Gregarius » BetaNews.Com » novembre 21, 2011

In an effort the provide better personalized recommendations, eBay has acquired privately-held Hunch, a two-year-old service that suggests content on the Internet based on personal tastes. The auction service expects Hunch to integrate into a variety of its offerings beyond recommendations.

Hunch founder Chris Dixon will lead eBay's existing recommendations team, reports indicate. "We’ll be tackling all kinds of interesting challenges as part of eBay including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights", he writes in a blog post announcing the acquisition. "We can’t wait to get started".

Dixon says Hunch will continue to operate as a standalone site, and all employees will remain with the company, which stays in New York City.

"With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers", eBay's chief technology officer Mark Carges says. "We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers".

Hunch uses information from the users' activities on social networks, people they friend or follow and answers to a set of questions the service asks. From there, Hunch matches users with products it thinks they may be interested in.

eBay hopes that Hunch move it beyond traditional recommendation services, which often are merely aggregated from previous sales of similar items but have little to do with the interests of the users themselves.

The companies didn't disclose terms of the deal, however earlier Monday Michael Arrington wrote that eBay paid $80 million for Hunch.

Photo Credit: goldenangel / Shutterstock

Early Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" adopters must do without Flash, as Google confirms that current versions are incompatible. However, Adobe says they won't wait long: a compatible Flash release should be available by the end of the year.

Adobe announced earlier this month that it would end support for mobile versions of Flash, a move that acknowledges the shift towards HTML5 among mobile developers. Indeed, Adobe confirms that its port of Flash for ICS will be its last: future versions of Android will not be compatible.

There is one reality that Adobe must face with Android, and that's fragmentation -- thus some users could still be on versions of the OS that are still Flash compatible. Adobe will still provide updates for those users, but only to address "critical" bugs and security issues, it says.

In related Flash news, the company remains committed to Adobe AIR, its application runtime used to create Internet-based applications. That platform uses a variety of technologies -- including Flash -- and Adobe still plans to support it for the foreseeable future. The company also intends to support Flash for desktop applications, but even there HTML5 has made inroads.

A survey released in September by JavaScript and HTML5 consulting firm appendTo claims 84 percent of developers plan to employ HTML5 within the next six months. Another survey conducted by Appcelerator and IDC found that 66 percent of mobile developers are "very interested" in developing for the platform.

Network services company Infoblox on Monday released the results of a survey conducted by The Measurement Factory called the IPv6 Census, which revealed that support for IPv6 by .com, .net, and .org zones grew by 1,900 percent in one year, thanks in large part to the support by popular registrar GoDaddy.

Last February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that the last IPv4 addresses had been allocated, and that it would only be a matter of time before they ran out.

And in the decade that IPv6 has been around, it's been supported by software makers, popular web destination owners, and enterprise service providers. Having support from Go Daddy means IPv6 now has support from the world's largest accredited domain registrar, which is responsible for more than 50 million domain names.

Still, the massive jolt provided by Go Daddy only brings total support for IPv6 by .com, .net, and .org subdomains up to 25.4 percent. If we were to subtract Go Daddy's contribution, there was still growth, but the total support would only be around 3 percent.

The survey also found that less than one percent of the zones had IPv6-enabled Web servers, and that about two percent of the zones had IPv6-supportive mail servers.

Adoption of IPv6 has been glacially slow in certain segments, such as service providers. Just two weeks ago, the US' leading ISP, Comcast announced it was doing pilot market deployments of IPv6 for a nationwide rollout next year.

Infoblox, however, is targeting domain registrars.

"A significant percentage of businesses run on the registrars’ networks, relying on the registrars’ systems for email and a web presence, which don’t predominantly support IPv6 yet," the company's announcement said on Monday. "If the registrars added IPv6 support for email and web servers, a significant impediment to those businesses’ enabling IPv6 would be removed and adoption gains could jump. If a registrar isn’t supporting IPv6, it creates a serious obstacle to any business wanting to implement IPv6 for its external content."

Photo: Oleksly Mark/

When you need to install (or reinstall) Windows then normally you’ll reach for the regular CD/ DVD. But this is slow, easily scratched if you leave it lying around, and of, course, won’t be any use at all if your target system doesn’t have a working optical drive.

And that’s where WinToFlash comes in. This straightforward tool will take your installation disc (Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and Server 2003/ 2008 are supported), copy the files to a USB flash drive, and make it bootable, leaving you with a faster, more durable and convenient installer.

If you want to get involved in the complexities of this, then an Advanced Mode makes them all available. You can, for instance, choose the file system you’d like on the USB drive, its MBR configuration, FAT 16/32 configuration and more. So if you’re a Windows expert then there should be enough here to overcome any boot issues you might have with particular hardware.

The WinToFlash default settings are well chosen, though, so if you prefer the easy life then you can just run a simple wizard, point the program at your Windows disc and flash drive, and it’ll take care of everything else.

You still have to pay close attention to what you’re doing, of course. By default WinToFlash will format the target drive to make it bootable, for instance, destroying any data it contains -- so be very sure you point WinToFlash at the right location.

And booting from USB may not always be so easy, particularly with older PCs. If your system stubbornly starts from the hard drive as usual then check your BIOS setup program for its boot settings; you may need to give USB or removable devices a higher priority on the boot list.

For the most part, though, WinToFlash works just fine, and in around 10 minutes the program produced a bootable USB flash drive which launched without problems on our test Dell Inspiron notebook.

The first public beta of TeamViewer 7 is now available, revealing some major additions to this popular remote access tool.

Many of the new features concentrate on solid improvements to what’s gone before. It’s now possible to save advanced connection settings for each remote PC, for instance, so you’re ready to work with a system just as soon as you connect. File transfer is now as easy as dragging and dropping a file or folder from a session window to your own PC. And sessions can be recorded, both as screenshots or AVI videos.

Other additions can help you to manage complex remote control situations, with, for example, new multi-monitor support allowing you to display separate session windows in each monitor.

But the big news this time around is TeamViewer 7′s ability to host online meetings for up to 25 people. Participants can be alerted via email, and join from smartphones, tablets or computers. Once everyone arrives they’ll all be able to view the same screen, see and hear everything you’re doing, chat, use a white board or share files. And the new ability to create a video record of what’s happening may be useful for reference, later, or to share with others who couldn’t make the big event.  Not bad at all for a program that is still entirely free for personal and non-commercial use.

There are some minor issues to consider before you take a look at the new build. Older versions of TeamViewer won’t be able to connect to this build, for instance, or join the new TeamViewer 7 meetings. And the program is still a beta, of course, so will contain bugs: treat it with caution.

If these are concerns for you then the good news is that the finished release isn’t far away, with a release expected in early December.

But if you’re eager to see what the new build has to offer, then there’s no need to wait -- the beta build of TeamViewer 7 is available now.

US Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and their friends across the ocean have something for the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists to be grateful for: Canalys predictions that the Mac maker will be the No. 1 PC vendor next year -- gasp, possibly during holiday 2011. "HP and Apple will fight for top position in Q4, but Apple may have to wait for the release of iPad 3 before it passes HP", Canalys analyst Tim Coulling says.

It's an amazing proclamation, considering that IDC put Mac global share at a puny 5.2 percent in third quarter. You'll read lots of gleeful headlines today about how Apple is going to strip HP's britches, then leap to the top spot. Canalys' magical prediction is all about counting. Is a tablet a PC? The UK-based analysis firm says yes, and adding iPad to the mix pulls Apple up from the doldrums to the stratosphere.

I first asked the "Is Apple No. 1?" question that Canalys answers now in August 2010. The answer is hugely important and has far-reaching implications for Apple, perceptions about its future and how shareholders react in the early post-Steve Jobs era. Apple's a nobody at 5 percent, but the new kid in town if snatching HP's PC crown. Then there are the blogs and news stories pushed by the Apple Fanclub.

What's a PC?

Everything hinges on definition, which isn't as clear now as when I posed it 15 months ago. Gartner and IDC classify iPad and its Android competitors as media tablets, separate from PCs. They distinguish desktop operating systems like Windows from Android and iOS. Windows running on the Samsung Series 7 slate is a PC, while iPad is not, by their definition. Are they right?

Two factors muddle Gartner and IDC definitions: iOS 5 and Windows 8 on ARM processors. IDC defines a media tablet as a slate device ranging in size from 5 inches to as much as 14 inches and running so-called lightweight operating systems, such as iOS and Android OS, on ARM processors. The analyst firm classifies tablets running Windows on x86 processors as PCs. Windows 8 Metro will run on ARM processors, so will they not be PCs then? That's a definition question Gartner and IDC must address.

Then there is iOS 5 to consider. Over six months and several posts, I asked if Apple's tablet is a PC. February 2011 I answered: "iPad is not a PC". From the post:

As long as iPad requires a PC for activation and to receive operating system updates, it is a dependent device. Apple's tablet requires a PC to fully function. By comparison, I would rank the new generation of Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" tablets as PCs, based on function. Multi-core processors, improved graphic performance and Honeycomb will make tablets like the HTC Flyer, Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 PC replacements for many buyers. Android has never been dependent on PCs. Account activation takes place from the device and all updates are sent over the air -- that is directly to the smartphone or tablet.

By the "it's dependent" reasoning, Canalys and DisplaySearch are both wrong to classify iPad as a PC. Many Betanews readers have expressed similar opinion in comments, and they're due some recognition.

Uh-oh, iOS 5 and iCloud pretty much liberate iPad from its PC dependence. Users can sync to the cloud and receive updates over the air. There's still strong argument that iPad is a PC-companion device but it's no longer wholly dependent on personal computers. But is it liberated? You tell me. I haven't used iPad since iOS 5's release. Is activation also OTA, or is a PC required? It's a small thing but factors into the definition.

But is that enough distinction? My wife's Kindle doesn't require a PC, but that surely doesn't make the e-reader one. Windows on ARM makes definitions murkier than iOS 5, I think. Some people will argue that if iPad replaces a personal computer then it's a PC. I disagree. CD players replaced vinyl record players but they're not counted as the same thing. They're different devices recokened separately. Same is true of VHS and DVD players. Replacement doesn't make one thing the other.

Is iPad a PC?

Hell, not even Apple counts iPad as a PC. Tablet and Mac sales are separate. Before his death Jobs spoke enthusiastically about the post-PC era, and he referred to iPad and iPhone in that context. Not even Apple's then CEO regards iPad as PC -- if it's a product leading the post-PC era. From that perspective, Canalys shouldn't classify iPad a PC, like smartphones aren't counted as PCs.

The definition really should apply the other way around -- tablet classification needs changing. Windows slates should count as tablets not as PCs based on form factor and function -- and why not, then, those running x86 processors. The classification is more sensible and, by that reasoning, means that iPad is not a PC and it's outrageous for Canalys to claim that Apple will be No. 1 next year based on current shipment growth trends. Similarily, I shouldn't call Android tablets PCs, either. So I correct myself. If iPads aren't PCs, neither are Android tablets.

By the way, Canalys refers to tablets as "pads" and predicts 59 million unit shipments for all 2011 -- 22 million in fourth quarter. I won't state PC market share for obvious reasons.

Do you agree? Is iPad not a PC? Please answer in comments below and take to poll above.