest turn in this story, Kennedy appears to be capitalizing on his newfound infamy, perhaps as publicity for his research firm, whose list of contributors now bears Kennedy's name rather than "Barth's." In a response to Dignan yesterday, Kennedy not only accused his editors at IDG of complicity, but of actually creating a kind of false Randall Kennedy identity, in an effort, he claimed, to build a kind of "shock jock persona" capable of garnering millions of page views without being answerable to the publisher.

However, while he admitted to leading Keizer on, at the same time, he blamed Keizer for his ability to be misled: "Poor Gregg Keizer -- hey, the man was looking for an anti-Microsoft angle at every turn, and he let his zeal get the best of him. I honestly never meant any harm, especially to Gregg." Then finally, perhaps caught up in a climax of excitement, a few hours ago, Kennedy posted an "Editorial" on the blog that used to host "Barth," claiming that the entire revelation of his false identity was orchestrated by Microsoft, perhaps in an effort to divert public attention away from some hidden, dark truth.

"It was our research into Windows 7 performance that prompted Microsoft to call in its chips," either Kennedy or "Barth" wrote, speaking apparently on behalf of both. "And call them in it did, instructing its media cronies to silence me by dragging my name through the mud and casting doubt about what is by any measure a very successful professional history."

Larry Dignan has done the world a good service by exposing this individual's duplicity, and Gregg Keizer -- another honorable journalist -- has done well by coming clean and apologizing for an oversight that was made by many other reputable reporters as well.

Kennedy's defense is that, while he himself may have been untrue to the world, his data was not. That defense would never hold up in court. But it's also not even correct: As I discovered -- as it turns out, on two occasions -- his observations and his conclusions were flawed as well. I'm a little embarrassed to discover that two of the examples I often used to demonstrate Betanews' propensity for debunking mythical claims, even in the same sentence, were actually very directly related. That's one connection I missed.

The man's personal problems are perhaps more appropriate for discussion in a psychology publication. If we as journalists and professionals can learn anything applicable to our business from this latest flameout, it's this: At this level, we're expected by our readers to be more than just conveyors of data that somebody else assembled, produced, and pre-digested for our convenience. It's sometimes way too tempting to take somebody else's pre-packaged, extreme conclusions and analyses, complete with suggested headlines for Google News consumption, and run them as-is -- proof positive that the world will end next week, that Obama was born in Uzbekistan, or that Windows 7 is a conspiracy to make the world run slower. More so now than ever, everything we're handed on a silver plate -- everything -- needs to be inspected with a microscope before being passed onto the public as the truth. We need to be the security screeners for the world's facts.

If Wal-Mart buys Vudu, will the adult content go away?

Publié: février 22, 2010, 9:31pm CET par Tim Conneally

Wal-Mart is in the process of acquiring streaming video service Vudu, The New York Times reports today. An unnamed source said the two companies have begun telling Hollywood studios about the deal. No details have yet been disclosed to the public.

Vudu has had its own streaming HD video products available for a little more than two and a half years, and has gradually moved away from a hardware-centric service to something more akin to Netflix, where its platform is the core of the business.

This year, Vudu's HD on-demand movie service has been embedded in TVs and connected media players from major consumer electronics makers such as Mitsubishi, LG, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, and Vizio.

Among its competitors Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon, Vudu has the dubious distinction of being the only major digital streaming service to offer adult entertainment through its partnership with the AVN network.

This may cause issues since Wal-Mart is well-known for carrying "clean" versions of much of its disc-based music and movies, and this has extended to the download market.

The store's policy says: "Occasionally, Wal-Mart may refuse to stock music merchandise that may not seem appropriate. However, Wal-Mart may carry some recordings that some customers might find offensive, indecent, or objectionable. Parents are always encouraged to review the merchandise their children purchase from Wal-Mart to ensure it meets their own standards."

We've sent inquiries to both companies and will hopefully learn a little bit more today.

UPDATE- Wal-Mart has officially announced the acquisition, saying it expects it to be completed in the next few weeks. The financial terms, however, were not released.

Edward Lichty, VUDU's executive vice president said, "We are excited about the opportunity to take our company's vision to the next level. VUDU's services and Apps platform will give Wal-mart a powerful new vehicle to offer customers the content they want in a way that expands the frontier of quality, value and convenience."

IE6 isn't on the ballot: Will March 1 Windows update kick IE6 out for good?

Publié: février 22, 2010, 5:07pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

A screenshot of the first public beta of Microsoft's browser ballot for European Windows users. One of the more obvious, but little mentioned, facts about the upcoming Windows Web browser "choice screen," to be rolled out to European users via Windows Update March 1, is the absence of one very important choice: sticking with the old version of Microsoft Internet Explorer they may currently be using.

The "choice screen," as the European Commission now refers to it, will only be displayed for users who have IE7 or IE6 as their default Web browser. While they may choose Internet Explorer from this ballot, it explicitly offers version the latest version 8. The only upgrade procrastination option the ballot gives, based on snapshots of the first public beta, is a button in the lower left corner marked, "Select Later." The next time the user boots her computer, the choice screen reappears.

Over the past few years, one of Web developers' chief complaints is that IE6 was simultaneously one of the most successfully deployed, and least standards compliant, browsers ever made. Efforts at convincing users to willingly upgrade to a version that Web servers no longer have to "talk down to," have only seen success in recent months. The latest live running tally from NetApplications shows usage share for IE6 finally having dropped below that of IE8, though with as many as one fifth of the world's browsers that interact with servers NetApplications tracks, announcing themselves as IE6.

If fewer of the world's browsers were IE6, the argument goes, developers would have fewer excuses to delay adoption of methods created long ago to render pages, such as CSS and AJAX.

But legitimate -- or at least, legitimate sounding -- reasons may exist why businesses have chosen not to upgrade beyond IE6. Prior to last year's Windows Update-based IE8 push, which was classified by Microsoft as "Important," one of the most urgently asked questions among IT department workers was, "How can we block it?" That prompted Microsoft to release an IE8 blocker toolkit in December 2008, to help administrators prevent users on their networks from installing IE8 without their guidance -- or simply to keep users from changing their systems.

FOR MORE:

Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands by Esther Schindler, IT Expert Voice, February 20, 2010
Internet Explorer 8 Blocker Toollkit: Frequently Asked Questions. Published December 2008 on Microsoft TechNet.
Google: Phase-out of IE6 support will remain limited to Google Apps by Scott Fulton

The fascinating reasons why some of the world's businesses have been unable -- not even unwilling, just unable -- to upgrade even to IE7, was the subject of an IT Expert Voice investigation published Saturday by my friend and colleague, Esther Schindler.

While simple procrastination was the reason many small businesses avoid upgrading, according to independent consultants Esther spoke with, many larger enterprises have been stuck not only with IE6 but with Windows XP and/or Windows 2000, mainly because the Web applications upon which their businesses depend, have not been upgraded and perhaps may never be upgraded. In some cases, Web apps such as Siebel CRM (distributed by Oracle) began supporting IE7 in early 2008. That may very well have been when Siebel's clients began the migration process, but the actual software-changing element of that process for one client Esther spoke with, is only beginning now.

Another problem she encountered among enterprise-level IT is the lack of backward compatibility in Web apps that have been upgraded for IE7 and IE8 -- an absolute necessity for organizations whose business, ironically, is to help other clients manage their systems. As one IT chief named John told Esther, "For example, SAP's own portal site doesn't work right in IE8. So if we roll out Windows 7, our developers won't be able to request developer keys etc. and so won't be able to work...I'm sure time will resolve these issues but in the meantime we are stuck on XP and IE6/7."

For European enterprises, that logjam will not be broken by the rollout of the choice screen, which will not break Siebel's or Lotus' or SAP's dependence on older browsers. So admins may end up deploying the methodologies offered by that IE8 Blocker Toolkit, to postpone inopportune progress once again.

Apple's problem with Flash is mobile applications competition

Publié: février 19, 2010, 7:44pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Apple CEO Steve Jobs wants publishers to support iPad, but not with Adobe Flash. Jobs' anti-Flash campaign has grown bolder since the company announced iPad last month and during this week's Mobile World Congress, where Flash 10.1 inched a little close to widespread mobile device availability. What's Apple's problem with Flash? Simply put: Competition.

Apple wants to control the entire mobile applications stack. The App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform, which will soon include iPad, is a closed stack that Apple tightly controls. For developers, it's Apple's way or no way. But Apple could conceivably lose control of the stack -- most importantly the applications and their user experience -- should Flash run free and unfettered on iPhone OS devices.

Why Apple Disses Flash

As Adobe readies Flash for most every mobile platform -- other than Apple's, of course -- and publishers ask what about Flash on iPad, Jobs and Co. have responded by slandering Flash's reputation: Flash is too buggy, or iPad battery life would be 1.5 hours instead of 10 if running Flash. Flash slandering shifts the debate away from why Apple won't allow Flash on iPhone OS devices to why Apple supposedly protects customers by holding back the Adobe technology. It's the clever kind of counter marketing Apple excels at (Just watch most any "Get a Mac" commercial).

Apple's Flash slandering obscures the real reason for resisting the technology. Because of Flash's huge video success, too many people look at the technology in that context for iPhone OS devices. Long before Flash became the most common way of delivering video over the Web, developers used it to create applications -- and they still do today. Flash is a rival development platform, and one Apple doesn't control. If Apple lets Flash roam iPhone OS devices, uncaged and free, developers can create applications that bypass the App Store. By keeping out Flash, Apple:

Maintains tight control over the user experience
Avoids competition with a major third-party application platform
Keeps user interface fairly consistent across different iPhone OS applications
Ensures App Store remains iPhone's primary application development and delivery platform

Apple's problem with Flash is competition. The company doesn't want any. Hence the anti-Flash campaign now under way. The Flash slandering will only increase as Jobs courts more content publishers for iPad and Flash becomes widely available on every other mobile device.

There are Other Reasons

Of course, there is a secondary reason for all this campaigning to, ah, dim the Flash: Apple-Adobe rivalry. With the notable exception of PDF, Apple competes with Adobe in most of the same content-creation categories. That was by choice. Apple chose to compete with this major, long-time Mac supporting developer.

Something else: Contrary to commonly held convention, Apple's iPhone OS device strategy is not about the mobile Web. Apple seeks to establish iPhone OS devices as alternatives to the mobile Web. The mobile Web is all about the browser. The first iPhone was about the browser, but all that changed with App Store, which channels content consumption (or creation) away from the browser into application containers of disparate and discreet functions. "There's an app for that" -- Apple's well-known marketing slogan -- means that people work within separate applications; separately from one another since background operations are restricted or prohibited.

Apple wants any video capabilities to occur within these applications, using its technologies and the H.264 codec. Apple has worked around Flash, rather than support it, by iPhone's YouTube implementation. Jobs wants iPad publishers to work around Flash, too, by supporting H.264 streaming instead of Flash. The publisher controls the user experience (on Apple's terms, of course) with the application either way. The bigger benefit goes to Apple, which keeps out a rival development platform.

HTML5: Backdoor Lover

What I find fascinating is the backdoor Apple opened to yet another rival development platform: HTML5. Apple offers partial HTML5 support in its desktop and mobile Safari browsers, and the company has touted the advantages for video streaming without Flash. Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it, too, as the saying goes: Video streaming without the platform development competition.

But HTML5 support is hugely risky. Last year, at GigaOM, Alistair Croll asked the same question I did: "Will HTML5 break Apple's stronghold on apps?" Google has answered with a resounding "Yes." In 2009, Apple (or was it AT&T -- or both) refused to accept Google Voice in the App Store. In January, Google responded by releasing Google Voice for iPhone as an HTML5 app running in Safari. Last week, when launching Buzz, Google released an HTML5 mobile version for Android 2.x and iPhone 3.x devices. No Apple App Store approval process required.

Apple should be more concerned about Google. As I will explain in a subsequent blog post, the mobile Internet is diverging along two paths: Discreet applications and the mobile Web browser. Apple strongly advocates applications, which benefit its closed App Store/iPhone OS device platform. Google is pushing the browser for consuming services or running HTML5-based apps (even while supporting mobile apps in the Android Marketplace). Microsoft also is taking a hybrid mobile Web browser/applications approach with Windows Phone 7 Series. Nokia favors browser and widgets more than discreet applications, which are more open on Symbian^3, Maemo or MeeGo, like Google's Android.

Competition is in inevitable. It's the nature of things. Life on earth is about living things competing for survival -- something that transfers to the things humans create. Apple may try to shut out Flash as a rival development platform to App Store/iPhone OS devices, only to see HTML5 take its place. Google is a much bigger problem for Apple than Adobe ever could be.

Steve Jobs responded to Flash competition with words -- anti-Flash marketing that came out of his mouth and which blogs and news sites candidly reported, all without him providing substantive evidence to back up the claims. How will Apple handle Google or try to close that HTML5 backdoor? The answer may be soon coming.

PleaseRobMe wants to turn its Foursquare jab into a real security operation

Publié: février 19, 2010, 7:43pm CET par Tim Conneally

This week, Dutch group Forthehack launched PleaseRobMe, a site meant to expose the danger of location-based social networks such as Foursquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, and Google Buzz. Basically, PleaseRobMe says that every time someone posts his location in a location-based social network, that person is publicly announcing that he is not home, which could be taken to mean, no one is home.

To illustrate the point, PleaseRobMe rephrases public Foursquare posts to say, "@Username left home and checked in X minutes ago..." and then presents that person's current map location in a Twitter alert.

"Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome," the site's description says. "The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not...home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the Internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have 'friends' who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address...on the Internet..."

Naturally, the site gathered instant attention for its approach. Some called it totally irresponsible, while others agreed that it does show how careless some users can be with oversharing information.

Foursquare responded to the commotion caused by PleaseRobMe by saying, "The truth is, you could make something like this without using foursquare at all. Just try searching Twitter for the words 'headed to'...and you'll start to scratch the surface on all the location data a lot of us push into the internets, perhaps even without thinking about it.

"Anyway, we definitely 'get' the larger issue here -- location is sensitive data and people should be careful about with whom and when they share it," the company's blog said. "And at foursquare, we do everything we can to make sure that our users know with what people and social sites they are sharing their location with."

So little has changed for Foursquare, but PleaseRobMe is trying to turn its sarcastic jab at location-aware social networks into an actual security operation.

The site now leads with a blurb that reads: "We want to offer this Web site to a professional foundation, agency, or company that focuses on raising awareness, helping people understand and provide answers to online privacy related issues. If you're such a foundation, agency, or company, contact us."

You could call it fearmongering, but such a service may be necessary as more so-called "n00bs" adopt location-revealing technology.

Now that everybody and her grandmother is on Facebook, we can see just how clueless and vulnerable many tech-disinclined people are.

Last week, hundreds of Facebook users who type "Facebook" into their Google search bar rather than use the URL in the address bar were routed to a ReadWriteWeb article instead of Facebook when Google temporarily shuffled the search rankings. What followed is one of the most tragically hilarious comment threads of all time.

After reading it, you start to wonder if Foursquare couldn't eventually have posts from helpless users saying things like: "I'm walking unaccompanied down a dark alley with a pocket full of cash."

The problem with status updates and social location sharing is that privacy is incumbent upon the user, and many aren't capable of handling that responsibility. Foursquare's comments yesterday said "Foursquare only knows where you are when you decide to tell us (by checking-in)."

In this way, each post a user makes is a waiver of his privacy, fully left up to his discretion. This means that everything a user does not post is meant to be private. But the problem occurs when users post very frequently. When a user waives his privacy by default, he can become a target not for what he says, but for what he leaves out and deems "private."

Through simple deduction, an observer can watch for gaps in the user's content stream and learn when he's doing something he doesn't want to share with the public.

Settlement in benchmark case means FOSS licenses can be enforced

Publié: février 19, 2010, 6:49pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

There will be no further legal action in a case whose outcome was already upheld in August 2008 by a US appeals court. As a result, legal precedent has now been made permanent for the right of open source software developers to seek monetary damages for infringement of their copyrights, even if their products were being distributed freely.

Settlement documents in the case of Jacobsen v. Katzer were filed early this morning in US District Court in Northern California, as Linux Foundation attorney Andrew Updegrove informed Betanews just hours later. A pending appeal of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling last August is now terminated. In the judgment that was being appealed, the Circuit panel ruled that the right to declare software free, could be given monetary value: "There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties," that court ruled. "For example, program creators may generate market share for their programs by providing certain components free of charge. Similarly, a programmer or company may increase its national or international reputation by incubating open source projects. Improvement to a product can come rapidly and free of charge from an expert not even known to the copyright holder."

The case itself was somewhat simple: Model railroad software developer Robert Jacobsen discovered that a commercial railroad parts maker was using his software without his permission, his license, or his original copyright attached. The point of contention had been whether the copyright that protects open source software is entitled to the same monetary evaluation as the copyright for commercial software. It was a fair question, since judgments in commercial software copyright violation cases are typically evaluated based on how much revenue the software would have earned in a normal market, had copyright not been violated.

Knowing that the Appeals Court had decided open source software was entitled to something, the remaining question was, how much? Rather than leave that for a judge or panel of judges to determine -- especially since luck appeared to be on the plaintiff's side up to now -- parties agreed to set the precedent themselves.

The terms of the settlement award the plaintiff $100,000 plus costs, payable in installments over an 18-month period. Though arbitration is still binding with regard to ensuring payments are made, both sides have agreed to dismiss any pending and future action on this matter.

Microsoft to begin deploying final EU browser ballot March 1

Publié: février 19, 2010, 5:56pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

In an early morning blog post Friday, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner announced that final field testing of the company's Web browser ballot screen for European Windows customers (XP, Vista, and Windows 7) is under way now. The goal is to have a fully operational ballot screen by March 1 -- a week from Monday.

"External testing of the choice screen will begin next week in three countries: the United Kingdom, Belgium and France," Heiner reported. "Anyone in those countries who wishes to test it can download the browser choice screen software update from Windows Update. We plan to begin a phased roll-out of the update across Europe the week of March 1."

Heiner's post offered two very small renditions of what the browser ballot should look like. A careful study of these photos by Betanews indicates that these screenshots might not have been taken consecutively, assuming Heiner's description is accurate.

As the rollout is currently being planned, Windows-based PC whose update features are set to automatic, will download the program that gives users the browser choice. At next bootup, if any version of Internet Explorer is pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, it will be automatically unpinned. The screenshots show Windows 7. We do not know whether Vista-based systems with IE attached to their Quick Launch bars (a feature replaced in Win7 by the new taskbar) will unattach these icons as well, although since the process by which a program pins and unpins icons to these two devices is similar, it's safe to forecast that Vista users will notice IE icons missing as well.

A screenshot of the first public beta of Microsoft's browser ballot for European Windows users. This will not mean IE is uninstalled. After the user reads the introductory screen (which explains why IE was unpinned, and gives the user an option to pin it back), the ballot screen appears. Here, just as Microsoft's previous public rendition of the browser ballot indicated, the world's top five Windows Web browser titles will appear in equally-sized vertical slots along the top row, with a second group of randomly organized titles made visible by scrolling to the right. What's different about this latest rendition (we apologize for the screenshot not being any larger or clearer) is that the obvious Internet Explorer controls, including the menu bar and search bar, are removed from this ballot.

However, at least in this rendition, the IE icon reappears in both the title bar and the address bar, which does remain. Microsoft's picture of the introductory panel shows the address bar missing, and the icon for the ballot being not the IE icon but a generic ballot icon Microsoft has used before -- for instance, with generic Control Panel components. In its browser ballot screenshot, not only does the icon reappear but IE is re-pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar.

The reason this actually matters (whether there's a blue IE icon in the corner or not) is because it was believed to have been a topic of complaint by opponents to Microsoft's original proposition for a browser ballot, which was later revised to look more like this one. If the second rendition is accurate, such a complaint could arise again, hopefully not pushing Microsoft past its current March 1 deadline for full deployment.

Heiner does not mention in his blog post whether this process would enable IE to be uninstalled. Based on our understanding of how Windows works, this will probably not be possible from the browser ballot, specifically if the user currently has IE7 or earlier versions. Although IE8 now can be uninstalled, no such procedure exists for IE7 and older versions. However, IE6 and IE7 can be upgraded to IE8 which, when uninstalled, should not leave too many traces of older browser parts strewn about the system directories. Still, that's a process that everyday users should perhaps avoid.

Public schools to open doors for after-hours Internet access

Publié: février 19, 2010, 12:20am CET par Tim Conneally

This story was originally published on E-Commerce Times.

One of the "national priorities" in the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan is to use high-speed connectivity to "provide more educational opportunities and improve outcomes" for those in rural areas and inner cities.

The FCC said today that 97% percent of public elementary and secondary schools do have Internet access, but speeds are insufficient, and services are being wasted.

The Schools and Libraries Universal Service Support Program already offers eligible public schools and libraries a special "E-rate" discount for telecommunications services and Internet access. But Commission rules currently require schools to certify that they will use "E-rate" funded services only for educational purposes, or activities that are "integral, immediate, and proximate to the education of students."

Therefore, these subsidized services go completely unused on evenings, weekends, school holidays, and summer breaks, when people in surrounding communities may have no access to Internet services at all.

Today, the Commission said schools receiving the subsidized "E-rate" will have the option to open their facilities the public during non-operating hours.

"These connections will be available to adults taking evening digital literacy courses, to unemployed workers looking for jobs posted online, to citizens using e-government services, and for other uses that local schools believe will help their communities," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said today. "By making broadband available to more members of the public, this waiver furthers the goals of universal service and the Congressional directive to encourage access to advanced telecommunications and information services. And it does so in a way that doesn't increase the size of the Universal Service Fund -- indeed, that encourages more efficient use of USF funds."

Schools that allow community members to use their E-rate services after hours, however, may not request service enhancements above and beyond those needed by students.

How long can Unix hang on? What three high-end platform launches tell us

Publié: février 18, 2010, 11:43pm CET

By Charles King, E-Commerce Times

Recent IT industry events have created a field day for those who think the news tend to come in "threes":

During a five-hour-plus long event highlighting the conclusion of its Sun Microsystems deal, Oracle discussed plans for the company's hardware division, and said it would continue investing in Sun's Sparc- and X64-based systems and storage hardware. The company provided a Sparc road map and said it was planning upgrades for systems based on both the Sparc T series (now made by Oracle) and the Sparc64 chips made by Sun partner Fujitsu. However, there was no discussion of the status of UltraSparc-RK "Rock" processors and related "Supernova" systems, which are rumored to have been discontinued.

Oracle Co-President Charles Phillips commented extensively on the company's plans to build integrated systems/appliances for online transaction processing (OLTP) and other Oracle database-intensive business applications. Only general guidance was offered regarding the availability of these new solutions.

Intel introduced the Itanium processor 9300 series (codenamed "Tukwila"), which the company said delivers more than double the performance of its predecessor, boosts scalability, and adds reliability features to the platform. The new chip boasts twice as many cores (four versus two) as its predecessor and eight threads per processor, plus significantly improved cache, interconnect bandwidth, memory bandwidth and memory capacity.

Intel discussed plans for "at least" two more generations of Itanium: "Poulson," (scheduled for delivery in two years) will add an advanced multicore architecture, instruction-level and hyperthreading enhancements, and new reliability features. Future Intel Itanium processors in development will support socket and binary compatibility with 9300-based systems and software. The company expects OEM systems based on the new processors to ship within 90 days.

IBM's Power Systems group launched its next-generation Power7 microprocessor, along with a quartet of business class, enterprise class, high-end and high-performance servers featuring the new chips. According to IBM, Power7 systems can deliver four times the performance, four times the virtualization capabilities, and three to four times the energy efficiency of previous generation POWER6+ systems, but will sell for the same price as those solutions.

Power7 processors can now run up to 32 simultaneous tasks -- with eight cores and four threads per core. The chips also support more memory and throughput and offer new features, including TurboCore, Intelligent Threads and Active Memory Expansion. These features will make Power7 particularly valuable for demanding enterprise applications, as well as for the basis of workload-optimized IBM solutions like last year's Smart Analytics Systems. In addition, Power7 systems' robust performance and flexibility make them appropriate for increasingly complex Smarter Planet workloads and processes. IBM's new Power7 systems will begin shipping between February 19 and March 16.

While these announcements all focused on their respective vendors' latest/greatest microprocessor architectures (RISC for IBM Power and Sun Sparc, EPIC for Intel's Itanium) for supporting enterprise-class Unix and Linux workloads, what was really going on beneath the surface? In short, the trio offers excellent examples of vendors engaged in customer preservation (Oracle), partner management (Intel) and forward thinking (IBM).

It's important to consider the general state of the Unix market before slicing and dicing the announcements themselves. Once considered a nearly unassailable bastion of enterprise-class business and high-performance computing (only mainframe systems have a higher status), Unix solutions have been under continual pressure from below for the past half decade, due to the expanding capabilities and popularity of servers leveraging x86/64 Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. In fact, x86/64-based systems have essentially eclipsed RISC and EPIC in high-performance computing and supercomputing environments.

The battle is likely to become increasingly fraught with next-gen x86/64 processors, including Intel's Nehalem EX, waiting in the wings. How are Unix vendors responding? Not surprisingly, by emphasizing their platform's already robust RAS (reliability / availability / security) features, as well as expanding virtualization and other capabilities that even the best x86 solutions have trouble meeting, let alone surpassing. Such strategies have tended to force Unix solutions into higher and higher market niches, but upwardly ratcheting performance has also allowed vendors to explore, develop and inhabit entirely new commercial opportunities, including workload-optimized systems.

So, what did the announcements say about the status of these vendors? Perhaps more importantly, did any of the three reveal anything appreciably new or unexpected?

Oracle Sparc

In the case of Oracle/Sun, not much. The marathon webcast was hours longer than other vendors' comparable acquisition events, but painted Oracle's plans for the Sparc server business with a broad brush.

Yes, Oracle will continue selling and developing existing Sparc processors and systems (an issue about which CEO Larry Ellison seemed notably unenthusiastic when the company first announced its plans to buy Sun). Yes, Oracle will develop new Sparc-based solutions, setting its sights on workload-optimized servers/appliances. However, that doesn't show much in the way of imagination or innovation -- Oracle has been shipping similar systems based on HP hardware for months, and IBM's workload-optimized systems are arguably more sophisticated in terms of targeting specific industries and markets.

Oracle also said that it plans to increase its overall research and development budget some 55% from USD$2.8 billion in the past fiscal year to $4.3 billion in the year ahead. But how much of that budget, plus time and effort, will be spent to resurrect a Sparc platform that has fallen on hard times? That remains unclear.

Though no company wants to give its competitors a clear view of its strategic plans, the lack of transparency also doesn't really matter if the essential purpose of Oracle's discussion was, as I expect, to reassure current Sun customers and constrain them from jumping ship to IBM and HP, where many have already found comfortable homes.

Without clients' good will, Sparc's marketplace position will continue its slow decline, and could sap enthusiasm for continuing platform development. What should Sun customers do? Carefully watch how Oracle pursues to its Sparc/system plans, and keep an eye on what's happening in Power and Itanium systems.

Intel Itanium

The timing of Intel's announcement says almost as much about the state of Itanium as did Tukwila's technical details. Coming on the same day and nearly at the same time as the Power7 launch, Intel appeared to be looking to overshadow IBM as much as trying to establish thought or market leadership. Some may see this as reading too much into press release minutiae, but there were also some curious issues around the launch, including the low-key responses of Itanium OEMs.

Also significant: The considerable three-month lag time between Intel's announcement and the likely appearance of 9300 systems suggests the event may have been a bit premature. So, what was the point? First and foremost, to keep partners -- especially HP -- happy. Since HP and other Itanium OEMs have handed off microprocessor development to Intel, it behooves the company to be aggressive in offering those partners good news to take to market.

Overall, Intel deserves credit for delivering a 2X bump in performance, especially since less than a year ago, the company decided to incorporate DDR3 memory into Tukwila rather than the buffered DIMM memory of previous-generation Itanium chips. Despite that, it seems worth considering Itanium's long-term prospects. At this point, HP represents some 85% of the Itanium market -- a massive position, especially for a microprocessor once intended to become the Industry Standard platform for 64-bit enterprise computing.

That isn't likely to change appreciably over time, but I'm not as pessimistic as some other analysts about the outlook for Itanium. Though Itanium is feeling the same upward pressure from x86/64-based servers as other Unix platforms, development will likely continue as long as vendors' solutions, particularly HP's Integrity systems, remain profitable. However, if HP ever begins porting HP-UX or its other legacy platforms to x86/64, it will likely mark the official beginning of Itanium's end.

IBM Power7

In comparison to Oracle and Intel, IBM's Power7 announcement had all the confidence of a vendor in firm control of its circumstances and thinking far ahead of its peers, and with good reason. Less than a decade ago, IBM trailed both Sun and HP in Unix sales. Today, it leads both those rivals, owning some 40% of the $16 billion Unix market.

In part, that success came as disaffected Sun and HP customers jumped ship to Power. Why? Because as Itanium and Sparc development hit potholes, snapped axles, and headed into the ditch, IBM Power stayed remarkably on track and true to the company's long-term road map.

Power7's significant performance improvements mean that any competing vendors' platforms or systems are unlikely to pressure, let alone alter, IBM's current Unix performance leadership position; Power6/6+-based systems own over a hundred #1 industry benchmarks.

The Power7 announcement also demonstrated an interesting development in IBM's marketing strategy: Rather than specifically highlighting next-generation microprocessor improvements, which were considerable, the company instead focused on how Power7 is helping drive end-to-end system innovation. The result? IBM made strong cases both for Power7 delivering significant benefits to traditional business applications and for providing the engine in next-generation Smarter Planet workloads and processes.

How this will play in the market is an unknown. But as systems become ever more complex, it seems possible, if not likely, that microprocessors will increasingly take a back seat to overall systems evolution. If that is the case, it will require Oracle to further ramp up its Sparc efforts, and Intel to tighten development and messaging efforts with its OEM partners.

Overall, the events of the past weeks portend an increasingly interesting future for RISC- and EPIC-based systems. Far from the inevitable death spiral some have prognosticated for this sector, both IBM and Intel's efforts suggest that innovation and competition remain alive and well in the Unix market.

Even the uncertainty around Oracle/Sparc is better than Sun's previous wallowing in the Slough of Despond. That said, I also believe that IBM's Power7 represents the current bar by which upcoming Itanium 9300 and Sparc systems will be judged. If Oracle, HP and other system vendors cannot or will not step up their games, the market for Unix servers will likely be a very different place in three to five years than it is today.

Charles King is principal analyst for Pund-IT, an IT industry consultancy that emphasizes understanding technology and product evolution, and interpreting the effects these changes will have on business customers and the greater IT marketplace.

Microsoft's mobile dreams aren't dead yet

Publié: février 18, 2010, 11:07pm CET par Carmi Levy

I read "Windows Phone 7 Series is a lost cause" with great interest. In it, my Betanews colleague Joe Wilcox lays out the reasoning behind his apocalyptic conclusion that Microsoft has used up its ninth life in trying to extend its desktop OS dominance into the mobile OS space.

He makes a number of rational, indeed valid, points about why Microsoft won't be a top-tier mobile OS vendor now, anytime soon, or ever. Microsoft's Windows Mobile franchise has been in freefall for years, thanks largely to a legacy OS that was completely out of tune with today's market, and a product development roadmap marked by countless delays and occasional lipstick-on-a-pig refreshes of the increasingly creaky product. So since it's hard to argue with the facts, with the numbers, and with history, it's also hard to take exception to his thesis.

But I'll disagree with him anyway. Because for all the headlines that Apple and Google have generated with their respective iPhone and Android universes, Microsoft remains the company whose software we touch when we get off the road, get into our homes and offices, and get down to work. And as much as some of us like to malign Microsoft for clinging to yesterday's business model long after the rest of the world has moved on, Apple and Google have hardly been poster children in playing nice with our data or playing nice with developers. Microsoft may be down, but it's more than a little unfair to say that it's completely out.

Mobile: The platform Microsoft can't refuse

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) First, the why: Microsoft cannot afford to abandon the mobile market any more than General Motors can afford to walk away from next-generation propulsion technologies. Like GM, Microsoft is faced with making huge investments to catch up in areas where others have leapfrogged it. When GM finally does bring such products to market, starting with the Volt next year, it'll lose money on every one sold. The cars themselves will likely underwhelm, as they'll be first-generation examples of radically new technology selling for significantly more than existing offerings from competitors. Toyota's recent troubles notwithstanding, the strength of its Prius branding should hold.

But here's the kicker: If GM continues on its same old path, it'll be dead in five years. Not bankrupt-and-bailed-out-by-the-taxpayer dead. Dead-dead, because the world will have long since moved on from the traditional solutions on which its original business was based.

On reflection, this looks a lot like the Microsoft of today. Its legacy revenue streams -- namely Windows and Office -- won't exist in any recognizable form in five years. Windows, in particular, will decline largely due to the shift from desktop to mobile. Despite the fact that big operating systems just don't fit into our world view anymore (does anyone even care about what OS the iPhone runs?) Microsoft needs to find a new revenue source to replace it.

So Microsoft abandoning its mobile efforts would be akin to GM deciding it doesn't want to be in the transportation business anymore. It's unheard of, and it won't happen for either company anytime soon.

Who needs hardware?

What will have to change, however, is Microsoft's view that it has to own the OS in order to own the revenues that ultimately stream through it. I don't buy that for a second. Google's done just fine making money off of services that run on countless hardware and software platforms, all of which are owned and controlled by companies other than Google. While Google's Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS initiatives are all designed to return some gatekeeper-like powers to Google by giving it greater control over the mobile OS, browser and desktop browser experience, the company will survive quite nicely in the unlikely event that all three initiatives simultaneously implode and fail to gain further market traction.

(That said, I've got issues with the decision to pursue both Android and Chrome OS, but we'll discuss that another time.)

Apple's model, of course, has always been hardware-based. And a good-enough OS with a good-enough developer community that allows it to sell zillions of high-margin devices is good enough for the company and its shareholders. In this respect, it's somewhat unfair to compare it directly to Microsoft, which never bundled desktop or mobile versions of Windows into self-branded hardware.

However similar or dissimilar they may be, they still compete against each other when we head down to the wireless store and ogle the shiny new devices. And for all their success to-date, Apple and Google have both made critical errors along the way that leave room for others to carve out enough market share to, if not dominate, at least survive. Apple continues to tick off developers with an opaque app approval process that discourages long-term partnership and threatens to sink lesser-capitalized small developers. Google's push to become a player in social media -- latest salvo, Buzz -- has opened it up to the kind of privacy firestorm that threatens to derail Facebook's quest for global social media domination.

Windows Phone 7 Series Music Hub

Is the OS the only avenue?

Into this breach steps Microsoft, which wisely -- and finally -- dumped its old Windows Mobile architecture in favor of a clean-sheet design...or at the very least, dumped it off the roof onto the top-floor balcony, where it may be called "Windows Mobile Classic" (a new euphemism for "dumped").

As sweet as Windows Phone 7 Series seems to look and work, it won't threaten the iPhone or Android. Not soon and not ever. But Microsoft's mobile end game isn't limited to the mobile OS itself. Its upcoming Office 2010 suite will be more Web- and mobile-friendly than any previous version of its venerable productivity offering. Its search partnership with Yahoo positions its Bing search engine favourably as a distant #2 to Google. Its Xbox Live and also-ran Zune marketplaces are finally being pulled in a consistent direction.

Even if Microsoft's new mobile OS dies on the operating table, that won't stop the company from throwing everything it has into ensuring it remains more than relevant as consumer attention shifts away from its traditional desktop strengths and toward the mobile Web. It's almost too easy to write the company's efforts off solely based on its well-regarded but late-to-the-party new mobile OS. There's so much more to this story.

Exclusive: Google's latest Buzz privacy changes enable possible new exploit

Publié: février 18, 2010, 10:52pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Test Results

Today, Google Gmail customers are seeing a promised round of software changes whose purpose is to make Google Buzz users more aware of their privacy options, and to give them a more obvious way to back out of Buzz. These changes come a mere nine days after the social networking product's rollout as an element of Gmail, although some have already claimed personal damage, and have already begun legal action.

Before we went to that extreme, Betanews tested the Buzz changes on accounts where Buzz was already set up. There we noticed the promised Buzz tab has been added to Gmail settings, where as we expected, the user is given the option to withdraw the lists of other Buzz users she's following from her public Google profile. This is effectively a copy of the option from Buzz setup that Google only made prominent after its first round of changes at this time last week.

Though the initial problem with new users inadvertently sharing the identities of frequent Gmail contacts with others appears to have been addressed, it was in testing the efficacy of the new option for turning Buzz off that we discovered another potentially serious problem, which can begin with social spoofing, and can lead to the ability to follow other users with complete stealth.

The new Buzz settings tab in Google Gmail.

First, we noticed one little quirk: Beside Show the list of people I'm following and the list of people following me on my public Google profile, there's a link labeled Learn more. It takes the user to a page we've seen before on Google's help system. But if you click this hyperlink, you also select the Show the list... option, even if it had been previously set to Do not show these lists on my public Google profile. This is something that users will have to remain cautious of before clicking on Save Changes.

Clicking on the clearly labeled Disable Google Buzz link brings up the Delete your profile dialog box (shown below), which explains the ramifications of exiting the social network. We noted that when the user clicks on this link, even though she has an opportunity to back out at this point, the Buzz link and its associated window are removed at that moment from the Gmail sidebar (but not from the Settings tab). Clicking on No, I changed my mind takes the user to the familiar Edit your profile dialog; but even then, Buzz is disabled.

You've just disabled Google Buzz and you're about to delete your profile. This is the message you see.

But disabling Buzz does not mean deleting one's Google profile. From here, the user is given the option to wipe her profile clean. As the explanation reads, "Your personal profile information will be permanently removed from our system." Based on that explanation, it seems curious that Google would add another option, Also unfollow me from anyone I am following in Buzz, Google Reader, and other Google products. You would think that not having a Google profile means you're not following anyone in Buzz. As we would discover, that's wrong.

As a test, we first clicked on No, I changed my mind. But Gmail did not respond as we expected; it did not re-enable Buzz in Gmail. As it turns out, the disablement part already happened; the "change my mind" part refers to the deletion of one's Google profile. This may lead to some confusion among users of Google Reader and Picasa, where profiles are also prominent; they may never have had an interest in deleting their profiles on those services anyway, just in Buzz.

Next, we noted that once the user has disabled Buzz and signed out of Gmail, she will not be given the traditional invitation to join Buzz. So Google will not continue to advertise a service the user has apparently rejected. However, even if the user visits http://buzz.google.com to restart the service, she'll find she's taken to Gmail where Buzz remains disabled.

But the Buzz tab still appears in Gmail settings, where she has the option of clicking on Show Google Buzz in Gmail and restoring it to the Gmail sidebar. If the user has not deleted her profile (if she "changed her mind" earlier), then Buzz will re-appear as though nothing had changed at all. Followers remain followers, and members who were followed before, are followed again.

Next, we tried the more destructive option: disabling Buzz and deleting the public profile, with the Also unfollow me... option checked. Google responded by taking us to the Accounts page, where we were told we didn't have a public profile yet and were given the option to create one. That makes sense, because one reason a person might want to delete his profile is to start over with a new one.

What's interesting here, though, is that the information in the Google Account we used for this test continues to include my picture, which one might think was a profile element. If the user goes to the page for the profile she thought was deleted, she'll find a page with her picture on it...which might have her thinking she still does have a Google profile. Is it true that Google really deleted the profile information as it said it would? To figure this out, we tried re-entering Buzz.

Even when a user who's discontinued Buzz once before enters Buzz through its own dedicated URL, she's taken to Gmail where Buzz remains disabled. Though there are no explicit instructions here, we discovered the user can re-enable the service using the Buzz tab. However, she won't be led by the hand in the creation of a new profile -- there's no auto-suggesting, no auto-following, no auto-anything. Buzz starts out with a blank slate. Arguably, that's the most secure state it can start out in, blank -- and perhaps Google wouldn't have been the subject of such criticism if it had started out presenting a blank slate to begin with.

But what we were surprised to discover was this: When using a Gmail account to re-enroll in Buzz after having exited the service once already, Buzz does not automatically set up any Google profile at all. This despite the fact that our new Buzz service picks up the list of followers we generated the first time -- not the list of people being followed, that's gone. The list of people following a once-deleted Buzz user does remain and is restored once the user re-enters Buzz. This is probably because that list is compiled "live" from the active profiles of non-deleted Buzz users, so it can be reconstructed.

A person without a public profile shows up in Buzz as a person without a public profile, at least at first.

A person without a public profile shows up in Buzz as a person without a public profile, at least at first.

This made us wonder: If a user follows someone else using her old Buzz account, then disabled Buzz, and re-enabled it later, is the user still following that other person? No. Does the other person get notified? No, not directly. Can the followed person go into his Buzz list and discover that person is no longer following? Yes, just as though the following person were still inactive in Buzz. If the following user re-enrolls the followed user, is the followed user told? No, but the followed user can see the picture and ID of the following user in his list, assuming he's looking for it.

Next: Following somebody who thinks she's blocked you...

Test Results

As we discovered in our tests, when a user deletes her Google profile, certain information about her remains -- for instance, the photo from her Google account, and her screen name. For someone who legitimately wants to discontinue using Buzz and all other Google services, erasing the Google profile may be pointless. Even though Google appears to promise that a deleted profile is a destroyed one, traces of a user's activity could enable elements of that profile to be reconstructed. Apparently one key element survives the profile deletion: the list of people that a Buzz member is following.

But that points to a second problem, which may even be dangerous: Theoretically, a malicious user could leverage this situation to create a false Buzz identification that is not tied to any publicly searchable profile. That malicious user could then masquerade as someone whom the followed person knows, using only a name and perhaps a photo (that's optional anyway), both of which could be false. If the malicious user created a false Google profile with Buzz, and then de-activated Buzz, the false photo and name would remain associated with the Gmail account.

The fact that this element survives even before the public Google profile is reconstructed reveals certain characteristics of Buzz that we did not previously know:

A Buzz user may follow others without a Google public profile. Even though Google states the creation of a public profile is necessary in order for a new user to enroll into Buzz, one certainly was not necessary for us to re-enroll an account into Buzz after de-activating it and deleting our test profile. As a result, if you find yourself using Buzz, you may discover that other individuals are following you whom you did not invite, and whose identities you cannot determine. In order to keep things simpler and more brief, let's call the malicious user trying to follow someone X, and the person being followed Y. At first, X's ID and photo (if he has one) is listed in Y's Gmail under Y's list of followers, even if X does not have a "public profile," and even if X elects not to share his list of followed contacts on his (non-existent) profile. Y can unfollow that person (assuming he's a person at all). However, if X does not have a public profile, all Y can see is the name and perhaps the photo. Therefore, it's possible that a "non-profiled" person can follow any Buzz user, not with complete stealth, but at least without being able to present his credentials first. And if he has set up his Gmail account under a false name and photo, then conceivably anyone may easily become followed without permission by someone else passing himself off as a friend. This, in our opinion, is dangerous -- perhaps even more so, theoretically, than the possibility of accidentally revealing one's contacts list during sign-up.

Here, the list of suggested Google Buzz members to follow is gleaned from the pre-existing list of once followed members that we thought was deleted after our test profile was removed.

Evidence exists that a user's Buzz activities in Google's database survive the deletion of her Google profile. Even without re-creating the Google profile, in our test, when we re-activated a once deactivated Buzz, it suggested (but did not automatically select) other Buzz members to follow. That list of suggestions (shown above) contained individuals to whom our test account had never sent a Gmail message, and from whom it had never received one, but who were previously followed under our Buzz account before we disabled it and deleted our test profile. That fact suggests that each user's Buzz activity is being stored at Google independently of that person's profile, so deactivating Buzz does not wipe one's slate clean.
"Blocking" a follower can lead to a situation where the blocked follower can end up following that person anyway without being detected. Assume that X has no public profile, and is following Y. Y discovers X in her list of followers, so she blocks X. X is not notified -- in fact, X still thinks he's following Y. But he doesn't receive Y's updates, so he gets curious. X unfollows Y. Then X follows Y again. X is no longer blocked. What's more, not only is Y not notified that X is no longer blocked, she cannot see that X is following Y. Y appears in X's list of followed people, and X does not appear in Y's list of followers. What's more, X is not counted as one of the followers in Y's Buzz count; so if Y has three other followers besides X, Y's Gmail will read, "3 followers."

X is informed he's following two people, one of whom is Y. Y believes she has blocked X, and Y is told that X is not following her. X does not have a public Google profile.

Two simultaneous dialog boxes from different Gmail accounts: X is informed he's following two people, one of whom is Y. Y believes she has blocked X, and Y is told that X is not following her. X does not have a public Google profile.

An unprofiled Buzz user may be followed by anyone else without being notified. This is where you could say Y turns the tables on X: Assume once again that X has no public profile, and is following Y. Y discovers X and blocks X. Immediately afterward, Y follows X. X can continue to follow Y, and Y will not appear in X's list of followers. If X has not discovered yet that Y has blocked X, and X has not yet unfollowed and re-followed Y, then for the time being, X appears in Y's list of followed people, and Y does not appear in X's list of followers. However, X does have this one strange clue: Y is counted as one of the followers in X's Buzz count. So if X has no other followers besides Y, X's Gmail will read, "1 follower." However, when X clicks on that link, the dialog box that appears will read, "X has 0 followers."

In our initial tests last week, Betanews determined that it was indeed possible for a Buzz user to not have a public profile, and we explained why in one sense, this was a good thing. It made it possible for there to be a safeguard for new Buzz users to avoid inadvertently sharing her list of frequent Gmail contacts with other Buzz users.

But the addition of a system that enables a Buzz user to exit the service and come back with no profile at all, creates a new problem: It makes it easier for someone you don't want following you to falsify his identity. Betanews notified Google of our test results prior to the publication of this story.

Nintendo smashes DS mod chip in Australia

Publié: février 18, 2010, 6:50pm CET par Tim Conneally

Nintendo top story badge An Australian federal court has ordered game hardware distributor RSJ IT Solutions, parent company of GadgetGear, to immediately stop selling the R4 DS modification chip that allows pirated games to be played on the popular handheld console.

The R4 chip is a microSD reader that fits into the Nintendo DS' Slot-1 port and bypasses all security functions, so the user can play music and movies, read text files, create homebrew software, and, of course, play copied games. It usually retails for around $45.

Nintendo has been trying for several years to control the distribution of the R4 cart, and in 2007 the company famously said, "We are keeping a close eye on the products and studying them. But we cannot smash all of them."

But that has not stopped the game company from trying, and the R4's availability may weaken as a result of this suit. Australian publication IT News said today that RSJ IT Solutions must file an affidavit by the end of the week which identifies all of the suppliers of the R4 chips, and pay Nintendo $520,000 in damages for selling a device that facilitates piracy.

Amazon launches Kindle for BlackBerry beta

Publié: février 18, 2010, 5:51pm CET par Tim Conneally

Kindle for BlackBerry Beta

It has been just about one year since Amazon launched its Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch; and today, thanks to popular demand, it has come to BlackBerry.

Like the iPhone app, Kindle for BlackBerry is free, and doesn't require a dedicated Kindle e-reader to use. Within the app, users can browse the Kindle Store and download e-books directly, and if you have already purchased Kindle e-books, you have access to your entire library, synced to the last place you left off in each book.

Unlike the iPhone app, Kindle for BlackBerry users cannot yet create annotations or highlights. Amazon said this feature will be added in future versions of the software, along with the ability to scroll text line-by-line, and search for text within books. Furthermore, the app does not have access to Kindle newspapers, magazines, or blogs, and service is limited to US customers.

BlackBerry users can download the Kindle app within their mobile browser at amazon.com/kindlebb.

AT&T finally gets its first Android device, will have first Dell smartphone

Publié: février 18, 2010, 3:38pm CET par Tim Conneally

Motorola Backflip

AT&T announced today that it will start selling Android devices, and the first one will be the unique Motorola Backflip, beginning on March 7.

While T-Mobile began selling Android devices as soon as the first became available in late 2008, the other major carriers have been slower to catch on. Sprint announced its first, the HTC Hero, in September 2009; and Verizon's first, the Motorola Droid, came just one month later.

According to a number of unsourced reports, AT&T could have actually had an HTC-made Android device in Q3 2009, but it had difficulty "passing AT&T validation."

The Motorola Backflip will be available for $99 after mail-in rebate and two-year service contract which requires both a voice plan and a $30 per month data plan.

Additionally, a new page on AT&T's Web site dedicated to Android says the first smartphone from Dell will be coming to the network soon. This confirms reports from last October, which said the carrier would have a Dell smartphone "as early as 2010."

The PC maker launched its first device in China earlier this year, and told us that it didn't have plans to launch that particular model in the United States. However, the company has recently been showing off a 1 GHz Snapdragon-powered Android tablet called the Mini 5 which it says will definitely be coming to the US this year.

Microsoft's Social Connector adds a bonus upgrade for Outlook 2007

Publié: février 18, 2010, 1:30am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Download Outlook Social Connector 32-bit Beta for Outlook 2007 for Windows from Fileforum now.

It's no surprise that Microsoft has begun distribution of the first beta of Outlook Social Connector, the Office plug-in that adds a list of each contact's social network activity to Outlook. It's also no surprise that business contacts network LinkedIn is Microsoft's first partner -- that fact has been known for some time. What is interesting is that today's beta release also contains a version that supports Outlook 2007, adding to it one key feature that could very well have been a reason to upgrade to Outlook 2010: the People Pane.

Only the 32-bit beta is available at present, so users of 64-bit Office 2007 will have to wait, although the beta will work in 64-bit Windows. Once installed, the new People Pane appears in both the Mail and Contacts panels, and in e-mail messages. Surprisingly, it also new Outlook functionality that doesn't even require social network connections. The People Pane is built into the latest Outlook 2010 Release Candidate, so you don't need to download the separate beta package; if you have the RC, you already have Social Connector. You don't actually need any social network connections at all to make the People Pane work. However, to expand its functionality to see social activity, you need a "connector" package; and the first such package available comes from LinkedIn, and is available for download here.

In our tests today, we noted that the Social Connector beta (which should, by all rights, be called the People Pane) collected its photos of contacts not from LinkedIn (which does use photos) but from Outlook's existing database. So even though you may make contact with several people in LinkedIn who are not necessarily enrolled in your list of Outlook contacts, at least for now, there's no automatic device in Outlook for importing a LinkedIn contact as an Outlook contact. This was the case for us, even though the Profile Pane clearly reads, "Connect to social networks to show profile photos and activity updates of your colleagues in Outlook." Of course, you could have your LinkedIn friend send you a vCard.

The People Pane added to Outlook 2007 by way of the Outlook Social Connector beta.

On the other hand, this critical separation between the social network and the e-mail client does cast light on a fundamental, and in many regards, beneficial difference between this system and Google Buzz in Gmail. When you select an e-mail from a known contact or the entry for that contact in Outlook's database, the People Pane recalls that person's LinkedIn activity (as well as from other connected networks), and Outlook merely reports it -- the connection is one-way only. Your LinkedIn contacts do not see your e-mail contacts in Outlook, and you don't use LinkedIn any differently than you did before.

More social connectors are expected to be made available soon, but not from Microsoft directly. A company spokesperson tells Betanews that, although LinkedIn did develop its connector in partnership with Microsoft, in typical situations, it will be up to outside developers to create new connectors that merge social networks' APIs with that of Outlook. So while Twitter and Facebook connectors are quite likely, perhaps even before Outlook 2010's general release this June, the theoretical ability for Outlook to connect with Google Buzz will have to be tested either by Google itself (the company acts as though this is a possibility) or by independent developers.

Social Connector will be a standard feature of Outlook 2010 when it's released as part of Office 2010 by Microsoft in June.

Texas Instruments 'Blaze' OMAP 4 tool is a mobile developer's dream toy

Publié: février 18, 2010, 12:08am CET par Tim Conneally

TI OMAP 4 Blaze

To spur development on the OMAP 4 family of ARM Cortex A9-based systems on a chip, Texas Instruments this week unveiled its Blaze development platform which incorporates nearly everything an OMAP developer/tester could possibly need to into a single tablet-sized device.

Blaze is equipped with two 3.7" capacitive WVGA touchscreens, three multi-megapixel cameras, a pico projector, HDMI out, accelerometer, compass, sensors for light, temperature, barometric pressure, and proximity, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, FM transciever, and broad support for digital microphones and stereo speakers.

As far as cellular modem support, the Blaze MDP can be connected via an expansion bus breakout connection, and any PCIe-supported modem can be used to provide 3G connectivity.

The Blaze development platform will reach general availability in mid-2010, and widespread production of the OMAP 4 platform will come in the second half of 2010.

Unfortunately, TI won't be releasing a full sheet of specs until the device comes out later this year.

Windows Phone 7 Series is a lost cause

Publié: février 17, 2010, 9:52pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Could Windows Phone 7 Series save Microsoft's mobile platform? Yes. In 2007. In 2010, it's a non-starter. That's not easy for me to write, because with Windows Phone 7 Series Microsoft is following much of the advice I offered via blog posts over the last few years.

That advice would have meant something when given, not months and years later when the competitive landscape has radically changed. Then there is the crucial analysis given last week -- that Microsoft failed to deliver on: Immediate release of new phone software and/or Microsoft phone. Holiday delivery on new Windows Phone 7 Series handsets is simply too late.

The geeks may be gaga this week about Windows Phone 7 Series, but that won't much last beyond next month's MIX10 conference. Apple's shipment of iPad and presumably March iPhone 4.0 OS announcement will change geek chatter away from Microsoft mobile. (For the last two years, Apple announced new iPhone OS versions in early spring.)

Microsoft's problem is more about timing than strategy -- or technology (Hey, I like the user interface and presumed user experience, too). If Microsoft were running a marathon, its new runner would be entering the race to replace the one falling behind the leading group. But the new runner would be starting when the others already were well ahead to their 26-mile goal. No matter how good the runner, the leaders would be too far ahead to easily catch.

Sure, the market for converged handsets (e.g., smartphones) is seemingly small-- about 15.4 percent of 2009 global handset shipments, according to IDC -- but it grew 39 percent last year. Microsoft is reviving its mobile strategy just as competition increases among established players like Nokia and Research in Motion and newcomers Apple and Google -- all while losing market share and mindshare.

Because I'm still struggling with the flu, I'm going to blast from the past, using my previous predictions for context about now and the 12 months or so ahead (I purposely have chosen posts before 2009, for predictive emphasis). In short, Windows Phone 7 Series is a lost cause because:

There is no Windows monopoly leverage to jumpstart the platform
Windows Mobile has lost too much sales and developer momentum
Android adoption -- by manufacturers and mobile users -- is too great
Microsoft doesn't have an end-to-end software plus hardware plus services platform

Now for some long-form explanation:

Windows Phone has no Windows Leverage

Just the opposite, mobile devices leverage against Windows. I've been predicting -- for years -- that during this decade the connected mobile device would replace the PC as primary computing platform. I wrote in February 2008 post, "Microsoft's Mobile Madness":

The future of mobiles is PC replacement. It's an inevitable outcome and one Microsoft simply isn't accepting. Microsoft's denial is madness, too.
The cellular phone market is:

Enormously bigger than that for PCs. For every PC in use there are three cell phones, based on analyst estimates of 3 million mobiles in 2007.

Captive, as most people carry mobiles most of the time; but not PCs.

Personal, because people care more about their cell phones than PCs. Who asks to be buried with their computers, but it's a common request for mobiles.

More global, as more people are likely to have cell phones than PCs, particularly in emerging markets.

More connected than PCs, as cellular services reach many places than does the wired or WiFi Internet.

To update the first bullet point, combined analyst estimates put the total number of cell phone subscribers at 4.6 billion worldwide. PC install base: About 1 billion. IDC predicts the number of cellular subscribers will increase by 1.3 billion by 2013.

In July 2008 post, "iPhone 3G: Windows 95, Only Better," I wrote: "The mobile remains the future of computing and connectivity. How long before dictation replaces typing? If you don't need a keyboard, why would you need a PC when the cell phone offers anywhere computing, any time?" Dictation already replaces the keyboard on Google's Nexus One.

Matters are worse, Apple and imitator Google have better platforms already because of mobile application stores. In 2005, I warned Microsoft executives they should use product activation to build a third-party application store into Windows. Developers could sell and distribute applications from within Windows, ensuring a revenue stream for them, while better protecting their software from piracy. A Windows app store would have been great leverage to mobile devices.

About three years later, Apple did with App Store on mobile devices what Microsoft failed to on the desktop. As I explained in October 2008 post, "Windows Mobile Is an Also-ran," in Apple's application store, developers have:

a software distribution mechanism built into every device and means for getting paid for the applications

access to millions of captive devices because people carry cell phones everywhere

digital rights management protection that hugely diminishes piracy of distributed applications

Apple claims about 135,000 mobile applications in the iTunes App Store and more than 3 billion downloads. By the time the first Windows Phone 7 Series handsets ship, Apple will offer apps for three mobile devices -- iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Meanwhile OEMs are pushing Google's Android on ebook readers, netbooks and smartphones. The two rising stars already have leverage, with developers and mobile users, because of applications stores. Sure, Microsoft has an app store, as some Betanews commenters will surely observe. I say them: Have you looked at it lately and seriously compared what Microsoft offers compared to the Android Marketplace or App Store? Yes, games will come for the holidays, but Apple will only have widened its portable gaming lead to three devices.

Windows Mobile has Fallen Too Far Behind

The chart below, which Silicon Alley Insider put together from ComScore data, is nearly all that's needed to demonstrate Microsoft's mobile fall from reign. The data is for US subscriber share (from a poll of 30,000 consumers). Some other perspective: Based on global smartphone sales to end users, Microsoft's mobile market share declined to 7.9 percent during third quarter from 11.1 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner (Q4 data isn't yet available).

Mobile OS subscriber share

Smartphone is the category where Windows Phone 7 Series will compete with upstarts Apple and Google and leaders Nokia and RIM. IDC has released full-year smartphone shipments, but not for operating systems. For Apple, they're synonymous -- 21.5 million. Based on the first three quarters of data, it's likely that more iPhone OS handsets shipped than Windows Mobile devices in 2009 -- and that's without accounting for iPhone touch.

Android Adoption is Simply Too Great

In June 2007 post, "Why Google Succeeds, Part 2," I warned: "If Google and its partners can bring to mobile devices what they have to the desktop, I predict it will be game over for Microsoft. Windows' relevance will diminish before the Web platform." Google delivered with the G1, as I explained in September 2008 post, "How Android hurts Microsoft." I referred to the G1 as Google's "alternative platform to the Windows PC."

A month later, in the Windows also-ran post, I wrote:

Once Android reaches the world markets, it will be too late. Microsoft has no Windows desktop leverage to drive mobile development or sales. The question now: When will HTC make Android a priority over Windows Mobile? That will be the day when all doors close Microsoft's mobile operating system into a tomb.

Android has global reach (and competes with Windows Mobile/Phone for same licensees), nearly all of the coolest HTC handsets run Android and Google claims surprisingly brisk sales. Yesterday, at Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that 60,000 Android phones ship every day. That works out to nearly 22 millions for the year, but the figure could be hugely conservative. According to IDC, 1.35 million Android phones shipped in third quarter (Q4 data isn't available), or 14,674 a day. That puts daily shipments up nearly 4 times in less than two quarters. If the growth curve continues, and Schmidt's figure is accurate, Android shipments would easily exceed iPhone as early as this year (but not when combined with iPad and iPod touch).

"Android is reaching the mainstream," IDC analyst Kevin Restivo expressed during our Skype chat earlier today. "Awareness efforts are paying off in the form of increased distribution, which is widening quarterly. More importantly, additional models are being offered by Android manufacturer partners -- hence increased sell-in."

The day of Android as "alternative platform to the Windows PC" has come. Yesterday, Schmidt said that Google's priority would now be mobile applications "first" before desktop apps: "Our programmers are working on things mobile first." While Microsoft has little Windows monopoly leverage for Windows Phone 7 Series, Google has huge leverage from search and supporting Web services.

There's No Microsoft Phone

For years, Microsoft has rallied behind the banner of software plus services. But in January 2008, I boohooed Microsoft for failing to add hardware to the equation. In post, "The Minus in Software Plus Services," I explained that Microsoft needed to add hardware to the software-plus-services equation. At the time, there was no Google phone. I wrote:

Microsoft enters 2008 in position to leapfrog Google by early 2009 or 2010, depending on how both companies execute. The company that best delivers software plus hardware plus services will best the other. Yes, that's a prediction.

Google has done much better than Microsoft delivering software plus hardware plus services -- to the point of having a phone (the aforementioned Nexus One). But Apple has done even better, as I acknowledged in post "iPhone 3G: Software + Hardware + Services." Apple's approach is one stack it controls. Google has it both ways -- three, really, considering open source -- by making Android available to hardware manufacturers and shipping its own handset. Microsoft is a licensor only. There is no Microsoft phone.

Apple is making huge margins from selling iPhone as a single software-plus-hardware-plus-services device. The iPhone accounted for about 36 percent of Apple's fourth calendar quarter $15.6 billion revenue. Microsoft will compete against Apple, which makes mountains of money off iPhone, and Android, which is free. Microsoft will charge for licenses (of course) and make little for its efforts. According to Silicon Alley Insider estimates on Windows Phone 7 Series OS revenue during Microsoft fiscal 2011: "A reasonable average is somewhere in the $300 million range, which is less than 0.5 percent of the $66 billion in revenue that Wall Street expects Microsoft to generate in fiscal 2011."

My November 2008 post, "I Believe in a Microsoft Phone," expressed hope Microsoft would do a handset -- keeping with a software-plus-hardware-plus-services approach. "The time has come," I wrote. "It's inevitable: Either Microsoft has a secret phone project or its mobile strategy is collapsed." I warned that even for 2009 "Microsoft's biggest problem is time to market," because of Apple's App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform.

Time-to-market situation is way worse looking at holiday 2010. Microsoft needed to announce a phone this week, shipping within a few months. Perhaps Microsoft executives think they can show off a reasonable software-plus-hardware-plus-services strategy next month at MIX. Maybe they can without Microsoft doing its own phone. But time to market is too long -- and Microsoft competes with Apple big money making software plus hardware and services (Nokia and RIM, too) and Google free. Microsoft has started the marathon late. Apple, Google, Nokia and perhaps even RIM will set the agenda for your mobile future. Microsoft's mobile platform is a lost cause.

Redbox rentals won't change for consumers, but will be more profitable anyway

Publié: février 17, 2010, 8:57pm CET par Tim Conneally

Well, it's final: New releases from Warner Home Video will not be cheaply rentable until four weeks after the DVD is released in stores.

In January, Netflix acquiesced to the studio's demands and imposed a 28-day rental blackout for new release Warner films; and yesterday, the results of the Warner/Redbox lawsuit were released, showing that Redbox will be doing the same.

Hollywood studios are of the opinion that low-cost rentals such as those from Netflix and Redbox actually devalue new releases, and that a four-week window will encourage full-price sales of the films. Redbox disagreed with the notion that its service undercuts full-price DVD releases, and sued Universal, 20th Century Fox, and Warner for the right to get DVD new releases at the same time as traditional rental outlets like Blockbuster.

The suit with Warner in Delaware District Court has ended with Warner's 28-day blackout still in place, where Redbox does not get new DVD or Blu-ray titles immediately, but is guaranteed wholesale prices on the discs it buys when they become available.

Though the outcome of the suit is effectively a draw, the result was actually a pretty sound defeat of Redbox's accusations in court.

Redbox rental kiosk "Redbox never addresses the critical fact that it has signed a number of direct deals with studios that effectively lock up over 50% of the supply of 'new release' DVD titles it seeks to carry; it never addresses the statements sprinkled throughout its own public filings and pleadings attesting to the explosive growth its DVD kiosk business has experienced throughout the same period of time that Warner, Fox, and Universal kiosk distribution policies have been in effect; it never asserts that a single one of its kiosk customers has actually been unable to obtain a Warner title or had to pay more for a Warner title since the implementation of Warner's policy; and finally, it ignores the numerous inconvenient public admissions made by its parent company that its DVD kiosk business competes with a wide variety of distribution channels, technology, and content in the 'highly competitive' home video industry," according to testimony from Warner Home Video officials last week.

In the end, Redbox has come out with a single benefit in that it can once again stock its kiosks with Warner titles at cheaper wholesale purchase rates and not bulk retail rates.

Unfortunately, nothing has changed for the consumer. Titles still cost $1 at the kiosk, and their availability is still delayed.

Mitch Lowe, President of Redbox said, "By agreeing to a delayed release date, Redbox can now acquire Warner Home Video titles at a reduced product cost, preserving value for our consumers and increasing customer access to Warner titles at Redbox locations nationwide."

So who really benefits? Redbox and its investors.

"The agreement is accretive to EBITDA, and removes the risk of buying and selling DVDs on the open market," Ari Black of Thomas Weisel Partners today wrote today. "We believe there is now a lot more certainty that Redbox will be able to maintain margins going forward."

Canada curious about Google Buzz, EPIC accuses Google of deception

Publié: février 17, 2010, 8:50pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

The office of Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that she has contacted Google officials by telephone, in an informal inquiry regarding its Google Buzz social networking service. Although Comm. Stoddart's office acknowledges the changes the company has already made, and is continuing to make, since Buzz's rollout last February 9, she says she asked a conference of Google officials why they released Buzz service to Canada without any advance notification to government regulators there.

Stoddart's office has not reported the nature of Google officials' response, or whether they responded at all. The phone call does not appear to be, at least at this point, the full-scale investigation implied by a CBC News report yesterday. But a statement issued by Stoddart's office in response to Betanews' inquiry this morning indicates that she may have told Google that, had they consulted with her first, she might have noticed the potential for privacy issues, enabling them to make changes prior to launch.

The process she describes resembles one Google did follow with respect to previous products, called "beta testing."

"We have seen a storm of protest and outrage over alleged privacy violations, and my office also has questions about how Google Buzz has met the requirements of privacy law in Canada. My office has a variety of resources available to help companies build privacy into their products and services," reads Comm. Stoddart's statement. "When companies consult with us at the development stage, they can avoid the problems we've seen in recent days."

The Commissioner's questions come as one of Google's frequent opponents in the US, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, issued a new formal complaint against Google to the Federal Trade Commission (PDF available here), accusing the company of outright deception. Essentially, EPIC accused Google of creating a two-click process whereby Gmail users ended up sharing their lists of contacts with not only the outside world, but with search engines, all without notifying them what was going on.

"Gmail contact lists routinely include deeply personal information, including the names and email addresses of estranged spouses, current lovers, attorneys and doctors," the complaint reads. "The frequency with which a user communicates with a given contact is also deeply personal and demonstrates the closeness of the user's relationship with that contact. The activation of Buzz disclosed not only portions of users' contact lists, but more specifically disclosed the contacts with whom users communicate most often. The fact that the auto-following lists were composed of users' most common Gmail contacts was widely known and publicized, as well as easily deduced by individual users. As such, anyone looking at a newly-activated Buzz user's 'following' list would know that the list indicated which people that user communicated with most often."

The details of Buzz's alleged transgressions as EPIC portrays them, however, did not always match our experience in Betanews tests. For example, EPIC states that Gmail users were not warned that their list of followed Buzz contacts would be pre-assembled from Gmail. Yet the formal complaint actually contains a screenshot of the Buzz welcome screen that contains these words: "No setup needed: You're already following the people you e-mail and chat with the most in Gmail."

EPIC also states Google failed to warn users that they would be creating public profiles that are searchable using search engines. However, Betanews tests revealed that the Google profile created when a new user, without a pre-existing Google profile, launches Buzz, the newly generated profile does not use a publicly searchable URL. The user must go into the profile manually to make it searchable.

The advocacy group also claims Google activated Buzz service for Gmail users even when they clicked on "Nah, go to my inbox," in response to the company's invitation. This is something Betanews tested first, while we had the opportunity to do so: In our experience, Buzz was not activated for any account where we refused the invitation.

Though EPIC acknowledges Google began making changes to Buzz just four days after its introduction, it characterized the act of un-selecting suggestions of members to follow as an undue burden on consumers. Public opposition to the current scheme was represented with citations of bloggers' reports over the past few weeks, including from CNET, Silicon Valley Insider, Lifehacker, and one major blog whose headlines included for a time, "F--- you, Google!"

EPIC also cited comments posted by Austin, Texas-based appellate attorney Don Cruse (misspelling his name), whose contribution last Thursday to the official blog of his state's Supreme Court warned officials of the possible repercussions of joining Buzz and accepting all of its defaults. Cruse wrote, "Assume for just a moment that this concerns you. Assume, perhaps, that some other people might expect to be able to contact you in confidence -- as a lawyer, a blogger, a journalist, or even (gasp) a friend. Assume that part of your professional responsibility is keeping the confidences of others."

Surprisingly, EPIC appears to have missed the context of Cruse's warning: not so much that Buzz could expose potentially confidential contacts, as much as the fact that users who do manage to separate their work e-mail from their private e-mail (unlike a certain former governor of another state) may not have been given adequate tools by Google to continue doing so, once they began experimenting with Buzz for personal purposes. "This is not your first rodeo, so you click on the 'Settings' menu at the top right of your Gmail," reads Cruse's following paragraph, not cited in the EPIC complaint to the FTC. "You expect to see be offered privacy options for this new Buzz service, but you see that there aren't any. Although Google has integrated Buzz directly into your Gmail, it has hidden the controls (feeble as they are) somewhere else."

The added option for discontinuing Google Buzz, added to the Google Profile page.

Cruse goes on to explicitly instruct users who have already begun Buzz experiments, as to how to find and use privacy controls that were not made obvious by Google. Spokespersons from Google have informed Betanews that such controls will be made obvious in a new round of changes still to be implemented this week. One of those changes did go live this afternoon: a new link (shown above) added to your Google profile editing page, allowing you to discontinue your use of Buzz. Again, this has been added to the profile page, not yet to Buzz itself. However, we do expect to see a new Buzz settings tab to be added to Gmail this week.

Internet Explorer 9 demos set for March MIX conference

Publié: février 17, 2010, 6:09pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

It could possibly be at least as significant a technology upgrade as Windows 7 itself: the replacement of Microsoft's current Web browser -- and with it, its rendering engine for dynamic text -- with entirely new code for Internet Explorer 9. With both Microsoft's forthcoming Office Web Apps and now its Windows Phone 7 Series dependent on dynamic rendering (as ascertained from demos at MWC last Tuesday), as well as JavaScript performance, the judgment of the company's mobile applications performance could depend entirely on the capability of its new Web browser.

After Microsoft's latest refresh of its conference schedule for MIX 10 in Las Vegas in four weeks, a non-committal statement on its conference blog, under the heading, "Internet Explorer 9 at Mix 10" reads, "After all, what would our premier web conference be without a browser update!?" Although the time and date for this "update" have yet to be set, the notice appears beside a picture of Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's IE General Manager and one of MIX' most popular speakers each year.

The wording of the notice -- probably intentionally -- left the definition of "update" open, so attendees may speculate as to whether this means an update of the software or a news update on the browser's progress. Microsoft will say no more than this at this time.

However, at PDC 2009 last November, Hachamovitch and Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky both set a kind of roadmap for the browser -- one which leads directly to MIX. Web developers attending the conference will need to see how the new browser functions, especially with respect to its all-new support for Direct2D rendering (a Windows-only feature that has potential to flatten its competition), as well as improved support and functionality with Silverlight (a cross-platform feature).

A demo from a Steven Sinofsky keynote to PDC 2009 in November showed vastly improved text rendering through Direc2D.

A demo from a Steven Sinofsky keynote to PDC 2009 in November showed vastly improved text rendering through Direc2D.

What we saw three months ago were promises that early builds of IE9 were scoring 32% on the Acid3 standards compliance test (up from 20% for IE8), posting speeds in the SunSpider general computational performance test that were comparable to those of daily builds of the then-latest Mozilla Firefox 3.6 betas. An early build of IE9's rendering engine, which Hachamovitch showed us personally, rendered a Virtual Earth map on a netbook computer with astounding ease and fluidity.

A demo from a Steven Sinofsky keynote to PDC 2009 in November promised vastly improved SunSpider test performance.

However, that was using Direc2D rendering, which as a Windows feature, isn't exactly a Web standard. Internet Explorer has gotten into trouble in the past for promoting a Windows-centric, or at least Windows-leaning, axis around which Web pages could revolve, compelling developers to support the platform with the biggest installed base rather than the standard promoted by independent agencies such as W3C. Then when both standards and software performance evolve at speeds faster than Microsoft has been able to keep up with, developers reluctantly continue to seek compliance with rendering to the older model -- in many cases still today, IE6 on Windows XP. Early criticism of Microsoft's strategy with IE9 took the company to task for, as they described it, engineering a repeat of history.

Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates slow GDI and fast Direct2D road map rendering and scrolling using Direct2D.

This time, Hachamovitch and others at Microsoft have told us, will be different: Direc2D rendering is already something that software developers are being taught today, and that they could implement today if they so desired without paying anyone a license fee. So if Microsoft sets a new standard, there's nothing holding back followers who are willing and able. But that requires Microsoft to set a standard, which makes it imperative that the company make a bold statement when MIX 10 convenes in four weeks' time.

First signs of Broadband Plan scale-back include subtle dig at FCC predecessor

Publié: février 16, 2010, 10:45pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

The need for an American national broadband deployment plan, focused at the time on extending broadband access to rural areas, was not initiated by current Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Julius Genachowski. It was proposed last May by his immediate predecessor, then-Acting Chariman Michael Copps, who remains a commissioner today. Copps' proposition likened the deployment of a national broadband strategy to the historically successful construction of the interstate highway system -- Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's crowning achievement after D-Day (PDF available here).

Comm. Copps invoked that analogy in order to emphasize not only the tremendous public works effort that would be required, in his view, to deploy truly fast broadband Internet service cross-country, but also a massive public/private partnership that relied on corporate investment, and faith in an eventual supreme payoff for all of American industry.

At one point quoting the former President, Comm. Copps wrote in May, "The interstate highway system provides another example of the success public-private partnerships have had in stimulating infrastructure development. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 initially funded construction of the nation's interstate highways. Funding continued until 1996, when the originally-planned network was near completion. State governments received the bulk of the funds, owned the interstate highways, and awarded contracts to the private sector to construct the segments that lay within their boundaries. President Eisenhower, recognizing the capacity of a highway system to unify the country, said of the project, 'Together, the uniting forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the name we bear: United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.'"

Today, in a speech whose language clearly positions the FCC apart from Copps' clarion call of the previous year, in a speech to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed a somewhat different vision of America's broadband future. That new vision is just as lofty, in many regards, but without emphasis on the public/private partnership that Copps foresaw: a coalition of major and minor telecommunications companies, with federal agencies empowered by funds from the just-passed Recovery Act.

No clearer signal of the new FCC's separation from the idea of including private participation was made during Chairman Genachowski's speech than his blatant dismissal of Copps' key interstate highway analogy, as inappropriate for the times.

FCC Chairman (designate) Julius Genachowski "Building world-class broadband that connects all Americans is our generation's great infrastructure challenge," the Chairman told the audience of state public utility commission members. "Some compare high-speed Internet to building the interstate highway system in the 1950s. It's a tempting comparison, but imperfect. In terms of transformative power, broadband is more akin to the advent of electricity. Both broadband and electricity are what some call 'general purpose technologies' -- technologies that are a means to a great many ends, enabling innovations in a wide array of human endeavors. Electricity reshaped the world -- extending day into night, kicking the Industrial Revolution into overdrive, and enabling the invention of a countless number of devices and equipment that today we can't imagine being without. Now in the 21st century, it is high-speed Internet that is reshaping our economy and our lives more profoundly than any technology since electricity, and with at least as much potential for advancing prosperity and opportunity, creating jobs, and improving our lives."

In the national broadband system envisioned by the then-Republican-led Congress in 2005, a national licensing system would enable service providers that do business on a national scale, such as Comcast and Verizon, to obtain nationwide licenses that would bypass the existing system of municipal licenses -- the system that NARUC represents. Somehow, some senators suggested at the time, municipalities would still be compensated, though it was unclear how. As incentive to compel service providers to choose national over municipal licenses, Republican senators including Ted Stevens (R - Alaska) envisioned a kind of waiver that would enable providers to charge different fees for different tiers of service. It was Democratic opposition to this proposal that triggered the current "net neutrality" movement in this country.

Certainly, Chairman Genachowski was playing to his audience today. But the picture he painted for the rest of the world was of an American broadband Internet system that is effectively a magnification of the present system, where municipal regulators maintain their authority and the federal government basically funds the launch stage of the effort. He even chided current private initiatives in broadband deployment as being ineffective:

"The fact is, and our broadband record shows, that despite significant private investment and some strong strides over the last decade, America's broadband ecosystem is not nearly as robust as it needs to be. Right now, the vast majority of Americans don't have broadband fast enough to take advantage of remote video learning or diagnostics. Right now, roughly 14 million Americans do not even have access to broadband. Right now, more than 100 million Americans that could and should have broadband don't have it. Because they can't afford broadband, don't know how to use it, or aren't aware of its potential benefits."

Only toward the end of his speech did Genachowski specify the role he envisioned for private investment: literally, as a backer of public service messages: "to increase Internet adoption, and ensure that all children can use the Internet proficiently and safely -- with programs like [the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's] new A+ program playing a helpful role."

Already delayed once by factors such as AT&T's request for a date certain when the wireline telephone network (yet another major US public works project) may be shut down, the national broadband plan is now expected to be delivered to Congress by March 19.

RIM debuts free BlackBerry Enterprise Server for small businesses

Publié: février 16, 2010, 9:27pm CET par Tim Conneally

Today, Canadian enterprise smartphone leader Research in Motion announced it has released BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, a new server software solution for small BlackBerry deployments that incur no additional software or user license fees.

Starting in March, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will be able to download BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express for free. With it, small deployments of BlackBerry smartphones will be able to wirelessly sync e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks; remotely manage e-mail folders and search through the mail server; book meetings and appointments; check availability and forward calendar attachments; set out-of-office replies; edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using Documents To Go; and access files stored on the company network or business systems behind the company firewall.

As a free solution, it naturally lacks a significant number of the high-end services offered through the full BlackBerry Enterprise Server software (and even Hosted BlackBerry Services), such as support for IBM Lotus, Domino, Novell and Groupwise platforms, and client-based instant messaging protocols like BB Messenger, AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk. Also, high availability, monitoring, and wireless provisioning are not available.

With BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, up to 75 users can access the e-mail server, or with dedicated servers, upwards of 2,000 users can be supported.

Research in Motion told us that the main difference between BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express and BlackBerry Professional Software are that BES Express has no cost for the software or CALs and can run on any internet-enabled data plan; BlackBerry Professional Software has a cost for the software and CALs, and it requires a BlackBerry Enterprise Server data plan.

Furthermore, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express provides some additional features not found in BlackBerry Professional Software, including: HTML email support, Flag emails for follow-up, forward calendar appointments, open attachments in calendar appointments, remote file access, support for audio (.AWE, .WAV, .MP3 and Audio WMA files), support for Open Document Text (ODT), Open Document Presentations (ODP) and Open Document Spreadsheets (ODS), and support for Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008.

To receive updates on the availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, sign up on RIM's product page.

A BlackBerry browser with a 100% Acid3 score: RIM finally picks up the Torch

Publié: février 16, 2010, 6:58pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

The first time the general public has ever seen a BlackBerry browser make any kind of score on the Acid3 test, let alone pass.

It turns out Microsoft isn't the only mobile platform producer resetting its ecosystem this week. In a lower-key move that could actually affect millions more customers than Microsoft's reboot of Windows Phones yesterday, Research In Motion today took over control of Mobile World Congress' side-show, called "App Planet," with a series of developer-focused seminars whose intention appears to be resituating developers on the new purpose of the BlackBerry platform.

While BlackBerry has never been much for eye-candy, what passes for such took center stage during a demo by CEO Mike Lazaridis this morning. Making good on the promises inherent in RIM's acquisition of browser maker Torch Mobile last August (taking it out of the Windows Mobile picture for good), the company presented the first public demonstration of a real Web browser for BlackBerry. Perhaps the last mobile platform to have a built-in browser built for standards higher than 1997, the new BlackBerry browser produced accurate Web pages, zoomed into and out of pages with reasonable speed (not exactly an iPhone-like rush, but not thumb-twiddling either), and scored a 100% on the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test.

By contrast, Opera Mini (a third-party product considered the browser of choice by many current BB users) scores a 54% on the same test. And even with JavaScript rendering turned on, BlackBerry's current built-in browser for system version 4.5 (still used by last year's models) doesn't parse the Acid3 well enough to even adequately inform the page that scripting works at all -- it actually scores a 0%.

The device used in the demo (at least, the only portion RIM has released to the public today; MWC's own video servers were not carrying the demo and reported themselves down when we checked) was a BlackBerry Bold 9700, already widely available. It uses the touch-sensitive pad rather than the trackball of earlier BlackBerrys, or the touchscreen of the Storm and Storm 2. It also uses a 624 MHz processor, at a time when smartphones on Qualcomm Snapdragon and other platforms have already raised the bar to 1 GHz, and the word dual-core is being used in a smartphone context. So a respectable browser can only go so far to restore BlackBerry's reputation in the "user experience" department, as many WebOS, Android, and iPhone owners will point out.

The new browser does appear to take a few visual cues from Mozilla's "Fennec," or Mobile Firefox, particularly in the use of a few charcoal-colored buttons alongside the address bar, that scroll up and out of the way as the user scrolls up. In the demo clip we're seeing, these appear to be History and Bookmarks buttons, and their placement implies easy access to Storm and other touchscreen users.

What the demo does not show us is the performance of embedded video. The Bold 9700 currently supports H.264, WMV3, MPEG4, and Flash rendering through On2's VP6 codec. But how video performance looks in the context of a Web page, while the user is scrolling, will say a lot about the performance of the browser in BlackBerry's (slower) processors, and whether it's really clinched the whole "user experience" motif.

Perhaps more importantly than the simple inclusion of a Web browser that doesn't make every page look like something your nephew spilled from his Lego box, is the integration of Torch Mobile's version of the WebKit rendering engine into the BlackBerry environment. The result will be the integration of standards-based widgets that follow specifications published by the Joint Innovation Lab yesterday, for formal submission to W3C. The goal here is to open BlackBerry to the same level of Web apps deployable through PCs; and the only way to do that was by means of a 100% compliant rendering engine.

Attendees at App Planet today are being given a full-day symposium on the new BlackBerry application model, which includes the JIL's work. The JIL framework utilizes embedded Web resources, a BrowserField object addressable from the script, and JavaScript extensions that handle the addressing. But all this takes place using standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- nothing specific or proprietary to BlackBerry. The Gears API (formerly Google Gears) is also employed. Extensions are embedded in the widget's COD file, so they're not actually part of the operating system, and once deployed, they're not accessible from Web pages -- so they can't be exploited by malware. RIM's toolkit for producing JIL-compliant widgets, BlackBerry Widget SDK 1.0, is still on Beta 3 in its development cycle.

A recently released presentation on the Widget SDK fills in a few details that weren't released in the public disclosure of the demo today: It's for version 5 of the system software, which means it won't work for holdouts with older Curve and 8830 models.

Transcripts and video of this morning's keynote were not available at press time, although multiple sources cite RIM's Lazaridis as having borrowed a page from Google, introducing the new application concept for BlackBerry as "superapps." Though demos of the concept were apparently reserved for paid attendees to today's seminars, he was quoted as having described a "superapp" as an application aware of what else was going on in the greater phone context, and capable of making itself available at the proper time, rather than just through some menu grid. One example he did give was a Twitter app that made itself available through the BlackBerry's inbox.

In what was taken as a preview of his keynote speech, Lazaridis told analysts with Rysavy Research, in a report cited by India's Economic Times, as having cited the bandwidth crunch AT&T has warned about, as the reason why developers should build more lightweight mobile applications. The CEO is quoted as saying, "Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this."

Well, actually, there is: You can produce a more efficient browser that renders according to standards, so that users aren't reloading, reloading, reloading just to see if they can read what they're supposed to read. In that respect, RIM may have just done its part for the environment for the whole year.

Game changer: Verizon Wireless okays unlimited Skype over 3G

Publié: février 16, 2010, 6:21pm CET par Tim Conneally

Skype Logo At a joint press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced that Verizon's smartphone customers will be allowed to place and receive unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls. The voice-over-IP chat client is one of the world's most popular ways of connecting, especially for the purposes of international voice and video conferencing.

When the service opens in March, nine phones will support unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls, instant messaging, and international calls at Skype Out rates. These will include: BlackBerry Storm, Storm2, Curve 8330, 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630, Motorola Droid and Devour, and the HTC Droid Eris.

"For Verizon Wireless' more than 90 million customers, Skype mobile adds great value because we're effectively giving customers with smartphones and data plans the option to extend their unlimited calling community to hundreds of millions of Skype users around the globe," said Verizon Wireless Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton in a prepared statement today.

T-Mobile rushes ahead with HSPA+, announces first USB modem

Publié: février 16, 2010, 5:59pm CET par Tim Conneally

T-Mobile top story badge Even though T-Mobile's HSPA+ deployment consists of only one city right now (Philadelphia), the mobile operator today unveiled its first piece of consumer equipment that will be able to handle the 21 Mbps HSPA+ network, and indeed the first HSPA+ modem available in the US, the WebConnect Rocket.

The Rocket is sort of a sequel to the WebConnect Jet 3G modem which launched last year. The main difference here is that T-Mobile was actually the last United States wireless carrier to offer a 3G USB modem, and it could be the first to offer a next-generation (some consider HSPA+ to be 3.5G or 3.75G) USB modem commercially.

T-Mobile is working to upgrade its 3G network -- which now includes more than 240 markets -- to the HSPA+ standard, and hopes to have most of its 3G footprint covered by HSPA+ by the end of 2010.

The device will become available in March, but pricing and local market availability have not yet been announced.

LG introduces beta of 'Air Sync' for featurephones

Publié: février 16, 2010, 5:13pm CET par Tim Conneally

LG Mini

Today, South Korean consumer electronics maker LG debuted a full-touch featurephone called the Mini, which would have otherwise been unremarkable had it not been tied into a still-in-beta service called LG Air Sync which also was announced today.

LG Air Sync is a three-way sync service for feature phones (currently only works on the Mini) that syncs contacts, calendar data, memos, and photos and Web browser information with the user's PC and his related Air Sync Web account.

Air Sync's banner features are the following: "History Sync," which updates the phone's browser with the 100 most recently viewed Web sites from the user's PC; "Personal Information Manager (PIM) Sync," which syncs contact details and daily plans between the phone and the PC; and "R-Click" which instantly sends right-clicked images from the user's Web browser to his phone. It's a novel feature that hasn't been done elsewhere.

LG has not said if this service will open to the rest of its featurephones, and the beta testbed is currently Europe only. Interested LG device owners can still sign up for the service, however, despite current handset or region incompatibilities.

HTC introduces multitouch Sense UI

Publié: février 16, 2010, 4:43pm CET par Tim Conneally

To welcome the launch of the new multitouch Android 2.1 devices named Legend and Desire, HTC announced an upgrade to its trademark Sense user interface today.

The upgrade includes a new view called Leap which is essentially a zoomed-out version of the phone's home screens. With a pinch-to-zoom gesture, the view backs out and shows seven thumbnails, one for each home screen. This feature actually leaked out in a custom ROM for the HTC Hero in mid-January, so this should already be familiar to HTC Android fans.

But there are also some new applications and widgets available with the new UI.

Like Motorola's BLUR interface, HTC has incorporated a new application and widget into Sense which are based on the user's social networking activity. Called Friend Stream, the application pulls updates from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and similar sites, displaying them in a single feed.

Sense has also gotten its own newsreader app and widget, a feature that has heretofore been something of a weak point in Android. There are dozens of RSS reader applications that work suitably, as well as a number of Google Reader-integrated apps, but there have not been any integrated with the UI thus far.

The new Sense will be launched with Desire and Legend in Europe and Asia early in the second quarter of 2010 and will be available as an upgrade on the HTC Hero at that time. HTC did not offer a launch date for the Americas or Oceania, but it did note that the Desire will be available exclusively through Telstra in Australia.

HTC also produces Sense UI for Windows Mobile 6.5, and announced its intention to produce a version for Qualcomm's BREW platform last month at CES.

Tight window for developers of Windows Phone 7 Series before Q3

Publié: février 16, 2010, 1:08am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer closed this morning's preview of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by saying he wanted to diffuse some of the buzz that would inevitably be generated. This after the company intimated to reporters during last January's CES that Windows Mobile 7 would be introduced this week, then later urging them to issue a correction on the name.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaks to attendees at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, February 15, 2010.

But he left developers in a bit of a quandary, many of whom are now thinking, what do we do now? The Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 SDKs are still being actively distributed, even though WP7S will run applications through an entirely different model. In the end, the new system may end up being more about the Xbox, Bing, Zune, and Office brands than even Windows, which is represented now almost in name only. Windows Phone 7 Series is not, as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie once suggested, Windows on a different scale.

Developers can't exactly continue to build the apps they're building now, even for attractive models such as the HTC HD Mini being announced just today, knowing that the book could be thrown out on Windows Mobile, as a model and a brand, as soon as October. And one of the key missing elements of today's Windows Phone demonstration was the apps marketplace. It isn't known for sure, even now, whether Microsoft will continue to support one, or whether it will do as CEO Ballmer suggested today and let operator partners such as AT&T determine the phones' app distribution model. Just today, AT&T and Verizon Wireless were among two of 24 mobile operators signing on to the formation of a cross-platform mobile app network, the existence of which Microsoft hinted at in conversations with Betanews last November.

Developers may have to wait another four weeks for their first opportunity to see the new Windows Phone system at work. Although Microsoft spokespeople were not wont to provide Betanews with an explicit timetable, the setup for now is exactly right for an SDK rollout on March 15, during the company's MIX 10 conference in Las Vegas.

"We will make both a beta and final release of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools available to developers well before the general availability of Windows Phone 7 devices in market, to ensure adequate time for development," the company's spokesperson told Betanews this afternoon.

That means the tools themselves will need to be tested out. Visual Studio 2010 is officially in Release Candidate status; however, that probably won't exclude it from being the development platform of choice, especially since it uses the Windows Presentation Foundation libraries for its own display environment. Those libraries may end up being necessary for WP7S to be simulated in the VS2010 environment, the way WM6 is simulated in VS2008.

In a post on The Windows Blog this afternoon, the company's Eric Urban simply acknowledged developers' concerns, while pointing to next month for the solution. "Developers are already speculating about the app platform and tools. All I can tell you is that we are going big at MIX10, March 15-17."

Assuming Windows Phones meet the very general timeframe of "Holiday 2010" outlined by Ballmer this morning, developers may only have weeks, if not days, to assemble a completely revised roadmap for supporting the Windows Phone ecosystem. With flexible tiles replacing icons on the home screen, and the mini-desktop model literally being scrapped, developers may not even really know the answer to the simple question, "What is a third-party Windows Phone app?"

Hearing Steve Ballmer classify Microsoft's Windows Phone partners in two categories -- the phones' manufacturers and the phones' mobile operators, excluding the usual "developers, developers, developers" -- couldn't be too encouraging.

Vodafone debuts the cheapest mobile phone ever

Publié: février 16, 2010, 12:40am CET par Tim Conneally

While Mobile World Congress is mostly about the most powerful handsets, the most dazzling mobile operating systems, and the next generations of wireless technology, it's fundamentally about communications.

And today, international mobile carrier Vodafone introduced what is a big advancement in the connection of developing nations, the first new mobile phone with a price tag of less than $15, the Vodafone 150.

Sure, the rugged little device looks more like a phone from 15 years ago than something bound for release in 2010, but for emerging markets like Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Turkey and India where it will launch, it is just fine.

And according to the International Telecommunication Union Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré today, "Even the simplest, low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve healthcare in the developing world. Good examples include sending reminder messages to patient's phones when they have a medical appointment, or need a prenatal check-up...or using SMS messages to deliver instructions on when and how to take complex medication such as anti-retrovirals or vaccines. It's such a simple thing to do, and yet it saves millions of dollars -- and can help improve and even save the lives of millions of people."

The power of mobile phones in the developing world is genuinely amazing. Many people are experiencing the Internet for the first time on mobile phones, and according to the ITU today, many people now have a mobile phone subscription before they even have a bank account.

Of course, the BBC noted today that this sub-$15 price point isn't quite a tremendous accomplishment, as many mobile phones can be bought for around $20-$25 in emerging markets.

But it's still a record low by most accounts.

Wireless operators want their own open app store

Publié: février 15, 2010, 11:41pm CET par Tim Conneally

Today, a group of the most prominent wireless operators in the world announced its intent to form an "open app store," that is capable of vending applications to all mobile phone users.

Calling itself the "Wholesale Applications Community," the group is made up of 24 of the biggest mobile network operators including China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, SK Telecom, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and hardware manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.

The group says it aims to set up the simplest way for developers to publish to the widest range of users and devices, or "scale unparalleled by any application distribution ecosystem in existence today."

It's a goal others are trying to reach...the decades-old WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) ideal. Adobe, for example announced today that it is bringing its AIR runtime environment to Android, which lets users develop across multiple platforms.

But the WAC today said it will utilize mobile widget language JIL (Joint Innovation Lab) and application runtime OMTP BONDI to reach that goal, rather than devise new standards for developers to be able to write once and run anywhere.

JIL is currently in beta and BONDI is only up to version 1.1, but they both have SDKs available for download now.

Linux shakeout merges Maemo with Moblin, while Symbian^3 awaits its future

Publié: février 15, 2010, 10:52pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Before today, if you had asked, which mobile phone company is the one that intends to split itself into two pieces, you might have gotten the answer: Motorola. Today, Nokia is the company taking two directions, both of which are a little startling, and both of which appear uncertain.

First, it's made a decision to merge its open source mobile Linux project, maemo, into Intel's Moblin project, with the result being MeeGo -- a product that, at least at first glance, bears more resemblance to parent Intel than parent Nokia. Second, Symbian proponents are still awaiting word about a future Nokia phone, the N87, believed to be the launch pad for the now-fully-open-source Symbian^3 operating system. But they're waiting in the backseat, it would appear, as Windows Phone 7 Series and MeeGo get the lion's share of attention, on this first day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Screen shot from Intel's Moblin operating system, which will cede the stage to make way for MeeGo.

A late screenshot from Intel's Moblin Linux-based operating system, which was geared more toward Atom-based netbooks.

Intel Moblin was being developed as the mobile Linux system for Atom-based netbooks, with the strong backing of the Linux Foundation. Meanwhile, maemo (lower-case "m") was Nokia's project for ARM-based platforms, including TI's OMAP application platform. Not only were their environments different, but their focuses seemed different as well: Moblin was more metaphorical, capturing the spirit of the mobile desktop; while maemo tried to be more of a facilitator of mobile applications, especially those made with the cross-platform Qt development tool.

One of the last screenshots of the maemo operating system from Nokia, which will make way for MeeGo later in 2010.

Nokia's maemo system was designed for ARM-based smartphones, although it extended the desktop metaphor used in Windows and Linux for PCs, complete with widgets like this example.

Although there are no early screenshots of MeeGo to go on at this point (perhaps some will pop up at MWC), it would appear from the art direction employed thus far (a sort of Henry-Moore-meets-Friz-Freleng theme) that Intel's look and feel may win out. However, comments released today in the video below suggest that one very important element of maemo development is being assimilated into Moblin whole: the use of Qt libraries, with which Moblin developers have historically had trouble. It's Qt which will let a developer write a mobile Web application for MeeGo that can also run in maemo, in Moblin (with a little help in the library department), and even in Symbian.

As of now, MeeGo's newly launched community Web site urges new developers to get started by downloading the Qt development platform for their respective PCs, and compiling the "Hello, World" test case app. That wasn't exactly the message community developers wanted to hear today; they're looking for clues from just about anywhere -- YouTube videos, gadget blogs, last year's analyst meetings -- as to what a MeeGo application is supposed to look like. While Nokia and Intel tout the merger of the two platforms, and thus the coming together of the two communities behind those platforms, all that members of those communities see today thus far are a bunch of executives shaking hands.

"You print-screen a simple QT-helloworld with no copy-paste-possibility (even without the full lines of code)," writes MeeGo community member ckpinguin this morning. "Are you so desperately looking for developers in order to push app-downloads?" And zeevik the fox writes, "Where is the example to show Meego power or benefits? What is new in Meego and what is the advantage over other platforms? Is this is the way to attract developers, with software code for an 11- year-old kid?"

While that bit of confusion is going on, the Symbian community awaits word on what some had hoped would be the pinnacle smartphone for the newest rendition of their operating system: the Nokia N87 for Symbian^3. Expectations have already been raised high for an incredible device featuring a 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics capable of shooting 720p video.

But Nokia's Symbian^3-related announcement today was about as cerebral and invisible as the future UI of MeeGo. Although Nokia purchased the Symbian code last year with the intention of releasing it through the Symbian Foundation as a fully open source system, its proponents still expect Nokia to show some leadership in steering Symbian^3 development forward. Last December, Nokia promised a display of such leadership, which proponents assumed would come this week.

While this week is far from over, the bone that Nokia threw to Symbian proponents may be less than they expected: a preview of coming attractions video that frankly looks less convincing than Microsoft's preview of Windows Phone 7 earlier today, and a promise that Symbian^3 would be code-complete by the end of March.

That gives developers a six-month window to develop applications for this apparently completely revised platform, assuming Nokia sticks by plans to release some kind of Symbian^3-based device (no word yet as to which one) during Q3. Once again, the development platform of choice is Qt; and although Qt is well respected and firmly entrenched in the development community, there remains no clear instruction manual as to what developers should start doing besides "Hello, world."

So the early word from members of the Symbian community was, we're encouraged...kind of. "I realize this is a preview but it seems to address many of the UI frustrations that I am currently experiencing. However, many of these already exist in Android and the iPhone," wrote Mopedia this afternoon. "I guess we'll have to wait and see what new features Symbian will be bringing to the table."

Windows Phone 7 Series: The good, the bad and the ugly

Publié: février 15, 2010, 9:06pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The new operating system is a bold move for Microsoft, which is looking to reinvigorate its mobile strategy. But how bold is Windows Phone 7 Series in context of other mobile platforms? That's the question this post seeks to answer.

Because I'm miserably sick with the flu today, I'll limit this post to three areas: Windows Phone 7 Series as Microsoft's mobile Manhattan Project, mobile applications competition and garnering developer interest.

1. Mobile Manhattan Project

The Good. Finally, Microsoft is on a path of reinvention, which its mobile operating system desperately needed. Windows Phone 7 is something new, deriving heritage from Zune. Windows Phone 7 Series is a refreshing departure from Windows Mobile -- it demos well, anyway. Microsoft finally is making the kind of commitment necessary to once again be a major competitor in the handset market. Microsoft also seems to have at least some sense about how the mobile device market is changing.

Last week, IDC reported that the mobile sector, which now is an $850 billion market, accounts for nearly 60 percent of the global telecom market. Combined analyst data puts the worldwide mobile subscriber base at 4.6 billion. IDC predicts another 1.3 billion subscribers will be added by 2013.

"The mobile sector is in transition from its prior focus on subscriber growth," Courtney Munroe, group vice president of IDC Worldwide Telecommunications, said in a statement. "The expanding demographics of smartphones and new operating systems, the arrival of mobile broadband, and the explosive growth of applications and content are combining to reshape the landscape of mobile telecommunications."

Windows Phone 7 hub

The point: Microsoft still has time to recover lost momentum and consumer mindshare.

The Bad. The transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 could cost Microsoft market share, as manufacturers transition from one operating system to another and consumers delay purchases (or buy a competing handset). Today's announcement makes Windows Mobile even less appealing, because something new is coming.

In fourth quarter, based on a survey of 30,000 US consumers, ComScore put Microsoft handset subscriber share at 18 percent. Research in Motion: 41.6 percent. Apple: 25.3 percent. Google: 5.2 percent, up from 2.5 percent three months earlier.

The Ugly. Microsoft is taking too long to bring Windows Phone 7 Series to market. Today, Microsoft announced holiday 2010 availability for new handsets, which isn't soon enough. In between, Apple will start selling iPad and is sure to release a new iPhone. What's trendy from Microsoft today could look less appealing come the holidays. New Android-based and Nokia handsets are sure to ship in between, too.

IDC predicts a mobile operating system transformation in 2010 because of open-source operating systems (like Android) and user-interface and user-experience (UI and UX) improvements in new categories such as iPad. Microsoft's time to market will put it on the tail-end of this transformation.

2. Mobile Applications

The Good. Microsoft has done well to leverage existing products or services, such as Xbox and Zune, for Windows Phone 7 Series. The new Mobile IE will be based on the desktop version 8 and no longer 6, which should hugely improve the browsing experience and safety. Windows Phone 7 Series devices will also extend to Web services through features like "hubs" and "live tiles." However, I predict that Windows Phone 7 Series poses greater risk to BlackBerry, rather than Android-based handsets or iPhone.

The Bad. Microsoft's core leveraged applications are games and music, where Apple has a huge lead, with consumers and developers, on iPhone, iPod touch and presumably forthcoming iPad. Microsoft's core entertainment push knocks up against Apple's huge lead. Microsoft will offer mobile Office on Windows Phone 7, which I contend is totally unnecessary for consumers, although it's good for extending and preserving Microsoft's productivity suite monopoly.

The Ugly. For years, Microsoft executives have talked about software plus services. But on mobile devices, Apple and not Microsoft has brought them to market. Apple claims about 135,000 mobile applications in the iTunes App Store and more than 3 billion downloads. Meanwhile, Google, which does offer the Android Marketplace, is pushing Web services, leveraging its strengths and offering alternatives to mobile applications. Once again, Microsoft's long time to market -- holiday 2010 -- will allow competitors to widen their leads.

Windows Phone 7 Series 3. Wooing developers

The Good. Microsoft is using the time between Windows Phone 7 Series' announcement and availability wisely, For starters, the company plans to woo developers during next month's MIX10 conference. Meanwhile, Microsoft is opening up its mobile platform to more third-party customization than does Apple (but not Google or Nokia). Microsoft also is a notoriously good development partner, providing lots of documentation and support.

The Bad. Windows Phone 7 Series doesn't really offer anything shockingly new for developers to embrace -- other than perhaps Office support. That's great for the enterprise market, but Microsoft needs to make a big consumer play. Microsoft will have to work developers all year long, and, once again, time to market -- meaning, when developers can profit from the platform -- is a deterrent to supporting it.

The Ugly. Apple already has huge mobile application developer lead among closed platforms. Meanwhile, today, Symbian Foundation announced open-source Synbian ^3. Nokia and Intel revealed that they will combine their Maemo and Moblin platforms into the single MeeGo. Like Symbian ^3 -- and Google's Android -- MeeGo is open source. Closed Windows Phone 7 Series must woo developers from closed iPhone OS and three open source mobile operating systems -- Android, MeeGo and Symbian 3.

Google's next attempt at a more secure Buzz may take a few more days

Publié: février 15, 2010, 8:39pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that a second round of privacy changes, the nature of which was revealed last Saturday evening, is still being developed, and may yet go live "in the next couple of days."

Among those changes will be a more obvious way to turn Buzz off (no pun intended), a feature that remained obscure after the service's first round of privacy changes last Thursday. At that time, Google chose to un-hide an option that new customers may easily have ignored: to not only build a list of followers from existing Gmail contacts, but to publicize that list on the Buzz user's public profile. Depending on what other Google services the customer may have been using, that profile could possibly have been visible to anyone, including non-Buzz users.

On Saturday, the company announced it would change Buzz again, not with regard to profiles (which will apparently continue to be made public, if only to other Buzz users, by default) but rather, followers. As Buzz product manager Todd Jackson wrote, "Starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked 'Follow selected people and start using Buzz.'"

Google's mockup of Buzz's new "auto-suggest" list, produced Saturday, appears to collect a larger swath of Gmail contacts for possible inclusion than the "auto-follow" list demonstrated last week. What we will not know until the rollout date (Google is not providing further details until then) is how this process would make a material difference over the method Buzz uses presently. Specifically: At present, Buzz gives the new user a more direct option for seeing the list of people who will be followed. Assuming the user finds and activates this option, he can then uncheck those people from the list he does not want to follow, and then click Save profile and continue. At that point, he's a Buzz user, and whomever he didn't uncheck is now a followed contact.

Under what appears to be the new system (we won't be able to test it ourselves until it's finally rolled out), it's no longer a question of whether the user sees his contacts. He will see them, and he will be given a chance to uncheck the ones he doesn't want, before clicking on a new button labeled Follow selected people and start using Buzz. At that point, he's a Buzz user, and whomever he didn't uncheck is now a followed contact.

From that perspective, it doesn't appear to matter whether Buzz enrolled a cavalcade of Gmail contacts into the user's Buzz profile before he removed them and launched his own Buzz status, or refrained from enrolling those contacts until the user reviewed the list. Or in short, whether we call it an "auto-follow" or an "auto-suggest" model may not actually matter, except to the extent that it may change the public's perception of how Buzz implements its privacy model. What will change for certain is that all incoming users will see their list of suggested contacts prior to signing up.

Also over the weekend, Google essentially admitted it was not the best of ideas to assume that items already shared through Picasa and Google Reader, on a local basis, should become automatically shared through Buzz; new users were discovering they were already sharing Picasa photos without ever having given their permission. What we have also yet to see next week is whether Buzz users can still make use of a trick that a security engineer discovered last Friday, to use Picasa to ascertain one's semi-public Google Profile URL as though it were a fully public one.

The overkill response to Google Buzz

Publié: février 15, 2010, 6:22pm CET par Carmi Levy

In today's viral, social media-driven world, it never seems to take long for things to get ugly. This is especially true for Google Buzz, which became a lightning rod for privacy-related criticisms almost as soon as it went live last week.

My advice to the critics: Don't get your panties in a knot.

Google's public privacy debacle

I'm not saying that Buzz didn't come out of the box with an embarrassingly long list of issues. It did, and Google should fix them pronto. And Google users everywhere should hold the company accountable for doing precisely that.

I'm also not saying that such criticisms aren't deserved. Whenever any Web service is flawed to the point that everyday use can compromise the integrity of our personal information, we can't simply let it slide. As originally delivered, Buzz was, shall we say, problematic. Its auto-follow feature created a list of contacts from users' Gmail accounts and automatically followed them. Then, it "helpfully" made this list of most frequently used contacts public, so any stranger with a Gmail account could then see who they'd been corresponding with.

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) Buzz's initial profile setup was also a privacy minefield. At first blush, the profile requirement wasn't such a major issue, since most social networking tools ask for at least some personal data. It helps add value to the user experience by, for example, making it easier to localize search or quickly build a list of contacts.

Unfortunately, the devil of Google's profile setup methodology lurked in the details. While users of most other online services could expect this private, personally-identifiable information to be kept relatively private, they had no such protection in Buzz. Google by default made the profile public and forced users who wanted it kept hidden to edit their profile manually.

Changes are welcome but insufficient

We all know how this works in the real world: Tech-savvy early adopters will typically explore the full feature set and tweak the settings to their heart's desire. The other 95% of the population would never even know there were additional settings to set -- and they'd be exposed without even knowing it. It's a scary place to be, and Facebook, for one, has been there too many times to count. As more services move online and become more dependent on socially aware architecture, it'll only get worse.

To its credit, Google has responded quickly to the criticism. Specifically, it's rolled out two separate waves of changes to the service. The ability to block those who follow you and those you follow from your public profile is now a much more prominent and linear component of the setup and account management process. Blocking followers is also more visible, and you can do it before they actually start following you. Previously, you had to wait until someone started following you before you could set up a block, which was another point of exposure. More broadly, Google is making it more obvious to users what's public, what isn't, and how they can change things to suit their personal comfort level.

Although the controversial auto-follow feature has now been replaced with one that merely suggests whom you may want to follow, Buzz continues to make new users' follow lists public until they specifically choose otherwise. While this fits Google's release-first, tweak-later-and-iteratively Web app development methodology, it reinforces the never-ending struggle between usability and privacy, and how Web services vendors don't always strike an optimal balance. Since this looks like the first social networking tool in Google's inventory that'll actually stick around, it's a conversation we'll likely be having for a while.

We still need to be nice

As we discuss the pros and cons of Buzz, we'll want to keep in mind the tone with which these conversations are held. While the feedback is mostly deserved (Google missed the memo on privacy, and wrongly assumed that none of this mattered to its users), the nasty barbs being tossed in Google's direction are largely uncalled for.

Maybe my rampant Canadianism is showing through, but when the blogs and Twitter feeds light up with Google-is-evil invective that would make my mom blush, I can't help but think that we all need to step back and put it in a little perspective:

No one forces you to use Buzz. This is all volunteer. If you don't like the feature set, use something else. Or nothing at all. If the vendor can't or won't solve the critical issues at the root of the firestorm, you can easily opt out. (At least in Buzz's case now, you can opt out from the Buzz tab in Gmail, which wasn't there at first.)
It's free. I always laugh when users assume vendors owe them something when a given service doesn't work as intended. It could be loose with privacy (Facebook or Google), unavailable (Twitter), or feature-deficient (every other service known to humankind) and thousands of people will cry foul as if they've been fundamentally wronged. They haven't. They've invested nothing beyond their own time to use these services, so when they glitch out they should shrug their shoulders and move on. If they've decided to base their careers and lives on these free services, I humbly suggest they consider an upgrade to a premium account, which adds some vendor accountability and gives folks a leg to stand on when they feel they aren't getting their money's worth.
Responsibility for privacy rests with you. Relying on vendors to secure our privacy is like trusting used car dealers to do everything in their power to get us the best deal. That's our job, not theirs. So if their tools for managing privacy are deficient, it's up to us to navigate them and make them work for us -- and, yes, complain. We may grumble at the inconvenience, and we may jump to competitors who make it easier for us. But in the end no one else is going to captain this ship, so stop complaining if things get rough along the way.

I have no doubt the conversation will ultimately make Buzz a better product. It is, after all, how Web services evolve today. But it's time we stopped blaming vendors like Google for being evil (They're not. A bit disconnected, perhaps, but not evil), and realized the accountability for online privacy rests with us and not them.

This is not a PC: Microsoft debuts Windows Phone 7 Series

Publié: février 15, 2010, 4:29pm CET par Tim Conneally

Without a doubt the biggest news from Mobile World Congress thus far, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series today. This is the big update to Microsoft's mobile environment which presents a more social, touchable, consumer-friendly user interface with new ways to interact with mobile data.

Windows Phone 7 Series Start Screen

In short, the experience in Windows Phone 7 Series is almost nothing like the Windows Mobile experience, which was designed as a complement to the desktop PC.

And to drive that point home in today's Mobile World Congress presentation, Microsoft repeated one key phrase at four different times: This is not a PC.

This is because Microsoft has turned completely against its old model in the mobile space. Instead of a system that is a truncated desktop experience, or an experience that hinges upon the device's partnership with a PC, Microsoft's new mobile platform is being sold primarily on its standalone capabilities and secondarily with its integration with Zune and Xbox Live. Integration with the PC has been moved far out of the spotlight.

Windows Phone 7 Series=Games Hub

"We have redesigned every step," said Andrew Lees, Senior Vice President of Mobile Communications.

Indeed, they've even moved away from the app-based model popularized by all of the other major smartphone platforms. Windows Phone 7 Series offers an almost entirely widget-based interface with its concept of task-oriented "hubs" and "live tiles."

Windows Phone 7 Series Music Hub

Windows Phone 7 Series has six hubs built into it: People, Pictures, Games, Music/Video, Marketplace, and Office. Each hub corresponds with an ecosystem, and rather than simply present a blank field full of app icons, it is meant to act as a central point to interact with live icons representing all of the user's related content.

"Just about a year ago we took a hard look at the state of the smartphone industry -- particularly at design," Eric Urban wrote in the Windows Mobile team blog today. "Our view is that the predominant user interface design -- screens of icons to manage and navigate -- has become a little outdated. It's a UI paradigm that was created for the PC, where it's EASY to have lots of separate apps which you navigate between, spend time with, and operate with a large screen and mouse. We said to ourselves 'a phone is not a PC...it's got a small screen, no mouse, and you want to use it not just for long periods but in short bursts -- it should work great in the tiniest of moments.' We wanted to solve for 'glanceability' -- so you could get data and information without constantly going in and out of applications. We knew that we would need to innovate further to deliver something in which each of us, and each of our customers can take delight. So here it is."

One of the immediate points of criticism, however, is that Windows Phone 7 Series was shown today on a mocked-up device, and it isn't expected to come to market until the 2010 holiday season. Given Microsoft's history with delays in the mobile space, this is a bit unnerving, and means the final experience could be quite different from what was shown today when it is run on actual consumer hardware late this year.

But regardless of the launch date, Microsoft is working toward an entirely different mobile experience, one that moves beyond the stigmatized Windows Mobile environment, and even beyond the stigmatized PC environment, into one designed especially for the devices we all use.

Proof that online telemetry improves systems, from of all places, Chevrolet

Publié: février 13, 2010, 1:03am CET par Tim Conneally

Chevrolet parts logo from 1946 Eventually we will all be able to keep track of everything we do, like Nicholas Felton, the man who relentlessly chronicles the minutiae of his own behavior.

We're not even that far off right now. Today, it's downright easy to keep a comprehensive record of our spending with online banking, our complete phone and Internet records, and our exposure on the Web in general, so we can check our behavior. It's the sort of thing almost inherent in being a geek...checking logs, watching records, and tweaking for optimum performance.

While there is not yet a study showing that "Government 2.0" economic reports actually help curtail frivolous expenses, or that Smart Meters actually decrease energy consumption, these sort of detailed record-keeping systems are at least helping keep auto repair bills down.

Chevrolet sent out a report this week which claims that OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics subscribers have significantly fewer customer warranty claims. In fact, in the month of January, 99.3% of the 1.8 million Chevrolet owners enrolled in the program had no "health" issues with the essential systems of their vehicles.

Users are e-mailed monthly diagnostic reports, which classify the conditions of the car by red, yellow, and green status icons. They're also informed when an oil change is needed, based not upon any mileage or time rule, but instead upon the condition of the engine systems.

The same way I stopped running out of Cyan printer ink when I switched to a printer with a network interface that included an ink gauge, automated diagnostic systems have an appreciable effect on tasks of all kinds.

Google Buzz and Outlook 2010 Social Connector: Competitors or partners?

Publié: février 13, 2010, 12:58am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Since the launch of Google Buzz last Tuesday, we've been hearing more analyses from professionals and bloggers warning of a possible showdown of sorts between Google and Microsoft in the social space. Buzz is Google's social connection with its Gmail; but Microsoft already announced last year its own social connection with its mail platform: the forthcoming Social Connector plug-in for Outlook 2010, due for release with the rest of Microsoft Office 2010 this June. The latest release candidate for Office 2010 was distributed to private testers earlier this month.

Social Connector promises to transform Outlook 2010 into a live network teeming with contacts who share not just e-mail, but chats and texts through Windows Live and documents through SharePoint. Messages received from a "live" contact will be adorned with that person's availability, location, and a record of recent activities. Though LinkedIn has already signed on as Microsoft's first third-party partner, connectivity with Facebook -- probably distributed by Facebook, not Microsoft -- appears likely. So much of the same kind of functionality folks are seeing with Buzz, will likely appear in Outlook as well, although slanted more toward professional tasks rather than personal friends and acquaintances.

Microsoft's early response to Buzz was covered last Tuesday by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley was that the company felt there were already enough social networks to go around without Google building another one. But that response came from a Windows Live product manager -- someone defending a product that Microsoft is building into a social network. As Mary Jo and others who've also covered Microsoft for decades know full well, the other end of the Redmond campus may as well be a different hemisphere.

So although the initial implication of that response appeared to be a defensive strike, the truth of the matter is, Social Connector is being designed to connect to social networks, not to become one. It doesn't have to be perceived as going head-to-head against Buzz unless that's how Microsoft insists on marketing it. The very real possibility exists that Buzz could be connected to Social Connector, by means of the open API that Microsoft began distributing to Office developers since the release of the public beta.

A snippet from the activities list that appears beside a contact or a contact's e-mail message, in Outlook 2010 with Social Connector attached. [Courtesy Microsoft]

A snippet from the activities list that appears beside a contact or a contact's e-mail message, in Outlook 2010 with Social Connector attached. [Courtesy Microsoft]

Betanews asked Microsoft spokespersons representing that opposite hemisphere, how likely is it that Google Buzz will become represented in Outlook Social Connector? Technically, we were told, it's absolutely feasible. Microsoft would not preclude Google from making Buzz connectivity feasible in Social Connector. What that means is that it won't be Microsoft that does the deed, though it may be Microsoft that provides the incentive for Google to do the deed -- and that makes it look like Google's the one that's abstaining, if it chooses not to take action.

Will Google do the deed? Betanews asked our contacts at Google, who firmly responded with several "no comments" embellished with the telltale phrase "for now." Spokespersons cautiously agreed that the phrase "for now" is intentional; that this situation could change without notice...making this one of the more telling sets of "no comments" we could receive.

Will the ribbon work in Mac? Design clues from the Office 2011 screenshot

Publié: février 13, 2010, 12:15am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Microsoft was under no obligation to build a ribbon component, similar to the one premiered in Office for Windows, for the Mac. That's especially true given the fact that the menu bar is such a prominent element of the Mac user experience. Ever since System 7, the menu bar -- which remains fixed to the top of the screen -- indicates which application is active. In Windows, applications have their own menu bars, if they have them at all; and starting with Office 2007, the ribbon replaced the menu bar.

In Windows, the replacement of the menu bar for Office apps was one of its design goals: a way to reduce screen clutter and minimize the steps or clicks required for a user to find a function. At least that's how Microsoft presented the original idea back at PDC in September 2005. In MacOS, you can't replace the menu bar, so a ribbon would have to find some way of complementing it, sharing the workload with it, in a way that makes sense to the user.

And that's the problem: Judging from the one screenshot Microsoft released yesterday of an early development build of Word 2011 for Mac, it's not obvious how its implementation of the ribbon will complement, and coexist with, the menu bar. Perhaps one screenshot isn't a good enough clue, but that screen does show the new Home tab of Word, as it's currently being envisioned. If a new user, unfamiliar with the word processor, were to sit down to this screen and try to ascertain how to use this program on her own, it seems more likely she'd start by perusing the menu bar than the ribbon tabs.

For three decades now, the most skilled developers have embraced and extended the principle that menus in a bar should have consistent categories whose divisions are simple for someone to intuit without a manual. When asked to give my advice on the matter, I've always maintained that menus should distinguish between actions and things, the same way a sentence clearly distinguishes between verbs and objects. For instance, "Insert" is a very straightforward menu name that implies the creation of something new, typically a visual component rather than just text. "Insert" is the name of a ribbon tab in Office 2007 and 2010 for Windows. "Edit," meanwhile, implies the changing of something already present. It has been the second menu category of nearly all applications ever created that follow the Common User Access principles, for both Mac and Windows; and it remains the second menu category in the Office 2011 screenshot.

On the other hand, things can be both edited and inserted. So you can see how the confusion over what function does what action, can begin. Several years ago, I commented to Microsoft developers about how the Word menu bar contained "Edit" (an action) and "Table" (something that can be edited). A reasonable novice user might ask, "If I want to edit a table, which menu should I pull down?" Depending upon whom I was speaking with at the time, the response I got was, "Well obviously, 'Edit,'" or "Well obviously, 'Table.'" It didn't help that the menu selection for inserting a table fell under the "Table" menu rather than the "Insert" menu -- technically, it was under a submenu: Table > Insert > Table. How intuitive is that, really? The explanation I usually got was, "Well, the 'Table' menu is for tables that already exist." "Then why isn't the 'View' menu for views that already exist?" I responded.

This was one of the quandaries Microsoft designers specifically addressed in the creation of the ribbon for Office 2007. When it was first demonstrated to me at PDC 2005, developers said that the most reasonable thing to expect a novice user to do when editing a table, was to click on the table. The ribbon should then respond with the features that pertain to changing or doing stuff to the table. That's when the design principles clicked for me, and I started really liking where the ribbon was going.

Microsoft's screenshot of an early build of Office 2011 for Mac, now featuring the ribbon. [Courtesy Microsoft.]

Microsoft's screenshot of an early build of Office 2011 for Mac, now featuring the ribbon. Click here for the full-size image.

So I'm wondering why these same principles appear not to have been referenced in the initial design of Word 2011. Here, the ribbon contents we're looking at are from the Home tab, where the general character and paragraph editing features are most often found -- the contents of the regular toolbars in earlier versions of the product. What Word 2010 for Windows calls the File tab is represented here in the Word menu, which is alongside the File menu.

Inside the Home tab, one finds the Insert frame. Now, suppose you're a new user and you want to insert a table. There's a big Insert frame in the Home tab, but it only gives you Text Box, Shape, and Picture. So you don't go there. Perhaps a table is one of the Document Elements represented by that tab. (We won't know from just this one screenshot.) Assuming that's wrong, the user gets sent back to the menu bar. And we're back at square one; do we try the Insert menu or the Table menu?

It appears from this glance that the Word for Mac designers weren't trying to solve any of the same problems the Word for Windows designers were working on. Instead, they concentrated on the sole problem of getting a ribbon-like something into a Mac window. To do that, they didn't even bother to borrow the more refined elements of Office 2010; they went instead to the five-year-old drawing board of the "Office 12" project.

From PDC 2005, a screenshot of the premiere public showing of the ribbon in an early beta build of Excel 2007, in what was then code-named 'Office 12.'

From PDC 2005, a screenshot of the premiere public showing of the ribbon in an early beta build of Excel 2007, in what was then code-named 'Office 12.'

Office 12 (PDC Right sidebar) The idea of making the ribbon subdivisions into tabs came after the initial design was shown off to the public. In this 2005 screenshot from Excel above, as well as in this blow-up from Word at left, you see how the frame categories (at one time, folks experimented with calling them "drawers," but thankfully that never caught on) were printed on top of the frame. The user clicked the little plus sign that pointed up, to pull up a dialog box with expanded options below -- which didn't make sense. Granted, on the Mac, the system clipboard is a sacrosanct Apple property. Still, it is the tool with which one cuts, copies, and pastes, even if she's accustomed to typing Command-X, Command-C, or Command-V to do it. Ever since the beginning of the ribbon project in Office 12 for Windows, designers had the objective of making cut, copy, and paste more obvious.

So where are they in Word for Mac? Probably under the File menu where they've always been. Possibly a user could customize what Office 2011 designers are calling the "Standard Toolbar" by adding cut, copy, and paste to it (thereby making it non-standard). The counterpart for this device in Office for Windows, the "Quick Access Toolbar," takes up just the left corner of the title bar by default, though it can be scooted down below the ribbon. On MacOS, since the title bar is Apple property, the Standard Toolbar must be displayed as a full-size stripe below the title bar, although I imagine there's a way to turn it off.

In almost every sense, the addition of the ribbon to this rendition of Word 2011 for Mac distributes the application's functionality to a bunch of various on-screen devices -- perhaps a ribbon, perhaps a menu, perhaps a toolbar -- rather than consolidating them in one place, which was the ribbon's original design goal. Marketing this implementation using trendy phraseology, doesn't mask this choice to the user.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is wont to try anyway: "Together, the menu bar, standard toolbar, and ribbon complement each other seamlessly," wrote developer Han-Yi Shaw for the company's blog yesterday. "The standard toolbar hosts the most highly used controls -- such as New, Open, Print, Save -- so if you've seen an Standard Toolbar in Office sometime in the past twenty years, you'll know where and what to expect. The Office for Mac ribbon hosts the most highly used formatting and creation tools that were previously evenly distributed between the Formatting Palette and Elements Gallery in Office 2008. With the new Office for Mac ribbon, you know [sic] longer have to travel between these two user elements, but instead just focus on a single, unified, tab-based design."

Put together with the existing menu bar, this design can't possibly regain lost screen real estate in exactly the same way as for Office 2007. But perhaps if we just say it does anyway: "You'll also be pleased learn that the combined height of the standard toolbar and ribbon is noticeably less tall than the standard toolbar and Elements Gallery in Office 2008 for Mac. So you actually regain screen real estate when you switch over to Office 2011...For the remaining least used 20 percent of functionality, it doesn't clutter up the user interface and you can simply access them via the Mac OS X menu bar during that rare occasion when you them."

I used to write about Macintosh two decades ago for Computer Shopper. One thing that has never changed about people who use the Mac, is that it's because they want to use a Mac. So they want to use the menu bar at the top of the screen because that's what they prefer. It works for them. The problem Microsoft is trying to solve by grafting the Windows Vista/Windows 7-style ribbon onto Office for Mac is not so much a functionality problem as a perception problem: If Office for Mac can work well the old-fashioned way, then one might possibly ask why Microsoft developers didn't leave Office for Windows the way it was, or at least give them an option to switch back to the old menu bar.

But something which perhaps has never occurred to the company's developers to believe is the sheer possibility that maybe, just maybe, some people use Windows because they want to use Windows. Don't laugh. Why not envision a time when that's possible, and build Windows apps to suit the needs of Windows customers? And then for Mac customers, make Mac applications that run like they belong on Macs. If both groups were equally pleased with good design choices that appeal to them individually, there would be no perception problem for Microsoft to solve.

Samsung's first Bada phone to be shown next week?

Publié: février 12, 2010, 10:12pm CET par Tim Conneally

In November, Samsung launched its own open smartphone platform called Bada, which the company positioned as a replacement for Symbian, and eventually the rest of Samsung's proprietary non-smartphone operating systems.

Since that time, Bada has been keeping a pretty low profile. Samsung showed off screenshots of its UI and some quick videos of software (and Flash) running on the platform at a London event last December. The company also said the first Bada phone would be available in the first half of 2010.

Now, with Mobile World Congress just around the corner, Samsung has set up a huge advertisement for a new device called the Wave, with the tag line "with Samsung's new mobile platform Bada."

We've contacted Samsung to see if we can get a taste of what to expect from the consumer electronics giant next week.

Windows Phone rumors ramp up in advance of Mobile World Congress

Publié: février 12, 2010, 10:01pm CET par Tim Conneally

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The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week looks like it will play host to the usual range of exciting announcements in the mobile devices and software field. Based on the continued appearance of enticing rumors, Microsoft's Windows Phone platform looks like it will be one of the main attractions this year.

At 9:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, CEO Steve Ballmer is expected host a press conference unveiling the latest Windows Mobile developments, which could be anything from the official announcement of Windows Mobile 6.5.3 to the launch of Xbox Live-enabled games on Windows Mobile to a so-called "Zune Phone."

Reuters today cited anonymous sources who said the announcement will be "new mobile phone software," an aggravatingly vague description, which The Wall Street Journal tightened up into "Windows Mobile 7," which it says will resemble the Zune HD's interface, but all signs seem to be pointing elsewhere.

Microsoft assured us last month that its user-friendly, non-legacy mobile operating system was NOT Windows Mobile 7, and a report from Bloomberg today eliminated its mention of Windows Mobile 7 in favor of "The renamed Windows Phone operating system."

A new version of Windows Mobile that concentrates on media and entertainment instead of business functionality would no doubt be welcome in the new consumer-driven smartphone market, and many would say it's long overdue from Redmond.

10 ways Microsoft can save Windows Mobile -- starting NEXT WEEK!

Publié: février 12, 2010, 9:56pm CET par Joe Wilcox

What will Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announce during Monday's Mobile World Congress press event in Barcelona, Spain? There's what he will announce and what he should. I'm skipping the speculation about what and going right to should. Microsoft's mobile strategy is a mess. Apple and Google have routed Microsoft in mobile operating systems. Android and iPhone OS make Windows Mobile look about as fresh as Windows 95. Meanwhile, Microsoft has chased Research in Motion's BlackBerry in the enterprise for years, never making any real gains.

It's long past time for the Big Ballmer to step up and offer something substantial -- not promises of future technology coming but goodies available immediately or nearly so. I've condensed what easily was a list of 15 or so items down to 10 things Microsoft must do immediately to save Windows Mobile from extinction. Microsoft has no more time. It's do or die, and even doing now may be too late. With that introduction, Microsoft should:

1. Release Windows Mobile 7. That's not announce but release, either next week or within 60 days. Anything less than immediate or near-immediate timing is simply too long. Google's Android is on rapid development and end-user adoption pace now, and Apple is sure to release a new iPhone model by summer. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile continues its decline. Gartner and IDC haven't yet released worldwide smartphone OS shipments for fourth quarter, but ComScore has released US phone subscriber share, based on a survey of more than 30,000 mobile users. Android phone share (based on actual subscribers not shipments) was 5.2 percent in fourth quarter, up from 2.5 percent sequentially. Share by phone OS vendor: RIM, 41.6 percent; Apple, 25.3 percent; Microsoft, 18 percent.

Ballmer will make a huge mistake if all he has is something to show. He can drone on about how much better is the Windows 7 Mobile user interface or blow about natural user interface enhancements. Big fraking deal. Microsoft's theme for Windows Phone at MWC is "Ready. Set." If Windows 7 isn't ready, set, go, Ballmer should stay in Washington State (or fly back if he already is in Spain).

2. Announce Zune phone -- or, at least, a handset based on Danger technology. Of course, Microsoft should do its own phone. A Danger phone -- the so-called "Project Pink" -- would be something better than nothing, but a Zune phone would be much better. Sure Microsoft risks alienating some of its OEM partners, but many of them are pulling back Windows Mobile in favor of Android anyway. Microsoft risks more by doing nothing.

In my September review of Zune HD, I wrote:

The Zune HD's size, particularly its thinness, would be ideal for a cell phone -- way better suited than iPhone. With a 3G radio, Bluetooth and application store, Zune HD could be a helluva phone. The task-oriented user interface, while very non-phone like, is ideally suited for a multi-functional device, even one with 3G telephony. Task-oriented UIs emphasize simplicity and hide complexity, increasing usability.

That's self-explanatory enough as to why a Zune phone makes sense.

3. Make a major mobile acquisition. I expect that Windows 7 Mobile or Zune phone won't be ready come Monday, and Microsoft simply can't afford to wait. Even if Windows Mobile 7 released to manufacturing next week, new handsets would still be months away -- at least. Microsoft needs to acquire some company with good mobile hardware, software and services. Kara Swisher made similar suggestion on February 8:

Microsoft and its giant wallet might be better served by buying one of the big and more established telecom companies, such as Research in Motion, Palm or even -- as another Microsoft exec said to me, 'Why not?' Nokia. Nokia has a market cap of close to $50 billion, with RIM at close to $38 billion. And Palm? A paltry $1.74 billion. Microsoft's current valuation is $246 billion, and the company has $40 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand...many sources at Microsoft have told me that CEO Steve Ballmer has expressed interest in buying RIM many times (while also dismissing any interest in Palm).

In late December I stated "10 reasons why Microsoft should buy Palm now." Maybe Ballmer has hard feelings about Palm because of past competition and the short-lived commitment to Windows Mobile. If so, he should act logically, not emotionally. Palm would be a cheap acquisition that would instantly give Microsoft great hardware (Pre), operating system (WebOS) and services, particularly synchronization. RIM and Windows Phone overlap too much in the enterprise. Microsoft needs some consumer pull, and Palm has it. What Palm doesn't have is a strong company backing its great technology. Microsoft could provide that.

4. If no Zune phone or mobile acquisition, announce Windows Phone handset development contest. Microsoft needs a Manhattan Project for mobile. If the company has got nothing, it should encourage third parties to come up with something. Microsoft should announce a contest to develop the Windows 7 Phone. Major manufacturers, startups and individuals should be allowed to submit prototypes (with all appropriate NDAs and contracts in place to protect designs). The contest must last no more than 120 days (Hey, it's a Manhattan Project!), with Microsoft committed to choosing one to three designs within 30 days and begin manufacturing 30 days later. Microsoft would commit to buying the prototype design for pre-stated price and -- for existing, major manufacturers -- promising exclusive production deal for at least 12 months.

The contest would be worth the buzz alone -- and there should be plenty of that. Suddenly anyone could conceivably develop Microsoft's own Windows Phone and get a big, fat contract in process. The Web would buzz with speculation and ideas about what Microsoft should do. The contest could be the ultimate in crowdsourcing but instead of culling the crowd for free Microsoft could put forth its longstanding corporate axiom that people should be paid for their creative work. Take that, free-monger Google!

5. If no mobile acquisition or Zune phone, make closer development, strategic and business ties with Nokia. Barcelona is the right place, given Nokia's handset dominance across major parts of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Buying Nokia wouldn't be a bad idea, either, as Swisher suggested.

In most emerging markets, the mobile handset is the first Internet-connected device, not the PC, that most people first use. During fourth quarter, Nokia sold 126.9 million handsets worldwide for 39 percent worldwide market share. Worldwide, there are 4.6 billion mobile phone subscribers, and manufacturers ship about 1.3 billion mobile phones each year. By comparison, the total PC install base is only about 1 billion.

The point: The future of computing is the mobile device, not the PC. Nokia has huge presence in most countries, particularly emerging markets. A Nokia deal, or acquisition, should emphasize extending Microsoft products and services to cell phone users in these markets. Microsoft also should align any Nokia deal with the "Unlimited Potential" program.

6. Release -- not announce -- a new mobile browser. The browser should be based on Internet Explorer 8 or WebKit, and it should be available for all major mobile platforms, starting with BlackBerry OS, iPhone OS, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. It's OK if Microsoft snubs nose at Android -- for now. Microsoft's new browser should be available in beta, at least.

7. Unveil Zune Silverlight client. As big as Windows market share is, Microsoft needs to extend Zune's reach, particularly to sell more music players or to launch a phone. Microsoft should release a Zune client for Mac -- and even Linux -- and that could be easily enough done with Silverlight. Microsoft could go all Web-based, but the Zune UI and features are already compelling in the Windows client. That said , Silverlight could allow for the option of both -- Web-based and desktop clients.

8. Release Silverlight for Mobile. In two years, HTML 5 could make Silverlight less relevant, not just Adobe Flash. Microsoft already is off to good start supporting HTML 5 streaming with Silverlight. What Microsoft needs more is a Silverlight client for all major mobile platforms, including iPhone OS. Windows Mobile won't be near good enough. Support must be broad, starting with Symbian S40 and S60 handsets. Microsoft should make beating Flash to market a top mobile development priority. Flash 10.1 is nearly ready for mobile device release and could debut as early as next week.

9. Tag it! Barcodes have a huge future on mobile devices, and so far only Nokia really gets it. But Nokia is lumbering too slowly to market. Google also gets tags, for search and advertising, but misses the broader utility in emerging markets. Enter Microsoft Tag. Mobile money is the hot topic in emerging markets. The idea: That people spend and also receive money via accounts attached to their mobile phones. Mobile phones also could be used for distributing financial aid.

In emerging markets where people don't otherwise bank, the mobile phone can contain funds access and be used to pay for items. On possible future payment option: Scanning barcodes with the phone's camera. Microsoft already is an aggressive technology provider in emerging markets. Mobile money tied to Microsoft Tag would be glue binding new customers to the company's products and services.

10. Make mobile location-based search immediately available. Google is there now. Mcrosoft's Bing needs to offer even better location-based search services -- tied to advertising and maps, for starters. Nirvana: Jack Consumer searches for Patti Smith book Just Kids, on his computer. While out and about, his smartphone beeps and, based on location and store database stored in the Azure cloud, informs that the Borders shop on the next block has Just Kidsin stock.

Google adjusts Buzz setup for privacy, makes 'public' choice more obvious

Publié: février 12, 2010, 5:59pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Already sensing that too many potential users were attributing the "evil" moniker to Google (in the absence of actual evil in the world), the company yesterday made adjustments to its Google Buzz sign-up procedure. In Betanews tests, we found Google's altered dialog box is much more descriptive about the repercussions of setting up a public profile. It uncovers a critical choice about what you share with others publicly, that had been buried beneath an Edit link, by copying it up front where everyone can see it.

The danger involved with a new user setting up Buzz without being mindful of its default consequences, is that her public profile can be automatically filled with the names and profile links of Gmail contacts she communicates with most. Betanews tests this morning indicate that changes Google has made to Buzz setup appear to reduce that danger somewhat:

When a Gmail user logs in from the Web and is invited to try Buzz for the first time, a dialog box gives that user an opportunity to find people to explicitly follow by default. We noticed that when the user starts typing in names, Buzz does attempt to auto-complete those names, using a list of contacts from the Gmail account. However, at this point in the process, Buzz did not gather those same names into a list of people to be automatically followed, and that's a big difference. Here, the user is effectively creating a new default list of people to follow that is devoid of automatic references from Gmail. If she starts her Buzz setup by accepting this invitation, she may be able to avoid inadvertently publishing her list of followed members to the world right away.
The dialog box for editing one's new Buzz-compliant profile now appears the first time the user tries to enter a comment into Buzz (the equivalent of tweeting). But at this point in time, the user's Google profile is not public. That's significant, because it means information the new user is just now entering into Buzz isn't being broadcast to Google's search caches, before she has an opportunity to make it private.
The revised dialog box at this point now includes the Show the list of people I'm following and the list of people following me on my public profile check box -- which had been buried behind an Edit link -- up front, as well as behind the Edit link where it was before.
Although Buzz urges the new user to create something called a public profile, the degree to which Google publicizes that profile to the world depends on two factors: 1) the amount of information the user includes in it; 2) whether the user opts to give her profile a public URL. Although signing up for Buzz does result in the creation of a "public profile" of sorts, it is only directly viewable to Buzz users (and perhaps, through a circuitous route, to other Google social services, such as Google Talk). That profile page will include a list of entries shared via Buzz, which does include tweets made using Twitter. It will also include links to the Buzz user's lists of followers and followed contacts, but only if the user allowed them to be visible to others. Yes, visibility is the default choice, but that choice is no longer buried. And until the user fills in profile details such as career, location, and a list of one's superpowers (yes, that's one of the blanks provided in Google Profile), it cannot be searched from the Web.
Google Profile pages created by Buzz are only "public" by default in a limited sense. Specifically, for a Google profile to be searchable, one still has to edit her profile page manually, outside of Buzz. Checking the option at the very bottom enables anyone to browse to http://www.google.com/profiles/Gmail_name, thus giving everyone -- even non-Buzz users -- access to what the user is buzzing. Although this isn't stated explicitly, enabling this option is what makes the profile searchable like a public Web page, with results that show up in Google searches. Buzz does not check this option by default. Until the user checks this option, the profile page's URL does not include the user's Gmail name, but rather a large integer at the end. So although it is technically public, it's not something that's designed to be given away, and no one is likely to be able to guess that integer's 21-digit value.

Google's changes do set up a few new speed bumps along the way to creating a Buzz profile, which new users will notice, and many may not appreciate. We know from experience how folks reacted to the abundance of security warnings shouted out by Windows Vista. But when making folks aware of the security risks inherent in doing things automatically, this is a good thing. And the fact that one's Google profile page is not broadcast to Google's searchable caches by default, gives Buzz users an important safeguard.

Update ribbon (small)

4:50 pm EST February 12, 2010 · Today on his personal blog, a white-hat hacker who only goes by the name theharmonyguy announced that he had discovered how one can use Picasa to learn the Google username -- the Gmail name -- of any Google user (who is, unofficially, a Picasa user) using the long-integer numeric profile address. With this method, a person whose "public Buzz profile" is only public in a limited sense, could become public in the literal sense.

"With the introduction of Buzz, Google is encouraging users to take advantage of Google profiles," he wrote. "But in the process, Google is tying together services that many users may have treated quite distinctly in the past. If you want your Gmail address to remain private, you need to manage properly the other Google services you use to avoid one of them exposing your Gmail username."

Opera 10.5 leaps to beta, holds on to unexpected performance lead

Publié: février 12, 2010, 1:31am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Download Opera 10.5 Beta 1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

Actual Beta News feature banner Just yesterday, we saw yet another daily build of what Opera Software was calling its "pre-alpha" of the Opera 10.5 Web browser, a product that the company certainly wanted folks to test, even though they were warned it wasn't even ready for daily use. With various software publishers' development schedules being organized so differently from one another, it's difficult enough distinguishing "previews" from "alpha previews" from "preview alphas" -- just yesterday, for example, Mozilla finalized a public "developer preview" of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1, closing off its "Alpha 1 preview" track before starting, on the same day, its "Alpha 2 preview" track.

But Opera, perhaps breaching etiquette altogether and going for the sinister "Triple Dog Dare," this morning skipped right over Alpha 1 -- which we were all expecting -- and officially dubbed the latest build of 10.5 "Beta 1." In so doing, Opera also removed what it had been calling "10.2 Alpha 1" off of its list of test builds, and replaced it with 10.5 Beta 1 on its "browser/next" page.

There are a few elements of this new beta that still have a certain "alpha" flavor to them: for example, a button on the search bar that doesn't search for the contents already in the text box, but only after you type new text into the box. And a JavaScript control problem on a very simple conditional loop still forces an error condition on one of our basic JavaScript tests -- an error that one can excuse in a "pre-alpha."

That said, Opera is now officially back in the hunt for Web browser performance supremacy, warts and all. Today, after a huge set of Patch Tuesday updates forced a slowdown of our index browser (Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista), and even a slight speed gain in IE8 on Windows 7, triggered a reset of all our Windows 7 browser test scores slightly higher, Opera 10.5 held on to the lead over the latest development build of Google Chrome 5.

But the lead is much narrower than it was last week, by almost 44%. With the wind in Chrome 5's sails now, Opera has to paddle as fast as it can to maintain its distance from what has become the fastest evolving browser chassis in history.

We'll get back to performance in a bit; first, a look at some of the other new Opera 10.5 features we're noticing. Last December, we showed you the completely revised Opera front-end, which made us wonder why this wasn't being called "Opera 11." For Beta 1, we've noticed a few tweaks: First, there are fewer buttons in the Address bar than in the first "pre-alpha." Back and Forward are now paired, and a new "fast-forward" button (there's no textual name for it that we can see) is capable of paging ahead, within sequences of pages that haven't been loaded yet. We tried it with Betanews articles, and it works quite well -- you can get to Page 2 from Page 1 even if you can't find our page button.

The tweaked, but still revised, front end of Opera 10.5 Beta 1, with the tab bar opened up to show thumbnails.

The tweaked, but still revised, front end of Opera 10.5 Beta 1, with the tab bar opened up to show thumbnails.

The Search bar has been tweaked, and now bears the logo of the search engine you're using (Google remains the default). The search button has been moved to the right, but as we mentioned, there's times when it didn't function for us in the first beta build.

The Side panel is back in 10.5 (it wasn't working for us in the pre-alpha), and it remains the most convenient way for us to pull up bookmarks. One of our favorite Firefox add-ons is the All-in-One Sidebar, but as we've been reminded any number of times, its design inspiration comes from Opera.

The tab bar can still be slid open to reveal thumbnail previews, though in the beta, Web pages' icons ("favicons") have returned to accompany their title bars. When you hover over a tab or a little thumbnail, Opera 10.5 pulls up a big thumbnail, along with more space for the page's title and URL. The tab button with the picture of a tab in it, that didn't convey its meaning very well, has been replaced with a "recycle bin" button that makes more sense. From here, you can re-open closed tabs.

Controls along the bottom of the new Opera window are now rendered in their own tabs; and this is smart, because the tabs themselves are opaque. Opera has been joining the trend toward embracing the translucent window frame in Vista and Windows 7; in the pre-alpha, you could only see the charcoal-grey feature icons when the window was in front of something white or chalky-colored.

Version 10.5 is Opera's first to follow Firefox's lead in supporting the HTML5 <VIDEO> tag -- the ability (theoretically) to show streaming videos from the Web using a codec built into the browser. Unfortunately (and this isn't Opera's fault by any means), the biggest open test of the functionality of the HTML5 tag comes from YouTube, where the test uses the proprietary H.264 codec. While both Firefox and Opera can try to run these tests, they're geared (for now) for Google Chrome 5 and Apple Safari 4.

With pages using the Ogg Theora codec for the <VIDEO> tag -- the one Web standards architects intended -- Opera's built-in player performance appeared stable in early tests. Streaming movies did appear a little "mosaic-ed" for the first few seconds, almost like a JPEG image that's half-loaded. We did notice problems with 10.5 Beta 1 and the Flash codec, especially in YouTube. When a new video player is repeatedly loaded into the same space as the one that initially inhabits a page, Opera has a tendency to blank out the reloaded viewer. You can hear sound, but you see nothing but the page background.

We're impressed by an Opera 10.5 feature that's out of the ordinary for any other browser, and potentially less of a security risk for users: Pop-up windows, including message boxes, are rendered by the JavaScript interpreter as part of the active page, not as separate Opera windows. That means you can't drag a pop-up window outside the page area, which might possibly become an inconvenience in some situations. But it reduces the opportunity for the type of cross-window spoofing that has characterized exploits of Internet Explorer and Firefox, because pop-ups are run in the context of the active page -- a much tighter sandbox.

We're not impressed with the first beta's upload ability: In fact, the browser does tend to crash following an upload. The built-in session manager (one less add-on you need to attach) does pick up where you left off when you reload the browser.

Next: The chase is on...

Download Opera 10.5 Beta 1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

With a few builds under its belt now, it's clear that the development builds of Google Chrome 5 are resuming that browser's course of performance improvement at a rate, on our index, of about half a point per month. Our recent round of Windows 7-based browser tests show higher numbers across the board for another reason: Patch Tuesday has slowed down IE7 in Vista, our index browser, while giving a slight boost to IE8 in Win7.

So the fact that the latest stable build of Google Chrome 4 surged from under 20 to well over 21 on our index, is only partly due to a speed improvement. What's important with regard to these index figures is relative performance, and the bar graph will help you better visualize how well one browser compares with another.

The Opera 10.2 alpha track is no longer on our graph, because it's no longer on Opera Software's roadmap. That's probably a good thing, because 10.2 was the slowest browser in the line-up after IE8. The gulf between the current stable Opera 10.1 and the new 10.5 beta is unprecedented: a 370% performance improvement, mostly reflecting massively improved computational performance, and somewhat improved rendering performance.

Relative performance of Windows-based Web browsers in Windows 7, February 11, 2010.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

In our tests, the 10.5 pre-alpha suffered from unexplained poor performance in rendering conventional HTML tables -- those tools that old Web pages used to divide and conquer pages, prior to the advent of CSS. That problem completely not only disappeared in the 10.5 beta, it blows away every other browser in the field in this department. On Win7, 10.5 scores a 9.19 -- 919% the performance of IE7 in Vista -- followed closely behind by an 8.80 score from the latest stable Safari 4, and 8.10 from Opera 10.1 (the opera brand has typically performed well on this test).

Relative SunSpider (general JavaScript computation) and SlickSpeed (CSS selector) test performance slid a bit from the pre-alpha to the first beta, but we expected that from the first official public build, with all the corrections developers needed to make. Table performance helped Opera 10.5 make up for that, and the new beta still holds the overall lead on the SunSpider: 69.57 versus 68.69 for Chrome 5, and 57.17 for the latest daily WebKit build of Safari.

And Opera's graphics rendering importance is unbelievable: Chrome 4 had us already whistling on the Canvas geography map rendering test, with a 31.75 score. Opera 10.5 Beta 1 scores a 63.50 on that same test. Where Chrome 5 still holds an edge, including at times over its stable predecessor, is in ordinary page rendering. Chrome 5 scores an 11.49 in the Nontroppo CSS rendering battery, while Chrome 4 surpasses that with 12.05; Opera 10.5 Beta 1 scores 7.44 there. In the standard page load test from Nontroppo, Chrome 5 posts a staggering 16.27. Opera 10.5 is in second place on that scale, but still way behind at 9.99. That Chrome 5 score was so staggering, we tested several times to confirm it.

If Chrome 5 were to improve its handling of plotting graphics to the Canvas element of modern HTML, before Opera 10.5 improves its handling of everyday rendering, Opera could be in trouble. It's a tenuous situation at present for Opera, but let's face facts: It's the nicest tenuous situation that anyone at Opera Software last year could have asked for.

If you're one of those long-time Betanews commenters who has spent the last two years saying, look out guys, Opera is on a comeback...you have to be smiling now.

Marvell launches the next 1 GHz smartphone processor

Publié: février 11, 2010, 10:45pm CET par Tim Conneally

At CES 2010, chipmaker Marvell showed off its ARMADA 610 applications processor for tablets, mobile internet devices (MIDs), media players, and other portable connected devices. The impressive ARM v7-based chip runs at 1 GHz and is capable of encoding and decoding full 1080p HD at 30 fps, and 3D rendering up to 45 million triangles per second. At its CES booth, Marvell showed a single reference model tablet rendering 3D graphics while playing full HD video smoothly through HDMI on a 30" television. Marvell said the chip's display controller is actually capable of playing video on four simultaneous displays with 2k x 2k resolution.

Today, just ahead of Mobile World Congress, Marvell announced it will be showing off the next chip in the 600 series, called the ARMADA 618, which is a close relative of the 610 especially suited for smartphones.

The ARMADA 618 is based on a Marvell-designed 1 GHz ARM v7-compatible CPU with a 12mm x 12mm footprint. It can use LP-DDR1 or DDR2 memory up to 533 MHz, and its graphics engine supports DirectX, Open GL ES 2.0, and Open VG 1.1. The unit supports Linux, Android, Windows Mobile, and full Adobe Flash.

Why is Google suddenly so evil?

Publié: février 11, 2010, 9:52pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Google is the great Internet God of goodness, or so claims No. 6 of the company's "10 Things" corporate philosophy list: "You can make money without doing evil." But this week, Google has suddenly put its doing no evil claims in doubt.

Yesterday, Google launched social networking service Buzz with opt-out privacy settings, meaning that a user's list of followers and followees are fully viewable in Google Profile, by default. Unrelated, but by Twitter -- ah, buzz -- standards even more evil: Google deleted six popular music blogs hosted at its Blogger service.

How evil these actions are -- and others coming later in this post -- depends on viewpoint. To whom is Google's first obligation? Itself? Its shareholders? Or its customers?

Customers-First Scenario

By the viewpoint of customer standards, opt-out privacy and blog deletion -- without forewarning, I should emphasize -- are evil acts. Google absolutely is making money while doing evil. Plain, pure and simple. The blog deletions, whether or not justified by DCMA take-down notices, are also the worst kind of public relations. People love their music, and they rally behind the underdog -- David standing before Goliath. The blog deletions are worse than evil. They're stupid.

How about Buzz, which requires users to opt-out of exposing followers and followees rather than opting-in to make the information public? While various news sites and blogs have suggested the opt-out approach could expose, say, secret relationships (like that girlfriend you were boxing on the side), I immediately thought about China. There, Google is making a stand against censorship (supposedly). Because Buzz doesn't self-censor by default, new users in China could expose dissident relationships to government investigators. Buzz uses Gmail to auto-generate follower lists. Whoops.

Buzz privacy also is as much stupid as evil, because of the negative buzz generated over the past 24 hours. Example news headlines or blog titles demonstrate how much:

Google Buzz is a dirty snitch, Gizmodo
Google Buzz leaves privacy concerns ringing in our ears, The Register
WARNING: Google Buzz has a huge privacy flaw, Silicon Alley Insider
Google Buzz's big privacy problem -- cheaters start worrying now, Electricpig

Google-First scenario

But the customer is only viewpoint. There is Google itself and taking actions for its benefit over customers. The blog deletions and Buzz privacy approach seem to put Google before the customer. As YouTube popularity increases and Google negotiates more deals to offer legal, commercial content -- such as TV shows and movie rentals or sales -- there is increasing pressure to respond to DCMA take-down requests.

Then there is the return on investment in Blogger, which is a free service anyway, to consider. Google risks more by losing paying content than it gains by defending presumably infringing content on a free service (Although one could argue that Google could delete offending music like it removes soundtracks from infringing YouTube videos without wiping out whole blogsites). The point: Google put its own interests before customers. Is that doing evil?

Buzz privacy is even more about putting Google interests before customers. Buzz clearly is designed to compete with Facebook, Twitter and other real-time social services. Buzz can't generate buzz without users. By auto-generating follower lists from Gmail and making them publicly viewable, Google increases the means by which Buzz can scale users faster. Facebook now has more than 400 million subscribers -- 100 million of them from mobile devices. Buzz needs to quickly scale, which wouldn't happen as fast by taking an opt-in approach. Is putting Google's interests before customers evil?

Shareholders-First Scenario

Shareholders are the third viewpoint -- that Google put the interest of shareholders first by its approach to the music blog deletions and to Buzz privacy. Google's shareholder priority is simple: Make money -- return value back to shareholders, who are the company's owners. From that perspective, these actions were good, because they put shareholders first. But from a yet another perspective, the actions could be argued as being evil since the two largest shareholders are Google's energetic cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose voting control is 59 percent. They are the major beneficiaries of any action that makes money for Google. But is that really evil?

The answer is yes, by Google's own philosophic standards. Google's first of the 10 Things: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." The statement strongly suggests that the customer is top priority. But the blog deletions and Buzz privacy options don't "focus on the user." They arguably violate the user -- and in the case of the music sites the millions of users who lost access to the blogs. No. 2: "It's best to do one thing really, really well." Google further explains: "We do search...Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps." OK, how does having a blogging service -- and one where blogs are deleted without notice -- "improving search" or doing "one thing really, really well"?

Then there is Buzz, which like many other Google products or services -- including Apps, Blogger, Chrome, Picasa or Reader -- is another thing, not one done well. Some other Google services enhance search or use search to enhance something else (like book search or mobile mapping), but Google has gone way beyond doing "one thing really, really well."

Protectionism as Evil Behavior

There is a fourth viewpoint. As Google grows and extends a monopoly over advertising and Web search, priorities change -- as they did with Microsoft, for example. Microsoft the growth company behaved differently than Microsoft the mature company. Monopolies seek to preserve their status quo and as such they chase every competitive threat. During the second half of the last decade, the majority of Microsoft online services followed something Google did first. Then there are Google services that potentially threaten Microsoft products. Example: Google launched Apps. Microsoft responded with Office online services and soon Office Web Apps.

Buzz, and also Google Wave, are in part responses to Facebook and Twitter, but mainly Facebook. Protectionism will lead Google to evil, at least by someone's measure, and to making stupid decisions (like opt-out default for Buzz). Why? Because they're reactionary. Competitive reaction can lead innovating companies away from responding to customers, or even to shareholders. Microsoft is one example of how reactionary business practices are simply bad business.

Microsoft went from being viewed as an innovator (doing good) to being perceived as quashing innovation (doing bad). Google stands at the precipice that most monopolies come to. Does Google operate by its principles -- the 10 Things -- dilute them or adopt new ones?

In closing, I ask Betanews readers: How good or evil do you see Google? In November, I aske:d "How would you rewrite Google's '10 Things?" Please answer either or both questions in comments.

Google Buzz's first victim: Facebook

Publié: février 11, 2010, 9:09pm CET par Carmi Levy

For all its success in turning mostly free Web-based services into lucrative rivers of cash, Google's been a miserable failure in the social networking space. While Facebook marched from a Harvard dorm room to a global army of 400 million users and Twitter became the short-form darling of politicians and celeb-utantes alike, Google threw one project after another at the wall (Orkut and Wave, anyone?) and hoped at least one of them would stick long enough to gain traction.

They never did. Orkut may be huge in Brazil and India, but it's virtually invisible everywhere else. Wave disappeared into the ether after its much-hyped public launch last September. Less ambitious steps toward creating a more social online experience (like baking Google Talk into the Gmail interface) similarly vanished from the tech culture radar almost as soon as they appeared.

Google's strategy with Buzz serves notice that it may have finally figured out a formula for integrating more social networking goodness into its already leading suite of Web services. Here's what Google got right with Buzz:

It isn't a solution in search of a problem. Wave was and is impressive, chock full of features that, when we first played with them with our friends and colleagues, gave us all more than a few "wow" moments. Wave was cool at first. But after the buzz (sorry) wore off, we all realized there was no corresponding consumer or business need to keep using it. Wave accounts everywhere have been gathering dust ever since.
It's relatively simple. Those cool features in Wave presented another problem for Google: They made absolutely no sense to the average end-user. While tech-savvy users happily explored the feature set, people with, to put it charitably, more mainstream technical capabilities just didn't get it, and stayed away as a result. Google Buzz is, for now at least, a much less ambitious product with a more restrained feature set and interface. But that's just fine. Because it's simply an extension to the familiar Gmail environment, it won't leave users scratching their heads.
It's connected. The online world has enough walled gardens. Most of us don't want or need to spend countless months building yet another social network to the point where it's even remotely useful. Google Buzz leverages existing connections in Facebook, Twitter, and other Google services to give new users an instant head start.
It's mobile. My experiment with Wave ended the moment I hit the road. Social networking tools need to work across every platform in the typical end user's life. Twitter and Facebook work as well as they do because you can easily do most of what you need to do no matter what device you're using. Mobile-enabled access also opens the door to geolocation-based services, which is shaping up as one of The Next Big Things in online advertising.

So now that Google seems to finally have gotten its act together on the social networking platform front, should Facebook be worried? I'd wager yes. Its vulnerability lies in the fact that it's never quite played nicely with others, its interface is maddeningly and unnecessarily difficult to use, and it's constantly reinventing itself -- and ticking off end-users and advertisers in the process -- as it attempts to become the sole platform within which its subscribers choose to work, play, and interact online.

Dominance isn't permanent

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) While Facebook fans may point to its 400 million-strong subscriber base as ample evidence that Google poses no threat, that figure can be misleading, as it's doubtless inflated by countless folks who have let their accounts lapse. Like MySpace before it, once the non-core users got tired of logging into a separate environment to connect with each other, they simply went back to whatever worked for them before.

Facebook also remains a closed-off environment compared to Google's more open landscape. While Apple's tightly controlled model seems to work well in the mobile space, it's a different ballgame in Web services, where Google's throw-the-doors-open approach has allowed it to build a broad and deep ecosystem that developers and businesses alike want to connect with. While Facebook's application platform seems, on the surface, to have been successful, Google generates far more cash from its apps, many of which actually change how we use the Web. Facebook's environment, on the other hand, remains choked with Farmville, Mafia Wars, and half a dozen apps that let users poke each other in new and fascinating ways.

Finally, Facebook's inability to keep its feet out of its mouth when it comes to security and privacy continues to give users a growing excuse to quietly try out, and transition to, new alternatives as they are introduced. While no company, including Google, can ever grow to market-dominating size without getting some egg on its face, Facebook has long fared worse than Google in this regard. Eventually, regular users notice and lose their connection with the service.

Google's ability to persevere and finally get it mostly right with Buzz stands in stark contrast to Facebook's propensity to periodically roll out disruptive changes to both its interface and its policy framework. While Facebook rearranges the deck chairs without actually improving the experience for anyone, Google methodically adds functionality to its key offerings and gives advertisers, developers and end-users alike ample reason to spend more time there.

Change begins slowly

Like most Google products, Buzz will remain a work in progress for quite some time. So while on a feature-for-feature basis it will likely lag Facebook for a while, it's likely good enough in its initial form to prompt some Facebook users to question why they're spending so much time over there.

Twitter also finds itself in a newly vulnerable position thanks to Google Buzz, but that's a whole other issue for a whole other column. For now, it's Facebook that needs to look inward and wonder if the model that worked so well when it was a category of one remains relevant now that the sleeping giant has finally woken up. Google's Buzz may finally challenge Facebook to decide what it wants to be when it grows up, or become another MySpace as it becomes yesterday's news.

TiVo teases something new with private event invites

Publié: février 11, 2010, 8:20pm CET par Tim Conneally

TiVo invitation teases something more than a DVR?

Who says Apple is the only company that puts out enticing invitations? Today, TiVo sent out invites to a private March 2 event in New York City that simply reads, "Inventing the DVR was just a warmup," with no other hints as to what the event is for.

For a single statement, it's a pretty big one, considering TiVo popularized the viewing model that made linear broadcasting more or less obsolete.

In December, Dave Zatz got his hands on a setup guide to an unreleased DVR from TiVo called the "Premiere," which Zatz said looked like "an evolutionary product." Unfortunately, the document was pretty light on info, and didn't say anything about what it contained under the hood, and gave no clue into anything other than the connections on the back of the device (which included a single multistream CableCARD slot, and a lack of S-Video out.)

It is unclear whether this unit will be involved in TiVo's event next month, but we'll be covering it, so we will soon find out how the DVR pioneer has outdone itself.

Mobile World Congress preview: Netbooks to soar, femtocell gadgets may flop

Publié: février 11, 2010, 8:05pm CET par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

Netbook sales are starting to inch closer to those of smartphones and laptops, while Google Voice is set to pose a serious challenge to Skype, according to an analyst report to be presented at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

In other findings, femtocell boxes -- already available in the US through Sprint, for example -- will not sell as well as first anticipated, because "the added value a femtocell will bring is too low in the eyes of end users," says the upcoming report from analyst firm IDATE.

Worldwide shipments of "connected devices" -- consisting of netbooks, e-readers, and MIDs -- will skyrocket from 50 million to 166 million units between 2010 and 2013, the analysts predicted during a press pre-briefing on Thursday.

Over the same time span, smartphones will step from 216 million to 321 million units and PC laptops from 179 million to 285 million units. But femtocells -- emerging consumer devices that bring together access to cellular and home DSL or cable broadband networks -- will grow from 970,000 to just 9.31 million units.

"Following the success of smartphones, dedicated to mobile Internet browsing and data exchange, the emergence of a new category of connected devices, in which netbooks have been the most successful to date, has caused upheaval in the mobile telecom market," points out the study. "Whereas MID and electronic book traction has been limited for now, most [mobile] operators worldwide are now proposing netbook offers bundled with a data allowance."

Of the 166 million "connected devices" expected to be shipped in 2013, notebooks will account for 60 million. However, the report previewed on Thursday doesn't speculate about how many of the remaining 106 million devices will be e-readers, Apple iPads, or ARM-based Linux tablets, for example.

Western Europe will lead the way in netbook use, whereas the Asia/Pacific and then North American markets will catch up later in shipments, the study says.

Yet somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the US will be "the most dynamic market" for femtocells, accounting for 50% of all units shipped in 2013.

Essentially, femtocells are small, low-capacity residential 2G or 3G wireless base stations aimed at letting users communicate across any IP access network from a standard cell phone. Sitting on the user's desktop, the femtocell box connects through DSL or cable broadband to the mobile network, where a provider uses a controller device to pull together -- or "aggregate" -- communications from the multiple services. At CES 2010 in Las Vegas last month, advocates touted femtocells largely as a way to raise the quality of cellular phone calls in houses and other indoor places.

"Regional disparities are due to different expectations associated with femtocell," notes the IDATE report. "North American users see strong value in the indoor coverage capabilities of the solution. But consumers in Asia and Western Europe expect more than just a better quality network; for them, the added value of femtocell is in its convergence features."

Mobile VoIP -- a technology that allows voice calls to be sent over mobile data networks instead of voice networks -- currently provides cost advantages only for international calling, the IDATE analysts contend.

By 2014, IDATE predicts mobile VoIP penetration among end users of 12.5% in the US, 17% in the UK, 14.5% in France, and 8.5% in Germany.

Google Voice brings services such as single number access across multiple devices and automated voice mail transcription. The analysts acknowledge Google Voice could evolve into a major game changer: "Skype is the undisputed champion of the mobile VoIP provider today," according to the report. "However, Google Voice will provide stiff competition; they offer the same mobile VoIP services, but from a completely different angle in the form of unified communications. At present, subscriptions are available in the US and by invitation. Once the service becomes available worldwide it has the potential to make a real impact."

Microsoft announces Office for Mac 2011: New UI, Web-based tools, no Entourage

Publié: février 11, 2010, 7:44pm CET par Tim Conneally

At Macworld 2010 today, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its Office productivity suite for Mac OS, which brings a new UI design, new collaboration tools, and replaces Entourage with Outlook for Mac.

Microsoft today said the new look of Office for Mac is based on Office 2008 Elements Gallery, and combines the standard Mac menus with Office toolbars, so the design is peculiar to the Mac, but stays true to the Office ethic.

The design, however, really isn't the crucial improvement in Office for Mac 2010, but rather it's just one of the new bits of information about the suite that Microsoft showed off today. Office for Mac 2010 will also be enabled with the collaborative features of the Windows version of Office. They include the ability for multiple users to work on a single Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document from different locations, and the ability to share documents over Office Web apps, or save them to a SkyDrive account.

And as Microsoft announced last August, Entourage will no longer be Office for Mac's e-mail client. It has been replaced by Outlook for Mac, a unique version of Microsoft's popular e-mail program built in Cocoa, the development layer for OS X primarily written in Objective-C. Today, Microsoft announced that Outlook for Mac will be able to import .PST files, the files also known as Personal Storage Tables which are used to save messages and events in the Windows version of Outlook.

Microsoft said that Office for Mac 2011 will be available "later this year," and some have estimated that it will be before the 2010 holiday season.

Shazam finally hooks up with Pandora and Last.fm

Publié: février 11, 2010, 6:15pm CET par Tim Conneally

Shazam Logo Music identification software Shazam is indispensable. When users hear a song they don't know playing in a commercial, over the radio, or on the PA at a club, and they want to know what the song is, all they have to do is fire up Shazam on their smartphone, let the app "hear" the song, and it identifies it.

As useful as it is, Shazam has kind of been a one-way street: It identifies (or "tags") the song and then links the user out to other services. For example, the user can then purchase the song, go to YouTube to watch related videos, or go to the artist's MySpace page, all where applicable. But up to now, the app ended there, and the list of songs a user has tagged didn't get used anywhere.

Today, though, Shazam Entertainment LTD announced that the Shazam Encore and (Shazam)red apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone can be used to create stations in Pandora, which will include additional songs by the same artist and similar ones. When a song is tagged, an icon appears in the "Tag Results" page which takes the user directly to their radio station.

A user's tag list has also been incorporated into Last.fm to generate a list of upcoming shows made from their favorite tagged artists, with suggestions based on the user's location.

The updated versions of Shazam Encore and (Shazam)red are available in the iTunes App Store now.

Does Google Buzz offer better privacy than Facebook?

Publié: février 11, 2010, 5:31pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Analysis

With Google already the center of controversy worldwide over how it uses the information it gleans from its search users, red flags were almost certain to be sent up over Google Buzz, announced Tuesday. It's the company's new social platform for sharing bits of Twitter-like communication, and it's built rather cleverly on its existing Gmail platform.

The red flags concern how Google leverages Gmail to create a pre-established social network for Buzz users. Unlike a fresh, new social network that asks incoming users to build their lists of followers from scratch, Buzz starts out by collecting a list of folks who appear to be doing the most communicating with the incoming user via Gmail.

If the new Buzz user simply accepts the default settings, then that list will become "public" information, at least to all the other Buzz users who opt to follow him. And that's the problem, because somebody who simply accepts the defaults may end up broadcasting the list of most frequented Gmail contacts to other Buzz users, perhaps with some inadvertent results.

"The people you are automatically selected to follow are other Gmail users, who may or may not have started using Buzz," a Google spokesperson explained to Betanews. "In order to automatically suggest people you might want to follow, Buzz looks at the contacts you e-mail and chat with the most. It uses the same kinds of signals that Web mail programs typically use to determine which contact should come up first when you start typing an e-mail address in the 'To' line."

As Google's Buzz privacy policy explains, "When you first enter Google Buzz, to make the startup experience easier, we may automatically select people for you to follow based on the people you e-mail and chat with most. Similarly, we may also suggest to others that they automatically follow you. You can review and edit the list of people you follow and block people from following you. Your name, photo, and the list of people you follow and people following you will be displayed on your Google profile, which is publicly searchable on the Web. You may opt out of displaying the list of people following you and who you're following on your profile."

The problem of accepting a relatively open privacy policy by default was brought to the public's attention by Facebook, in its revision of privacy policy last December. Originally advertised to have been a response to users' concerns that Facebook was too open, that network created a default setting that was not only marketed for everyone, but was actually named "Everyone," perhaps to improve its popularity. That default setting shares all information, including the user's contacts, not only with other Facebook members but with folks stumbling upon Facebook profiles in Web searches.

Facebook's explanation and instructions left users baffled about how much information they may or may not be sharing with the rest of the world, and what control they may have over it, if any. Betanews tests on Google Buzz reveal that, although inadvertently sharing other Gmail contacts may be a problem at first, a reasonable user may have far less difficulty taking control of his sharing settings than with Facebook.

The default sign-up page for Google Buzz could have you sharing Gmail contacts, or might not.

In our test, we used a very seldom-used Gmail address. Although there were messages there, no group of message senders appeared more prominently than others. As a result, Buzz did not pull up a list of suggested contacts. It did bring up the photo of this guy from the pre-existing Google profile, which was established in Google Talk several months earlier.

The notice on the initial dialog box reads in small print, "Your profile includes your name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you." From here, it may not be clear to some users that this profile is very nearly about to broadcast the names of frequent Gmail contacts (never mind for the moment that this guy doesn't have any), if they were to click on Save profile and continue.

Clicking the Edit link on Google Buzz' sign-in dialog lets you overcome possibly dangerous defaults. The ability for users to not only see those contacts but prevent them from being broadcast to other users, or to the world, does exist -- perhaps not obvious, but it's there. It's the Edit link at the top of the dialog box. When you click that, the dialog box expands to let you add and remove Buzz contacts manually (we found a fellow who appears to be enjoying a cool beverage), as well as disable the broadcasting of the contacts list, in a check box marked Show the lists of people I'm following and people following me on my profile. Twitter users will be familiar with the ability to see one's followers and whom one is following; that's a feature, not an option, with that service.

Can a Buzz member follow someone else privately? "Yes," explains Google's spokesperson, "but only if that user sets their list of followers to private. By design, if you choose to follow someone in Buzz, that person will see your name in his or her profile. Just like you get to choose whether or not to make your list of followers public, it's up to that user to do the same. That said, if the user chooses not to make his list private and you want to remain anonymous, one option is to not follow, but still read, any publicly available posts."

The Buzz privacy policy states that a user's profile is searchable from the Web. That means that if a Google Talk user has set up a Google profile, and that profile is already searchable from the Web, then after joining Buzz, that profile may contain some Gmail contacts. However, assuming that users know how to use this Edit link prior to formally signing up, this may not necessarily be an indicator to others that followed and following members have necessarily shared a plurality of Gmail messages with one another.

Furthermore, the ability for a Google user to make his profile searchable through the Web is turned off by default. If you have a Google profile already, then this link will take you to it. At the bottom of this page, you'll find the Profile URL section, where you'll see the URL of your public profile if it were searchable through the Web. To turn search ability on, you click on the check box beside the URL, then click on Save changes. As the instructions clearly explain, "To help others discover your profile, in some Google services contacts who know your e-mail address will see a link to your profile."

That's only if you turn this feature on. By contrast, the whole point of using Facebook is to develop a public profile page. Thus it is conceivable that knowledgeable users who wish to construct a limited social network may be able to do so with Google Buzz.

Next: Can other Buzz users see what you've mailed?

Analysis

During Google's Tuesday demonstration, it was suggested that Buzz assembles the initial, default list of followers based on such factors as common interests, which suggested that Google scanned the contents of Gmail messages. Google's spokesperson indicated to Betanews that such a suggestion was in error: "We don't look at the content of messages. Instead, we automatically select people based on how often you e-mail and chat with them, not the content."

Finally, noting that Google adds advertisements to Buzz content similar to how it adds ads to search results, we were curious as to how the company would apply an existing element of its general privacy policy, to Buzz users. The general policy states, "We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services."

We already know from Google's own announcement that if you're a Buzz user, then what you do on other Google services -- for example, adding a photo to Picasa -- will be "buzzed" to other members. Will this mean that Buzz users may be compelled to join other Google services to enjoy the full benefits, and in so doing, enable Google to combine the information from all these activities into a kind of target platform?

The default list of Google services that can be tied to Google Buzz. Apparently, the answer there is yes to all counts: "Buzz is designed to work with some other Google services, like Picasa, as well as some third-party sites like Flickr," Betanews was told. "Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open, distributed conversation system, and that includes connecting with a variety of services that are popular among our users. Right now, comments write back to Google Reader: The comment streams are totally merged, so if you comment on someone's shared item in Reader, that same comment will appear in Buzz, and vice versa. That is not the case for other services connected to Buzz. In the future, we'd like to enable this for other connected sites as well."

That suggests that Google Labs has plans to expand the Buzz API so that services that open themselves up to Buzz activity may become featured in Buzz members' buzz lists. What we will not know yet, until someone else becomes the first to try this out, is whether this opening-up process will, in turn, broadcast a Buzz members' activities on another service, through Buzz, to another Buzz member by default. There's where the second round of red flags will inevitably be raised.

Windows XP WGA validation 'spyware' case dismissed

Publié: février 10, 2010, 9:58pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

On Monday, a US District Court in Seattle dismissed with prejudice a class action case originally brought by Los Angeles native Brian Johnson in the summer of 2006. Johnson's claim at the time was that, when Windows XP used Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) feature to validate his rights to use a newly purchased XP, Microsoft not only employed software not covered by the end-user license agreement, but used it to transmit his personal information to Microsoft against his wishes.

His allegation was that XP violated California's and Washington state's statutes regarding spyware -- separate software that transmits personally identifiable data back to a source.

Although it took several months for the parties in the suit to simply give the judge permission to declare it over and done with, Johnson's case actually started falling apart in June 2009. At that time, Judge Richard A. Jones denied the plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment. In his denial, Judge Jones found that WGA was a part of Windows XP, not some separate software. If it had been separate, plaintiffs had argued, a strict interpretation of Microsoft's EULA should have prevented it from being downloaded. The typical definition of spyware (which may also be part of some states' legal definition) is that it keeps itself hidden from its user; and the judge maintained WGA not only announces its presence, but is part of Windows XP just like any other component.

But the clincher was the Judge's declaration that when WGA sends the computer's IP address to Microsoft's servers, that's not sending them personally identifiable information, as plaintiffs alleged. Plaintiffs relied upon a passage from Microsoft's online glossary at the time, which did count IP addresses as personally identifiable, as the company's official definition of the phrase. But the judge said that online glossary was not part of the software, citing the company's defense as trumping its Web site's glossary.

"Because the EULA does not incorporate the Web glossary by reference, and there is no evidence that any of the Plaintiffs even read the glossary, the court finds that the Web glossary is not helpful to construing the provision," Judge Jones wrote last June. "Furthermore, the court finds that Microsoft's interpretation of 'personally identifiable information,' in the absence of any definition, is the only reasonable interpretation. In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer, and can do that only after matching the IP address to a list of a particular Internet service provider's subscribers. Thus, because an IP address is not personally identifiable, Microsoft did not breach the EULA when it collected IP addresses. Plaintiffs' contract claim on that ground must fail."

The last eight months were mostly spent haggling over legal affairs, which included the dropping out of some members of the class action, and the self-excusing of Johnson's attorney. In the end, Judge Jones' June opinion sufficed as the foundation for his dismissal with prejudice this week.

Facebook Chat is now accessible on popular instant messaging clients

Publié: février 10, 2010, 9:32pm CET par Tim Conneally

Making good on a promise delivered just about one year ago, Facebook announced today that its popular chat feature can now be accessed through any Jabber (XMPP)-compatible desktop instant messaging software, including AIM, iChat, Pidgin, Adium, and Miranda.

Users can simply connect their Facebook account with their instant messaging client of choice and they can then chat with Facebook friends without having to stay logged into the social networking site.

Further, Facebook Chat has been integrated into the Facebook Connect platform for developers so other services wishing to integrate instant messaging into their sites.

Last June, Facebook's chat service reached the milestone of 1 billion messages being exchanged in a single day, and its growth has continued.

No solution yet for SSL/TLS security hole besides turning renegotiation off

Publié: février 10, 2010, 8:31pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Pentagon (Defense Dept.) top story badge A defect in the protocol that secures monetary exchanges and other private transactions throughout the Web, discovered by wireless security engineers last August, continues to go unfixed as vendors work towards a solution. It can only be described as miraculous that a working exploit hasn't yet been detected for a security hole that hid in plain sight ever since Transport Layer Security was developed.

The problem was inadvertently made public last November. In short, it has to do with the transition Web sites make between the older Secure Sockets Layer protocol and the augmented TLS. During the transition process, the Web sites leave one protocol, but have to remind each other what they were transitioning from and to -- like asking one another, "What were we talking about again?" The question and answer get sent in the clear, making it easy for a man-in-the-middle to spoof the site with the answer.

Yesterday, Microsoft issued an advisory for server administrators, linked to a Knowledgebase article that provides an update package for Windows Server. But that package is not a fix; actually, it's just a System Registry patch that disables the entire renegotiation process. It makes your system safe from the exploit, but it may end up leaving transactions encrypted with SSL rather than TLS.

Microsoft warns that this could be an inconvenience for some customers whose applications require this kind of step-up renegotiation in order to make a connection. That could be a very serious inconvenience indeed if your name happens to be "US Dept. of Defense."

Back in April 2004, DoD directive 8100.2 (recently redubbed 8100.02) specified that data traffic over wireless devices was only permissible by layering an encryption system atop the existing wireless infrastructure. This was back before Wi-Fi was trusted. That changed with a supplement to that directive issued in June 2006 by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (known on record as "ASD(NII)/DoD CIO"). The supplement marked the Department's official embrace of 802.11i security standards for Wi-Fi, which the CIO deemed compliant with Security Level 2 out of 4, of the government's Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules (PDF available here).

As the latest (2007) version of 8100.02 now reads (PDF available here), "Encryption of unclassified data for transmission to and from wireless devices is required. Exceptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis as determined by the Designated Approving Authority (DAA) for the wireless connections under their control. At a minimum, data encryption must be implemented end-to-end over an assured channel and shall be validated under the Cryptographic Module Validation Program as meeting requirements per Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication (PUB) 140-2, Overall Level 1 or Level 2, as dictated by the sensitivity of the data."

And as the FIPS 140-2 document explains, "Security Level 2 allows the software and firmware components of a cryptographic module to be executed on a general purpose computing system using an operating system. An equivalent evaluated trusted operating system may be used. A trusted operating system provides a level of trust so that cryptographic modules executing on general purpose computing platforms are comparable to cryptographic modules implemented using dedicated hardware systems."

Standard 802.11i is published and maintained by the IEEE, and its encryption protocol of choice is maintained by the IETF: EAP-TLS, the most evolved form of the protocol that started out as SSL.

Now, it would appear the DoD may be on the threshold of wading into precisely the minefield they had hoped to avoid, prior to their embrace of 802.11i. The fix to the TLS security hole, when it comes, will have to be coordinated and simultaneous, involving the cooperation of not just Microsoft but hardware vendors that supply the government with systems, such as Cisco and Aruba Networks. Technically, operating systems that were considered "trusted" enough to substitute for firmware cryptographic modules, under FIPS 140-2 Security Level 2, may not qualify as "trusted" now, were someone to make that official evaluation. The more time vendors assume in coordinating their response, the more opportunity the Pentagon may have to reach that dreadful conclusion.

Google drops a bomb: It's building its own fiber network

Publié: février 10, 2010, 5:53pm CET par Tim Conneally

Google announced today that it is planning to build and test broadband networks in several trial deployments across the US which promise to be "100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home connections."

A careful read of that line suggests that Google is promising 1 Gbps fiber, which is 100x faster than the average broadband user's transfer rate, as opposed to a 100 Gbps pipeline. The company says the service will reach 50,000 people initially, with a potential reach of up to 500,000, the company announced.

Right now, Google is putting out a request for information for communities looking to test Google's new fiber service. On March 26, the Mountain View search company will be announcing the markets where it will begin deployment.

AT&T commits to LTE, names equipment partners

Publié: février 10, 2010, 5:18pm CET par Tim Conneally

Almost exactly a year after Verizon Wireless named its LTE equipment partners, AT&T has done the same. And like Verizon, AT&T has chosen Swedish wireless technology provider Ericsson and French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent, to make the transition from 3G to LTE more streamlined.

Rather than start fresh and attempt to install all new hardware at its cell sites, AT&T is going for hardware that is easily upgradeable. All 3G equipment purchased from the Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent this year will be easily convertible to LTE, AT&T said.

Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent will be the suppliers for AT&T's Radio Access Network Domain, also known as the middle tier between the users and the central AT&T network. It's called a "domain" because it is part of AT&T's Domain Supplier program which launched last September. In this program, only two suppliers are selected to work on each part of AT&T's network, and they're given multi-year contracts which include not only immediate goals, but also goals for the future. That way, the contractors can develop systems that can evolve, and AT&T can worry less about legacy systems.

This year, AT&T says it will upgrade the fiber backhaul to its cell sites to boost 3G speeds and pave the way for its first LTE-compatible sites next year.

Certain to cause uproar, Opera shows off its browser for iPhone

Publié: février 10, 2010, 4:00pm CET par Tim Conneally

Opera Mini iPhone Prominent developers sometimes tease us with products made on the iPhone platform that have not yet been approved by Apple. Frequently it's because their applications face certain rejection; sometimes on the famous grounds of "duplicate functionality", sometimes for other reasons.

Mobile World Congress next week will be hosting the mother of all iPhone app teases: Opera Mini for iPhone.

Opera Mini is already on more than 40 million devices, and is easily the most prominent browser for resource-constrained mobile devices. The company announced today that it will be showing off a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone that is up to six times faster than the iPhone's native Safari browser and can cut bandwidth consumption by up to 90%, thanks to the server-side rendering techniques that Opera uses.

Naturally, the browser is not available to the public, nor is it likely to ever be. Opera has built the "duplicate functionality" argument into its very presentation...claiming it can improve upon a primary piece of the iPhone's software.

It actually looks more like Opera has gotten wise to Apple's PR magic; and hopes to stimulate some attention for itself in showing off a product certain to create friction with the strict Cupertino company.

The Windows 7 battery life issue: What's making notebook batteries die?

Publié: février 10, 2010, 2:54am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Since Windows 7's final release last fall, some testers have been reporting that dual-boot network computers seem to consume power more efficiently running Windows XP than Windows 7. One example came last October from JKOnTheRun's Kevin C. Tofel, who saw his own Toshiba notebook battery die 45 minutes sooner running Win7 than Windows XP. But even then, Tofel was skeptical of a few curious facts, including that Toshiba changed its power management utilities.

Since 1999, the system that has reported battery capacity and relative power levels to the operating system has been the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), developed by industry leaders such as Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and Toshiba. But ACPI was developed with the BIOS in mind; and as PC architecture evolves, as even Phoenix will readily concede, the conventional BIOS is becoming an historical remnant. And history has also shown that as a lithium-ion battery degrades, its capability to report its own health degrades with it. Only now have batteries become capable of reporting their capacity -- how much charge they can hold -- as compared to their manufacturers' specifications.

Recently, some Windows 7 users have become acquainted with a new "feature" of the operating system -- an advisory where the operating system suggests it might be time for users to replace their batteries. That started feeding into reports that Windows 7 was degrading batteries faster than its predecessors, such as this from InformationWeek that cites members of Microsoft's support forums. That helped feed stories that the operating system was "tarnished" by a battery plague.

The instigator of these complaints appears to be the advisory itself, which users may be interpreting as an indicator that Windows 7 has "eaten" their battery. In fact, as Microsoft Windows division president Steven Sinofsky told users today in a post to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, Win7 is merely reporting a fact of everyday life, whose information had not yet been standardized in the days of Vista.

"PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status," Sinofsky writes. "The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information -- design capacity and last full charge capacity -- are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set, or configure battery status information. In fact all of the battery actions of charging and discharging are completely controlled by the battery hardware. Windows only reports the battery information it reads from the system firmware. Some reports erroneously claimed Windows was modifying this information, which is definitely not possible...Every single indication we have regarding the reports we've seen are simply Windows 7 reporting the state of the battery using this new feature and we're simply seeing batteries that are not performing above the designated threshold."

As Sinofsky explains, batteries can report their capacity using ACPI in terms of Watt-hours (W-Hr); and from now on, Windows compares this capacity against design capacity. "In Windows 7 we set a threshold of 60% degradation (that is the battery is performing at 40% of its designed capacity) and in reading this Windows 7 reports the status to you. At this point, for example, a battery that originally delivered 5 hours of charge now delivers, on average, approximately 2 hours of charge."

That's a fairly simple calculation to perform, and theoretically, it's been there since the turn of the previous decade. But it would appear that the readings reported by batteries may only have become reliable enough for Windows to rely on this conclusion, in only the last few years.

Last July, Microsoft published this document for hardware engineers explaining how Windows 7 polls information from new-generation batteries. Although Microsoft explains that Win7 can only read information from these batteries, it clearly advises engineers that it's up to them to set their batteries' firmware so that it reports the proper levels.

As the document reads: "Users who run their system on battery power sometimes use the system until the battery is critically low and must enter the hibernate state to save open programs and data. Windows provides multiple battery warning level and action policies that the system manufacturer can tailor to the underlying hardware platform and battery capacity."

The four settings that the document states may be customized by engineers are low battery level, reserve battery level, critical battery level, and critical battery action. These are threshold values separate from the real-time indications reported by ACPI, like last full charge.

With Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a completely revised power configuration utility -- a new PowerCfg, whose purpose is to enable engineers to determine the energy efficiency of a notebook computer. Just last month, Microsoft published a document explaining how the revised utility works:

"PowerCfg inspects the battery information during the analysis. It logs an information item that contains the battery manufacturer, the battery chemistry, the design capacity, and the last full charge capacity. PowerCfg logs an error if it cannot retrieve the battery information from the firmware. PowerCfg logs a warning if the last full charge capacity is less than 50 percent of the battery's design capacity. PowerCfg logs an error if the last full charge capacity is less than 40 percent of the battery's design capacity."

There's where engineers are given that 40% threshold mark for the first time -- the 40% mark that Sinofsky referred to in his blog post today. So the fact that users are seeing "Replace Your Battery" reports for the first time now, may only be because the reliability of such a warning has only recently become viable.

"It should stand to reason that some customers would be surprised to see this warning after upgrading a PC that was previously operating fine," writes Sinofsky. "Essentially the battery was degrading but it was not evident to the customer until Windows 7 made this information available. We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 'causing' the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case."

Why former employees say Microsoft can't innovate

Publié: février 10, 2010, 12:43am CET par Joe Wilcox

By many measures, Microsoft is simply too big. The bigness is in the gut, like a middle-aged man who drinks too much beer and eats too many classic potato chips. In computing years, Microsoft most certainly is a middle-aged company. So is Apple, which by comparison is leaner and healthier. What's up with Microsoft's gut?

Based on communications with current and former employees, Microsoft's midriff problem is one of middling middle management. The number of middle mangers swelled over the last decade, and they also are the employees making key management decisions, which includes who gets laid off or fired and where the remaining people work. What manager will fire himself or herself? (Before continuing, let me be clear that only former Microsoft employees will be quoted, and anonymously at that. Current employees would only communicate with me on background, for concern of risking their jobs).

One former employee, whom I'll call Boris, had this to say about how last year's layoffs affected him and his former team: "Out of a starting staff of nearly 20, four remained, all managers. I'm not sure what they manage." Who made the decisions about whom to layoff? Another former Microsoft employee whom I'll refer to as Fred said that a "dramatic increase in middle management, and the fat cutting the muscle, is right on target."

I don't have figures on how many middle managers Microsoft now employs. But various former, and even some current, employees say that their number of "reports" -- meaning people they report to -- has increased by five to seven managers above them during 2000. Typically that works out to double or more the layers of middle management over the decade.

"When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates," Boris said. "In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer." Fred said, "the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10," during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I'll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.

Microsoft's swelling workforce gives some hint of the midriff, middle management problem. In June 2000, at the end of fiscal 2001, Microsoft employed 39,100. At the end of fiscal 2010, even after 5,000 layoffs, Microsoft employed 93,000.

'All Praise the Holy Reorg'

Microsoft manages middle management by way of seemingly perennial reorganizations. Every former or existing Microsoft employee I communicated with for this post and the accompanying "Microsoft Confession" series harshly criticized the reorganizations.

"How many reorgs have ever benefited anyone except the folks on top?" asked a former employee I'll call Jack. "The people that need to be cut at MS are the managers that don't support their teams and only support their own careers. I've watched countless super visionary managers get bogged in politics and leave."

Another former employee, whom I'll call Amanda quipped: "All praise the holy reorg, which is an approximately annual religious festival in certain sects, I mean divisions, of Microsoft." Recent reorganizations -- those publicly disclosed or uncovered over the last 12 months -- include desktop operating system, developer tool, entertainment, mobile device, search and server organizations, among others. This year's reorg affecting Microsoft's TV products came with the departure of Enrique Rodriguez, a corporate vice president.

Bill Veghte is one of Microsoft's highest-profile executive departures steaming from reorganization. Microsoft announced Veghte's departure on January 14, after he failed to find a new position following the summer 2009 reorg that put Steven Sinfosky in charge of the Windows & Windows Live group. Weeks later, Microsoft acknowledged the departure of Mike Nash, like Veghte a 19-plus year veteran. At the end of 2009, Microsoft also lost Chris Liddell, as chief financial officer. The point: Microsoft is shedding top-level managers all while middle-manager ranks add bulge to the organizational structure.

The reorganizations can be looked at another way -- as reflecting ineffective management processes that Microsoft tries to resolve by changing which groups report to which groups or to whom. In theory, Microsoft's five business groups -- Business, Entertainment & Devices, Online Services, Server & Tools and Windows & Windows Live -- should be small enough to be nimbler than a company employing more than 90,000. But there are mitigating factors, such as reporting hierarchies that cut across different groups and supporting organizations, like marketing and services, that have responsibilities affecting all five Microsoft divisions. In many ways, Microsoft's organizational structure is best described as a middle schooler's messy room (also a Windows Plus! Pack for Kids theme).

Incentives that Discourage Risk, Innovation

Related to gut-bulging middle management: some HR review and compensation processes discourage many employees from taking the kinds of risks necessary for Microsoft to regain its competitive edge and, quite frankly, to innovate in truly meaningful ways. Microsoft's definition of innovation, for most of its product groups, is anything that preserves the status quo -- meaning extending Office and Windows and increasingly server software like SharePoint and Windows Server. Risk is a dirty word for many employees looking to advance at Microsoft.

A former employee whom I'll call Rodriguez said of the HR review process: "Microsoft has become too 'scorecard' heavy and highly litigated to the point it kills an employee's spirit of free thinking and creativity, since everything a person does is closely judged by management." Among the former Microsofties I communicated with over the last couple of months, Rodriguez was the harshest critic of Microsoft's review process, which he observed is going on right now; fiscal year ends on June 30 and reviews occur midway.

Several former and existing employees tried to explain Microsoft's seemingly complicated review and compensation process. People are hired at a certain level and can advance up levels, which have corresponding salary ranges. During reviews process, employees are graded with such designations as 'exceed,' 'achieved' and 'underperformed' commitment ratings. These are based on numerous criteria, which include management assessment of performance and achieving goals set during the previous review process. Other criteria include "contribution rankings." Problem: These criteria sometimes work cross-purposes to performance. Fred explained:

Processes became more bureaucratic and individuals were less empowered to take action. In fact, oftentimes the incentive structure encouraged individual contributors not to do the right thing, but just to do what they committed to in their review the year prior. In other words, if you committed to include Feature A in Windows, and halfway through the year you realized that was a bad thing for Windows and Microsoft customers, the incentive structure actively discouraged you from trying to kill the feature, because then you wouldn't have achieved your commitments.

Barry also made similar complaints about the "decentives" to doing a good job. "The metrics are too complex," he said. "We were evaluated also on a client's satisfaction with our work." The client could range from a reporter for Microsofties working in PR to developers for employees doing product development or for anyone to other groups within Microsoft.

Several current and former employees wanting to do better or escape from stifling management situations would request transfers. However, many managers wanted to keep their staff in part "because it would reflect badly on them," Barry said.

"I was put in 'performance detention' due to wanting to expand to another part of the company and ended up in the 'crapper' list," said another former employee, whom I'll call Mickey.

What About those 5,800 Layoffs?

Last year's layoffs surprised many Microsoft employees. There are looming questions about whether or not Microsoft dismissed the right employees. From Friday through Monday, I posted four stories from former employees laid off in 2009. Each story reveals something about the layoff process and the middling middle management problems. Posted as Microsoft Confessions:

These four stories and others I received but didn't publish raise questions about whether Microsoft laid off the right people, whether certain groups were targeted and whether more middle managers should have been axed. Perhaps the most visible of the surprising layoffs: Don Dodge, who within two weeks of being let go was hired by Google.

Based on former and current Microsoft employee stories, five trends can be seen in Microsoft's layoff of 5,800 employees during 2009. Laid-off employees tended to be:

High salaried
With the company eight or more years
Older -- many in their late 30s or early 40s
At a status of what Microsoft calls "long at level"
In positions later refilled by younger, lower-salaried people
In positions the former Microsoftie resumed as a non-employee contractor

Several former employees proactively contacted me about these six similarities, but not all people used all six. Mickey said he was:

1. Over 40
2. Worked at MS for almost 11 years, industry almost 28
3. Pretty high salary
4. Senior guy but brought in underleveled

Barry, who had worked as a manager, clearly understood employee evaluations and he concurred about the six similarities. I should point out that in fairness to Microsoft, I've seen this pattern elsewhere, including journalism. Older and/or higher-salaried employees are laid off and either replaced by someone younger who is paid much less or the original employee returns on a freelance basis. For Microsoft, the returnee would a contractor. Barry is someone whom Microsoft laid off and took back as contractor doing essentially the same job as before.

Barry insinuated there was some age discrimination in the layoffs, but other former Microsoftie's disagreed. Former employee Randolph (not his real name, of course) noted that four of the people he was laid off with were ages 36 to 59, with two of them being 50 or over. "Suspicious, perhaps, but just as likely a consequence of the team demographics," he said. Two of the people remaining on the team were 48 and 51. The ages were provided with Randolph's severance package. However, "the fact that they gave me the paper in the first place suggests they are sensitive to the implication of age discrimination."

Then there is "long at level," which refers to employees who have stayed in the same position or designated organizational and pay level for a long time. Presumably a long-and-level employee lacks ambition to outperform. But for a smaller product or services group, where an employee shows expertise, there may be nowhere to go but out. Other employees stay in organizations where moving up or out is discouraged or even penalized by the manager. I know of current Microsoft employees who change positions every few years simply to avoid being perceived as long at level.

In conclusion, no company's organizational structure is perfect, because too many people put their personal ambitions before the company they work for. But companies can encourage mismanagement by the organizational structure, corporate culture and review and compensation processes. Based on my communications with dozens of former and current Microsoft employees over the last couple months, Microsoft needs to streamline its management processes, empower small groups to act like startups, reward risk-taking innovation and sharply reduce the number of middle managers.

Update: Mini-Microsoft's blog and especially the comments can offer broader perspective on this post's topic. While I purposely didn't read Mini's blog when researching and writing this post (I typically avoid outside influences when writing), several of my sources sent some of the comments they had posted to the blog. Mini has an active following of current Microsoft employees. I'll resume reading now that I've finished here.

Rhapsody to become an independent company

Publié: février 9, 2010, 11:33pm CET par Tim Conneally

Now nearly a decade old, RealNetworks' online music service Rhapsody is going to be spun off into an independent company. The spin-off will mean that RealNetworks will no longer have operating control over the service, and it will have no single majority owner.

Currently, Rhapsody is a joint venture with RealNetworks and Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks, with real owning 51% of the equity of Rhapsody and Viacom owning 49%.

Robert Kimball, president and acting CEO for RealNetworks today said, "Separating Rhapsody into its own independent company is a significant first step in making RealNetworks a more focused and profitable company. Rhapsody will be the largest pure play digital music service in the market. We have provided Rhapsody with the right team, and financial and intellectual property assets to succeed in the competitive market for digital music."

Real expects the spin-off will be complete late in the first quarter of 2010.

Google Buzz: Another attempt to harness the content firehose

Publié: février 9, 2010, 9:31pm CET par Tim Conneally

Rather than create another new destination social network like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, Google today announced that it has added social networking and location-based features into Gmail, Google Profiles, and Google Maps with a new service called Google Buzz.

Late last week, rumors surfaced that Google was debuting a new "Social Gmail" this week, and that really is kind of what Buzz is. With it, you can post status updates and share links, photos, and location-based updates with your Gmail contacts, and the content being posted by your contacts is automatically ranked according to your interactions with that contact. Ultimately, it's a lot like FriendFeed but with a Google flavor.

Buzz updates are read directly in Gmail just like an e-mail thread, and posts can be kept only between friends or be published to the Web at large under the user's Google Profile like a Twitter feed. All posts and comments appear in real time, and they can come from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader. Location-based posts can be sent from buzz.google.com through the user's mobile browser. Additionally, the Google Maps app for Android and Symbian received an update today which adds a Buzz layer for plotting buzzed-about spots. In the Google Search widget in Android, users can simply do a voice search where they say "Post Buzz" and their location will automatically be posted.

The service will be rolled out to Gmail inboxes this week, the mobile site is currently live, and the updated Maps app is available now. Users who already have a Google Profile and Gmail account don't need to sign up for anything, and can immediately begin posting.

Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist for the Altimeter Group said today, "To Facebook, this is a direct threat, these features emulate Friendfeed and the recently-designed Facebook newsfeed. Expect Google to incorporporate Facebook connect, commoditizing Facebook data as it gets sucked into Google and displayed on Google SERP...This is good for Twitter in the short term, as it'll amplify tweets, and suck them into a new system and give additional reach. Yet over time, status features will become a commodity, and Twitter as a destination will fade into the background."

Nvidia debuts new dynamically-switched graphics card technology

Publié: février 9, 2010, 5:56pm CET par Tim Conneally

Nvidia top story badge The idea behind notebooks with switchable graphics processors is that the most common tasks are handled by the lower power integrated GPU; but should the user need more complex graphics, a discrete graphics processor will be able to kick in to take care of the hard work.

It's been an option in certain notebooks for more than three years, and it has certainly grown more common as the technology has aged. But it has never quite been a perfect, on-demand solution. In the earliest switchable setups, the computer had to be rebooted for the swap to take place, and in later iterations, it required a physical switch to be thrown or sessions to be reset. and still others could turn on the discrete GPU, but not switch back to integrated once the change was made.

Today, Nvidia debuted its Optimus technology for GPU switching, which will soon be available in a handful of Asus notebooks (UL50Vf, U30Jc in the "ultra slim and light" series, and N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv in the Multimedia N series) Instead of requiring a conscious effort on the part of the user, Optimus-powered graphics processors balance the graphical processor load as a background task. Unlike ATI's switchable graphics platform, which uses the discrete card when under AC power and the integrated graphics processor to be used in battery mode, Optimus switches dynamically based upon the needs of the running applications.

"We needed hardware support to quickly move the graphics data around in the system, so we created a fast copy engine. The Optimus Copy Engine is a new alternative to traditional DMA (Direct Memory Access) transfers between the GPU frame buffer memory and system memory used by the IGP. With Optimus we also removed multiplexers, called MUXs, so we use the integrated graphics as a display adapter or pass through," Sasha Ostojic, Nvidia's Senior Director of Notebook Software, wrote in Nvidia's blog today. "The discrete GPU can do the heavy lifting and pass through the results to the integrated graphics chip to be displayed. By doing this, Optimus eliminated the need for hardware multiplexer and completely removed glitches associated with switching the display from IGP to GPU. Optimus transfers the display surface from the GPU frame buffer over the PCI Express bus to the system memory-based frame buffer used by the IGP. The key to performing the display transfer without negatively impacting 3D performance is the Optimus Copy Engine."

Asus' notebooks featuring Optimus are expected to begin availability some time in mid-March, with specifics pending.

Success: Google's Nexus One shipping support line takes tech support questions

Publié: février 9, 2010, 5:06pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Update ribbon (small)

11:35 am EST Tuesday, February 9, 2010 · In a test of Google's willingness to take customer concerns this morning, Betanews Editor-in-Chief Nathan Mook -- a new Nexus One owner himself who has not experienced either the 3G connectivity problem or the touchscreen tracking problem -- contacted the Nexus One shipping support line with a technical concern. After getting off the phone with a live Google support staffer in San Francisco, Nate reported very positive results.

The problem Nate was having, he says, is minor: The phone's automatic brightness isn't working well, remaining too dark when auto-brightness is turned on. Plus, the phone's touch-sensitive panel buttons at the bottom appear non-sensitive if you touch too close to the bottom.

Nate tells us Google's representative very kindly put his concern into the system, and offered to set up an exchange of phones with him; he responded it was not necessary.

"She was really quite nice," Nate reports. "She put my concerns into the system. Best customer support experience I've ever had from a big company. Better than Apple. I had zero wait time." His previous phone was an iPhone 3G S.

10:46 am EST · With hopes of being able to talk to a real, live person for the first time, to address not only 3G connectivity issues but an emerging, separate problem with poorly tracking touchscreens, Google Nexus One phone users had hopes today of being able to dial a toll-free phone number and speak with a Google representative. But despite headlines blazing through the blog-O-square this morning, that number is only "for questions about your existing order," as Google's support page clearly states.

Immediately below the newly posted instructions for shipping questions, the "Technical Support" section now directs customers with problems with the phone to HTC, the phone's manufacturer: "For technical support, please contact HTC customer care at 1-888-216-4736. For additional details and international support, please visit HTC's website."

This despite Google executives having told analysts during the phone's premiere event last month that Google was the "vendor of record," implying that it would be responsible for managing customer concerns.

"I knew it was too good to be true," writes Nexus One customer xsyclubs to Google's support forum early this morning. "However, I am still going to call daily."

A snippet from Google's Nexus One customer support page, February 9, 2010.

That may be just a symbolic act for now, as xsyclubs and others may end up being transferred to HTC. Over on HTC's support forums, a bold message appears to have declared the 3G connectivity issue resolved. But an unusual message from Google employee Ry Guy yesterday told Nexus One customers that HTC was, in fact, declaring a different issue resolved: "The message...on HTC's website concerns a previous temporary data outage, not the 3G connectivity issues that some users have been experiencing," he wrote.

As 3G connectivity issues continue for many customers even after the distribution of an over-the-air software update, a growing number of owners are experiencing trouble with their touchscreens. In fact, defective touchscreens appears to be becoming a popular subject of YouTube videos, where owners everywhere are letting Google and the rest of the world see these symptoms for themselves.

The video above shows the touchscreen failing to respond to browser functions, but responding nominally to the home menu. Another YouTube video from a different customer shows the drawing program registering repeated taps on the screen as vertical lines starting the same distance (about an inch) below the fingertip, and ending at the fingertip location.

In the wake of scrutiny not only from Nexus One customers but Congress as well, Google decided yesterday to reduce its "equipment recovery fee" from as high as $350, as stated in its original Terms of Sale, to a maximum $150. However, that fee is in addition to whatever T-Mobile (for now, Nexus One's exclusive carrier) may charge; and as Google's revised terms state, the customer must agree that $150 is necessary to compensate for a kind of depreciation Google only describes as "market changes."

Google lowers 'unusually high' early termination fee on Nexus One

Publié: février 9, 2010, 3:24pm CET par Tim Conneally

Google's Nexus One At the end of January, the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Task Force launched an inquiry into the Early Termination Fees (ETFs) of the major wireless providers with a special focus on the Google Nexus One handset.

The Nexus One is unlike other smartphones in that it is sold only by Google and available on multiple carriers. As such, if a customer terminated his contract, he faced early termination fees from both Google and his wireless provider.

The Consumer Task Force's Inquiry said: "Consumers have been surprised by this policy and by its financial impact. Please let us know your rationale(s) for these combined fees, and whether you have coordinated or will coordinate on these fees and on the disclosure of their combined effect."

Google's response appeared quite plainly yesterday evening: it has lowered its early termination penalty from $350 to $150.

Responses from the FCC and Google this morning are pending.

Netgear and Ericsson introduce a mobile broadband hotspot with a twist

Publié: février 9, 2010, 7:20am CET par Tim Conneally

Netgear HSPA 3G router

We have seen a couple of mobile broadband hotspots come to market in the last year, the Novatel MiFi on Sprint and Verizon, and the recent Sprint Overdrive from Sierra Wireless. They're pocket-sized, battery-powered devices with a 3G connection that can connect a handful of devices to the Internet wherever they're plopped down.

Today, Netgear and Ericsson announced that they have created a 3G mobile broadband-connected router like these devices, except that it's not pocketable and battery powered.

Instead, the new mobile broadband router, called the MBRN3300, is designed for fixed or semi-nomadic use. For example, it can provide a broadband connection to rural homes that don't have the appropriate infrastructure for a DSL, Cable or Fiber; or it can be set up in mobile homes, boats, automobiles and trains.

It provides an HSPA connection to the Internet and both 802.11n and Ethernet LAN for home networking. The broadband speeds depend, of course, upon the service providers' capabilities, but the current peak in U.S. speeds is 7.2Mbps and the average is around 4Mbps.

Though a number of companies have been pushing WiMAX as the solution to rural connectivity in North America, Southeast Asia and Africa (with 519 deployments in 146 countries), HSPA is showing strong growth across the world as well. According to the GSA's latest survey (February 4, 2010) 315 network operators in 133 countries have upgraded to HSPA.

The companies will be showing off the new wireless hotspot at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, but carrier partnerships haven't been mentioned yet.

Goodnight, moon: What I learned from a space shuttle

Publié: février 8, 2010, 11:19pm CET par Carmi Levy

Like many nighthawks across the continent, I found myself glued to more than one screen...all right, three. Plus my BlackBerry...as I watched this morning's launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. I observed the spectacle with a curious mixture of excitement and sadness because after the current STS-130 mission, the shuttle program has only four more scheduled flights before it's grounded for good.

It's not the retirement that gets me. Every technology has its day, and it's fair to conclude that a system largely designed in the early 1970s has now served its purpose and should logically be replaced. It's also fair to conclude that this same system was and is too complex to ever be fiscally feasible. Despite the orbiters' reusability, which was supposed to drive down the cost of spaceflight, extensive maintenance in-between missions made the program even more expensive to fly than conventional expendable rockets. The shuttle's inherent design flaws (you'll never see humans riding below any other part of a space vehicle again) pretty much sealed its fate.

The absent successor

What irks me about the whole thing is the fact that when the shuttle program is over and done, there won't be another program waiting in the wings to take over. President Obama's 2010 budget announcement last week virtually killed funding for the Constellation program, which would have resulted in new hardware to take humans more safely into orbit, to the moon and beyond.

We've been down this road before. After the Apollo program ended with the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project in 1975, nearly six years passed before the US once again launched its own astronauts into space. Then as now, NASA lacked the funds because the US lacked the national will to prioritize spending on sending humans into space. Then as now, NASA found itself going up against a wartime government dealing with frightfully uncertain economic conditions. Then as now, NASA lost the battle and spent years twiddling its thumbs waiting for its new ride to be ready.

With Constellation now virtually dead, NASA doesn't even have that comfort anymore. Had the key components for the regularly scheduled program already in progress -- the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule -- survived the axe, NASA would have had at least a five-year gap before its next launch. Now, it could be buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets indefinitely while it waits for commercial space interests to fill the giant void. While thousands of NASA employees wonder what tomorrow might bring (hint: it won't be pretty) I can't resist the urge to draw a personal connection.

Liftoff of Space Shuttle STS-130, perhaps the final nighttime liftoff in the shuttle program's history. [Courtesy: NASA]

Liftoff of Space Shuttle STS-130, perhaps the final nighttime liftoff in the shuttle program's history. [Courtesy: NASA]

Of cars and spaceships

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) My wife and I cart our kids around in a vehicle we affectionately call the "wondervan." Despite our guilt over contributing to global warming, our car is an essential pillar of life for us and our kids. Like all vehicles, it has a finite lifespan, and we're already planning for its replacement over the next couple of years. The plan will be relatively simple: Save up a lot of money, do a lot of research and preparation, drive to the dealer in the old car, and return home (somewhat poorer) in the new one.

The same process applies in the real world. Planning for any technology platform's end-of-life is a fundamental requirement of any business in any sector. The laptops that your employees use and the servers they connect to can only last for so long. When they reach the inevitable point of no return -- where the costs and risks of keeping them in service outweigh an investment in followon technology -- it's time to take the plunge. Your business can't afford to be without laptops and servers until you decide you've got enough money saved up. The time to get off your duff and do something about it is not just before the thing dies an inglorious death or the vendor pulls its support. If you fail to bake lifecycle planning into your operations, your fate may be even more bleak than NASA's. The agency, despite countless layoffs, will exist in some form by the time this is all over. Your business? Don't hold your breath.

For a variety of self-inflicted and externally influenced reasons, NASA's new business model will see it walking the proverbial five miles to school for a whole lot of years before a new vehicle, likely developed by commercial partners, is ready. The agency failed to anticipate upcoming change, and now thousands of its employees will pay the ultimate price. I'm going to guess the former Can-Do organization will have a tough time convincing us to stay engaged while its human spaceflight capability remains grounded.

Who do you trust?

Despite their obvious differences, businesses and government agencies are equally dependent on trust. Once stakeholders lose trust, it's over. Would you willingly do business with an organization that failed to anticipate end-of-life for its core competency?

As you scope out potential partners, supply chain members and, yes, even customers, you're making one judgment call after another, typically revolving around whether you think this outfit has the brains and the moxie to stick with you for mutual benefit. If its leadership is so blind that it can't anticipate normal technology turnover, do you really want to be aligning yourself with it in the first place? Would you have any trust in its ability to balance near-term and long-term goals? I'm going to guess letting something like this happen would erode your confidence a bit.

In a year or two, my wife and I will take that infrequent trip to the dealer and return home with something newer, nicer, and safer than the vehicle it replaces. By then, NASA will be well into its human spaceflight stand down, waiting for the figurative bus while nations with bigger budgets and different priorities pass them by. I do hope businesses are studying this monumental gaffe and revisiting their technology investment roadmaps to ensure they, too, don't get caught without the basic ability to keep themselves relevant.

Netflix to FCC: NBCU + Comcast could bypass net neutrality

Publié: février 8, 2010, 9:02pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

In a world where Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski's six principles for net neutrality are enforced, everyone who makes a living on the Internet could conceivably be "unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators." The exception would be when a pipeline provider such as Comcast merges with a content provider such as NBC Universal, to make certain classes of content viewable online only when it designates. That's the opinion of attorneys for video rental service Netflix, in a filing last month with the FCC and recently made public.

"Netflix believes that the codification of the existing network neutrality principles, together with the addition of nondiscrimination and transparency, create an effective framework for preserving an open Internet," begins Netflix' filing, written last January 14 (PDF available here). "These rules will allow all parts of the industry -- network operators, consumer electronics manufacturers, and edge providers of content, applications, and services -- to continue to innovate at a rapid pace, unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators."

The exception is when a dominant network operator like Comcast puts together a service like TV Everywhere, its lucrative on-demand platform for Internet streaming of content to subscribers. In a strangely familiar sounding refrain, Netflix warns that a bundling of the operating system, so to speak, with content makes it difficult for other distributors of content to compete at the same level.

"By bundling the traditional cable TV offering with Internet delivery of content, vertically integrated MVPDs and network operators are potentially extending and expanding their dominant market position at the expense of competitive online offerings," Netflix' attorneys write. "Moreover, the recent announcement of the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal serves to exacerbate the growing concern that MVPDs will use their control over programming networks to stifle competition, including the growing competition from online video providers like Netflix."

The company's attorneys particularly point to a clause in the FCC's notice of proposed rulemaking last October. There, the commission acknowledged that certain classes of service that use the Internet as their backbone, probably shouldn't be managed the same way as the Web (based on HTTP, just one of the Internet's many applications). So the FCC proposed the creation of a service class called either managed services or specialized services, that it describes as industries unto themselves, and as such, deserving of special recognition and treatment. VoIP service such as what Vonage provides, and multi-channel video offered by AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS, are obvious examples.

As the Commission wrote at the time (PDF available here), it was interested in public comment regarding how such services could remain managed while the Internet stays open: "We recognize that these managed or specialized services may differ from broadband Internet access services in ways that recommend a different policy approach, and it may be inappropriate to apply the rules proposed here to managed or specialized services. However, we are sensitive to any risk that the growth of managed or specialized services might supplant or otherwise negatively affect the open Internet. In this section, we seek comment on whether and, if so, how the Commission should address managed or specialized IP-based services in order to allow providers to develop new and innovative technologies and business models and to otherwise further the goals of innovation, investment, competition, and consumer choice, while safeguarding the open Internet."

That's precisely the section to which Netflix' attorneys responded: "Netflix is concerned that network operators will use so-called managed services in a way that harms unaffiliated content or service providers that compete directly with services provided by the network operator, owing either to their vertical integration...or resulting from competitive threats to their legacy 'managed services' business. This concern is heightened in light of the fact that such 'managed services' are offered over the same physical network as broadband Internet access."

The danger, Netflix believes, is that by even creating the exception class in the first place, the FCC could inadvertently create the very "fast lane" for the Internet that lawmakers in 2005, coining the phrase "net neutrality" for the first time, sought to avoid.

As legislative momentum for passing Pres. Obama's ambitious public agenda has slowed, public support for the President's policies as a whole, has waned. As a result, even net neutrality -- something seemingly unrelated to health care, jobs, and the fiscal deficit -- appears to have become yet another can to be kicked down the avenue, as yet another topic tied to Mr. Obama. Last week, as House members discussed the Comcast + NBCU consolidation proposal, even net neutrality's principal backers appeared unwilling to take their own side, enabling Republican opponents to resume their counterattack.

House Telecommunications and the Internet ranking member Cliff Stearns (R - Florida) began last Thursday's hearings by suggesting the entire net neutrality issue was being raised in the context of Comcast and NBCU just to be anti-competitive. Rep. Stearns cited the DC Court of Appeals, which last month indicated the FCC may not have enforcement rights with respect to how Comcast may deploy its Internet services.

"The Court, in fact, seemed skeptical that the FCC even had legal authority to impose these mandates. One of the judges asked the FCC counsel 'whether he wanted to lose on process or jurisdiction.' Unless a condition is narrowly tailored to a transaction's specific harm to competition, it does not belong in this negotiation," stated Stearns. "Since this deal will not materially increase concentration in either the distribution or programming markets, demonstrating such harm would be difficult, especially in light of the robust competition in the video sector...If Comcast and NBCU are right that this deal creates a stronger entity that can better serve viewers, I think it can succeed. If they're wrong, it will fail."

The ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (R - Texas, a former chair of the Committee), didn't have much to add besides a smile and a wink: "It's good to see NBC and Comcast sitting side by side. That doesn't break my heart."

Report: Streaming video drove 72% global increase in mobile data consumption

Publié: février 8, 2010, 6:27pm CET par Tim Conneally

A new study from subscriber management company Allot Communications today says that worldwide mobile broadband consumption increased approximately 72% in just the second half of 2009.

Though the Federal Communications Commission is worried that there won't be enough bandwidth in the United States to support the growth in mobile broadband use, the Americas are actually being outpaced by both the Asia Pacific region (APAC) and the Europe/Middle East/Africa region (EMEA) in terms of growth rate. APAC experienced an 86% growth in mobile broadband consumption, and EMEA experienced 70% growth, while use in the Americas grew by 59%.

Allot's study says that streaming video is "the single most influential factor driving the need for increased mobile network capacity," and that consumption of streaming video grew by 99% in the second half of '09. YouTube alone accounted for 10% of the world's mobile bandwidth consumption in the third and fourth quarters of last year.

"Mobile broadband networks are still facing the same challenges as fixed networks -- growing bandwidth demands, congestion, as well as finding ways to enhance the user experience and to lessen the negative impact of a few [P2P users] on the network," a statement from the company said today.

Stymied by continuing Nexus One 3G issues, Google blames the environment

Publié: février 8, 2010, 5:59pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

For the most part, last week's over-the-air software update to Google Nexus One phones, which was intended to address the 3G connectivity issues with certain versions of the phone's firmware (with a gift of added multitouch), appears unsuccessful for many commenters to Google's support forums. Very few customers reported improvement, and some who did in the early going are now saying their flip-flop problems between 3G and EDGE have returned.

Meanwhile, although Nexus One manufacturer HTC has typically referred phone issues to Google -- the self-proclaimed "vendor of record" when the device premiered -- as of now, it has declared the issue resolved, suggesting that customers still experiencing problems "restart their Nexus One device to restore their T-Mobile data connection."

The entry of new customers into the Google support forum who report having purchased their phones in the last week, only to be confronted with the issues some others have faced since last month, suggests that Google may continue to be selling phones containing the firmware suspected of having the connectivity defect.

"I just recently purchased the Nexus One and discovered that I am unable to make calls and access the internet at the same time," reports new entrant Mayo1 on Saturday. "Once I make a voice call, I am unable to browse the Internet or use any apps that require Internet connectivity. I am mostly in a 3G area. Initially, I'm browsing or using my apps just fine then I decide to make a voice call and all of a sudden Internet connectivity is gone. The minute I hang up the voice call, I can go right back to browsing."

Besides this and the flip-flop problem, the other prominent symptom users are reporting is that connectivity seems high until someone touches the phone, then it drops to zero -- which suggests a problem with the phone's antenna. Although the common thread among customers with these symptoms appears to be the same firmware version, customers are beginning to suspect that these issues are actually unrelated -- that they are separate problems that afflicted a certain strain of the phone, but may not be caused by the firmware in that strain.

Last Sunday afternoon before the Super Bowl, Google employee Ry Guy posted a perplexing message. Citing the fact that "there's still a lot of interest here," he began by reminding customers of the existence of the OTA software fix "that will improve 3G connectivity for many Nexus One users." No one continuing to report negative symptoms had claimed to have refrained from installing the fix.

"However," Ry Guy continued, "there are a variety of factors which feed into the quality of 3G connectivity on mobile phones, a number of which are dependent on the environment rather than the phone itself. For instance, a software update can't address the experience of users on the edge or outside of 3G coverage areas. We're going to continue to track 3G performance closely with HTC and T-Mobile and will post any updates we've got."

Customers responded as though Google had just fumbled in the fourth quarter. "Just face facts: There is something significantly wrong with the software or hardware," wrote andrewrchick. "If you just tell us you will fix it but you need time, most of us will hang on in there. But don't insult us and blame it on T-Mobile as too many people here have enough experience to say otherwise."

And customer olypdd noted the trend of some technology news services following the forums lately: "Please remember...many, many entities, some who research and report on these technologies, are following these blogs. I would be careful to not blow smoke. It doesn't do anything to save Google (and HTC) from what is already an embarrassing Superphone release, and anything that looks patronizing will be reported as such elsewhere."

Over on the T-Mobile forums, customers who had not reported 3G connectivity problems appreciated the "pinch-to-zoom" multitouch addition in the latest OTA fix. For them, it certainly didn't hurt. For others who did report troubles, not only were their connectivity symptoms unchanged, but multitouch seemed to be crashing their browsers.

Writes T-Mobile customer polobear this morning, "Overall, I'm happy with the phone. Specifically however, I'm not happy with the 3G. As luck would have it, I live in an area with fantastic T-Mobile coverage. I get 5 bars (EDGE) in my basement no matter what phone is used. But on the N1, I can't pick up 3G anywhere around here (not in the house, not outside). I've never actually seen a 3G connection on the phone, ever."

Judging from T-Mobile's support forum, there did not appear to be any similar 3G connectivity issues affecting its other Android brands, including the MyTouch 3G, which is co-branded with Google.

Microsoft Confessions: 'There were a ton of bozos'

Publié: février 8, 2010, 6:15am CET par Joe Wilcox

Do middling, middle managers run Microsoft? That's the consensus among the former Microsofties who shared their work stories with me over the last couple months. The new work week starts with another Microsoft Confessional -- the fourth in four days -- from 13-year company veteran Boris, which isn't his real name, of course. Boris was smart enough to see the end coming, and he made preparations in the days before his May 2009 layoff. He learned to read middle managers the way a genuine fortune teller might read tea leaves.

People being asked to leave are one view of Microsoft. But those leaving voluntarily are another perspective. In looking at Microsoft, I'm hugely concerned about the departures of two important and long-time Microsoft executives: Mike Nash and Bill Veghte, revealed on February 4 and January 14, respectively. Both men are 19-plus years veterans working for the Windows and Windows Live groups. Nash is headed to Amazon, and Veghte departs following last year's executive shuffle that put Steven Sinfosky in charge of the group (as one of five Microsoft presidents).

Historically, successful shipment of a new Windows version ends with big promotions. Windows Vista was the exception, leading to demotions, sideways transfers and departures (Microsoft wouldn't call them firings). But Windows 7 is a huge success, so what gives with Nash and Veghte leaving Microsoft?

The departures of Nash, Veghte and also Chris Liddell, Microsoft's former chief financial officer, are canaries in the coal mine. They signal something fundamentally wrong. Boris' story and the three before it -- "Killed over politics," "Deeply dysfunctional family" and "Poor worker bees" -- offer some insight into what is part of the problem.

Boris' story is the longest of the quartet of confessionals; as such, I've added subheads to make it easier reading. With that introduction, Boris' story:

My career out of college started with working as a technical writer for a few now-defunct engineering software firms. I recall my first day on the job, being assigned a massive Compaq 'portable' as my workstation, and teaching myself MS-DOS and batch file programming via the Compaq's user manual. We had a cool array of hardware around the office for porting: IBM AS/400, Silicon Graphics Iris and Indigo, some of the early Sun SPARCstations, and my favorite, a NeXT Cube.
During the next five years I moved up from a junior writing position to managing an entire department of writers and illustrators. I was largely self-taught as a manager. We made some good hires, got the work done on time, wrote what I still think were some actually helpful manuals, and introduced a bit of publishing innovation with on-demand printing, electronic distribution of documentation on the Web (in 1995!) and CDs, highly modular content, and so on.
In the mid-90's, on a goof, I applied for a job with Microsoft. I was convinced a friend was pulling a fast one when they called for an interview. A month later I was a full-time, blue-badge Microsoft employee.
Through most of my career at Microsoft I worked as an editor of one sort or another, working on both developer and end-user content. In the early years, I was aligned with the Developer Evangelism team and got to work with a really amazing cross-section of smart, influential people in the software industry. Jeff Richter, Don Box, Aaron Skonnard, Charles Petzold, Mark Russinovich -- the list goes on and on.
For a few years I was part of the user assistance team for one of the big orgs, working on UI, help, SDKs, articles, books -- whatever they threw at us. We shipped some very good products and got a lot of recognition in the form of industry awards. I worked on launching a few companywide internal tools and standards projects that made important contributions to the way we build products and communicate with customers. One is still in active use today, almost 7 years after we started. That's a long time in MSFT years. I'm very proud of that since I was a key contributor from the very beginning.
Hamstrung by Ineffective Management
My career trajectory slowed a bit at Microsoft, in part because I mostly worked on small teams and there simply wasn't room for advancement. Also in part because, during the first few years, I didn't understand how the MSFT review and promotion system worked. The reality is quite a bit different from many people's expectations.
It was clear to me at a certain point that Microsoft had turned the corner. There were still a lot of smart people beavering away on various projects, but they were largely hamstrung by multiple levels of largely ineffective management. Who you knew, or how well you could influence those above you, counted more than results.
There were a ton of bozos. Arrogant bozos. Not to suggest that I'm some sort of genius. Far from it. But the intellectual rigor demonstrated by much of the management -- and strategy -- was sadly lacking. In some ways it was funny, but mostly depressing.
The end of the road came in early 2009. Half of my team was let go in the January layoffs. We scrambled forward with vendors for a few months until the remaining editors were canned in May (me included). Out of a starting staff of nearly 20, four remained, all managers. I'm not sure what they manage.
The End -- a Relief
Some of us saw the end coming. I was working on a post-Microsoft business plan, but had envisioned another 12 months of employment for planning and scraping together a bankroll. In the event, on a Thursday afternoon, a friend and I intuited -- partly from sudden, unnanounced travel status of certain managers -- that the end was much closer. Friday we brought in suitcases and took home our personal items. I used my StayFit allowance to buy a gym membership. Monday we printed out any important personal papers. Tuesday we sat down with our GM and got the news.
In my case it was a relief. I wanted to leave many times over the years -- and in fact did once -- but the salary, the benefits and to be honest the good people, too, kept me there. Devil you know. But I walked out the door that day knowing it was for the best and, though it might take a while, I'd come out of the experience OK.
I spent the summer with my family, relaxing, and taking a wider look around the industry. It was much needed, much appreciated time away from the Microsoft hot house. Thanks to the severance package, unemployment and some careful budgeting, we haven't yet needed to dip into our savings. In the longer term we may need to move somewhere less expensive to reduce our housing costs.
Of my former colleagues, only two of us are now employed fulltime in the industry, though at significantly lower compensation. Another seems to have steady consulting work. Clearly the tech publishing industry (including tech writing/editing) has changed significantly, and probably permanently. I don't think the need for communication experts has vanished, but it remains to be seen how we fit into the changing landscape of the industry.
From six to 13 Management Layers
It's a bit hard to equate the different [Microsoft compensation] level systems over the years, but I basically started at what today would be a level 59 and finished a level 61. That's not much of a bump in a dozen or so years. Assume what you will. I know what went down. I know the value of what my team accomplished (we measured it, with business-relevant, industry-relevant metrics). I know what my contribution was to the team. I am more than satisfied that I pulled my weight and more.
When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and Bill Gates. In 2009, there were 13 people between me and Steve Ballmer. My inability to climb the corporate ladder cannot alone explain that away. When layoffs hit my team, only the bottom two layers of the org were affected -- the entire bottom layer of individual contributors (ICs) and two first-level managers. Who's working here?
Ironically, I once wanted to climb up that ladder. But I'm glad it never happened. Through friends, I saw the costs: Huge amounts of additional hassle, not a lot of additional pay, effectively no training or support, unbelievable politics, etc.
On the other hand, MSFT philosophy is up or out. Review depends more on managing perception up the chain of command than actual results. (I tested this theory and it's true. I managed a single set of metrics up the management chain, just spinning the results differently depending on who I talked to and what they cared about. The metrics were useless as the tools they came from were broken. Result = promotion.)
There's little or no interest in sustainability. No recognition for doing a job consistently well over time. No incentive for effective cross-team work (unless you can get another team to do work you can take credit for).
Swimming Against Reward-Driven Culture
Interestingly, [internal] MS Poll results show that the ability to work effectively across teams has been consistently one of the lowest-scoring poll items for over a decade. (Yes, I looked it up.) I've seen managers bend over backward to bring a poll score from 75 percent to 80 percent. I've never seen anyone try to address the cross-team problem.
There are good managers at MSFT. I've seen them. There just aren't very many, and they're swimming against an internally focused, reward-driven culture that puts the highest value on visibility.
It can also be very, very difficult to work in a non-engineering role or organization within an engineering-dominated company. Management focus was just on completely different things than what my teams were doing. Successful or not, it was seen as a distraction. Arguably, good management should be able to multitask, look at the world through different lenses, make situation-specific decisions, strategize in a diverse and complicated world. Realistically, that's a rare set of skills.
Long story short, there were many good and bad experiences over the years. The bad stuff made me stronger and more confident in my abilities. The good stuff is work, friendships, and experience I'm still proud of. I know, for a fact, that we helped people. So that's my story. I remain proud of what I did and [I am] hopeful for the future.

Other stories in this series of confessionals:

I'm still collecting stories. Please e-mail joewilcox at live dot com. Stories can be anonymous, but I will need to verify identities.

Microsoft Confessions: 'Poor worker bees'

Publié: février 7, 2010, 7:02am CET par Joe Wilcox

Today's Microsoft Confession comes from a woman let go during the first round of layoffs, in January 2009. I'll call her Amanda, which, of course, isn't her real name. Amanda shared key elements of her story on deep background, but she also provided a reflective portion that she hopes will give deeper insight to anyone looking to work for Microsoft or to HR departments looking to hire former employees.

By telling this story, Amanda wants to give some meaning to her layoff, or so I detected from what she shared for private and public consumption. Amanda's story is consistent with every other I received. She sharply criticizes Microsoft's culture of reorganization, but also emphasizes the heavy workload. I detect deep frustration in her story about Microsoft management problems that won't easily be fixed.

Amanda's story follows two other confessionals -- "Killed over politics" and "Deeply dysfunctional family." As explained on Friday, after the last round of Microsoft layoffs, I asked former employees to tell their stories, which are presented anonymously to diminish risk of repercussions -- either to work elsewhere in the tech industry or to any Microsoft severance arrangement.

I challenge current or former Microsoft employees to either confirm or contradict two key points from Amanda's story: That some Microsoft divisions demand overlong work weeks and that employees who can't keep pace are penalized. From my experience, long hours are standard among many software companies. Does Microsoft demand too much? Current or former employees, please answer the question in comments. With that introduction, Amanda's story:

A lesson and caution to the masses is found in how quickly I went from rising star with a bright future to yesterday's dishwater that couldn't be tossed out quickly enough, without changing how I approached my work! In summary, it was all due to the arrival on the scene -- all praise the holy reorg, which is an approximately annual religious festival in certain sects, I mean divisions, of Microsoft -- of a particular manager...The organizational culture in many parts of MS is such that one manager, even one with a history of their own performance problems, can spell doom for even the most diligent, accomplished, well-intentioned and politically-savvy employee.
The opportunities? [They] can be among the most amazing for your career that you'll ever encounter. This is balanced, however, by the reality that merit isn't always the primary criteria by which opportunities are given out, and that opportunities that are given in the blink of an eye can be -- and sometimes are -- taken away in the blink of an eye for no apparent reason at all.
The culture of the work environment? Let's talk about that, because while people need to know that the culture of working like a dog for 5 years to retire a millionaire is long gone, they also need to know that the culture of working like a dog for 5 years for your regular wages isn't, in some departments.
My former team required 60-90+ hours a week of its employees for several years straight. The average across many weeks was 80-90 [hours], for months on end. If you were unwilling to do the hours any more, you became persona non grata. This meant the least desirable assignments, poor reviews and so on. While the conventional answer to a bad team situation in a big company is to transfer teams, it didn't work for people on that team.
Multiple people on the team wanted to transfer off the team and away from its overtime commitment but management exercised their prerogative to retain them on the team out of urgent business need so that they could not leave. This justification was used to delay their departures 3-6 months, with the effect of causing them to miss the opportunity they'd wanted to pursue [elsewhere in Microsoft] and requring them to continue to do the excessive hours.
Meanwhile, the rest of us poor worker bees had to listen to them complain about the situation until they were allowed to leave. It's not good for morale to be reminded every day that when you get tired of the excessive commitment required by the team, you're likely to be just as trapped, and just as unhappy about it, as your peers are.
In some cases, overassignment of work was used to cause competent employees to appear to be failing at completing their required responsibiltiies. In other cases, people who had not been with the company long enough to be eligible to transfer to another team had to just quit to get out of the unpaid overtime without a permanent black mark in the form of a bad review on their Microsoft record.
Pregnant women ended up on early bedrest from the stress. People slept at the office in order to use the commute time for more work. For some, there were weekly all-nighters in the schedule. A capable contributor on my former team, whose name I know, experienced the indignity of a second-level manager suggesting that they go out on disability if they couldn't handle the stress of the workload, as the manager insisted they should be able to get that workload done in a 40-hour week. Given my background as the longest-term member of the team, including management, I'd call the assertion that that was a 40-hour load shamefully ludicrous to the point of professional negligence.
Anyone in the industry knows about crunch times right before ship. But this was three years of crunch times. After a year had elapsed, the "we don't have the luxury of time to train additional staff to help us get this done" justification for it started to smell kind of bad.
Few teams are like this, but it only takes ending up on one to end your career as a blue badge. It's good for people who are considering Microsoft employment to know. It's also good for people who are considering ex-Microsoft employees for roles in other organizations to know, because among those cut loose are some smart, dedicated, hard workers who were simply asked to do too much, for too long to be able to succeed at it forever in the eyes of the organization -- and who'd be an asset to just about any company in the industry. I know that if I ever, in the future, receive a résumé from someone who left Microsoft during one of the layoff timeframes in 2009, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Other stories in this series of confessionals:

I'm still collecting stories. Please e-mail joewilcox at live dot com. Stories can be anonymous, but I will need to verify identities.

Microsoft Confessions: 'Deeply dysfunctional family'

Publié: février 6, 2010, 1:38am CET par Joe Wilcox

The next former Microsoft employee story comes from someone I'll call Fred, which, of course, is not his real name. Fred took a job right out of college and might still work at Microsoft today, if not for the elimination of his group during layoffs last year. Like the former Microsoftie from the first post in this former employee "confession" series, Fred helplessly watched as the exciting and flexible workplace he joined bogged down in increasing layers of middle management.

When Microsoft hired Fred nine years ago, the company employed a little more than 47,000 people. When he was laid off in May 2009, the number was around 93,000. That number is for full-time employees and doesn't include contractors. According to Microsoft's fiscal 2010 10-K, the breakdown on June 30, 2009: "56,000 in the United States and 37,000 internationally. Of the total, 36,000 were in product research and development, 26,000 in sales and marketing, 17,000 in product support and consulting services, 5,000 in manufacturing and distribution, and 9,000 in general and administration."

How many more layers of middle management did Microsoft add when more than doubling headcount during the last decade -- before more than 5,000 layoffs? Fred has an answer for that.

As I explained yesterday, following the last round of Microsoft layoffs, I asked former employees to tell their stories. Responses came from recent departures and others long ago. No identities will be intentionally revealed, although I have verified each one. Fred understands that there is enough detail in his story for Microsoft to possibly identify him. But he is willing to take the risk (and hopefully not risk work elsewhere).

Fred's story is the second posted in this short series running for the next couple days. His account is first-hand, but I will string some other stories together as narrative for better readability and to protect identities.

Something is missing from Fred's story that I would like to encourage some commenters to fill in. Microsoft hiring and compensation follows a scale of levels. While I have some information about the levels and associated salaries, I would prefer some existing or former Microsoft employees pipe in with current salary information for level 63. I ask in hopes of generating discussion. If no one does, I'll later add the information to this introduction or in comments. Four years ago, WashTech News offered an excellent review of Microsoft's complicated compensation system.

Now for Fred's story:

I started with Microsoft in June 2001, right out of college (I received a BS in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). I was hired as a level 59. My first role was with Microsoft Consulting Services as an IT Infrastructure Consultant based in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. I stayed in that role for four years, traveling around the country (mostly on the East Coast, but with a few exceptions) to help large organizations design/plan/implement Microsoft technology -- mostly Windows desktops, Active Directory and Exchange. My clients included Fortune 100 companies in the retail, financial services, higher education and government sectors. Even a branch of the US military.
In 2005, rather tired of the Monday-Friday travel schedule, I started searching for a new role. That June, I accepted a role in the MSDN & TechNet organization -- the part of the company responsible for communicating with developers and IT professionals. I was a level 61 at that point. Over the following four years, our business grew -- we were reaching millions of IT pros with high levels of customer satisfaction -- the team grew and my role grew as well. The role of the group was really one of audience marketing -- to take a post-sales approach to the dissemination of technical information, with the intent of making the job of IT professionals easier, and hopefully as a result making them more satisfied with Microsoft.
Unfortunately, over the course of reorg after reorg, our group got buried in an IT infrastructure group. We were 15 people doing audience marketing, as part of a larger group of 450 responsible for the Microsoft.com web infrastructure. Our group had proposed a number of times to be moved into a more appropriate organization, like global marketing, that was better aligned with our mission. But our management chain, which grew deeper with every reorg, resisted the idea of giving up headcount or budget.
At the time I was laid off in May 2009, I was a level 63. I had never received anything other than exemplary reviews (I received an "Exceeded" rating in the three consecutive review cycles leading up to the time I left.) The size of the company more than [doubled] in my eight years there. The number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10.
Processes became more bureaucratic and individuals were less empowered to take action. In fact, oftentimes the incentive structure encouraged individual contributors not to do the right thing, but just to do what they committed to in their review the year prior. In other words, if you committed to include Feature A in Windows, and half-way through the year you realized that was a bad thing for Windows and Microsoft customers, the incentive structure actively discouraged you from trying to kill the feature, because then you wouldn't have achieved your commitments. That sort of behavior just got easier and more engrained as the organizations grew.
Our entire group was laid off in two rounds. The first half were let go in January [2009]. Their roles were taken up by an outsourcing company based in India. The rest of us were let go four months later, and the remaining operation was outsourced. Four months after that, the majority of our work was dismantled. At the time I was laid off, I was given a choice of accepting a different role within the company, but it would have required my relocation, so I refused. My understanding is that I was the only member of the staff offered that chance (because of my technical background; the rest of the staff was purely marketing).
There's a part of me that can actually understand our group being laid off. An argument could reasonably be made that non-Microsoft employees can be just as effective at fulfilling our mission and could do so at a lower cost (though that's proving to not be true in the aftermath; it was a disaster). Some of the other people I knew around the company who were let go, though, made my jaw drop to the floor. While areas like Search and Zune continued to received astounding resources, areas focused on customer satisfaction and connection, evangelism, and program management were decimated.
One of the better examples where fat ended up cutting muscle, was someone like Steve Riley, who was a noted security expert and one of the best public faces Microsoft had to the IT Pro audience. He was the only person from his group let go. He never had anything other than stellar reviews, and [he] was one of the few people Microsoft had who could pack a ballroom and hold their attention for as long as he wanted. That one really shocked me.
To be honest, as much as I miss many of the individuals I worked with -- and the steady paycheck and benefits, which were always great -- I'm glad to not be a part of Microsoft any more. It bares very little resemblance in my mind to the company I joined 8 years ago. It's hard to describe the atmosphere of excitement and innovation that existed when I first started. But over time, that certainly diminished, seemingly in an inverse relationship to the size of the company.
The company as a whole seemed more and more focused on chasing competitors into any business where they might someday present a threat -- which to me always felt like ego on the part of SteveB [CEO Steve Ballmer]-- and seemed to completely lose sight of its core strengths and where it could deliver the most value to its customers (see the investment in Zune and Live Search as it correlates to Windows Vista).
If I had to sum up my feelings about the whole experience though, it really boils down to sadness and disappointment -- not over the loss of my job, which, for the most part I enjoyed, but am happy to move past, but rather over the failed efforts, missed opportunities and wasted potential of Microsoft as a whole. I've never met so many talented, passionate individuals. But it felt like everyone was part of a deeply dysfunctional family, and in the end, that dynamic trumped what could have been astounding achievements.

Other stories in this confessional series:

I'm still collecting stories. Please e-mail joewilcox at live dot com. Stories can be anonymous, but I will need to verify identity.

Wolfram|Alpha makes a strong argument for virtual keyboards

Publié: février 6, 2010, 1:01am CET par Tim Conneally

I don't keep my personal preference for mobile devices with physical keyboards a secret; the sensation of hitting real keys is an indivisible part of the text entry experience for me, and it's not likely to change any time soon.

But there is one area where physical keyboards are woefully inferior to virtual ones: adaptability. A virtual keyboard can represent any alphabet or be arranged in any configuration the user or software needs, and a physical keyboard simply can't keep up with that.

Wolfram|Alpha keyboard iPhone app

There is no better example than Wolfram|Alpha's iPhone/iPod Touch app, which now has four full-screen keyboards to accommodate all the various mathematical symbols that it includes in its searches and computations.

Today, Wolfram Research pushed out the 1.1 update to its $49.99 application in the iTunes App Store, which has been redesigned to provide a more useful interface with the "answer engine."

"To determine the optimal keyboard layout, we scoured Wolfram|Alpha's server logs for the most commonly entered phrases that have characters with meaning in Wolfram|Alpha," the team's blog says today. "Given that Wolfram|Alpha is built on Mathematica, one of its core strengths is advanced mathematics. True to form most of the commonly typed characters are related to math."

In addition to the standard keyboard, Wolfram|Alpha includes specialized ones labeled "Math," "Greek," and "Symbol" to simplify the act of querying the app.

"Whether people are converting currency, locating positions of planets, or performing advanced mathematical computations far beyond the capabilities of scientific and graphing calculators, this new functionality provides a natural mobile computation experience," the team said this evening.

DOJ: Google can't leverage class action to settle with future authors

Publié: février 5, 2010, 11:39pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

US Justice Dept. top story badge Last September, the US Justice Dept. objected to the proposed terms of a settlement between Google and the Authors' Guild, which would have enabled Google to publish out-of-print titles in its Google Books catalog. The theory of the settlement at the time was, if authors or rights holders are given enough time to respond to a request to stand up for their rights -- say, at least several months -- and they don't do so, then that's as good as acquiescence.

Since that time, on orders of US District Judge Denny Chin, the two disputing groups have worked on a revised settlement. But yesterday, the Justice Dept. -- representing the United States' interests in the matter -- filed a second objection to the settlement. Although Google and the Authors' Guild made progress, US attorneys say, Google still appears to take the position not only that it can strike bargains on behalf of copyright holders, but that only Google can do so -- a position which they say the law does not allow them to take.

"The ASA [amended settlement agreement] suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: It is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation," write the attorneys, on behalf of Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust William Cavanaugh. "As a consequence, the ASA purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright. Those rights, in turn, confer significant and possibly anticompetitive advantages on a single entity -- Google. Under the ASA as proposed, Google would remain the only competitor in the digital marketplace with the rights to distribute and otherwise exploit a vast array of works in multiple formats. Google also would have the exclusive ability to exploit unclaimed works (including so-called 'orphan works') without risk of liability."

Orphan works were one of the principal problems with the settlement agreement as originally proposed, which attorneys concede was slightly improved upon in the amended form. Originally, Google intended to claim the right to act on behalf of the authors or rights holders of orphan works, unless they spoke up for themselves.

But a kind of Catch-22 managed to unravel the rest of the amended agreement, from the attorneys' perspective: Because Google has never expressed any intent to sell the books it intends to publish -- only make them available for free reading electronically -- it avoided taking any position on the matter of claiming any rights to sell that material. Such a claim, the attorneys concede, "would have been legally indefensible, and thus would have been at odds with Google's entire pre-settlement book search strategy, which was premised upon staying within colorable 'fair use' grounds."

Apparently in an attempt to be thorough, the amended settlement deals explicitly with the same rights Google tried to avoid -- the rights to sell orphan works, among others. And because it does so even though Google didn't intend to, the settlement may fail one of the critical legal tests of any such settlement: specifically, by attempting to settle in the future a claim that Google is not making at present.

But later, the attorneys return to their original claim: that Google is claiming rights it might not have exclusively:

"A core issue that arises out of the parties' effort to resolve this matter is the ability of Google, and no other entity, to compete in a marketplace that the parties seek to create. Nothing in the ASA addresses this concern...There is no serious contention that Google's competitors are likely to obtain comparable rights independently. For example, Amazon -- Google's likely chief rival digital book distributor were the ASA to be approved -- began scanning copyright-protected books in 2002, after first securing permission of the works' rightsholder(s). To date, Amazon has amassed a library of approximately three million digital titles...This impressive number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of books Google has scanned or is poised to scan if the ASA is approved. The suggestion that a competitor should follow Google's lead by copying books en masse without permission in the hope of prompting a class action suit to be settled on terms comparable to the ASA is poor public policy and not something the antitrust laws require a competitor to do."

Another tenet of Google's claim of exclusive rights was the focus of an objection to the amended settlement filed last week by the Free Software Foundation. It's a unique objection, in that the FSF would prefer to not have its due royalties negotiated on its behalf, even if the amount is tallied at zero. Doing so, it claims, would go against the spirit of the free licenses which cover open source documentation and manuals.

"When a copyright holder's license allows Google to distribute and display a work such that it may be included in Google Book Search, Google should be obligated to follow those terms," writes FSF license compliance engineer Brett Smith. "If those terms are unacceptable to Google, the company should simply refrain from including the work in the Google Book Search database. The proposed settlement agreement generally allows Google to include works in Google Book Search unless a specific reason exists to disallow it. The FSF has no objection to this approach for works that have been published under terms that never contemplated inclusion in a large digital database, as is the case with most works in the agreement's scope. However, copyright holders using Free licenses have demonstrably considered such a possibility, and set forth terms for such inclusion. Google should respect the freedoms that these licenses offer to the public and comply with their terms."

Motorola Droid gets its first official multi-touch gesture

Publié: février 5, 2010, 9:40pm CET par Tim Conneally

The Droid has gotten pinch-to-zoom in Google Maps.

Immediately after Google introduced the multitouch gesture on the HTC Nexus One browser, photo gallery, and maps applications, owners of the popular Motorola Droid began to ask if their devices would receive the same update, since it is widely known to support multi-touch input.

It looks like Google has delivered...partially, at least.

The update to Google Maps (v.3.4.0) which rolled out this week adds pinch to zoom to the Droid, but is the sole app to do so. Interestingly, it was not advertised with the update.

Devices without multi-touch capability received the same update, but naturally, it did not include the added gesture recognition.

For these devices it is a somewhat mundane update, adding deeper synchronization with the user's Google account. For example, a user's Google searches on the desktop can now affect the location-based suggestions in his mobile queries. Similarly, when a user "stars" a location as a favorite, it is now synchronized with his Google account.

Arguably the most important place to add the feature is in the Browser, but there are currently no updates available to the Droid's browser (or photo gallery, for that matter.)

Original Xbox being phased out of Xbox Live online play, but alternatives exist

Publié: février 5, 2010, 7:16pm CET par Tim Conneally

Microsoft today confirmed the long-running rumor that support for the original Xbox will be terminated on the Xbox Live online game servers. The company announced that April 15, 2010 will be the last day legacy Xboxes will be able to play on Xbox Live.

"This isn't a decision we made lightly, but after careful consideration, it is clear this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox Live ommunity," Marc Whitten, General Manager of Xbox Live announced today. Whitten noted that Halo 2, a version of the popular first person shooter for the original Xbox still retains a dedicated community of players.

The creators of the Halo franchise, Bungie, have forums dedicated to each version of the game, and users are already begun waxing nostalgic about the "classic" Xbox Live.

One user wrote, "Words don't describe the memories I've had on this title over the past roughly half decade... not just this game, but loads of others as well. I'll tip my hat to just that said fact any day. I'm sad to see the service go, I don't want to see it go, but so be it if it's in the best interest of future engagements for the Xbox Live community."

But there are still alternatives for the most devoted Halo 2 players. Users can connect to online games outside of Xbox Live with XbConnect or Xlink Kai, online game servers which support the legacy consoles, but require them to be connected to a PC.

While neither offer the same level of playability as the Xbox Live version, they will be the only options diehards will have after the April retirement of legacy Xbox Live.

Would you pay to read this?

Publié: février 5, 2010, 7:08pm CET par Carmi Levy

Everyone's got an opinion surrounding Engadget's decision to temporarily deactivate user comments because of its editors said things had gotten "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations." While I find the reaction to Engadget's decision engaging and often amusing (Betanews reader comments, in particular, often make for fun late night reading) I'm a little surprised at the near-universal lack of understanding of how the Internet works in 2010.

I have three fundamental thoughts on Internet publishing that may help put the Engadget brouhaha in perspective:

Web sites need comments, period. Engagement between publishers and readers is a prime creative lifeblood of the publishing industry. Writers and editors can't do what they do unless they directly understand who's reading them and what they're thinking. Comments are a critical element of this feedback loop, and a site without them rather misses the point.
Trolls happen. It's a given that not everyone likes to play by the rules. Large groups of people, whether they're taking in a baseball game or reading a tech site, cover a wide range of capabilities and motivations. Happily, the most readers choose to be positive contributors to the process, while only a small minority either lack the ability or the will to play nice. The comments section reflects the reality of the human condition, and it won't ever change. Readers can choose to not read, while publishers can choose to ban the trolls. Or, as Engadget decided to do this week, take their ball and go home.
This Internet thing costs money. The rise of the Web over the last 15 years or so has conditioned us into believing that all of this is and should forever be free. The current argument over Engadget's decision to suspend commenting has shed light on the realities of publishing on the Web. As much as we all like to get something for nothing, it takes resources -- money, people, and time -- to launch and run a server, populate it with content, and find ways to convert it into a self-sustaining business. Since readers don't pay the shot, advertisers do. But they'll only pay if there's an audience. Bigger audiences are, of course, better, but numbers are only part of the equation. Quality counts, too, and a site overrun with trolls doesn't just consume the resources of whoever's publishing it. Advertisers balk at paying money to connect with readers who are too focused on flinging the online equivalent of bat guano at each other to ever consider going out and buying what these companies are offering.

With these basic truths in mind, it's clear that Engadget's publishers felt the need to stop the flow of nastiness for a bit while they figured out their next move. We can slice them a new one if we wish, but Engadget's goal is not to make friends with the largest number of commenters. Rather, its entire reason for existence is to sell a particular audience to a particular set of advertisers. And if those advertisers don't feel that either the numbers or the demographic criteria fit their respective business needs, they'll pull their support.

Carmi Levy Wide Angle Zoom (v.2) Which brings us to the iPad launch, which delighted the folks who pay the bills because it meant they were delivering their message to a larger-than-usual audience. Apple's announcement gave online publishers a unique opportunity to enjoy higher-than-usual advertising revenues as a direct result of this audience. When big stuff happens in the tech world, people go online to learn about it and decide whether or not it makes sense for their needs. Traffic spikes as newbies and old-timers alike hit the Web looking for information, insight, and guidance. Everything else -- like run-of-the-mill news stories in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti -- gets shunted off to the side as sites do their best to meet demand. And drive it even further.

Is it fair that a touchscreen device trumps the very real drama unfolding in a certain Caribbean nation? No. But no one ever said publishing had to be fair.

Write what's hot, or don't get paid

Which largely explains the all-iPad-all-the-time philosophy that Engadget had followed in the days leading up to Apple's much anticipated announcement. Criticism in the comments notwithstanding, the site was merely reflecting what its readers were asking for -- if not directly, then certainly through their online readership patterns. The site capitalized on a golden opportunity to increase readership and the closely-linked, all-important advertising revenues. Likewise writers, some of whom are paid on a traffic-based formula, focused their efforts on the topic that would return the greatest number of page views.

Speaking for myself, the simple truth is, I typically get lots more page views when I write about Apple than when I write about, say, how social media is helping Haiti's recovery. To wit: My column last week about the iPad prompted 82 comments, as of the time of this writing. My Haiti piece? One. Based on this outcome, where do you think I'm going to focus my efforts in future to maximize reader response and, consequently, advertising value and revenue for my employer? Do you think I'm interested in writing stuff that no one reads? Do you think we'll be able to support a business that doesn't optimize its output for the largest, most desirable audience possible?

As I go through the ongoing process of coming up with topics that I think readers want to read, and that I think advertisers will appreciate, I focus on stuff that's hot and, yes, conversation-generating. If techies are discussing it around the water cooler, I want to write about it. I suppose if I wrote for a site whose readers paid for the privilege, I'd be able to back off the max-the-audience-please-the-advertiser mantra. But until the Web shifts to that model -- and the announcement by The New York Times that it will return to charging for access in 2011 signals a possible change in direction for the industry -- we'll continue to see wall-to-wall coverage of the most in-demand topics.

Because for now, advertisers call the shots. Not readers. And Engadget's decision to kill commenting for now is solid proof that Engadget listened to those who pay the bills before it pulled the plug.

Update ribbon (small)

Engadget restored users' commenting ability Thursday afternoon. In a blog post, its editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, wrote, "Making personal attacks against other commenters, publications, or our own editors seriously degrades the community and quality of the discussion, and it won't be tolerated."

Apple asks developer to remove Android mention from App Store

Publié: février 5, 2010, 6:37pm CET par Tim Conneally

Apple has asked one mobile app developer to refrain from mentioning Google's Android mobile operating system in its iTunes App store descriptions, or face rejection.

The description of the 99¢ "Flash of Genius" flash card app included the text: "Finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge!"

Apple contacted Flash of Genius, LLC and asked it to change the description.

"During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections," the message from Apple said.

"Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store. While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to remove 'Finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge!' from the Application Description," Apple's review team said. (The entire message can be found in Flash of Genius blog.)

Flash of Genius' Tim Novikoff willingly changed the description and said, "I suppose it's logical, and I'm not complaining; Apple is a wonderful company to work with."

Silicon Alley Insider's Jay Yarow agreed with the sentiment today, "It sounds harsh, but makes sense. It doesn't matter if it's a great Android application, this is a different platform."

But is it logical?

Yes, the Android Developer Challenge concerns a different platform, but the nomination still carries weight as an honorific. When an actor is nominated for an Oscar, don't we frequently hear that the actor is an "X-time nominee?" Those nominations were for different roles, so it has no impact on the current nomination, but it speaks to the overall quality of the performer. This is a similar case. The Android platform is different, but when a product excels somewhere, it is worthwhile to let potential buyers know.

For example, on the back of the box of the PlayStation 3 version of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, it says "Best of E3 2008 Winner" for Best RPG. When it got this award, the game did not even exist on PlayStation 3 yet...it was shown on an Xbox 360. Now, it would have been closer to the Flash of Genius situation if "Best Xbox 360 RPG," was printed on the game box, but ultimately, an award is an award and helps the customer actualize the quality of a product.

Microsoft Confessions: 'Killed over politics'

Publié: février 5, 2010, 9:47am CET par Joe Wilcox

Yesterday's Dick Brass commentary, "Microsoft's Creative Destruction," the company's response to the op-ed and Tuesday's Don Dodge pro-Mac post have put Microsoft in the hot seat. The blogosphere is abuzz about the extent of Microsoft innovations. More former Microsofties are ready to speak out, and they will get their chance here at Betanews.

After the last round of Microsoft layoffs, I asked former employees to tell their stories. I got plenty of responses and not just from people recently leaving the company. No identities will be revealed, although I have verified each one. Two main reasons: Either the former employees still work in the technology industry and don't want to risk their current jobs; or they're receiving severance from Microsoft and don't want to risk losing it. Some of these people have returned to working for Microsoft as contractors, which is another reason to remain anonymous.

Over the next three days, I will present some of the stories in different ways. We start with a first-hand account, and it's more stream-of-conscious than the others I received. Please expect more first-hand accounts and some others strung together as narratives.

What's most surprising about the stories received: Whether they left by will or layoff, most of the former Microsofties worked for the company for a long time, typically no less than eight years. This first account comes from a senior manager who willingly left Microsoft during the last decade after nearly 20 years:

When I left, I told Steve [Ballmer] my reasons. Microsoft [had] lost its competitive edge. Too much politics, too much BS, too much 'what can I do to you today, to make myself look better tomorrow.'
The strength of Microsoft has always been small, heavily empowered teams. Teams that could move fast, make lighting quick decisions and trust the people that made them -- and actually create real schedules, not what management wants you to tell them.
In early 2000, and towards the end of Y2K, the corporate landscape was changing. All the small teams were being eaten up by these uber teams -- complete with politics, backstabbing and posturing. I wanted no part of it. Even today MS is mostly Windows, mobile and Office. Decisions I used to make in 10 minutes, took weeks in Office.
I watched a revolutionary product killed over politics. The moment someone mentioned in a high level-meeting we were better than one of MS's cash cows, I told my [general manager] we were screwed. He didn't believe until the team was disbanded and moved where? Into that cash cow. Where 90 percent of the functionality was cut.
I've watched over the years, [as] poor managers work their way up the ladder, merely because they could play the game. They didn't want the truth, they wanted the answer they wanted to hear.
When Bill Gates first started the 'aggressive schedule' mantra to get people to work harder, [it was] tell folks we only had 2 months left, when we knew it was six. How could I as a manager look my people in the face and seriously tell them we're two months from shipping -- work your ass off -- knowing the bug count was high, the find rate was high and undercover dev work was still being completed?
I finally had enough when my last reorg had me put under a brand new manager, with less weeks experience than I had years doing his job, telling me I wasn't doing my job properly. I asked him how many products he shipped. A couple was the answer. Meanwhile, I had three full Lucite blocks packed with ship-it awards on my desk. At that point, I gave my notice.
How many [Microsoft] reorgs have ever benefited anyone except the folks on top? In all my reorgs, I only ever had one that actually benefited the troops; and that was a super good manager that said if you take me, you take my team. He was one of the best I'd ever worked for -- and, of course, he is no longer at MS either. To me, that speaks volumes.
The people that need to be cut at MS are the managers that don't support their teams and only support their own careers. I've watched countless super visionary managers get bogged in politics and leave.
While I love Steve [Ballmer] to no end, he's too removed from what's really happening, and only gets info from the politically motivated ass kissers that just want to keep their jobs, not do the right thing.

I'm still collecting stories. Please e-mail joewilcox at live dot com. Stories can be anonymous, but I will need to verify identities.

Boxee: We didn't steal anything from Hulu

Publié: février 5, 2010, 12:27am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

During the few comments he was asked to make during his testimony before the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee earlier today, NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker was asked by Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Va.) whether Hulu -- a video Web service co-owned by NBC -- intentionally blocked the ability of Boxee's media center application for PCs to replay Hulu videos. Rep. Boucher's question was by way of ascertaining whether a combined Comcast + NBCU entity would routinely block competitors' access to programming it generated.

Zucker responded: "What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. We have several distributors...of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with, so we don't preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those that illegally take that content."

That accusation before Congress that Boxee violated the law triggered a lengthy response late this afternoon from Boxee Founder and CEO Avner Ronen, on his company's blog: "Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu's content -- just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu's Web site and the video within that page plays. We don't 'take' the video. We don't copy it. We don't put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so."

The question of whether enabling access to another Web site's video through one's software is effectively "redistribution," cuts to the heart of the major issue of contention surrounding the Comcast + NBCU proposal -- since Comcast is essentially in the redistribution business. Opponents of the deal (one of whom spoke out forcefully before Congress today) allege that Comcast's motive is to extend the legal notion of redistribution to the Internet realm, in such a way that the reuse of content always carries with it some type of license...and probably some type of fee.

Boxee's Ronen went on to say that while he did receive requests to disable Hulu access from Hulu's management, those requests were said by Hulu CEO Jason Kilar to be on behalf of NBC.

Indeed, in a blog post last year to Hulu's own company blog, that's how Kilar explained the situation to Hulu users: "Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence -- bumps and all -- we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner Web sites."

MPEG LA won't charge free streamers to use H.264, will charge for selling codec

Publié: février 5, 2010, 12:05am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

While Google, Vimeo, and others continue to experiment with H.264 as the codec of choice for HTML5 Web browser-embedded video, there's still considerable debate over whether W3C -- the caretakers of HTML and other Web standards -- should allow Web proprietors to embrace standards that are not essentially free. MPEG LA, the rights holder for H.264 technology and its licensing agent for the Internet Broadcast AVC Video portfolio, recently said it will not charge royalties for the use of H.264 encoding in video that's delivered free -- specifically, for any video for which the creators or servers are not compensated -- at least until the end of 2015 (a date corrected from the end of 2016, which the licensing agency originally announced).

Does that mean H.264 is free for streamers? In a clarification for Betanews this afternoon, MPEG LA spokesperson Tom O'Reilly said it may very well be free...for those who use the codec for that purpose. But not for those who sell the encoding software that utilizes the codec.

"While MPEG LA does collect a royalty on the codec, that royalty relates to the making and selling of the product itself," O'Reilly told Betanews. "The right to use codecs for applications like Title-by-Title [where a fee is paid for the video's replication], Subscription, Free Television, and Internet video is not covered by that royalty, however. Rather, it is the subject of separate sublicense rights and royalties."

The Internet video subcategory is the tier that includes free streaming, where users will be exempt from paying royalties. But not from obtaining licenses, and that would appear to be the sticky part. In order for streaming video viewers to effectively be licensees, do they have to enter into an agreement with MPEG LA -- something on the order of a EULA?

Apparently not, responded O'Reilly: "Our AVC License is beneficial to all sites using H.264 because it provides coverage for use of H.264 in these free Internet applications." That would appear to indicate that a licensed streaming video provider effectively extends licensed use of the technology for decoding the streamed video, to its user, making the user effectively licensed.

O'Reilly added that the cost of the royalty effectively also pays for the license, so anyone who's purchased a licensed H.264 codec (which may be included with video production software, or sold separately as add-ons) has thus paid the royalty. If that party produces free Internet video, then the coverage purchased at that time extends to the viewer.

That goes to the concerns of Mozilla contributor Robert O'Callahan, who last week argued in a blog post that MPEG LA effectively reserves the right to sue the user or viewer of a streamed video whose producer was not licensed to use the H.264 codec to encode it. That may be somewhat of a stretch, however, and O'Reilly did not get into that level of hypothetical detail with us.

The latest official word on Mozilla's reaction to MPEG LA's news comes from a pair of tweets from Mozilla CEO John Lilly: "Regarding that MPEG-LA announce: It's good they did it, but they sort of had to. But it's like 5 more years of free to lock you in 4ever," Lilly wrote. "And my tweet last night about restrictions on the use of AVC to create videos still holds and is a major problem."

The tweet to which Lilly referred was not listed in his Twitter archive as of today. However, Mozilla contributors are on record as voicing their opposition to the possibility that by not being free for distribution (just free for use), the browser maker might not be able to include it within the Firefox browser under its current MPL licensing policy.

Net neutrality objections fade, Congress appears likely to pass NBCU + Comcast

Publié: février 4, 2010, 10:31pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Rep. Ed Markey (D - Massachusetts) In the end, it was one lone congressman who raised the subject of net neutrality, with respect to access to content over the Internet, as more than a passing reference, or by way of suggesting that certain topics be ignored altogether: Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass., who also chairs the Energy and Environment Subcommittee), author of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act still being deliberated in Congress, voiced his skepticism over the viability of the proposed acquisition of NBC Universal by a new unit of Comcast, saying he didn't see any guarantees that the current class of over-the-air programming offered by NBC would not be transferred to Comcast pay-TV services such as TV Everywhere.

But with NBC being the butt end of jokes on TV everywhere, and elsewhere, with respect to its dismal standing in audience ratings and its poor handling of the recent "Tonight Show" reprogramming kerfuffle, the objections raised by Rep. Markey might not have mattered much. In some folks' mind, why would anyone want to pay for NBC shows anyway?

"Clearly the concern here is that when a company that has the wire going into the home merges with a company that has all of NBC Universal's content, there could be a temptation to discriminate against others," stated Rep. Markey, during his Q&A period to a House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee hearing Thursday morning. The subject of the hearing this morning was the Comcast + NBCU deal, among the witnesses were Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, and NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker -- the executive who signed the dotted line on the Jay Leno / Conan O'Brien time change, and subsequently unsigned it.

For his metaphor, Markey chose to imagine the fate of an everyday sci-fi fan who wants to launch some kind of service or blog based on Avatar, but finds himself hampered because the title is owned by 20th Century-Fox. "Going out in the future, we are concerned about the proverbial kid-in-the-garage that's got that great idea. We've got a concern about the kid who thinks up the idea of 'Avatar.com TV.' It could be a big concept, right? And it's not owned by Comcast or NBC. So we have to make sure that it doesn't get discriminated against because it's not an NBC idea, it's not a Comcast idea. So how can we enshrine these principles of non-discrimination against those great new ideas, from having access to the pipes that go into people's homes, that are controlled by Comcast?"

US Capitol building, Senate side

It was perhaps the weakest argument made to date in favor of net neutrality principles in any public hearing to date. But it was the strongest argument in that category today.

Comcast's Brian Roberts appeared perfectly prepared to face much stronger opposition, oftentimes pleading innocence or even no knowledge of the situation where the US #12 cable provider, WOW (formerly WideOpenWest), was denied access to Comcast's existing cable channels (which include E!, the Style Channel, gaming network G4, and sports channel Versus). WOW CEO Colleen Abdoulah was one of only two witnesses who found themselves mounting their own assertive defense, amid the lack of probing from House members. Although Abdoulah admitted not being against the concept of an acquisition or merger on its face, she warned Committee members that a deal could encourage the combined entity to withhold more programming from competitors, including from NBC-owned cable channels CNBC, MSNBC, and Bravo.

And so it was that the net neutrality issue in Congress successfully metamorphosed into a debate over TV viewers' right to see Keith Olbermann, Maria Bartiromo, and Tom Colicchio.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, flanked by his father (right), company founder Ralph Roberts. "I would first want to point out that, whatever you do, if you're really trying to make that protection or achieve that goal, it's going to have to apply across the board," responded Comcast's Roberts to Rep. Markey, "whether that's to all providers, what levels of the Internet, what about wireless? The world is changing and converging and evolving very, very quickly. So again, I believe that this particular transaction doesn't really have the potential, in my opinion, to change that kid in the garage or that 'AvatarTV.com,' or whatever example one wants to pick. Let's just say, Google today is over 50% of all the video views, of the 30 billion views that took place last month."

By comparison, Roberts pointed out earlier, Hulu (co-owned by NBC) had 4% of video views for the same period, NBC itself commanded 1%, and Comcast was responsible for less than one-half of one percent. Although Comcast, by one estimate heard today, is responsible for providing more than 51% of cable service to Americans, its argument is that the combined Internet interests of NBC Universal and Comcast would fail to squeak by 5% of the world's video views, even with the TV Everywhere program going at full steam. Roberts used those figures to illustrate how the proposed combination would constitute the type of horizontal integration that legislators and regulators encourage, as opposed to the type of vertical assimilation of businesses that provide much the same services as each other -- assimilation that typically generates antitrust concerns.

Flanked by his father, Comcast founder Ralph J. Roberts (whom at least two representatives today broke protocol to identify as their personal friend), Brian Roberts promised Rep. Markey that it is not, and will not be, in Comcast's business interests to deny programming to an available carrier. That left Rep. Markey to do little more than praise Roberts, literally for creating a business model that the rest of the world could live by: "Broadband, to a very large extent, is a proxy...for 21st century American competitiveness for the 3% of the population of the world that we represent, and we have to make sure all of that creativity gets unleashed, because that's something we have to brand globally. So that's the conversation that I think we have to have going forward; and this agreement that you have really should be a model to ensure that that becomes who we think of ourselves [to be] as a nation."

Next: But what about Boxee?...

Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Virginia) Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Va.) turned up at least a few ticks more heat than Rep. Markey, by bringing up the subject of Boxee, the media center software that last spring got into a tangle with Hulu, which is co-owned by NBC. Boxee wanted to be able to show videos provided by Hulu, but its methodology appeared to give Boxee the ability to remove Hulu's advertising.

With NBC effectively getting married to the creator of the TV Everywhere concept, Rep. Boucher asked witnesses, what's to keep the combined entity from denying NBC or Hulu content from Boxee's or anyone else's software? Comcast's Roberts responded with a message that was crafted in a very comforting manner, taking credit for having done no less than invent broadband as we know it, and invent its successor as well.

"We have helped create the broadband experience that consumers enjoy today, some of the work out of CableLABS, going back a decade, was one of the first to create high-speed broadband. It's the fastest-growing part of Comcast, our broadband business," said Roberts. "In fact, we are in the process of completing a nearly $1 billion upgrade to create wideband. And if you say, 'What do you do with wideband?' Right now, I don't have a great answer, except that at 50 or 100 Mbps, I trust there are great entrepreneurs out there to come up with the answers, and we want to be a company on the leading edge...I've said consistently for several years that we believe that video over the Internet is one of those applications that requires more speed, and justifies the investments that we're making in wideband and broadband. We think it is a friend, not a foe."

All that without having to utter the word "Boxee." Boucher then put the question to NBC's Jeff Zucker, representing a co-owner's stake in Hulu. Zucker was more direct in his response, accusing Boxee of not stepping up to the bargaining table.

NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker "What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal," Zucker told Congress. "We have several distributors...of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with, so we don't preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those that illegally take that content." Would NBC be willing to negotiate such a deal with Boxee, Boucher pressed on? "Well, we said that we're open to negotiations."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D - California) One of Rep. Henry Waxman's (D - Calif.) perennially key issues has been content protection, and the need to craft digital content to prevent theft and piracy. With NBCU's content being added to the production catalog of Comcast, Rep. Waxman asked Roberts, would Comcast be more compelled to provide more of a leadership role in taking steps to reduce online content theft?

"I think we absolutely recognize the vital nature of protecting the licensed, legitimate, non-theft model. It's what's propelled NBC Universal to where it is today, and every owner of content," Roberts responded. "In the distribution business, we also rely on licensed content to be the successful part of our business. So I think we now have double the incentive to figure this issue out, better than it's figured out today. Specifically, I think there have been technological advancements in the last couple of years that are going to make it more likely that we can cooperate...We will now be an active member of NCTA, MPAA, and other industry trade groups that are focused on these questions. I think it's vital that we have a cooperative solution; we obviously, on one hand, have privacy concerns and copyright protection concerns; on the other hand, by having 33,000 employees at NBC Universal that I've got to worry about, and 100,000 employees at Comcast Cable, it's in my interest, and I think the consumer's interest, to continue the licensed model and find solutions that are acceptable."

The strongest opposition to the idea of extending cable-style licensing into the Internet space -- the thing that keeps Boxee from simply showing Hulu in its own window -- came from Dr. Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. Although Dr. Cooper was advised at least twice to keep his answers short so everyone could move on with things -- Rep. John Dingell (D - Mich.) strictly advised "25 words or less" -- he laid down the only law that anyone was going to lay down today regarding opposition to the deal for ethical reasons.

Dr. Mark Cooper, Director of Research, Consumer Federation of America "Frankly, we see it as an effort to extend the market division agreement that has existed between cable operators in the physical space, into cyberspace," Cooper told Rep. Dingell. That is the explicit intention of TV Everywhere. The statement that they will not use NBC properties to reinforce that does not answer our concerns, because NBC will stop developing altogether --." At that point, Dingell cut him off.

Dingell then asked Roberts, what commitments would Comcast make to prevent the very abuses that Cooper predicted? "Well...we're still 80% a cable company, so our eye is very much still in that perspective...Number two, I don't think the deal changes anything in that regard. NBC has great content and charges the best price that it can get from its customers, and I'm not sure that our incentive is any different, given the two companies coming together. I think that the quality of the content and the technology that's changed in the last several years, is part of the answer, but I think it's a broader industry question, not necessarily specific to this deal."

Earlier in the hearing, Roberts cited statistics saying that in the areas served by WOW cable, Comcast lost 1 million subscribers at the same time WOW gained 7 million -- a sign that competition must be working. But after Roberts' last remark, in an act of grace, Dingell allowed Cooper a "very quick" response, and it was definitely to the point:

"Comcast's sob story about losing cable subscribers is a dog that doesn't hunt," pronounced Dr. Cooper. "In the past few years, they have shifted to triple-play, increased the total number of subscribers that they have across their [portfolio], increased the price of cable, increased the margin on their cable customers. That is inconsistent with a market that is forcing them to lower prices. They are counting the wrong thing -- the thing that they're not really interested in any more."

ISPs are not responsible for illegal downloading, says Australian court

Publié: février 4, 2010, 8:49pm CET par Tim Conneally

Australian federal courts have decided that the country's second largest ISP, iiNet, is in no way responsible for the illegal actions of its subscribers.

In 2008, iiNet was sued by more than 30 film and television industry companies for copyright infringement; or more accurately, for the copyright infringement of its customers using BitTorrent to download pirated content. The group alleged that iiNet failed to take appropriate measures to stop customers from illegally sharing files with the P2P software.

Among the plaintiffs in the case were Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney, and the Seven Network. Justice Dennis Cowdroy's ruling says there was no way to find iiNet liable for the behavior of its customers.

"It is impossible to conclude that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement," Cowdroy said today. "It did not have relevant power to prevent infringements occurring."

In response to the ruling, iiNet said, "We have never supported or encouraged breaches of the law, including infringement of the Copyright Act or the Telecommunications Act. Today's judgment is a vindication of that and the allegations against us have been proven to be unfounded. iiNet has always been, and will continue to be, a good corporate citizen and an even better copyright citizen."

Symbian now 100% open source, and looking for developers to fill in the gaps

Publié: février 4, 2010, 5:31pm CET par Tim Conneally

Symbian OS logo The world's most widely-used smartphone platform is now completely free and open. Today, the Symbian Foundation announced that the entire 33 million lines of Symbian^3 code is now free under the Eclipse Public License.

The platform was only sort of open source before...sort of. When the Symbian Foundation launched in 2009, parts of the source code were made available to members of the foundation under a transitional license. But now, all of the third-party intellectual property has been removed from Symbian^3 and it can be downloaded and used freely by anyone.

By removing third party protected content, however, a number of gaps have opened up in Symbian's functionality, including features otherwise commonplace in mobile devices.

T9 predictive text input, for example, is a technology commonly found on Symbian handsets, but it is intellectual property licensed from Nuance Technologies. So in the fully open-source Symbian^3, this functionality is missing. Handwriting recognition is missing from the open source release as well.

The Symbian Foundation will be releasing more information about the newly open-sourced platform throughout the week leading up to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

To start playing around with the code, check out the Symbian Foundation's Platform Wiki/getting started guide.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone okayed for 3G streaming

Publié: février 4, 2010, 4:24pm CET par Tim Conneally

Slingplayer mobile iPhone

The $30 iPhone app which lets users watch content from their SlingBox "placeshifting" set top box will finally be un-crippled, Sling Media Inc announced this morning.

Like many other potentially bandwidth-hungry applications on Apple's iPhone, SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone was only cleared for use over Wi-Fi. When users wanted to watch content from their Slingbox SOLO, PRO-HD, or PRO on the go, they could only do it at a Wi-Fi hotspot. Users of the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian versions, meanwhile, did have 3G access.

However, AT&T has been testing the app on its 3G network since December, and has determined that it doesn't consume too much bandwidth, so it won't pose a threat to the already crowded AT&T network.

"Collaboration with developers like Sling Media ensures that all apps are optimized for our 3G network to conserve wireless spectrum and reduce the risk that an app will cause such extreme levels of congestion that they disrupt the experience of other wireless customers," Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said in a formal statement today. "Our focus continues to be on delivering the nation's most advanced mobile broadband experience and giving our customers the widest possible array of mobile applications."

SlingPlayer Mobile has existed since late 2006 and demanded a minimum download speed of 112-120 Kbps to view streaming television. The iPhone app was released in 2008 and required a connection of at least 256 Kbps.

Sling Media has not yet announced how the minimum connection requirements have changed for the iPhone application.

Comcast to rebrand cable, Internet services as Xfinity

Publié: février 4, 2010, 3:21am CET par Tim Conneally

If you're one of the more than 25 million Comcast subscribers, the bill you get next month may be for a service called Xfinity.

Beginning February 12, Comcast will begin rebranding its cable, Internet, and digital voice services in 11 markets under the Xfinity name, which it first debuted in December when the company began the process of acquiring NBC Universal.

At the time, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told investors, "We basically are creating two Comcasts."

Today, we found out more of what that entails.

In the company's earnings call for today Roberts said, "We are not only repositioning the company technically, we are repositioning the company with consumers." So Comcast the parent company will remain, but Xfinity will be the name the customers see, divorcing the stigmatized Comcast brand from the service.

The Xfinity advertising push is expected to begin during the 2010 Winter Olympics for subscribers in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chattanooga, and Augusta.

Tetris TV: A look at the weird places we've stuck Tetris

Publié: février 4, 2010, 1:56am CET par Tim Conneally

True story: When I was a freshman in college in the late '90s, my roommate and I had an NES in our dorm room that people would come over and play with. Though we had just reached the 64-bit era of consoles at that point, people loved to come play games from our formative years and socialize.

Everything was fine and fun until somebody gave us a Tetris cartridge.

From that point onward, people stopped coming and going from our room, and sort of just came and stayed. During most hours of the day, there was someone who wasn't me sitting on my bed playing Tetris...and it got old pretty quickly.

One morning after I had spent all night doing something (let's just pretend it was studying) a kid came knocking on the door asking to play Tetris.

"No, man, it's 8 a.m. and I'm trying to sleep," I said, and started to close the door.

The kid put his foot in the crack between door and the jamb, and said "Come on, don't be a dick."

This story ends after a heated exchange of words which culminated in me smashing the Tetris cartridge against a cinder block wall and then cramming it down a heating duct. While it brought an end to everyone's Tetris fun, it more importantly brought me to the point of this little article: all the odd places we've crammed Tetris.

Not in the frenzied flying-off-the-sleep-deprived-handle sense like I did, but the novel sense like today's announcement from Dish Network, Oberon Media, and the Tetris Company. The three partners today announced that there will finally be a Tetris Channel.

Yes, now with Tetris TV, Dish Network subscribers will have access to an online version of two different versions of Tetris for $2.99 per month. It's the first instance I've come across of "Subscription-based Tetris on TV," and it should fit right in the annals of Tetris history along with some of these other oddities from the long 25-year history of Alexy Pajitnov's greatest invention:

Tetris on a Chip & PIN terminal:

Tetris on the TI-83 Calculator:

"Scopetris" on an oscilloscope (by engineer Lars Pontoppidan):

Tetris coded in the .NET Micro framework (by Pavel Bánský):

Still others:

Though only 23 games were made for Nintendo's ill-fated, seizure-inducing Virtual boy, two of them were versions of Tetris.

Proving that the game has appeal beyond the sense of sight, there was reportedly a version of Tetris hidden in Braillenote terminals, accessible only by entering the code "playtime" during startup.

Nintendo started handheld gaming way before the Game Boy with its LCD Game & Watch games. Later on, it continued its LCD gaming history with devices like this Tetris watch. The one pictured below belongs to professional skateboarder and MTV reality show star Rob Dyrdek. The diamond embellishments weren't a standard option back when this watch was new, I'm afraid.

And this, of course, which needs little explanation.

H.264 licensing body won't charge royalties for HTML5, other Web streams

Publié: février 4, 2010, 12:05am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

One of the key objections Mozilla and its supporters have had to the use of H.264 codecs for HTML5 video -- the built-in decoding system being developed for the next edition of HTML -- is that it's proprietary technology. As such, there are no guarantees against the rights holders to that technology staking claims to it, and charging money for it...and there may not be much protection against others who believe they have claims on it, to test their theories in a full-scale patent infringement trial.

Up to now, the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA) has not been charging royalties to anyone, including streamers and the viewers of streamed content, for the use of H.264 encoding and decoding for the specific purpose of delivering free streams. That way, for example, the participants in YouTube's and Vimeo's current tests of H.264 in HTML5 -- Web browser-based video without any plug-ins -- can proceed without incurring charges.

But discussion about that fact prompted a reader of the Linux news service LWN.net to ask MPEG LA whether that meant H.264 users must still obtain some type of license. As part of its response late yesterday, MPEG LA delivered a statement to multiple sources, including Betanews, announcing that the rights management firm will extend the period for which it will refrain from collecting royalties for use of H.264 in free streaming video, until the last day of 2016 2015. The term of that royalty-free agreement was due to expire at the end of this year.

"Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video," reads MPEG LA's statement to Betanews, "continue to be royalty-bearing, and royalties to apply during the next term will be announced before the end of 2010." Internet Broadcast AVC Video is the name of the patent portfolio to which H.264 belongs, when used in the context of streaming.

But in a direct, personal response to the LWN.net reader that was shared with other members, MPEG LA global licensing director Allen Harkness explained that the fact it doesn't charge end users (viewers) royalties for downloading H.264 streams, doesn't mean they should not be licensed to do so. Effectively, someone has to be licensed to produce the videos, and that license does incur a fee. But that license is then effectively passed downstream to the end user.

"While our Licenses are not concluded by End Users, anyone in the product chain has liability if an end product is unlicensed," wrote Harkness. "Therefore, a royalty paid for an end product by the end product supplier would render the product licensed in the hands of the End User, but where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability. Therefore, we suggest that all End Users deal with products only from licensed suppliers."

The implied danger here is that a producer of video who did not use a licensed codec (whether or not he owed anything for it) could be exposing the viewer of that video to liability. Or as Mozilla contributor Robert O'Callahan described it in a blog post last Friday, "In other words, if you're an end user in a country where software patents (or method patents) are enforceable, and you're using software that encodes or decodes H.264 and the vendor is not on the list of licensees, the MPEG LA reserves the right to sue you, the end user, as well as the software vendor or distributor."

The AVC codecs used to encode video for streaming or other distribution, often carries a fee regardless of how the videos themselves will be used. Some software makers, including UK-based Magix AG, opt to enable H.264 encoders to be purchased separately, to ensure not only that users are properly licensed but also that users who have no plans to actually encode using H.264, don't end up spending extra money for the license.

Under the terms of the current royalty rates due to expire on December 31, makers of software products including the codec are charged 20¢ per unit after the first 100,000 units sold per year, and 10¢ per unit after the 5,000,000th unit sold that year. Royalties for this year are capped at $5 million. Subscription video streaming services also incur royalties, at a rate starting at 2¢ per subscribed title plus about 10¢ per subscriber per year. Those rates, and their associated caps, are likely to change next year, and MPEG LA may be announcing changes soon.

Update ribbon (small)

9:12 am EST February 2, 2010 · A spokesperson for MPEG LA contacted Betanews Thursday morning to say the termination date of the royalties terms extension from its previous statements, was incorrect. MPEG LA is extending its royalty-free terms for streaming video until December 31, 2015, not 2016.

Buffalo Technology tweaks its mini network drive to perfection

Publié: février 3, 2010, 11:46pm CET par Tim Conneally

Click here for more details and to sign up for the beta test.

Buffalo Technology LinkStation Mini NAS

Buffalo Technology's LinkStation Mini dual-drive network storage solution has been looked upon quite favorably. Om Malik called it "almost perfect", and its startlingly tiny profile (only 1.6" x 3.2" x 5.3") and quiet operation earned it high marks across the board.

Besides the somewhat high price of the unit, the only complaint users and reviewers seemed to have with the LinkStation was its rather unwieldy Web-based user interface.

Today, Buffalo announced it has a new "enhanced" version of LinkStation Mini, which has mostly the same specs as its predecessor: It's tiny, supports RAID 0 and RAID 1, is DLNA certified, and is iTunes and Time Machine-compatible, but it's gotten a performance upgrade and a new user interface.

The prices have also come down quite a bit since the NAS device debuted in late 2008. Now instead of $699, the 1 TB model now costs $329.99 and with the 500 GB model costs $229.99.

We'll see if we can't get some hands-on time with the updated versions to see if Buffalo Technology has cranked up its tiny storage device from "almost perfect" to "perfect" in just under two years.

Free project management beta community launches for iPhone and iPad developers (and users)

Publié: février 3, 2010, 10:45pm CET par Nate Mook

By Nate Mook, Betanews

ipad thumbnail iPadBeta.com is a new free service that connects iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch developers with beta testers for their Apps, offering the tools and help needed to easily run a great beta test. The aim is to help developers create Apps with less bugs, better reviews, and higher sales.

App developers are each given their own private projects, which include bug and feature tracking, custom surveys, discussion forums, custom wikis, build distribution, tester participation monitoring, reporting, and other features. iPadBeta.com will also recruit App testers matching the developer's market; or they can invite their own friends and customers.

Developers will have access to market research materials on the App market, as well as the ability to request custom research. These services are all offered at no cost, with no ads.

App users are given the opportunity to try new iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad Apps before anyone else. They can provide their feedback and bugs while participating in discussion forums and wikis with other Testers.

iPadBeta.com is accepting both App testers and developers. Signing up is free and requires only a few minutes to complete your profile. The service was developed by Centercode, a long-time beta test management software and services company.

Beta test a new massively-multiplayer online game

Publié: février 3, 2010, 10:33pm CET par Nate Mook

By Nate Mook, Betanews

Centercode is accepting applications for a new online game and world beta test. Inspired by a successful film franchise, and based on the timeless art of kung fu, the game is designed for the whole family. This new MMO includes character customization and the ability to battle others. Centercode notes that it is "an engaging and exciting environment with beautiful music, excellent scenery and fun yet challenging games."

The next testing stage of this project will be conducted on: Wednesday February 3, 2010 - 3PM and 6PM PST (6PM to 9PM EST), however testing will continue over the next few weeks and even if you do not get into todays event, there will be many more opportunities to participate.

The testing will be conducted during set times and you should be available to participate between the stated hours. Centercode will provide login credentials for people just prior to launching the load test. Once connected, you will have three hours to have fun and play the game.

Once on the project, testers will be able to have an exclusive opportunity to be a part of future releases, including more load tests and eventually the full beta test. The company also develops many other games and this can lead to more game test opportunities with Centercode.

Early mixed results for over-the-air 3G fix for Nexus One

Publié: février 3, 2010, 9:31pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

This morning, Google began deploying an over-the-air software update for its Nexus One phones, including the addition of true pinch-to-zoom multitouch and synchronization features for Google Maps, as well as a purported fix for poor 3G connectivity for at least one version of the phone's firmware. In the early minutes after deployment, there appeared to be some hope as some users of Google's support forums reported improved signal strength.

But that was in the early going. As the hours passed, customers were correcting their existing reports, and others were adding new reports, of only marginally improved 3G speeds at best. Connectivity appears to have improved for some -- getting at least some 3G where there was none before -- but that's not a complete solution for them yet. What's more, troubles with 3G signals being completely dropped when the phone is touched by human hands -- a problem reported by a minority of users, but still a sizable number -- seemed to continue.

"Initial thoughts: still on the edge of the world," reported a Google forum contributor whose handle is WorLord. "Still lose 3g in the house and back yard. No flip-flopping,,though, and one more bar of whatever I'm on than previously. Net connections no longer time out like they did before; maps and pages actually resolve in their own time as opposed to never. As predicted, new baseband and build versions. Overall I'm pleased... the phone is aactually useable in most conditions where I don't have a wireless connection to jump on."

Based on reports we've read, cases where customers with no troubles prior to applying the OTA fix, who then reported zero 3G connectivity after the fix (in order to add multitouch and improve Maps), may have actually been experiencing installation procedure issues. There's no conclusive evidence yet of the fix actually causing new troubles where there was none before.

As Nexus One customer idogadget reported: "My EDGE strength was at 63dBm [decibel milliwatts], and after the update is -51dBm. My 3G before the update when laying on the counter without touching was -103dBm, and went to zero when picked up. Now 3G is at -97dBm on the counter, -103dBm to zero when in hand depend on how you hold it...So I guess the question still remains unanswered: Is this a software or hardware problem? The update did help, but how much software tinkering can improve 3G if indeed [Nexus One] has a faulty antenna or antenna related problem?"

One customer who apparently has been experiencing fewer problems than most advised others in Google's Nexus One forum that one reason they may be seeing such rapid signal fluctuations as this one is because N1 is simply a faster phone. A slower phone would give the appearance of steadier 3G and EDGE signals, while fluctuations are actually the order of the day all the time. Another customer advised that 3G signals are not properly measured in "bars" anyway, and that flutters in the signal strength meter are indicative of total signal strength, not just 3G.

But users who've experienced little to no improvement after applying the fix are now complaining that the amount of time Google, HTC, and T-Mobile spent addressing the fix extended over their 15-day grace period for refunded returns. Now their only recourse is to trade their current units in for replacement Nexus One units, and their faith in the product's merchantability has been diminished along with its 3G signal.

"If I were to cancel service now, I will have to pay $350 to Google, $200 to T-Mobile, plus the $180 I paid for the phone and $100 ETF I paid to AT&T -- that is over $800," writes customer Bleeky. "I was fine with AT&T and my iPhone 3G S, and if it turns out that I am stuck with terrible service for the next two years, who's to blame? Are you saying that I shouldn't be upset for being duped into thinking a 'software bug' was the reason I had s****y T-Mobile service? I stayed faithful and hopeful that this 'update' was going to fix the problem, but it didn't. Now that my two weeks has passed, I have no recourse!"

Commenters in T-Mobile's support forums have not reported trouble with the OTA update; in fact, they've reported smoother operations, faster responsiveness from the Android OS, and generally positive results from multitouch. Early problems with the Google Voice application force-closing itself appeared to have been eradicated later in the day, and are now being blamed on the Web service, not the phone. However, traffic in T-Mobile's threads concerning 3G troubles appeared to have gathered around Google last week.

Don Dodge: The new anti-Microsoft evangelist

Publié: février 3, 2010, 9:06pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Somebody at Microsoft should be fired for laying off Don Dodge. The list of reasons why his layoff was stupid gets longer by the day. Yesterday's Dodge blog post, "From MSFT evangelist to Mac enthusiast -- the other side of the road," adds another reason. This Silicon Valley insider, who for five years evangelized Microsoft, has taken on the true tone of conversion -- a man filled with new Apple and Google religion. His conversion to the new faith is nothing short of tech evangelism disaster for Microsoft.

In my late-December post, "10 things Microsoft did wrong in 2009," "laid off Don Dodge" ranked No. 3. What seemed bad for Microsoft then is suddenly much worse.

"The move from Microsoft gave me the opportunity to try lots of new things," Dodge writes. "The move from Microsoft was complete. From Windows to Mac, from Outlook to Gmail, from Explorer to Google Chrome browser, from Office to Google Apps, from Windows Mobile phone to Android, from Zune to iPod." Whoa. "But this post is all about the move to Mac." The statement insinuates that Dodge will in the future share more about his other moves.

Dodge may be the most high-profile Mac switcher ever. His previous role as Microsoft evangelist, now Google evangelist, and geek status among the tech community makes him a formidable and believable preacher. Besides, people love turncoats. Reformers. Perhaps even the converted. Dodge's status as former Microsoft true believer makes his conversion to a new faith all the more delicious reading.

Most importantly, Dodge makes astute observations about the differences between the Microsoft religion and that of Apple or Google. All companies operate by a worldview. In December, I contrasted the Google and Microsoft worldviews. Dodge somewhat contrasts the Apple and Microsoft worldviews. He writes:

The most obvious distinction between Microsoft and Apple is design. Apple is quite simply the best hardware/software design company in the world...My Windows machine was a Lenovo X301 with Windows Vista. It was light and small for travel, but I don't think anyone would classify it as beautiful. You see the design ethic in everything Apple does.

Dodge concedes that Apple's design and functionality advantages derive from end-to-end control over software and hardware. As such, the Apple experience is "just easier and more elegant." He delights in the MacBook experience: "The first things I noticed about my Mac were: the touchpad, keyboard (backlit), the screen, battery life, start-up/shut down, power cord and appearance."

Among the Mac vs Windows PC debates I often see a common trend: Mac bashers complain that Apple's offers less features for more money. But what matters is getting features that matter to the buyer. Design is one, and Dodge extols another:

The first time I used the MacBook at night I was delighted to discover the backlit keyboard. I had no idea it was there. I guess it comes on when it detects low light conditions. The light shines through all the keys so you can type in the dark. OK, you can laugh at my backward ways, but I never had a PC with that feature. Working in low light or dark conditions is now simple. I love it.

Dodge's conversion and anti-Microsoft evangelism hits where it hurts Microsoft the most. He also astutely observes the ongoing shift from the PC platform to cloud platform:

Ten or 20 years ago users had to deal with the operating system to do anything on a PC. Today most people spend their time in the browser. From my perspective the underlying OS doesn't matter much. All my applications run in the browser. Web browsing, email, documents, spreadsheets, music, photos…everything is in the browser.

"The OS doesn't matter much?" This from someone who worked for Microsoft, which business was built on Windows -- a product still fiercely important to the company? Ouch, a statement like that has got to hurt. I've been saying that the operating system doesn't much matter for years. But I was never a high-profile Microsoft employee. Statement like this hurts Microsoft more because of who Dodge is -- emotionally for his former colleagues and logistically as anti-evangelism.

Dodge concedes that human beings are creatures of habit, that he might not have gotten this new religion if not for the layoff. "Leaving Microsoft and joining Google gave me the perfect opportunity to change everything," he writes. Over at TechFlash, Todd Bishop rightly put this in context of Microsoft's insular culture -- that it shouldn't take going to another company to try new products. Microsofties should do that now, regularly.

In the Biblical account of early Christian evangelism, Paul was a true believer against the followers of Jesus Christ. They were enemies that should be killed. Later, after converting to Christianity, Paul turned out to be a more earnest evangelist than the men who lived with and followed Christ. A true believer can convert many, as Paul did throughout the Roman Empire. The so-called Mac Faithful are known for their passion and obsession with all things Apple. Will Don Dodge be a great crusader among them? Or among Googlers?

Online video is not a complete solution, says study

Publié: février 3, 2010, 6:39pm CET par Tim Conneally

Though it seems like streaming TV services are getting more diverse and robust by the week, Parks Associates today said the number of people who consider them a viable replacement to their cable or satellite subscriptions is actually shrinking.

According to the consumer research firm's "All Eyes on Video" study, the percentage of broadband-connected homes that would consider canceling their pay TV subscriptions in favor of online video has steadily declined for the last two years.

In 2008, 11% of U.S. broadband-connected households said they would consider dropping cable/satellite to get their video content only from online sources. By early 2009, that number dropped to 10%; and now in the beginning of 2010, it's dropped down to only 8%.

Even then, Parks suggests, online video won't cover the needs of these users.

This is because that small percentage of broadband-connected homes amounts to about 5.5 million households who Parks says are the most die-hard media consumers. These households watch far more online video, and rent far more DVDs than the national average. As a result, these homes will have to pull content from multiple sources, Parks says.

"Nobody is going to rely on online video alone," John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates said in a statement today. "Households likely to cancel their TV services are going to use a mixture of online video, free-to-air broadcasts, and DVDs, including rental services such as Netflix and Redbox."

Five cures for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 ills

Publié: février 3, 2010, 6:00pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Microsoft shouldn't let Google set the Internet Explorer 6-ending agenda. Google services will stop supporting the browser, starting on March 1. It's Microsoft 's browser and responsibility for putting this antiquated technology -- and all Internet users subsequently affected by malicious and criminal activity -- out of misery. Save the Web! Stop Internet Explorer 6 now!

If security really is Microsoft's top priority -- and I say that it's not -- IE6 shouldn't be used by anyone anywhere. Microsoft bears the blame for the IE6 scourge. High IE6 usage is more than a situation of users clinging to older technology. Microsoft created this problem by:

1) Integrating Internet Explorer into Windows.

2) Pushing a closed and arguably flawed plug-in architecture (e.g., ActiveX).

3) After releasing IE6, essentially ending new browser development until Mozilla released Firefox in late 2004.

4) Blocking so-called non-genuine copies of Windows from receiving new updates, including IE version upgrades.

Microsoft should seek out and destroy IE6 wherever it's used. The browser is too much of a security risk. Since Microsoft isn't doing enough, I suggest five ways by which the company can decisively and quite aggressively take charge of this situation. A combination of the five, but necessarily all, would be necessary to eradicate IE6.

1. Take the lead away from Google, by disabling IE6 across Microsoft Websites -- and encourage other Web properties to do the same. According to Net Applications, IE6 usage share was just over 20 percent in January, making this antiquated browser second-most used. It's not rocket science to identify a browser version, block site access and to provide notice that IE6 is no longer supported. The notice could provide links to download IE8, and, if Microsoft is PR savvy enough, links to competing browsers, too.

Microsoft worries too much about breaking existing applications or Websites. The majority of safe sites should already support modern Web standards. Businesses that must have legacy support can run IE6 behind the firewall. Presumably, the majority of remaining IE6-supporting Websites would be the dangerous ones hosting malware. These are exactly the sites Microsoft should want to keep its customers away from.

2. Use a bot to identify all Websites supporting IE6, then request that site operators simply stop support. Microsoft could even offer incentives, like free software or support services, to Websites that quickly respond. For years, IE6 peculiarities compelled Website designers to put in special tags supporting Microsoft's browser. Surely they can be easily enough removed and replaced with redirects to pages explaining IE6 isn't supported and offering links to download more modern browsers.

3. For business that simply must have IE6, aggressively promote a virtualized alternative. The idea would be to quarantine IE6. If it must run -- say, to support legacy ActiveX controls -- do so in a sandbox separate from the operating system and other applications.

4. Forcibly upgrade non-genuine Windows users to Internet Explorer 7 or 8. This one is politically and logistically difficult, which are problems of Microsoft's creation. Microsoft long ago prohibited pirated, or presumed pirated, Windows versions from receiving critical applications and operating systems updates, such as Service Packs. Years ago, when working as analyst, I strongly and repeatedly discouraged Microsoft product managers from withholding updates. I expressed mixed feelings about withholding IE upgrades.

From a Microsoft political perspective, the withholding approach was about getting more people to pay for Windows. Product managers would never admit this, with the party line being something about rewarding so-called genuine users. Instead, Microsoft punished non-genuine users and tangentially genuine users assaulted by malware infesting non-genuine Windows copies. I argued that from a security perspective, it made more sense to update everyone with everything important. Anything bundled with Windows is important enough. By withholding critical system updates, including bundled IE, Microsoft puts every non-genuine Windows version at risk of being infected with malware.

Logistically, the solution is difficult because:

Non-genuine Windows copies wouldn't have the supporting system updates or Service Packs necessary to upgrade the browser to IE7 or IE8.
Malware might be in place that has disabled Windows Update or otherwise would prevent downloading Service Packs or newer IE version.
Even if possible, end users might not have the bandwidth or the patience to accept the updates necessary to replace IE6 with a newer browser version.

An alternative option would be political suicide within Microsoft's corporate culture: Disable non-genuine Windows copies that can't be upgraded to IE6 or IE7 after three attempts. I contend that Microsoft should disable non-genuine Windows copies without warning. Why should it have to, if the software is pirated? Yes, a small number of legitimate customers will be affected. But the greater security good would be served, and Microsoft could individually resolve problems with customers whose legitimate Windows copy was disabled by the action.

5. Immediately offer a mobile Internet Explorer alternative, even if it's a competing browser. IE6 isn't just a scourge of the past, it's ready to corrupt another platform's future. IE6 is the basis for Microsoft's mobile browser. That has got to stop now. Yes, some Betanews commenters will rightly argue that based on IE6 isn't the same as IE6. My retort: Why should the mobile browser be based on IE6, when newer, presumably safer versions are available? Microsoft owes it to mobile customers -- the majority of them business users -- to provide the safest browser possible. If IE8 is so much better, which Microsoft claims, shouldn't it be the foundation for mobile Internet Explorer?

Do you have a better or different suggestion about how Microsoft can purge the IE6 plague? Please pipe up in comments.

Motorola launches its next Android-based device on Verizon

Publié: février 3, 2010, 4:54pm CET par Tim Conneally

Motorola "Calgary" aka Devour Motorola Devour

Since well before Motorola released even its first Android device, a render of a seafoam green and silver slider phone called "Calgary" was floating around the Android blogs. It wasn't until today that Motorola officially announced this phone. Now known as Devour, the new Android device will be available on Verizon Wireless in March.

Motorola Devour

Motorola Devour Looking like the slightly smaller cousin of the popular Droid, Devour is Verizon's third Android phone, and first that carries Motorola's trademark MotoBLUR interface (built upon Android 1.6). In many respects, Devour looks quite a bit like the Droid, except with specs a little lighter to encourage affordability. The display, for example, is a 3.1" HVGA capacitive touchscreen with 320 x 480 resolution instead of 3.7" (480 x 854); and the camera is 3 megapixels instead of 5.

The main differences from the Droid are in the MotoBLUR interface, the chiclet-style keyboard instead of membrane style, and the touch-sensitive navigation pad instead of a D-pad.

Verizon has not yet announced the subsidized price of Devour, nor has Motorola announced an MSRP.

It's a three-way race: Opera preview clings to lead over Safari 4, Chrome 5

Publié: février 2, 2010, 11:34pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Download Opera 10.5 "Pre-alpha" for Windows from Fileforum now.

Test Results

This week marked Google's first release of a development build browser called Chrome 5, which contains some not-yet-fully-implemented features including the browser's first personalized security settings. In recent months, Chrome's dev build has been the standard-setter for performance in Windows, with scores in Betanews tests that rise by as much as one point -- one relative quantum of IE7/Vista horsepower -- per month.

Now that extensions are a formal part of Google's stable Chrome 4 browser, that trend is changing. And although it's not what anyone can call a complete Web browser (to do that, you really should avoid crashing randomly), the latest build of Opera's "pre-alpha" of version 10.5 continues to send signals that it will keep the afterburners fired up while it puts together a real contender. Despite the fact that you wouldn't want to use it yet as an everyday browser, the latest Opera 10.5 pre-alpha actually increased its lead over the latest Chrome dev build -- now just over two points -- in the latest Betanews tests on Windows 7.

Meanwhile, the latest Apple Safari test build with the development version of the WebKit engine remains neck-and-neck against the latest stable Chrome 4, slipping just behind it in today's count. The lower numbers for both browsers do indicate that both slowed down a hair, but also -- in all fairness -- that Internet Explorer 7 in Vista SP2 sped up, as a result of several security patches that appear to have restored much of IE7's lost performance.

Although it's not the latest Microsoft browser, IE7 is important to our tests because it helps us establish a benchmark against which browser performance can be judged, that's independent of the hardware. When we give Chrome 4 a 19.99 score, that means we believe that on any computer you choose to test, Chrome 4 on Windows 7 runs about twenty times faster and more productive than IE7 on Vista on the same machine. And by making use of that IE8 score of 1.38, you can easily come to this conclusion: Chrome 4 on Windows 7 should run 14.49 times faster and more productive (loading more text, calculating more formulas) than IE8 on Windows 7.

Relative performance of Windows 7-based Web browsers, February 2, 2010.

But with a score of 24.43 in our latest Windows 7 tests, the Opera 10.5 pre-alpha renders, crunches, and expedites content 17.7 times faster than IE8. We expect that number to decline a bit as Opera Software fixes this browser to at least "alpha" quality. Yet with a two-point gap over Chrome 5, Opera can actually afford to take it down a notch -- something we never thought we'd be saying just four months ago.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

Strengths and weaknesses: The code bases for Google Chrome 4 and Chrome 5 should not differ all that much at this point. Indeed, their CSS rendering scores (10.81 and 10.82, respectively) indicate they may not differ at all. But in certain algorithms, Chrome 5 is clearly superior: for instance, in using the MD5 cryptographic hash algorithm, and in executing the "Genetic Salesman" problem -- finding the best highway route between randomly-generated points on a map. Chrome 5's SunSpider score is also vastly superior to Chrome 4's, and 5's handling of CSS selectors is improved as well.

Opera 10.5 also posts a high SunSpider score, but not as high as Chrome 5 -- its computational skills are competitive, but not superior yet. CSS rendering capability for 10.5 is improved, but not up to Chrome quite yet. It's in handling old-style Web pages that Opera blows the doors off of the competition, scoring an 11.15 in typical page rendering versus 6.93 for Chrome 5, 3.99 for Chrome 4, and 5.82 for the latest Safari 4 + WebKit nightly build. Stable Opera builds are also strong in this department, but the 10.5 preview tips the scales, and then pulls them down.

And in graphics rendering, the 10.5 preview is posting obscene numbers in the Canvas object test. Safari should be the leader here, with the preview build scoring 33.40 and the stable build posting 29.18 -- this compared to 29.11 for Chrome 4 and 26.34 for Chrome 5. Opera's score here is a mind-blowing 66.45; and this is a test that is so above-board that there's really no way to cheat. It's that fast.

Mozilla Firefox scores continue to improve, with the latest 3.7 Alpha daily build holding on to a 13.25 overall Windows 7 score -- roughly equivalent to its score from last December, but in the face of a faster relative IE7.

Download Google Chrome for Windows Dev Channel build 5.0.301.1 from Fileforum now.

Google Nexus One gets proper multitouch

Publié: février 2, 2010, 11:00pm CET par Tim Conneally

A new software update for the Nexus One Android phone will finally offer the famous "pinch to zoom" functionality found in other "superphones" such as the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, and HTC HD2. This news came from Google earlier today.

The famous multitouch gesture has been present on Android phones outside of the US (including the Nexus One) but due to unspecified reasons, the American version of Android has not fully supported it.

Google's Andy Rubin, head of the Android project, was asked about the subject in a panel discussion for The Wall Street Journal at CES 2010:

"It's not an America versus outside America kind of thing," Rubin said. "It's a decision that is a result of the OEM model. I personally don't like two-handed operations...there is no conspiracy."

With this over-the-air update, what is described as "a new pinch-to-zoom mechanism" has been added to the Browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. To access the update, users will receive a message that will appear in the phone's notification bar. Like a standard Android notification, when the user clicks on that message, he'll be prompted to start the download. Google says the most users won't receive the update until the end of the week.

If this hotly-demanded feature doesn't come to other Android phones, Google's going to have some explainin' to do.

Proposed settlement in Facebook Beacon case draws fire from advocacy groups

Publié: février 2, 2010, 10:19pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Just over two years ago now, Facebook began deploying a behavioral tracking service it called Beacon, which automatically enabled the tracking of Facebook users' behavior, but shared that data with advertising partners. It wasn't an "opt-in" service by anyone's definition, and after Facebook took down most of the service, customers filed a class-action suit against the social network.

In a proposed settlement last September, Facebook is opting to use its own money -- some $9.5 million -- to establish a fund for the creation of a foundation to help make Web users more aware of their privacy rights, and how they can improve their online safety. It's what the law calls a cy près settlement, named for an old French phrase that literally means, "the next best thing."

"Next best" isn't exactly a settlement, contends the advocacy group Public Knowledge, in a statement for the court in the Beacon case filed yesterday. Why, asks Public Citizen, should Facebook use its own money to pay its own people to do what it should have been paying its own people to do in the first place?

"Creating the Facebook foundation is an inappropriate cy pres-like remedy that provides no value to the class because (1) the foundation is unneeded -- numerous established organizations already advocate for improved online privacy, safety, and security by educating users, regulators, and businesses; and (2) Facebook, whose founder and CEO questions whether privacy rights should be safeguarded, retains unwarranted influence over the proposed foundation," reads Public Citizen's official objection to the proposed settlement (PDF available here). "In essence, Facebook is paying itself money to gain a broad release of its users' legal claims and to create an unneeded foundation over which it will have significant control. It is difficult to imagine a greater abuse of the cy pres remedy."

Public Citizen is seeking a legal award of at least $2,500 per member of the class action, the precedent for which it claims has already been established by the Video Privacy Protection Act. That law was originally created to prevent the misuse of data belonging to customers of video rental establishments. But the group's plea is noteworthy also for what it's not asking for, or more accurately, what's it's asking to not receive: specifically, the creation of yet another policy group advising social networks to be more respectful, and users everywhere to be more careful. We get that already, the group argues.

"Numerous independent, non-profit groups already exist to do precisely that," writes Public Citizen. "A list of such organizations, although not comprehensive, includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center ("established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values"), the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("educates the press and public" by "defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today"), Privacy Rights Clearinghouse ("two-part mission -- consumer information and consumer advocacy" with goals to "[r]aise consumers' awareness of how technology affects personal privacy, and to empower consumers to take action to control their own personal information"), the Center for Digital Democracy (addressing privacy issues while promoting "an electronic media system that fosters democratic expression and human rights"), and the World Privacy Forum ("focused on conducting in-depth research, analysis, and consumer education in the area of privacy"). In addition, the Rose Foundation's Consumer Privacy Rights Fund, created from a series of settlements in cases involving consumer privacy issues, awards grants to support privacy-related research, education, advocacy, and policy development...In addition to being well-established, these organizations have the advantage of not being controlled by Facebook."

Public Citizen's retort now joins that of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, and four other groups which jointly filed their own letter of opposition last month. In it, the groups' attorneys write, "Facebook is not accused of failing to effectively 'educate' users and regulators. Facebook is accused of inappropriately disclosing its users' personal information in direct violation of state and federal law. A foundation whose primary goal is the education of users regarding business practices is not an appropriate remedy where it is the business practices that caused the harm."

When the settlement was proposed last September, digital media attorney David Johnson of law firm Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro LLP smelled a rat right away. In a blog post for his firm, Johnson wrote, "What a deal! Facebook is already required by law to promote the online privacy, safety and security of its users' information. For example, the FTC has mandated that all companies must 'maintain reasonable and appropriate measures to protect sensitive consumer information' and has already filed suit and obtained consent orders requiring a couple of dozen consumer-oriented businesses like Facebook to do so...So Facebook effectively gets most of its money back to fund projects that it is already has an obligation to perform. If the Court winds up cutting the fees paid to Plaintiffs' counsel, this just means that more money will go back to Facebook to pay for things it is already obligated to do."

For its part, Facebook declared the matter closed last September, and has had no further comment since then. The judge in the San Jose US District Court case already granted preliminary approval to the settlement in October, but final approval awaits the judge's review of comments received in the interim.

[A previous edition of this article incorrectly identified the intervenor in this case as Public Knowledge, not Public Citizen. Betanews regrets the error, has made corrections above, and apologizes to both groups for the misidentification.]

Sony shows how to lift Windows PCs out of the low-price doldrums

Publié: février 2, 2010, 9:19pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Windows PC vendors can effectively raise selling prices -- not that it will be easy, particularly as long as they sell netbooks. One Windows PC OEM shows the way. Today, Sony announced new E-series laptops packing Intel i3 and i5 core processors and boasting, brashy colored exteriors. The $799.99 price is about $326 more than the average selling price of laptops sold at US retail in fourth quarter, according to NPD data.

The $500-$1,000 price brand also is where Apple doubled its US retail unit share year over year in fourth quarter. Similarly, Apple unit share for retail PCs selling in the premium price brand -- more than $1,000 -- rose from 79 percent to 90 percent. Both segments are where the margins are.

Like Apple, Sony computer prices are typically higher than most Windows PC manufacturers. Like Apple, Sony also runs its own chain of stores, where customers can get on-site technical service and support. For these reasons and others related to sales and branding, Sony has maintained a premium status around its brand, much like Apple.

The new E-series notebooks play into a longstanding Sony trend of differentiating Windows PCs around features like style and portability, without aggressive discounting. The one exception is the W-series netbook, which starts at $449.99. Sony's next cheapest portable -- a thin-and-light netbook alternative from the Y-series, starts at $799.99.

Sony E-series portables aren't by any means the first Windows notebooks shipping with i3 or i5 processors. Sony is differentiating on style, higher pricing and brand cachet. It's what other PC vendors need do to resist falling ASPs, which are bad for everyone, even customers (Say, buyers, don't you deserve something better?).

Selling Prices in Free Fall

US retail average selling prices fell for both Macs and Windows PCs during 2009, but for different reasons. For Windows PCs:

Prices naturally declined due to commodity product maturation
OEMs and retailers further slashed prices because of the weak economy
Cheap netbooks pulled down ASPs, while also sucking away valuable margins

By comparison, Apple tightly controls Mac pricing, which largely declined because of cuts at higher pricing segments. Late last year, Apple turned the 13-inch MacBook into a "Pro" and slashed prices on costlier MacBook Pros, reducing the entry level price from $1,999 to $1,199. Apple cut prices in relation to its own existing pricing rather than lowering them to compete with Windows PCs.

Sony E-series

In what can only be described as a shocking trend: In fourth quarter, US retail Windows notebook ASPs fell below that of desktops, according to NPD. I have repeatedly asserted that netbooks are a menace -- and for good reason. Microsoft estimates that netbooks accounted for 11 percent of PC shipments in fourth quarter. Their wicked toll: In fourth quarter, notebook ASPs (including netbooks) declined to $473 from $604 a year earlier. Desktop ASP: $488 down from $533 year over year. Thank you, netbooks. May you burn in hell.

By comparison, also during fourth quarter, Mac notebook ASP was $1,359 down from 1,507 a year earlier. Interesting trend: Mac laptop ASPs also fell below desktops. The desktop ASP was $1,366 down from $1,471 a year earlier.

"Some of that [difference] is from falling notebooks prices -- aka netbooks -- and some is because Apple desktops and a smattering of others are all-in-ones, which add to the price of the desktop," said Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis.

Cheap Prices equal Cheap Brands

The ASP trend -- and where many Windows PC manufacturers or retailers are engaged in price wars -- is the below-$500 segment. For example, Dell portable prices start at $249 for the Mini Netbook or $399 for Inspiron notebook. Dell's mainstream portables sell for hundreds less than Sony, which I partly blame on over-agressive discounting and weak brand equity. Dell is not a premium brand like Apple or Sony.

Sony E-Series But it should be. Dell's Alienware brand has cachet. Alienware built up huge brand equity around powerful gaming systems that look cool and kick computing ass. Alienware should be the kind of brand where, with the right marketing and pricing, Dell could open up higher price brands in greater volume -- something the company has tried with the XPS series.

How is the low-price strategy working for Dell? The US PC market grew by 24 percent year over year in fourth quarter, while Dell's growth was a slower 5.3 percent. HP grew by 45.1 percent and Toshiba by a whopping 71.5 percent. Not that HP or Toshiba is in the pricing leagues of Apple or Sony, but they should be. Toshiba netbooks start at $349 and laptops at $449. HP and Toshiba also lack the premium brand status associated with Apple or Sony.

Companies don't just start new brands overnight, but they can subbrand. Dell bought its subbrand -- Alienware -- which, as previously asserted, could be a better volume performer if handled better. Through aggressive pricing, most Windows PC manufacturers have cheapened their brands. Do you buy a super deluxe Corolla or entry Camry for the same price? In other words, do you buy a Dell when you can have an Apple or Sony? Brand matters when people make pricing decisions, particularly when spending more for a product. Their purchasing criteria changes, too.

Premium Really Is Premium

Based on comments, many Betanews readers would rather build than buy because they can get more value for less money spent. That's OK for desktops but not as easy for notebooks -- with bigger sales volume and increasing install base than desktops.

Alienware Mx11 Premium brand equity is valuable for offering less for more, while differentiating around non-performance features, such as size as color and style. E-series is good example. The entry-level models come with LCD -- rather than the typical Sony LED -- displays and integrated Intel graphics. But it's that $799.99 starting price that matters.

Sony's E-series pricing and Windows PC differentiating features aren't lost on Microsoft -- nor their importance. Today, over at the Windows Blog, Brandon LeBlanc posted about the new Sony portables. He also blogged about the Alienware Mx11 thin-and-light notebook -- well, for a gaming laptop. Graphics memory of 1GB DDR3 is something unusual in a portable with 11-inch display, for the wicked price of $799. These are premium portables selling for $300 more than US retail laptop ASPs. Hell, waaaah! I want a Mx11. Don't you?

It's long past time that Windows PC OEMs should seek to deliver more value rather than sell for less. In Europe and the United States, most consumers are buying a second or third PC. The criteria for a replacement PC typically is much different than a new one. Style matters -- as do personal features. Brand matters, too. To Acer, Dell, HP and other Windows OEMs pushing cheap PCs, I say this: If you don't offer a premium brand with premium features at a reasonable premium price, your customers' next computer purchase will be a Mac. Get it?

Engadget shuts down commenting: Comment about it here!

Publié: février 2, 2010, 8:34pm CET par Tim Conneally

Popular gadget blog Engadget has been forced to turn off comments for an undetermined period because the posters have gotten a bit overzealous with poor-form commentary.

In the post announcing the temporary ban today, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky said, "What is normally a charged -- but fun -- environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations... and that's just not acceptable. Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that's simply not the case."

But the unfortunate outcome of such a situation is that everyone's reaction can't be seen or heard, So I'm extending an invitation to readers to let us know how you feel about being shut out from Engadget, and about forum censorship in general.

In my years here at Betanews, We've only ever had to ban a couple of users. This is because it is generally assumed that anonymous commentary carries practically no weight against personally attributable, reputation-staking reports, no matter how cogent the statement may be.

...and well, because like it or not, your posts are censored.

It's too bad that the level of discourse is often brought down so low that things like this have to happen. For a long time, I've joked about writing an "Internet style guide," similar to the Strunk and White's Elements of Style or the AP Styleguide.

Maybe it's time to stop joking.

I'm interested in hearing what you think: What's the ideal environment to foster free speech, yet encourage manners and respect?

Commercial Windows Azure is now live, along with cloud-based storage

Publié: février 2, 2010, 6:35pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

Microsoft Windows Azure top story badge Late yesterday afternoon, right on schedule, Microsoft announced the "general availability" of Windows Azure, its cloud-based hosting service for .NET applications. With a release like this, "GA" is somewhat peculiar, especially since the service has actually been in operation for several months. But it does mean that a ribbon has been cut, and from now on, new accounts are being signed up as commercial licenses. Old accounts are being given the warning to either convert or jump ship.

From this point on, prospective Azure customers will be given the opportunity to experiment with a limited amount of storage and transaction bandwidth, for a limited time. From now until July 31, testers will be allowed free access to 25 hours of a small compute instance with 500 MB of storage, and 10,000 transactions on one SQL Azure database (which will only be free for the first three months). Usage above that level will be charged at the regular rate of $0.12 per hour plus $0.15 per GB per month storage, and $9.99 per month per 1 GB database.

MSDN Premium subscribers are being offered eight months of promotional trial, with 750 hours of Azure service with 10 GB of storage, and 3 SQL Azure databases limited to 7 GB data transfer in / 14 GB out. Usage over and above those levels will be charged to subscribers, but at slightly reduced rates: $0.114 for small compute instances per hour, scaling up to $0.912 per hour for extra-large instances, plus $0.15/GB/month for storage, and $9.49 per month per 1 GB database.

The surprise came from Microsoft this morning: Up until now, Azure developers have contended with the problem of accessing stored data as blobs (binary large objects), which makes perfect sense for apps running on a very large-scale platform. But such apps would likely have to be designed for such a platform to begin with, which makes the whole notion of transporting .NET apps to the cloud seem a lot less seamless.

Microsoft introduced developers last November at PDC to something they called "Xdrive," which would be a way for at least some .NET code created for conventional networks to be transported to the cloud with more minimal changes, if any. Under this system, stored data resources could continue to be addressed using the familiar single-letter drive names (X:\) employed by everyday NTFS. It took a reformation of the blob concept to make this possible, called the page blob; and while that reminds me of a great Federal Express commercial from the 1970s, its purpose is to create a blob whose characteristics are compatible with the page structure to which non-cloud applications store data.

"The Page Blob can be mounted as a drive only within the Windows Azure cloud, where all non-buffered/flushed NTFS writes are made durable to the drive (Page Blob)," reads a white paper released this week by Brad Calder and Andrew Edwards of the Azure Storage team. "If the application using the drive crashes, the data remains persistent via the Page Blob, and can be remounted when the application instance is restarted or remounted elsewhere for a different application instance to use. Since the drive is an NTFS formatted Page Blob, you can also use the standard blob interfaces to upload and download your NTFS VHDs to the cloud."

Of course, Microsoft couldn't keep the same cool name for it, so "Xdrive" is now being called "Windows Azure Drive." The company won't bill for it as a device, like it does for SQL Azure databases, but it will charge for storage space consumed and read/write transactions employed. Since Page Blob structures are limited to 1 TB in size, Azure Drives will also be 1 TB maximum.

Employing an Azure Drive is not completely seamless from a .NET developer's perspective; you don't just mount the X:\ drive, load up your old code, and have it run. The drive's creation, mounting, unmounting, copying, and snapshot-taking (for backups and rollbacks) still require Azure-specific code. But that code may reside in procedures that are separated from the .NET code that performs the actual transactions with the drive, so at least a sizable chunk of some .NET applications no longer needs to be rewritten.

Believe it or not, though, Azure Drive is not the surprise here: When Azure storage engineers created the page blob concept, they discovered a method for caching the blob's contents to a local disk accessible by the Azure virtual machine. There's a trick here that takes data from the cloud and stores it...in another cloud, literally, and in such a way that the costs are driven down.

"Caching the data on the local drive can reduce the read traffic to the page blob, which will lower the transaction cost," wrote Brad Calder this morning. "There is no additional charge for reads that are to the local disk cache. The transactions against the Page Blob will be counted towards billing. Note, even when the cache is enabled, all non-buffered and flushed writes are committed transactions to the Page Blob in durable storage."

Azure customers wishing to test Azure Drive, with or without the cool name, must sign up for the new February release of the Azure SDK, and upgrade their instances to run the new Guest OS 1.1.

Is this a Bluetooth 3.0 phone or what?

Publié: février 2, 2010, 5:44pm CET par Tim Conneally

Just short of one year after the Bluetooth 3.0 specification was unveiled, we are just now beginning to see designs that take it into consideration.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) posted a Core spec 3.0 "qualified design listing" yesterday for a new Samsung Mobile phone going by the name GT-S8500, a 3.1" OLED touchscreen device.

Samsung's GT line of products has included a number of its higher-end devices carrying a branded OS, such as the Windows Mobile-powered Omnia and Omnia II, or the Android-powered Galaxy. If Samsung's number-names have any cohesion to them, the GT-S8500 is most closely related to the AMOLED-equipped Samsung Jet, also known as GT-S8000, which was released in non-American markets last June. Like the Jet, Bluetooth SIG says the GT-S8500 is a GSM/GPRS/EDGE device with the TouchWIZ interface and an "anti-reflective, high resolution" display.

Though reports today have said that this will be the "first Bluetooth 3.0 device," and cite the increased speeds of the new wireless technology, this may not be the Bluetooth 3.0 device everyone wants it to be.

A hallmark of Bluetooth 3.0 is a technology called Alternate MAC/PHY (AMP), and it appears in the documentation that Samsung's device does not include any of the necessary AMP protocols, including the Host Controller Interface, Manager Protocol, and 802.11 Protocol Adaption Layer. With these protocols in place, Bluetooth 3.0 can establish an on-demand Wi-Fi connection with a compatible peer device to greatly speed up the transfer of files.

Betanews contacted the Bluetooth Special Interest Group in an effort to clarify the potential misunderstanding, and they told us that the device does support Bluetooth core version 3.0, but not the high speed feature (which is actually optional). So it definitely includes the other benefits of Bluetooth 3.0 such as enhanced power control, and Unicast Connectionless Data, just not the high speed transfer which is arguably the most anticipated feature of the updated wireless standard.

Google drops clues on more document-centric Chrome OS for tablets

Publié: février 2, 2010, 5:31pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

An artist's concept of a possible Chrome OS-based tablet PC, rendered by the Chromium OS team.

Since the development of X, one of the first windowing UIs for UNIX, and as evidenced by Apple's early experiments with Lisa, the forerunner of Macintosh, software designers have been intrigued by the concept of a document-centric computing environment. More like a physical desktop, such a system would center not around the programs you launch but the work you do. The functions and applications pertaining to that work would pop up in the margins, but most of the time would stay out of the way.

That's the old-fashioned idea that the designers behind the Chromium OS project -- the open source team whose work feeds into Google's Chrome OS -- are now publicly experimenting with. With only a few crude mockups to show off today, the crew appears to be considering an environment that's scalable to any size tablet, where the document consumes the entire screen, but the functions and apps are tucked away either outside the margins or through zoomable context menus.

The mockups released today -- none of which appear rooted in any actual code -- would actually do away with the tabbed interface that has come to symbolize the Chrome browser, and the Chrome OS demos we've seen thus far. In its place, the document or Web page the user's working on at the moment, is maximized to full size. A cafeteria-style menu similar to how Alt+Tab works in Microsoft Windows, or how albums are selected in iTunes, lets the user switch between active documents. But if what we're seeing is an accurate representation of the Chromium team's ideas, the user wouldn't be switching between applications (e.g., Google Docs word processor, Chrome Web browser, Picasa photo selector) but rather open documents (e.g., a photograph, a Web page, another Web page, a Twitter feed, a document being edited).

An artist's concept of a possible Chrome OS-based tablet PC, rendered by the Chromium OS team.

How one wants to edit or view a document may depend, judging from the Chromium team's undescribed mockups, on the service the user chooses. That choice of familiar services (Facebook, Lala, Pandora, calendar, tasks) shows up not on the root menu or Start menu or the base of the desktop, but in a popup menu that appears in the context of the open document. This suggests that the design team is going back to a very old drawing board indeed, reconsidering some of the design elements first implemented by the original Apple Lisa.

A computing environment that is much less "app-centric," or that plays down desktop apps in favor of Web services, would play much more to Google's strengths than Microsoft's. Google might not necessarily have a built-in advantage with respect to productivity applications in a Web-centered world, but neither does Microsoft at this point, so the odds would be more even.

A video produced by the team, strangely, takes a different approach than the mockup photos, and may in our opinion have been produced by a different contributor to the project. It shows a more conventional, app-centric model of applications sharing real estate on a very large tablet, the size of a big-screen HDTV.

An artist's concept of a possible Chrome OS-based tablet PC, rendered by the Chromium OS team.

Running applications would be represented by tab-like protrusions from the window's left side; and in the video (unlike the stills), apps would remain more contiguous. So the RSS feed and the Gmail front-end would still belong to the Web browser, which in the video is represented by the left window. However, one common element remains the "Quick Access" window, which pulls double-duty in the video: It lets the user either pull up services such as Facebook, or initiate Google searches for unknown items.

We look for clues anywhere we can find them, and since we were scouring the Chromium team photos for anything and everything, we honed in on the common element of the photos and the video: the mock Google search for "pie cheese." In a few of the photos, the search is incomplete, and reads merely "pie chee." Wondering where we'd heard that before, and being stumped for a moment by the phrase rhyming with "Tai Chi," we remembered that something one letter off -- pee chee -- is an inexpensive, card-stock folder used to store loose-leaf papers. It would be about the size of one of the tablets in Google's mockup, and may even be an appropriate name for the thing if certain folks would refrain from giggling.

First Windows Mobile 6.5.3 device announced by Sony Ericsson

Publié: février 2, 2010, 3:36pm CET par Tim Conneally

Sony Ericsson Aspen, first Windows Mobile 6.5.3 device

Today, mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson announced a new smartphone called Aspen which is the first officially-announced Windows Mobile 6.5.3 device.

It's certainly not the big "Zune phone" or "Project Pink" announcement that we are expecting from Microsoft's mobile division this month, but it is nonetheless an important step for Windows Mobile.

The touchscreen-enhanced QWERTY handset has a 2.4" (240x320) screen, 3.2 megapixel camera, FM Radio, A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, and Wi-Fi, and can be tethered as a 3G modem on UMTS/HSPA 850/950/1800/1900 networks.

Because the device will not ship until the second quarter of this year, we don't have an official look at what makes Windows Mobile 6.5.3 special for it.

However, Aspen is being marketed as "The business mobile phone with green credentials at its core," so the consumer-friendly element that we heard so much about is not being played up at all. Instead, it is touting Office Mobile, Outlook Mobile, Skype, the latest version of MyPhone, Exchange ActiveSync, and handwriting recognition among its respectable list of features.

Flickering iMacs receive firmware fix

Publié: février 2, 2010, 3:45am CET par Tim Conneally