Latest Science, Technology News

Microsoft, Nokia plan mobile Office deal

2009-08-12T11:34:00.001+05:30

Posted by Ina Fried on 11 Aug 2009

Microsoft is expected on Wednesday to announce a partnership with European mobile giant Nokia to help get its Office software onto that company's mobile phones, CNET News has learned.

With the next version of Office, Microsoft is trying to expand its desktop hold on the productivity market into one that spans the PC, Web, and phone, and this deal is seen as a significant move in that last category.

The software maker has already said that, with the next version of Office, it plans to offer browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Those programs will be able to run inside Safari and Firefox in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That means that Office, for the first time, will run on Linux-based machines.

On the phone side, Microsoft has shown the ability for Office 2010 documents to be displayed on a variety of mobile phones. So far, the only phones that have their own native versions of Office have been those running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software.

Microsoft is looking for ways to strengthen its Office franchise into one that maintains its relevance and market share even as the PC becomes just one of many devices people use to access their information. Office is also vital to Microsoft's fiscal health, with much of the company's profits still coming from Windows and Office.

Microsoft released a technology preview of the PC-based Office 2010 applications in July, although it has yet to start publicly testing the browser-based versions. The final version of Office 2010 is due next year.

Although Nokia and Microsoft have long been rivals in the phone business, the two have also struck deals at times. Nokia already has a license that allows its phones to connect to Exchange Servers using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. In 2007, Microsoft also struck a deal with Nokia to have Windows Live services run on the Finnish company's phones.

The deal comes even as Microsoft is trying to figure out how to keep its Windows Mobile operating system in the game amid stiff competition from Nokia in Europe as well as Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and an emerging threat from devices running Google's Android operating system.

Expanding Office to other mobile devices may help that business, but at the same time takes away one of the areas where Windows Mobile had a leg up on rivals--its direct compatibility with Office.

Update: The two sides aren't talking details, but they have confirmed a press conference on Wednesday to discuss an alliance. It will start at 8 a.m. PT and CNET will have live coverage.

Also, as TechFlash's Todd Bishop points out, Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has scheduled an announcement for Thursday. Do you think we'll see Office for the iPhone this week?

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10307378-56.html

You Must Obey: The Unwritten Laws of Technology

2009-08-10T11:24:00.002+05:30

"Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you'll be tech support for life." This is but one of 35 immutable laws of technology that we've identified and recorded for posterity. There will be a test."

PC World Staff, with assistance from our Facebook friends and others..

Gordon Moore has one law but we've got him beat. Here at the (unofficial) Tech Law Brain Trust, we maintain a definitive, ever-expanding archive of the laws that govern your technology experiences--whether you know it or not. Please scan these lists to ensure that you are in compliance.

Basic PC Laws

Let's start with Nerve Central--the computer.

Law 1: For every fix that a Windows Update patches, the update will break two more things on your PC. --Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 2: The likelihood that Windows will automatically install time-sucking critical updates is directly proportional to your need to get your PC started. --Steve Fox, PC World

Law 3: The hard drive always fails just before you were going to back it up. --Denise Paolucci, Dreamwidth Studios via Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

Law 4: Your data will get corrupted just before you plug in your new backup external drive. --Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 5: Your backup plan is only as good as your last successful restore. --Michael Fisher, ElephantDrive.com via HARO

Law 6: The number of USB ports on your Mac will always be one less than you need at any given time. --Blair Hanley Frank, Macworld

Law 7: Feeling time pressure to make a computer fix quickly will cause you to take longer. --David Marshak, via PC World Facebook page

Law 8: If you close the PC case with screws before testing, it won't work; If you test before closing, it will. --Harry Liebman via HARO

Tech Support Rules

Now that you've mastered the basics, you're ready to move on to Tech Support.

Law 1: Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you'll be tech support for life. --Danny Allen, PC World

Law 2: Build a computer for someone, and he/she owns you! --Louis Farbstein, via PC World's Facebook page

Law 3: Recommend a product that you've used with no problems, and the friend/family member who buys it will immediately descend into RMA [product return] hell. --Scott Keck, via PC World's Facebook page

Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company's IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you. --Lars Jacobsen, via PC World's Facebook page

Law 5: If it's broken and you call tech support, it will fix itself while you're on hold. --Brenda Christensen, Public Relations, Servoy.com via HARO

Internet Ordinances

You can find a world of trouble online. For instance...

Law 1: Within a month of agreeing to be "friends" with your boss on Facebook you will regret it, big time. --Tom Spring, PC World

Law 2: The crappier the Web site, the sleazier (and sketchier) the ads. --Tom Spring, PC World

Law 3: When entering "Captcha" verification codes on a Web site, you'll always type in the numeral 1 when the site wants a lowercase L, and a capital O when the site wants the number 0. --Steve Fox, PC World

Law 4: Just before taking out the boss in a WoW raid, your Internet connection will die. --Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 5: The difficulty involved in redeeming a rebate is directly proportional to the dollar value of the rebate. --Tom Spring, PC World

Law 6: A nasty draft e-mail will always find its way to the (unintended) recipient. --Brian X. Chen

Precepts of Mobile Tech

Desktop technology isn't the only source of inevitable woe in your life. All those shiny mobile devices can cause pain, too, since the freedom of untethered technology doesn't extend to immunity from rank on rank of frustrating unalterable laws. We report 10 master Mobile Laws here.

Law 1: The charger for your current cell phone will not work with the next cell phone you buy. --Kimberly Brinson, PC World

Law 2: Your laptop's charger weighs half of what your laptop weighs. --Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 3: A laptop battery will drain at twice its normal rate whenever you leave home without your power cord. --Kimberly Brinson, PC World

Corollary: Your laptop's battery life is inversely proportional to the amount of work you need to get done on a single charge. --Blair Hanley Frank, Macworld

Law 4: Your iPod or iPhone will be on its last burst of power just as the plane door shuts. --Anne B. McDonald, PC World

Law 5: A replacement battery charger will cost 70 percent of the original purchase price of the device. For phones, the figure is 140 percent! --Robert Strohmeyer, PC World

Law 6: Your cell phone will inevitably break before your two-year contract is up, forcing you to overpay for a new, less-cool model. --Lauren Barnard, PC World

Law 7: The proprietary charging plug (cost to produce: 50 cents) for your device will disappear within two weeks and will cost you $40 to replace. --Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 8: On any vacation, the memory card for your digital camera will be safely lodged in the card reader on your desk at home. (And the camera's proprietary battery will be dead, with the charger sitting next to the card reader.) --Anne B. McDonald, PC World

Soft drinks are also bad for PCs.

Law 9: A cup of coffee on your desk is guaranteed to render your laptop utterly useless. --Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 10: Your MagSafe adapter will always come unplugged precisely when you need to charge your Mac laptop's battery. --Nick Mediati, PC World

Software Statutes

Finally, if entanglements with hardware principles don't leave you bound and gagged, there are always software standards to render you helpless.

Law 1: Your software provider's online support pages contain explicit instructions for troubleshooting every conceivable problem--except yours. --Mark Sullivan, PC World

Law 2: Nine times out of ten, tinkering with your Registry to fix a system issue will create a new problem that's more severe than the original. --Travis Van, ITDatabase via HARO

Law 3: Ten times out of ten, downloading a spyware product will create hidden processes/services more insidious than the original malware/adware encroachment you set out to stop. --Travis Van, ITDatabase via HARO

Graphic: Diego Aguirre

Law 4: The performance increase you can expect from running a Registry cleaner can be calculated as z(n + y), where n is the number of Registry entries cleaned, y is your system CPU's clock speed in gigahertz, and z = 0. --Robert Strohmeyer, PC World

Law 5: The larger the number of people who want your iPhone app, the likelier Apple is to reject it. --Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 6: iTunes will crash. That's it. No, really. --Darren Gladstone, PC World

Resources: http://www.pcworld.com/article/169388/you_must_obey_the_unwritten_laws_of_technology.html

Google's Schmidt resigns from Apple board

2009-08-04T10:18:00.002+05:30

Posted by Caroline McCarthy on 3 August 2009

In a move that comes as little surprise, Apple announced Monday that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is resigning from its board of directors.

"Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the release. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."

Schmidt had been on Apple's board for almost exactly three years, since August 2006.

In May, Google confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was planning to hold discussions concerning potential conflicts of interest related to Schmidt's presence on both companies' boards of directors. Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said at the time that Google did not believe there was a problem with the situation.

Schmidt has said repeatedly that he recused himself from Apple board discussions pertaining to areas in which the companies' interests overlap--the iPhone, for example, given Google's work on the Android operating system for smartphones. But the similarities grew more difficult to reconcile when Google announced the development of its Chrome operating system, which will compete directly with Apple's OS. (The companies already own competing Web browsers, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.)

Last month, Schmidt said that he was planning to discuss the future of his role on Apple's board given the advent of Chrome OS.

More recently, potential competitive turf became evident when Google's third-party applications for the iPhone--which comes preinstalled with Google Maps--started to get well-publicized scrutiny from Apple. Google's location-aware service Latitude, for example, has been restricted to a Web-based app rather than an installable one, and a Google Voice telephony app was outright rejected by Apple.

Last week, a report surfaced that the Federal Communications Commission had sent letters of inquiry to Apple, Google, and iPhone carrier AT&T concerning the blocked app.

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10301612-37.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Behind Microsoft-Yahoo: The Online Economics of Scale

2009-08-01T11:47:00.002+05:30

Posted by by Steve Lohr on 30 July 2009

In their persuasion assault on Wednesday, Carol A. Bartz and Steven A. Ballmer repeatedly explained the Microsoft-Yahoo deal using a term from classical economics: “scale.”

“What this deal is really about is scale,” Ms. Bartz, the chief executive of Yahoo, said in the morning conference call with analysts and journalists, adding that advertisers, consumers and the two companies themselves would all benefit as a result.

Mr. Ballmer, the Microsoft chief, said during the conference call that in Internet search “scale drives knowledge,” which, in turn, fuels innovation. That was his shorthand description of what he said was the particularly powerful “feedback loop” in search and search advertising.

In traditional economics, scale typically refers to the efficiency gains that result from size. These observations were originally applied, and measured, in industrial markets. In high-technology markets, like software and the Internet, scale advantages can sometimes behave as if on steroids — faster and stronger. The mechanisms include the feedback loop Mr. Ballmer described and “network effects,” the concept that a technology or online marketplace becomes more valuable the more people use it.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the textbook case of a supercharged scale technology. The more people use it, and the more developers write software applications to run on Windows, the more valuable it is to everyone in that technology ecosystem.

Just how powerful the scale economics and network effects are in Internet search is a subject of considerable debate among economists, antitrust experts, investors and business executives. In the conference call, Mr. Ballmer seemed to be suggesting that the snowballing effects of scale in Internet search were even stronger than in operating systems.

But understatement is not Mr. Ballmer’s first instinct. So in an interview after the conference call, I asked him if that’s what he meant. “In my view, scale is more important in this business than any other technology business I know,” he replied. Which helps explain why Mr. Ballmer has long been so intent on getting hold of Yahoo’s search traffic, one way or another.

The Microsoft-Yahoo partnership will now have nearly 30 percent of the search market. In Microsoft’s thinking, that figure may well be significant. David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard business school, and co-author with Michael Cusumano of M.I.T. of an insightful book on the browser wars, “Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft,” pointed out that the 30 percent threshold has been important to Microsoft’s strategy in the past.

In 1996, Microsoft’s goal in catching Netscape was to move from about 5 percent to 30 percent share of the browser market in a year. “The view inside Microsoft was that until you got to 30 percent, you weren’t credible in that market with business partners and developers,” Mr. Yoffie said.

There is another dimension of scale behind the deal, according to Murthy Nukala, chief executive of Adchemy, a Silicon Valley startup that uses statistical models, advanced data mining and machine learning to help target online advertising.

The pursuit of “data scale” in search, Mr. Nukala said, fueled the Microsoft partnership. The data-scale benefit, he added, comes from more than just generating more search traffic, though sheer volume is crucial.

A key challenge in search, he explained, is estimating the likelihood that a given user will click on a particular ad from a certain advertiser. In the search world, this problem is called “pCTR estimation,” for probability of click-through rate. The ranking algorithms for search advertising, Mr. Nukala explained, incorporate not only the price per click an advertiser is willing the pay, but also the estimated click-through rate (calculated by applying clever algorithms and machine learning to vast quantities of query data).

“It is well understood,” Mr Nukala said, “that as pCTR estimates improve, the quality of ranking is better, which leads to higher revenue per search.”

It is also important to understand, he added, that the click-through estimates do not improve merely proportionately as search traffic increases but by something more like an exponential multiplier. Presumably, that is the sort of thing Mr. Ballmer had in mind when he said “scale drives knowledge.”

Mr. Nukala concluded, “I believe that ‘data scale’ drove the strategic imperative and the structure of the deal.”

Resources: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/behind-the-microsoft-yahoo-deal-the-internet-economics-of-scale/?ref=technology

What does the Microsoft-Yahoo deal mean?

2009-07-31T13:17:00.002+05:30

Posted by Tom Krazit on 30 July 2009

With a few strokes of a giant purple pen, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo's Carol Bartz finally signed a deal Wednesday that will turn Microsoft into the second-largest search company in the world, and turn Yahoo into a media-driven advertising broker.

Here's a breakdown of the deal from the perspectives of the key players:

Yahoo

What it gets: Yahoo is paying below market rate for an outsourced search engine: Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88 percent of future search revenue, a better ongoing deal than had been expected, according to IDC.

It gets a guaranteed stream of search revenue for 18 months, and it gets to sell all the search ads on both Yahoo and Microsoft properties. And it gets to save money, one of the highest priorities for Bartz and new Yahoo CFO Tim Morse: the company estimated it will save $200 million in capital expenditures and see an overall benefit of $500 million in operating income.

What it loses: The ability to control its own destiny when it comes to search, still the most profitable sector of online advertising by a large margin. Yahoo's search revenue is now tied to the performance of Bing for 10 years, an eternity in the Internet world, and 88 percent of something is less than 100 percent of something.

What's next: Probably another reorganization, and another wave of departures as talented search engineers weigh their options among Microsoft, Google, Ask.com, and start-ups.

Expect rosier earnings calls where Bartz can point to the cost savings from the deal, and the evolution of a long-term plan for the company that doesn't involve dumping businesses.

Microsoft

What it gets: Far more search market share in one day than it could have hoped to obtain from organic Bing growth -- no matter how much people may like it -- over several years. All of Yahoo's search technology is now available to Microsoft to pick and choose what it might want to use on Bing.

And Microsoft also avoided having to make an upfront payment to take control of Yahoo search, as had been rumored for months leading up to the deal and hinted at by Bartz herself, claiming "boatloads of money" would be needed to pry Yahoo search away from the company.

What it loses: Relationships with advertisers on search ads, although it preserves its display ad sales operation...for now. Otherwise, Microsoft seems to have emerged from this deal pretty clean.

What's next: Heated search competition with Google, which only means the two companies have even more reason to detest each other.

Google

What it gets: Time. This deal will take months, if not years, to complete, and it will be a messy integration process. Google sales representatives likely called up all of their major clients this morning to remind those clients of the uncertainty that will accompany the integration process, and the notion that their ad dollars might be better spent with the more stable operation.

Google also gets to deflect some of the antitrust scrutiny that has been directed its way by pointing out that a combined Yahoo-Microsoft search property has a very healthy share of the market.

What it loses: The ability to play Yahoo and Microsoft search off one another: fractured competition meant it would have been much harder for either company to make serious inroads against Google on their own. It also turns Microsoft into a credible technology threat with Microsoft's right to pick and choose the best of Yahoo's search technology developments and match them with the well-received Bing.

What's next: Business as usual, for now. Google never had any intention of ceding its search lead before this deal was announced, and while there's arguably more pressure now to live up to that promise over the next several years, it's not anything that wasn't expected in Mountain View.

Advertisers

What they get: A credible second option for their ad spending, assuming ad spending ever becomes trendy again amidst the current economic backdrop. They're also in store for a renewed pitch on the benefits of Internet display advertising, which probably still doesn't resonate on Madison Avenue but may one day start to make sense for the Internet advertiser.

What they lose: The relationships between advertisers and the two companies will likely grow very complicated over the next several months as those used to working with certain representatives transfer their business to new faces. Those problems aren't insurmountable, but they can be annoying.

What's next: If the ad market ever comes back, renewed competition in search advertising for keywords, placement, and reach.

Consumers

What they get: "Powered by Bing" search results on Yahoo pages.

What they lose: Usually, consolidation is seen as bad for consumers--take banks as an example -- because it reduces choice.

What's next: The consumer impact of this deal is not obvious, especially not at this point with so many details left to be hammered out. One could argue that if Yahoo wasn't really committed to search, consumers would see better search results over time on Bing-powered Yahoo pages. And there are indirect benefits to consumers that come along with having advertisers that aren't chained to one search engine.

But this is really about freeing up Yahoo to focus more on its other businesses, and giving Microsoft more market share to force Google into playing defense on search, which could alleviate some of the pressure Google is putting on Microsoft with things like Google Apps and Android.

It will take some time for the impact of these decisions to filter down to the consumer: assuming the government gives the deal its blessing.

Resources: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/biztech/07/30/cnet.microsoft.yahoo.deal/index.html

Microsoft-Yahoo: A Rival for Google?

2009-07-30T12:06:00.003+05:30

"The deal, if approved by antitrust regulators, could give the Internet search giant a viable competitor. Advertisers are optimistic"

So Microsoft (MSFT) got its wish. Thanks to a long-awaited deal with Yahoo! (YHOO), the software giant is poised to become the clear No. 2 in the most lucrative Internet market of them all: search. Under the agreement, Yahoo will use Microsoft technology to respond to searches made on Yahoo sites and to serve up the ads that appear alongside the results. If the deal is cleared by antitrust regulators, which is no sure thing, Microsoft will triple its search market share to nearly 30% and become the only meaningful alternative to Google, which holds 65% of the market.

The deal casts Microsoft in an unfamiliar role. The software maker that drew fire for years for its allegedly anticompetitive behavior now must prove itself an effective force for competition against Google (GOOG). Advertisers and online publishers want a viable alternative to the search titan. But analysts question whether Microsoft can avoid losing ground as it implements the complex Yahoo partnership, which could take two years, and afterward come up with real innovations in the business. "We can't afford a hiccup on this," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an interview.

There is cause for optimism. Microsoft's Bing, the search engine it launched two months ago, is a hit, having begun to gain market share. And by combining Bing's search with Yahoo's, Microsoft will get more data about Web surfers' behavior to refine its technology.

A Much Larger Audience

Just as important as answering Web surfers' queries is delivering the ads that appear next to them. That, after all, is where Microsoft will make its money. Although the company's adCenter technology works reasonably well, many advertisers haven't bothered to use it, because it couldn't deliver as many eyeballs as Google could. Since all ads on Yahoo sites now will run though adCenter, advertisers using the system will be able to reach a much larger audience than in the past. "If you're an advertiser, you're going to be able to triple your reach overnight," says Robert Murray, chief executive of digital ad agency iProspect.

Advertisers are willing to give Microsoft a chance. Some complain Google's dominance has led to a lack of innovation and excessive costs for advertisers. "We think a formidable competitor is going to put some pressure on Google's model," says Chris Paradysz, CEO of ad agency PM Digital.

Ballmer negotiated tough terms with Yahoo. While analysts had expected he would have to spend $1�billion or more to get Yahoo to throw in the towel on search, Ballmer won't pay anything up front and will only have to cover the expenses of taking over Yahoo's search operations, an amount he says is "a few hundred million." That's a bargain, especially since Microsoft once offered $48 billion for all of Yahoo.

Microsoft has long struggled against Google. Now Ballmer is gaining substantial ground in his pursuit. "Microsoft doesn't necessarily get it right the first time," says Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. "But by God, you can't beat 'em on persistence."

Resources: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_32/b4142000198919.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

Microsoft Forges 3 New Security Tools

2009-07-29T12:50:00.002+05:30

Posted by Richard Adhikari on 28 July 2009

"Organized crime, disorganized crime, petty theft, fraud -- the Web has it all, and combating it requires and ever-evolving set of tools. Microsoft offered some details on three new security projects at the Black Hat security conference. It also unveiled the progress it's made with some of the projects it announced at last year's event."

Despite the best efforts of the computer security industry, hackers are launching more attacks than ever. In turn, members of the industry are working together to combat the threat. In line with this, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) on Monday unveiled some new tools at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Nev.

These include Microsoft Security Update Guide, Project Quant, and Microsoft Office Visualization Tool.

All are available for free download.

Microsoft also issued a report on how several programs to combat hackers, announced at Black Hat last year, are shaping up.

The Growing Threat

Spam is surging to unprecedented levels, and only last week hackers launched a massive campaign to co-opt free online storage and services to their ends.

This campaign was tracked by security vendor AppRiver. Spammers were creating accounts on Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) , LiverJournal and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Groups through an automated process that broke these sites' CAPTCHA defense, according to AppRiver security analyst Troy Gill.

CAPTCHA is a test which requires anyone trying to create an account to key letters and numbers shown in a box on the page into a capture field. Up until recently, this would screen out software that automatically created accounts on public sites, because the software could not read and key in the letters and numbers, but that barrier seems to have been overcome.

Spammers want to automate the creation of accounts on public Web sites, as that speeds things up and lets them hit more people in less time.

"We're in a dire situation where 15 to 20 percent of all packets on the Internet are bad stuff," David Perry, global director of education at security firm Trend Micro, told TechNewsWorld.

"We don't just have organized cybercrime, we have every kind of crime, panoply of crime."

Microsoft's New Tools

To fight that crime, newer and more sophisticated tools are needed. One of these is Microsoft Security Update Guide, one of the three tools Microsoft released today. It outlines Microsoft's resources, processes and practices surrounding its security release process.

The second one is Project Quant. This is an open community project that lets IT develop a cost baseline for updates.

The third is Microsoft Office Visualization Tool, which helps customers better understand and deconstruct Microsoft Office-based attacks.

All three are necessary, according to Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. "Most of the market is being managed almost part-time, and the Security Update Guide would be very helpful," he said.

Qant lets users figure out what it costs to deal with a security threat and the cost of the alternatives, which may include upgrading to a newer technology. While it could lead them to select a non-Microsoft alternative, that's the risk Microsoft has to take, Enderle said.

Coping With the Problem

A paper titled "Building a Safer, More Trusted Internet Through Information Sharing," released at Black Hat, outlined Microsoft's views on security.

"Cybercrime continues to grow ... but a safer online experience can only be realized when customers, the industry and the security and privacy community work together," the paper stated.

Microsoft's Active Protections Program supplies Microsoft vulnerability information to security software customers, and a total of 45 companies around the world have joined up so far.

Microsoft Vulnerability Research, another program, shares security expertise with third-party software vendors.

However, these efforts represent only bandages, and more needs to be done, Trend Micro's (Nasdaq: TMIC) Perry said.

"Eventually, we'll have to jack up the Internet and replace it or build something over it or under it," he explained. "Every time we knock out the supports from under a structure that supports the majority of criminals, we force them to evolve. We call that civilization. My hope is that the bad guys become so civilized that they can't be the bad guys any more and become the good guys."

Resources: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Microsoft-Forges-3-New-Security-Tools-67705.html

Whatever happened to the Conficker worm?

2009-07-28T15:30:00.002+05:30

Posted by John D. Sutter on 27 July 2009

The hugely talked-about computer worm seemed poised to wreak havoc on the world's machines on April Fool's Day.

And then ... nothing much happened.

But while the doom and gloom forecast for the massive botnet -- a remotely controlled network that security experts say infected about 5 million computers -- never came to pass, Conficker is still making some worm hunters nervous.

Phillip Porras, program director at SRI International, a nonprofit research group, said Conficker infects millions of machines around the world. And the malware's author or authors could use that infected network to steal information or make money off of the compromised computer users.

"Conficker does stand out as one of those bots that is very large and has been able to sustain itself on the Web," which is rare, said Porras, who also is a member of the international group tracking Conficker.

Still, computer users, even those infected with Conficker, haven't seen much in the way of terrifying results.

After the botnet relaunched April 1, it gained further access to an army of computers that the program's author or authors could control.

The only thing the author or authors have done with that power, though, is to try to sell fake computer-security software to a relatively small segment of Conficker-stricken computers, Porras said.

The lack of a major attack has led some people in the security community to assume that the worm is basically dead.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with F-Secure, an Internet security company, says the people who created Conficker would have launched a major offensive by now if they were going to.

Hypponen, who is scheduled to speak about the Conficker botnet next week at Black Hat, a major computer security conference, said he thinks whoever made Conficker didn't mean for the worm to get so large, as the size of the botnet drew widespread attention from the security community and the media.

"This gang, they knew their stuff. They used cutting-edge technology that we had never before. ... I've been working in viruses for 20 years, and there were several things that I'd never seen at all," he said. "That, to me, would tell that perhaps this is a new group or a new gang, someone who tried it for the first time."

He added, "The more experienced attackers don't let their viruses or their worms spread this widely. They, on purpose, keep their viruses smaller in size in order to keep them from headlines."

Veteran botnet creators tend to hold the size of the malicious networks to about 2,000 to 10,000 computers to keep from being noticed, he said.

"Even if the [Conficker] gang would want to continue operations, most likely they would drop the current botnet and start something new," he said.

Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA, an information technology company, said researchers are still watching Conficker.

"It's still being tracked, so it is still active out there, but certainly the threat has been mitigated by all of the attention and focus that it has received," he said.

DeBolt said the press hyped the Conficker story because it was tied to April Fool's Day and because it made so many computers vulnerable to attack.

He said other viruses and botnets pose more serious threats.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, a computer security company, said the infected Conficker network is still growing.

"The interesting thing is, the hackers never really did much with the botnet that they created. So they created an army of lots and lots of computers ... but they've never really done anything with it," he said. "They were almost frightened off doing it."

Others disagree with that assessment.

Hypponen said Conficker was not hype; it was the largest network of its kind seen since 2003 and deserved the attention it got from the security community and from the public.

Porras said theories about the the motives of Conficker's creator are based on speculation.

The important thing, he said, is that security experts will continue to work to reduce the number of computers infected with the worm.

Resources: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/27/conficker.update/index.html

HP researchers develop browser-based darknet

2009-07-27T10:18:00.001+05:30

Posted by Tom Espiner on 25 July 2009

Two researchers for Hewlett-Packard have created a browser-based darknet, an idea that could make it easier for businesses to keep eavesdroppers from uncovering confidential information.

Darknets are encrypted peer-to-peer networks normally used to communicate files between closed groups of people. Most darknets require a certain level of technological literacy to set up and maintain, including taking care of the necessary servers. However, HP researchers Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood plan next week to demonstrate a browser-based darknet called "Veiled," which they claim requires little proficiency to set up and run.

"This will really lower the barriers to participation," Wood told ZDNet UK. "If you want to create a darknet, you can send an encrypted e-mail saying, 'Here's the URL.' When (the recipient visits) the Web site, the browser can just get (the darknet application) going."

Hoffman and Wood are scheduled to demonstrate the technology next week at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Wood said HP does not want to turn the project into a commercial product. While the company does not plan to make the source code available, the researchers do plan to open source their idea, so to speak, so other security researchers can "pick up the baton."

"HP has no desire to patent or copyright or release any code," Wood said. "Black Hat is one of the top security conferences, and we want to get this cool idea into the hands of people who are really smart."

Businesses could use browser-based darknets to set up workgroups to exchange commercially sensitive information, or to have a means of making anonymous suggestions to management, Wood said. "I like the idea of a suggestions box on the Web," he said. "It provides an anonymous way to make suggestions to your boss."

HP's darknet research came about when the researchers realized the potential of new browser technologies, according to Wood.

Browsers with HTML 5 support--such as recent versions of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer--allow files to be stored "persistently" on the client, for working on them when offline. This feature, coupled with the distributed grid-computing nature of a darknet, means files can be effectively uploaded in perpetuity, even when the initial browser has been shut down. It also makes the darknet resilient, said Wood.

"One of the benefits of a darknet is that they are distributed," said Wood. "To destroy it, you would have to take down all of the clients, because if one server gets compromised, you just shift to a different server. They can hop around."

Advances in JavaScript engines, such as Google's Chrome V8 and Mozilla's TraceMonkey, have also helped make browser-based darknets possible, according to Wood. These engines allow browser-based communications to be set up quickly and encrypted. The Veiled darknet uses RSA public key cryptography, but any cryptography will work.

"Cool advances in JavaScript technology allow encryption in the browser," said Wood. "Browsers are getting really powerful."

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10295761-83.html

PayPal tries rewiring e-commerce with new interface

2009-07-24T10:59:00.002+05:30

Posted by Josh Lowensohn on 23 July 2009

PayPal, eBay's well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.

At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company's upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.

For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps' on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who's being paid. Finally, the interface takes PayPal beyond the browser, opening it up for use on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other increasingly smart devices.

"It's truly disruptive," said PayPal CEO Scott Thompson at the event. "It puts developers in the driver's seat by allowing you to do what you want to do and (choose) how you want to get paid."

The new service will be available to 300 PayPal partners starting Thursday, with a public beta this November--just in time for PayPal X Innovate 2009, its first developer conference.

PayPal is pitching the Adaptive Payments platform to developers as a way to more easily build PayPal-powered payment options into their applications. It's also a more streamlined version of PayPal's existing program for letting businesses manage transactions between several different parties.

The new payments service is a key part in PayPal's plan to double its revenues within the next three years. Back in March, PayPal's president Scott Thompson promised as much, saying that by 2011, the company should be doing somewhere between $100-120 billion in annual payments. PayPal has also had a fire lit underneath it since Amazon rolled out its own online payments service around this time last year. It let users make online purchases using billing information that was stored on Amazon.com

PayPal isn't just central to eBay's future. It will eclipse the company's auction and commerce operations, the company says.

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said Thursday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference.

PayPal is a force to be reckoned with. On average, more than $2,000 goes through PayPal every second of each day. It has 75 million active accounts, and it's available in 190 markets and 19 different currencies.

Beta testing

Before the announcement, PayPal had been working with a handful of companies to test the new APIs (application programming interfaces). One of those companies is Microsoft, which is tapping PayPal for online payments in the Web applications built for the company's upcoming Azure platform.

At the unveiling, Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, demonstrated an application that integrated PayPal's payment and billing functionality. It took only two days to integrate it into the existing product, Khalidi said.

Khalidi said that Microsoft plans to offer a simple way to build PayPal's mechanism into hosted applications as part of Azure's full release later this year.

Microsoft probably had an easier time choosing PayPal for its payment service than some of the alternatives: Amazon Flexible Payment Services and Google Checkout both come from companies in direct competition with Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing service.

Michael Ivey, CEO and co-founder of TwitPay, also took the stage to show his company's use of the new PayPal API--specifically to let people pay multiple people at once.

"In one transaction, I'm paying four different people," he said. Before the new APIs, the service would require users to make each payment as its own transaction.

Sites already using the new API include: Webassist, GroupCard, Lottay, Rainfall of Envelopes, and MedPayOnline.com

"PayPal will help you get paid for your innovations--your business will become our business," Thompson told the developers. "We view you as our third set of customers."

New features

The new payment service has a handful of new features designed to make it easier for developers to make money with their applications and services.

Thompson said that even if developers were acting as an intermediary between the person sending the money and the recipient, they would now be able to take their cut of that transaction--just as PayPal does.

Part of getting that to happen involves a new API that lets developers create peer-to-peer and business-to-business money-sharing applications. They can now also split up payments into several transactions and let users authorize a payment after the transaction's been made. Those two mechanisms can speed purchasing, regardless of whether the buyer is ready to pay the full amount at the outset.

As part of the new platform, PayPal also is changing the way fees are charged. Application developers can choose to have the sender of the money, not just the recipient, pay the fee.

In addition, the fee rates can be changed based on the type of purchase, which should ease the chore of handling both high-value transactions and micropayments (transactions below $12) within the same application. As it stands today, PayPal currently requires sellers to have two different accounts open, one for bigger payments and another for micropayments--and each has different rates.

People use PayPal today through a Web interface, but a new API will bring PayPal to nontraditional computing platforms including mobile phones, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. That's important, given that those devices increasingly are networked and have their own ecosystems of applications. And moving to a browser can be disruptive to a user who just wants to make a quick payment.

Using PayPal that way also means that a developer must build the necessary user interface, though. PayPal didn't provide specifics on that element of the new payments system.

Overall, Thompson said the new payment system will help PayPal keep pace with changes in technology and business.

"The pace of innovation is just staggering," he said. "And the next wave of innovation is poised to move that much faster. "

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10294233-2.html

Microsoft finalizes Windows 7

2009-07-23T10:51:00.002+05:30

Posted by Ina Fried on 22 July 09

Microsoft on Wednesday said it has finalized the code, paving the way for the software to make its way onto retail shelves and new PCs in time for its October 22 launch.

The software maker is hoping the response to the new operating system differs from the lukewarm reviews and compatibility challenges that marked the release of Windows Vista, which hit the market in January 2007. In contrast to Vista, Windows 7 has been marked by the company consistently hitting its deadlines and receiving largely positive feedback along the way.

"That is our final engineering milestone in what has been a three-year journey," said Mike Angiulo, general manager for planning in the Windows unit.

Windows 7 relies on the same underpinnings as Windows Vista, but adds a lot of features aimed at making the operating system both look and perform better.

Visually, it does a better job of managing open windows through an improved taskbar and a feature that lets users peek at one particular window or see the desktop that is hidden below all of the windows. On the performance side, it boots up and shuts down faster, and can run better on Netbooks and low-end machines.

Whereas Vista suffered several delays and saw its feature set change significantly in the years it was being developed and tested, Windows 7 looks very similar to the early developer preview version first shown at last October's professional developer conference.

"It feels great to be here on time," said Tami Reller, the Windows unit's chief financial officer, who recently added marketing responsibility for Windows as well.

Microsoft plans to offer Windows 7 in a number of different versions ranging from a low-end "starter edition" to an ultra-high-end "ultimate version." However, it expects most people in the U.S. and other developed markets to run either the Home Premium or Professional editions.

The company has been conservative in talking publicly about the product, waiting until features or dates were largely set in stone before discussing them widely.

Things were also fairly calm in the "shiproom"--the conference room inside Microsoft's Redmond headquarters where the Windows team meets to discuss outstanding bugs and issues before executives ultimately sign off on that the code is final.

With Vista--which was a more major update to Windows--it was a place of contentious debates up to the last minute about which issues needed to be fixed and which could be addressed later.

"When you are going through the end game, sometimes it is really bumpy; sometimes it is not," Angiulo said. "It's been really mellow this time."

Microsoft hasn't changed the code for Windows 7 since July 13, with much of the past 10 days spent just waiting to make sure long-term testing turned up no significant issues.

"After we produce a build, all the different teams will go through their test path," said Iain MacDonald, the general manager of the Windows Server unit. Microsoft also on Wednesday finalized the server version of Windows 7--a modest update known as Windows Server 2008 R2.

The actual build that Microsoft is using as the final one--build 7600.16385--has already leaked to the Web--several days ahead of Microsoft's confirmation that it was, in fact, the final version.

One of the last notable changes to Windows 7 was the incorporation of changes that were made to Windows as part of the last monthly "Patch Tuesday" bug fixes.

Angiulo said closer cooperation with computer makers, as well as the predictable schedule, has meant that a wide variety of new PCs should be ready to launch with Windows 7 in October.

"The (PC makers) have been working on a variety of systems--super-amazing thin and mobile systems," he said. "They are also working on really inexpensive low-end machines and all-in-ones.

Microsoft is also hoping, particularly since the underpinnings are similar to Vista, that users won't find the same sorts of compatibility issues that cropped up when that operating system first hit the market.

The entire PC ecosystem--from retailers like Best Buy to computer and hardware makers--are all hoping that Windows 7 can provide a boost to what has been a rough year.

"Our customers are very excited about Windows 7," Dell's Jim Ginger said. "We know because they tell us."

Update: Here's a video from Microsoft of the formal sign-off at Redmond.

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10292369-56.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Microsoft closing YouTube rival

2009-07-22T09:52:00.002+05:30

Posted by Ina Fried on 21 July 2009

Microsoft is closing Soapbox, its onetime video-sharing rival to Google's YouTube, the company said Tuesday.

Last month, Microsoft told CNET News it planned to significantly scale back Soapbox. Now it turns out Soapbox will be scaled all the way down to nothing.

"We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature," said Microsoft Vice President and MSN leader Erik Jorgensen in an e-mail. "Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and on August 31st, the service will no longer be available."

Microsoft will continue to support MSN Video, which has 88 million unique users each month and delivers 480 million video streams each month, he said. Soapbox was responsible for less than 5 percent of MSN Video's streams.

"Though we'll be retiring the Soapbox service in its current form, we are committed to user-generated content and our other video offerings through MSN Video," Jorgensen said. "We also plan to add functionality into MSN Video to easily enable bloggers and citizen journalists to upload content to share with our MSN users. Video remains an important and growing area within our overall content strategy."

Microsoft launched soapbox in 2006, but it never caught on as widely as YouTube. Google's in-house offering, Google Video, didn't either, but Google has chosen to support it.

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10292031-75.html

Microsoft Makes Apple Eat Humble Apple Pie

2009-07-21T13:14:00.002+05:30

Posted by Rob Enderle 20 July 2009

The very idea of Apple beseeching Microsoft to lighten up on its laptop hunter ad campaign is hard to swallow. That's apparently what happened, though, and if Microsoft is reacting with glee, it's understandable. After all, Apple is the company that knows how to brilliantly market its brand and devastate the competition while it's at it, right.

There's generally more attention on the fight between Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) this decade than on the fight between Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Microsoft. That's because Google seems to represent the future, while Apple and Microsoft are often seen as anachronisms from a prior age.

However, these two clearly aren't ready for the tech old folks home yet -- both have done some amazing things over the last few years. The difference is that Apple, because it's marketing-driven, typically gets more credit for its activities than Microsoft does. That has changed recently, and Microsoft has been kicking a little Apple buttusky. That's what I'll focus on here.

I'll close with my product of the week: a Linux-based electronic office in a box from Sutus. It gives a small company almost everything it needs, from phones to email.

Apple's Unique Advantage

Apple is a marketing-driven company -- something unique in the technology segment -- while Microsoft has largely been engineering-driven. During the 90s, this was actually more of an Apple liability than an asset, because Apple was being run by people who clearly didn't get Apple's unique capability. Steve Jobs returned Apple to its roots, and the company came back.

What makes a marketing-driven company is that products are created in line with marketing programs. In effect, they are designed to easily fit marketing messages and campaigns. In Apple's unique case, it is Steve Jobs himself who assures this link; he starts thinking about how he will introduce a new product right from its conception. This is part of what creates the magic when he presents something like an iPhone. His passion has helped define the product, and his pride in the result comes through when he introduces it.

I've recently been referring to him as the "Artisan CEO," and I believe that the tech market would benefit if more CEOs took this kind of personal interest in their products and could, with similar pride, introduce, protect and promote them.

For Apple, marketing is strategic, and top marketing people would like to have Apple on their resume. They get a lot of support, and they get to work with products that are relatively easy to market well.

Microsoft's Typical Problem

Microsoft -- and Google has also become a poster child for this -- is an engineering-driven company. This means that products are built based on requirements that are largely set by the engineering teams building them. They do use customer information, but they're generally far removed from those customers, and the information they're working from is often inaccurate or untimely. Their goal is to get the product out the door. Only after the product is crafted does marketing, which is often led by engineers, assume responsibility for selling it. It then has to scramble to figure out how to present and promote the offering.

CEOs at technology-driven companies tend to focus on major investors, large customers, and operations; they delegate the product responsibilities to others. They're often viewed as generic. It isn't uncommon to see engineering-driven firms hire their CEOs from completely different industries -- something Apple did with John Sculley with bad results -- because the role is perceived to be more management than product-related.

This tends to result in very complex products that are often incomplete from a customer perspective -- and very difficult to market. Given that marketing teams are typically neither very experienced, nor very well supported, nor particularly strategic, great marketing campaigns for wonderful products are few and far between. This is largely why Apple has been kicking Microsoft butt for much of the time since Vista launched.

Microsoft Strikes Back

However, anyone you pound on long enough will eventually respond, and Microsoft eventually did. Microsoft brought marketing experts on board, hired one of the most creative advertising teams in the world, and created the "I'm a PC" ad campaign.

This happened during a time when Steve Jobs was incapacitated. While Apple did respond to the campaign, its response wasn't particularly effective, and Microsoft started taking share back. More importantly, Microsoft's image started to improve, and it started to do damage to Apple's image by painting that company as elitist and priced out of the market.

This was allegedly capped by a whiny call from Apple's legal department pleading with Microsoft to change its ads because Apple had dropped its prices by a measly US$100 in response to its sharp drop in market share. Granted, the news of this call came from Microsoft's own COO Kevin Turner. However, the fact that Microsoft even mentioned this is unusual, while it's easy to picture Steve Jobs on stage relishing such a call from Microsoft, had the companies' positions been reversed. Turnabout is fair play.

The success Microsoft's campaign is enjoying -- and the very high visibility of this success -- may well change Redmond for the better in one fundamental way. It should make marketing more strategic, which means that Microsoft will be able to attract better people -- and that marketing will have more say regarding what and when products come out the door, resulting in more complete, elegant (simple) products.

Wrapping Up

I don't expect this change in marketing focus will happen overnight for Microsoft, but I do think this is a lesson most tech companies should take to heart. Done right, as Apple and now Microsoft have demonstrated, marketing can substantially improve margins, increase market share, and help create products the firm, the firm's stockholders, and the firm's customers can be proud of and lust for.

One final thought: If Steve Jobs is truly back, it won't be long before Apple uses a more capable competitive attack, but Microsoft has shown it may now be able to go toe-to-toe with him. Kevin Turner may turn out to be its secret weapon, and he's ex-Wal-Mart. This time, it could be a battle royal that results in better products that are nicely marketed from both companies. And that, my friends, would be a very good thing.

Product of the Week: Sutus Business Central 200

I'm in a nationally syndicated TV show called Tech Close Up, and I do a tech review segment called "Fast Forward." As a result, I get to review a lot of products and pick the ones that stand out to be in the show. One of the more interesting was from Sutus and what made it interesting was that it seemed to combine in a small box the critical components to a business.

Designed for offices with up to 20 people, this product provides advanced VoIP and POTS (plain old telephone service) with advanced features, an internal file server, a Web server, firewall, wireless router, access point, VPN, backup server and email with calendar -- all in one box with a starting price of around $2,200.

Based on Linux done right (you don't see the complexities of the OS, you interface with an easy to use custom interface) for small business, this one product could actually supply most of the needs for the average fledgling company at an affordable price.

Resources: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Microsoft-Makes-Apple-Eat-Humble-Apple-Pie-67628.html

Oracle raises software prices (again)

2009-07-20T12:42:00.001+05:30

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on 18 July 2009

One year after raising many prices by 20 percent or more, Oracle is once again raising prices--by 40 percent for certain products.

Interestingly, the products receiving the big price bumps are not the core database or application servers, but instead the administrative tools used for monitoring and compliance.

I'd certainly like to say this is price gouging, but really it is just smart business. Oracle knows database sales can't grow forever and that customers will sooner or later need to have additional tooling. Strategically, it's much smarter to price non-core components higher to ensure consistent adoption and cash flow of the primary product line.

This does introduce a few strategy questions related to the impending Sun acquisition--namely, how does Oracle price MySQL and its related packages, and will the existing tools work with MySQL or will customers running both be forced to buy two sets of tools? And will MySQL users be comfortable with Oracle changing pricing policies?

Pricing changes are common across all software companies, but open-source companies like MySQL have generally stuck to simple models to keep the costs of sales low and volumes high.

The big question is if Oracle owning MySQL helps customers. There are no doubt scenarios in which it will be convenient to buy and be supported from one source (the mythical "one throat to choke"), but it's hard to see how the hands-on approach of Oracle sales jives with MySQL's adoption to sales conversion process.

As a side note, if you think the GPL and open-source licensing is confusing, take a gander at Oracle's Application Licensing Table (PDF), which seems straightforward until you need to use a non-vanilla installation.

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10290187-62.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Belgian Tax Watchdogs Tracking Facebook, Netlog Updates

2009-07-19T13:57:00.001+05:30

Posted by Robin Wauters on July 18, 2009

Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is keeping tabs on citizens (article in Dutch) via their Facebook and Netlog profiles and their activities on eBay and other social networking sites.

Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos and videos from users as proof in case of a dispute, but apparently your lifestyle as you depict it online can prompt an investigation when it doesn’t seem to add up to what your official income is.

The local version of the IRS, the BBI, has already admitted that it actively tracks activity from citizens online to sniff out tax avoiders. To quote director Karel Anthonissen: “It’s technically possible, it’s legal, and it’s happening.”

Just in case they read blogs too: I’m getting paid to write this article and I will make sure to report the income, mr. Anthonissen! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to jump in my Maserati and drive to our second house on the coast.

Resources: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/18/belgian-tax-watchdogs-tracking-facebook-netlog-updates/

How to Keep XP Running in a Windows 7 World

2009-07-18T10:41:00.005+05:30

Posted by Jon Prange 17 July 09

"Operating system migration season begins this fall, with the release of Windows 7. However, there's no need for most companies to be leading the bandwagon. If you're running XP throughout your organization and you're still pretty well satisfied with it, here are some tips for keeping it in top-notch shape for months or even years to come."

With the official Oct. 22 release of Windows 7 approaching -- and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) recent announcement that business customers can start placing orders as early as September 7 -- many organizations are now facing a major decision about what to do with their PC operating system: upgrade it for all users, phase in an upgrade, or stay with their current OS.

Migrating poses challenges from equipment upgrades, to installing and configuring the new OS, to moving user data and settings. Many organizations will instead choose to stay with their current OS, which is most likely Windows XP. This alleviates the cost of upgrades, but it introduces its own share of maintenance challenges.

The good news, however, is that these challenges can be overcome with a proper maintenance plan. Follow these tips to keep your XP platform running at peak performance, and you'll have the foundation in place to squeeze every last dollar out of your XP investment.

Patch regularly. A good patch management strategy can reduce risks, costs and complexity within the IT environment. Patch management can be manual or automated, depending on how much control you want to exercise over the process. As part of its weekly schedule, Microsoft will continue to provide critical system patches for XP (with SP2) and Office 2003 until 2014. It is important to note that XP must have Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later in order to receive these system patches.

Update and test gold images. "Gold" system images should be created for all systems. These images should have all OS and application updates applied regularly. Once the images are updated, a complete test should be performed. Document an associated test plan that encompasses both the OS and applications.

Ensure software compatibility. Before downloading and installing new software, research its compatibility and known issues with the OS. Incompatible software could have an adverse impact on other components within the IT infrastructure and should be avoided.

Ensure document compatibility. It's important to manage the compatibility of Microsoft Office documents, across versions, for both internal and external users (clients, vendors, partners, etc.). Office compatibility packs allow legacy users to open/view/edit files from newer versions of the program. Be aware, however, that certain features and functionality might not be supported. Without compatibility packs, legacy users would constantly have to tell users of newer versions that they couldn't open their files.

Upgrade memory. Most XP platforms ship with 1 GB to 2 GB of memory. However, you can significantly improve system performance by upgrading to 3 GB or 4 GB. Note however, that upgrading to 4 GB of RAM on a 32-bit XP system will provide access to just 3.39 GB due to resource limitations. (It's a little better in Vista 32-bit, which provides access to 3.54 GB). In the future, consider using 64-bit, because it'll give you full memory access.

Optimize disk drive space. Following memory upgrades, managing disk usage is the second best way to increase performance. The easiest method is to uninstall unnecessary applications and remove the Windows "junk" files that are not needed. XP's System Restore (Control Panel » System » System Restore tab), by default, uses 12 percent of the total space on each disk drive partition to save restore point files and settings. Another step is to perform a disk cleanup by using the Windows built-in Disk Cleanup tool (Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Disk Cleanup) to identify and clean up files from sources like Internet caches and temporary files. After removing all of these files, the last step is to defragment the disk drives (Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Disk Defragmenter).

Load and maintain external drivers. XP has less built-in driver support, so organizations have to load external drivers for most hardware. These external drivers should be maintained with regular updates. However, be aware that many future hardware devices will not be supported on legacy operating systems.

Use the power of the Web wisely. With the ever-increasing availability of blogs, wikis, knowledgebases, etc., many issues can be researched and resolved by tapping online resources. Be specific in your searching, though, because the proper resolution is often found only by searching for the exact error message.

Download tips and tricks while they're available. Many of the current IT blogs and other knowledgebases will start to shift their focus toward Windows 7, which could make it difficult to find new information about XP. It's a good idea to search and save online information to your hard drive now, when it's easily found.

Implement Antispyware. Later versions of the Windows OS (Windows Vista and Windows 7) have Windows Defender, a built-in antispyware program. This same program is available as a free download, and it's recommended for installation on the XP OS. It is also a best practice to have more than one piece of antispyware on your PC. Increase your safety and install Lavasoft's Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy.

By maintaining XP for the long haul, organizations benefit from having a proven OS. A good maintenance plan can help keep it running smoothly, delaying extra costs and hassles until migration is absolutely necessary, which could be several years down the road if you follow the advice here.

Resources: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/How-to-Keep-XP-Running-in-a-Windows-7-World-67618.html

Could moon landings have been faked? Some still think so

2009-07-18T10:36:00.002+05:30

Posted by Brandon Griggs on 17 July 09

It captivated millions of people around the world for eight days in the summer of 1969. It brought glory to the embattled U.S. space program and inspired beliefs that anything was possible.

It's arguably the greatest technological feat of the 20th century.

And to some, it was all a lie.

Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon, a small cult of conspiracy theorists maintains the historic event -- and the five subsequent Apollo moon landings -- were staged. These people believe NASA fabricated the landings to trump their Soviet rivals and fulfill President Kennedy's goal of ferrying humans safely to and from the moon by the end of the 1960s.

"I do know the moon landings were faked," said crusading filmmaker Bart Sibrel, whose aggressive interview tactics once provoked Aldrin to punch him in the face. "I'd bet my life on it."

Sibrel may seem crazy, but he has company. A 1999 Gallup poll found that a scant 6 percent of Americans doubted the Apollo 11 moon landing happened, and there is anecdotal evidence that the ranks of such conspiracy theorists, fueled by innuendo-filled documentaries and the Internet, are growing.

Twenty-five percent of respondents to a survey in the British magazine Engineering & Technology said they do not believe humans landed on the moon. A handful of Web sites and blogs circulate suspicions about NASA's "hoax."

And a Google search this week for "Apollo moon landing hoax" yielded more than 1.5 billion results.

"We love conspiracies," said Roger Launius, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. "Going to the moon is hard to understand. And it's easier for some people to accept the answer that, 'Well, maybe we didn't go to the moon.' A lot of it is naivete."

Conspiracy theories about the Apollo missions began not long after the last astronaut returned from the moon in 1972. Bill Kaysing, a technical writer for Rocketdyne, which built rocket engines for NASA's Apollo program, published a 1974 book, "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle."

In the book and elsewhere, Kaysing argued that NASA lacked the technology in 1969 to land humans safely on the moon, that the Apollo astronauts would have been poisoned by passing through the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the Earth and that NASA's photos from the moon contained suspicious anomalies.

Kaysing theorized NASA sent the Apollo 11 astronauts up in a rocket until it was out of sight, then transferred the lunar capsule and its three passengers to a military cargo plane that dropped the capsule eight days later in the Pacific, where it was recovered. In the meantime, he believed, NASA officials filmed the "moon landing" at Area 51, the high-security military base in the Nevada desert, and brainwashed the astronauts to ensure their cooperation.

Some believe Kaysing's theories inspired the 1978 movie "Capricorn One," in which NASA fakes a Mars landing on a remote military base, then goes to desperate lengths to cover it up. Others insist NASA recruited director Stanley Kubrick, hot off "2001: A Space Odyssey," to film the "faked" moon landings.

Oh, and those moon rocks? Lunar meteorites from Antarctica.

Decades later, Kaysing's beliefs formed the foundation for "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" a sensational 2001 Fox TV documentary that spotted eerie "inconsistencies" in NASA's Apollo images and TV footage.

Among them: no blast craters are visible under the landing modules; shadows intersect instead of running parallel, suggesting the presence of an unnatural light source; and a planted American flag appears to ripple in a breeze although there's no wind on the moon.

The hour-long special sparked such interest in the topic that NASA took the unusual step of issuing a news release and posting a point-by-point rebuttal on its Web site. The press release began: "Yes. Astronauts did land on the moon."

In various documents, NASA has countered that the Apollo astronauts passed through the Van Allen belts too quickly to be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation; that the module's descent engines weren't powerful enough to leave a blast crater; that the shadows in photos were distorted by wide-angle lenses and sloping lunar terrain; and that the Apollo flags had horizontal support bars that made the flags swing.

Kaysing died in 2005, but not before grabbing the attention of Sibrel, a Nashville, Tennessee, filmmaker who has since become the most visible proponent of the Apollo hoax theories. With funding from an anonymous donor, Sibrel wrote and directed a 47-minute documentary in 2001 that reiterated many of the now-familiar hoax arguments.

Critics of moon-landing hoax theorists, and there are many, say it would be impossible for tens of thousands of NASA employees and Apollo contractors to keep such a whopping secret for almost four decades.

But Sibrel believes the Apollo program was so compartmentalized that only its astronauts and a handful of high-level NASA officials knew the entire story. Sibrel spent years ambushing Apollo astronauts and insisting they swear on a Bible before his cameras that they walked on the moon.

"When someone has gotten away with a crime, in my opinion, they deserve to be ambushed," Sibrel said. "I'm a journalist trying to get at the truth."

In an episode made infamous on YouTube, Sibrel confronted Aldrin in 2002 and called him "a coward, a liar and a thief." Aldrin, then 72, socked the thirtysomething Sibrel in the face, knocking him backwards.

"I don't want to call attention to the individuals who are trying to promote and shuffle off this hoax on people," Aldrin told CNN in a recent interview. "I feel sorry for the gullible people who're going to go along with them. I guess it's just natural human reaction to want to be a part of 'knowing something that somebody doesn't know.' But it's misguided. It's just a shame."

It's been 37 years since the last Apollo moon mission, and tens of millions of younger Americans have no memories of watching the moon landings live. A 2005-2006 poll by Mary Lynne Dittmar, a space consultant based in Houston, Texas, found that more than a quarter of Americans 18 to 25 expressed some doubt that humans set foot on the moon.

"As the number of people who were not yet born at the time of the Apollo program increases, the number of questions [about the moon landings] also may increase," NASA said in a statement. "Conspiracy theories are always difficult to refute because of the impossibility of proving a negative."

Launius, the National Air and Space Museum curator, believes Apollo conspiracy theories resonate with people who are disengaged from society and distrustful of government. He also believes their numbers are overblown.

"These diehards are really vocal, but they're really tiny," he said.

But Stuart Robbins, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Colorado who gives lectures defending NASA from Apollo hoax theorists, believes their influence can be harmful.

"If people don't think we were able to go to the moon, then they don't believe in the ingenuity of human achievement," he said. "Going to the moon and returning astronauts safely back to Earth is arguably one of the most profound achievements in human history, and so when people simply believe it was a hoax, they lose out on that shared experience and doubt what humans can do."

In its information campaign against Apollo's "debunkers," NASA may have a potent ace up its sleeve, however. Its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is now circling the moon with powerful cameras, snapping crisp pictures that could reveal Apollo 11's Eagle lander squatting on the moon's surface.

Then again, conspiracy theorists may just say NASA doctored the photos.

"Will the LRO's incredibly high-resolution images of the lunar surface, including, eventually, the Apollo landing sites, finally quell the lunacy of the Moon Hoax believers? Obviously it won't," writes astronomer Phil Plait in his blog on Discover magazine's Web site. "These true believers don't live in an evidence-based world."

Resources: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/07/17/moon.landing.hoax/index.html

Google Wants You To Know A Google Docs Redesign Is Coming (I Wonder Why)

2009-07-17T10:44:00.001+05:30

Posted by MG Siegler on July 16, 2009

On the Google Docs blog today, the company took the time to make a non-announcement. Basically, there’s a bunch of words that bury the real story: That Google Docs will soon be launching a “brand new shiny interface.”

Hmmm. I wonder why. Obviously, earlier this week Microsoft laid out its plans for Office 2010, which includes a web-based component meant to take on Google Docs. But once again, there is nothing to actually see right now from Google, instead this is a pre-announcement to let users know that they may be seeing wonky elements over the next few weeks as they tweak things on the fly.

Not surprisingly, the sharing of documents will be a key element to this redesign. Despite it being perhaps the key element of Google Docs, sharing items with others is simply not that intuitive right now. Here’s what Google has in mind for the future:

One thing you’ll probably notice in the next few days is that the “Shared with…” list in the left hand pane will go away. But don’t worry, you can still use Search to do the same thing. Just click on “Search Options” and type the user’s name into the “Shared with:” box. If this is a search you’ll do over and over again, you can click “Save this search” so it will be easily accessible in “Saved Searches”.

Another thing you’ll see is the new Sharing Menu. We feel this is a big improvement over the old one; we’ve moved all the sharing functionality into this one dialog, so now you can completely manage sharing without having to leave the Docs list.

Other than that, Google is adding a bunch of new search operators (which only the hardcore users will care about). And it concludes the post with “They [the new features] will be followed shortly by the new interface and a number of pretty exciting features we have in the pipe.”

Resources: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/google-wants-you-to-know-a-google-docs-redesign-is-coming-i-wonder-why/

Google vs. Microsoft: What you need to know

2009-07-16T12:12:00.001+05:30

Posted by Ryan Singel on 15 July 09

In less than a week, Google announced an operating system to compete with Windows, while Microsoft announced that Office 10 will include free, online versions of its four most popular software programs -- a shot at Google's suite of web-based office applications.

The fight between Microsoft and Google is over who'll be seen as the world's most important tech company.

And not more than a month and a half ago, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine Bing, which it hopes will steal market share from Google and finally make it real money online.

From the news of it, it's a full-blown tech battle, complete with behind-the-scenes machinations to sic government regulators on each other.

It is, however, not a death match -- it's more of an fight to see who will be the King of Technology, since both companies pull in their billions through completely different siphons and are unlikely to severely wound one another any time soon.

Google pulled in $22 billion in revenue in 2008, 97 percent of which came tiny text ads bought by the keyword and placed next to search results or on pages around the web. Google makes a negligible amount of money bundling its online apps for businesses, charging $50 a head annually -- but mostly it just gives its online text editor, email and spreadsheet programs away.

By contrast, Microsoft sold $14.3 billion worth of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and other business applications over the last nine months, making a profit of $9.3 billion. It made a further $16 billion in revenue in 2008 through sales of its operating systems, which range from XP installations on netbooks, to Vista, to Windows Mobile to its server software.

Google now plans its own range of operating systems, starting with Android, an open-source OS for small devices like smartphones, and Chrome OS, a browser-focused, open-source OS that will run on notebooks and desktops.

Clearly top executives at each company look over at the others' pots of gold and dream of ways to steal them, or at least make it harder for the other guy to make money.

In fact, they even dislike each other enough to spend money to make the other one lose revenue -- take for example, Microsoft's behind-the-scenes campaign to scuttle last year's proposed Google-Yahoo advertising deal or its ongoing attempts to derail the Google Book Search settlement.

But in reality, the competition is really about creating universes or ecosystems that it hopes consumers will want to live their technology lives inside. And it's about ego -- a fight to be recognized as the world's most important technology company.

Microsoft would love for everyone in the world to be using its Internet Explorer browser to search through Bing to find a story from its MSN portal to email via Hotmail or Outlook to a friend. Add in a smartphone running Windows Mobile and an Xbox in the living room for the kids, and you have a Microsoft family. And though it is much joked about, Microsoft is the dominant platform for software developers of all types, whether they are making small business software, massive online role-playing games or photo-editing utilities.

Google's ecosystem looks different. It starts with a Google Chrome browser (oddly running only on Windows) with a default homepage set to Google News or a customized Google homepage. From there you might go to Gmail and then click on a Word document sent to you as an attachment which Google will quickly -- and safely -- open for you in its online word processor.

But most importantly, Google wants you to search and travel around the web, hitting web pages that run Google-served ads and Google tracking cookies. You might think that Google is a really cool company to give away all this free technology, while never thinking about the persistent and silent data collection Google is undertaking to profile you in order to deliver you to advertisers for a premium.

So how do the two stack up in four key areas of competition?

Browsers: Internet Explorer in all its variations still retains close to 70 percent of the market (depending on who is counting and how). That dominance remains, even though Microsoft's latest offering IE8 lags behind all the other major browsers in features and advanced web capabilities.

Firefox, Opera, and Apple's Safari have all driven browser innovation over the last five years, but most people have not been convinced to leave IE behind, despite other alternatives being safer and more advanced. Why does it matter? Well, IE installations come with a default home page, don't they?

Google's Chrome browser, on the other hand, is a handsome, whiz-kid of a browser. It's sleek and nimble, and it revolutionizes how tabs are handled. The address bar is the search box (Google as default, naturally). Each website opened runs as its own browser instance and has very low permissions to read and write to files. The sandboxing of tabs means that if a single website hangs or crashes, the rest are unaffected. Meanwhile, lower permissions make it harder for a hacker to bust into your computer through your browser.

Chrome also has less than 2 percent of the browser market share.

Online Search: Google's name now means search to most users. Google's search engine means money to Google. In June, it delivered 78.5 percent of search results pages delivered to U.S. web users. In the first three months of 2009, Google pulled in $5.2 billion in revenue, a majority of which came from AdWords, an auction-based service that triggers ads based on the keywords in a search query.

Microsoft recently debuted Bing, a new search engine it hoped would fare well in comparison to Google. It's got some fine innovations, and shows the company is thinking very hard about better ways to present information to users by finding ways to synthesize data, rather than just retrieving links. Still, despite these improvements, a $100 million ad campaign, and generous press coverage that treats Bing like an underdog, Bing gained only a point in June to get Microsoft 8.2 percent of all searches.

Operating Systems: Microsoft has been making operating systems since 1979 and has spent 28 years perfecting MS-DOS and Windows NT, the frameworks that Windows have been built around. Microsoft is estimated to run on about 90 percent of all laptops and desktops in the world. By copying its competitors' best features, leveraging questionable licensing arrangements and using its base of accustomed users to buy it time against innovators, Microsoft has held on to its lead in the OS market for almost 30 years. That's despite challenges from Digital Research, Apple and IBM.

Microsoft's newest version, Windows 7, will be available in the fall. Early reviews say the OS boots quickly and sleeps fast, and avoids much of the confusing interface decisions that have made many dislike Vista, the successor to Windows XP. Microsoft also dominates in the business world, where nearly every medium to large company standardizes around Microsoft Office. Microsoft is also at work on version 6 of its operating system for handheld devices, which it first launched in 2000.

Its OS advantages are immense. It has millions of users who know nothing else and who like Windows. There are millions who are attached to games or the thousands of desktop apps that are only available on Windows. Thousands of devices just plug in and work on its hardware. And familiarity with Microsoft software is a requirement for a huge number of office jobs.

By contrast, Google first stepped into the OS game in 2007 when it announced its Android operating system for small devices. Google estimates that some 18 phone models will be running its system by the end of the year. Last week, Google announced, but did not show off, a new OS to compete with Windows, dubbing it Chrome OS.

That name signifies that Google's OS will be for the web and browser-based. It hopes to convince developers to write software that runs inside a browser, instead of on top of the OS as developers for Windows and Apples' OS X do. It will also let web developers extend the power of their websites by expanding the capabilities of the browser, allowing websites to lean on the browser for storage and processing help.

Advertising: Google is largely powered by its innovative auction-based text ads on its own site, but then expanded into serving ads on other people's sites with the Adsense program. It bought the ad-serving and behavioral-profiling giant Doubleclick in 2007 for more than $3 billion, and has ventured into mobile, print, radio and television ads.

Microsoft has struggled to replicate Google's online advertising success. Despite owning MSN.com -- a portal that is second only to Yahoo as a destination -- Microsoft has not made money on the internet. To turbocharge its ad-delivery technology, it paid more than $6 billion in cash in 2007 for aQuantive, a full-service online advertising concern.

Instead, Microsoft's online ad business lost $1.2 billion in 2008, double what it lost in 2007. The company expects 2009 revenues to be higher than the $3.2 billion it took in last year, but has not said it would make a profit.

Contrary to what some might have you believe, the benefits of the Google-Microsoft competition are immense.

Microsoft had largely grown complacent until Google came along to shake up categories. Gmail's massive online storage capability and fancy programming made Microsoft hustle to upgrade its popular, though not user-friendly, web e-mail service. Google Maps led to Microsoft's Live Maps, which now bests Google's efforts in some ways.

Google has been winning the fight for the last few years, showing that it is still nimbler than the software giant from the Northwest. But the pendulum may be slowing, or even poised to swing the other way. With the innovations in Bing and the promise that Microsoft's online Office offerings will be free and more fully featured than the Google equivalent, Microsoft is taking on Google where it matters for users: on the field of innovation.

Resources: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/15/google.microsoft.battle/index.html

In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents

2009-07-15T13:28:00.002+05:30

Posted by Michael Arrington on July 14, 2009
From: techcrunch

Here’s a dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.

We’ve spent most of the evening reading these documents. The vast majority of them are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting. An example - there are a number of documents showing the names of people who interviewed at Twitter for various senior level positions so publishing their names would obviously be distressing for them. Most of these people remain in their current jobs. Some documents show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices. We’re not going to post any of those documents.

But we are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings. We’re also going to post the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May, mostly because it’s awesome.

There is clearly an ethical line here that we don’t want to cross, and the vast majority of these documents aren’t going to be published, at least by us. But a few of the documents have so much news value that we think it’s appropriate to publish them.

Windows 7, Office 2010, Google Chrome OS: Never a Dull Tech Moment

2009-07-14T12:04:00.001+05:30

Posted by Todd R. Weiss on 13 July 09
From: pcworld

Microsoft is launching Windows 7, Google has fired back with Chrome OS, and today Microsoft is turning up the volume on Office 2010. That's a lot to juggle, and soon you'll be asking yourself: Can I afford to upgrade or can I afford not to upgrade?

Let's first review what's coming down the pike and when. It starts with the official scheduled release of the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system on October 22.

That's a Big Change Right There

Windows 7 has been getting many accolades from beta testers and reviewers, but that's pretty easy when it's being compared to Microsoft Vista, which was disappointing for many due to wide-ranging hardware and software incompatibilities and other problems, such as software bugs. Lots of users couldn't make their favorite programs, printers, and other peripheral devices work with Vista, highlighting glaring shortcomings.

Then there's the anticipated release of Microsoft's new Office 2010 suites in the first half of next year, with the usual new features and bells and whistles. Users often love the included new features, but do they really need them and the learning curves that are required?

And as if that's not enough change for now, Google last week unveiled its plans for its new Google Chrome OS operating system, aimed initially at netbook-sized computers, for release by the end of 2010.

So what's a tech-loving consumer to do? Are you the upgrading kind? That's going to be a key question.

And if you are, does that mean you'll buy a copy of the new Windows 7 and install it yourself or will you wait and buy a new computer that already has it loaded so you don't have to deal with the install?

And, even more importantly, will you take the plunge immediately upon its release or will you wait a bit to see how it all shakes out for others?

Ah, isn't a new Windows operating system release fun?

Here are Some Options for You.

If you are getting a stomach ache just thinking about doing the upgrade to Windows 7 by yourself on your present computer, then maybe you should consider replacing your machine. The upgrade itself is usually not a big problem, but there are plenty of landmines out there and you never really know what could happen.

The next issue is timing -- do you want to buy it right away on October 22 or do you want to wait to see how others are faring with it and read the first news reports from new users?

I think that's always a good idea.

Back in August 1995, when we were still using Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and DOS 5.22 on our early Intel Pentium-running computers, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was a huge splash and millions of people filled stores at midnight to try to be first in line for a copy. Talk about hoopla!

I admit, I was there, too, watching the chaos and feeling the excitement in the air.

But I didn't buy it and install it until six months went by; just to be sure it was worthwhile. By then, I was prepared, psyched, and the upgrade went beautifully. That was definitely a worthwhile move up the Windows food chain.

The same sort of upgrade worry has surrounded the release of every new Windows version. It happened again with the upgrade from Windows 98 (and the widely-despised Windows Me) to Windows XP, though that was an absolutely worthwhile upgrade to perhaps what has been the best Windows operating system built so far for consumers.

In the last couple years, some people have been so averse to using Vista that they've gone to extremes to find computers they can still buy that run Windows XP.

But Will You Pay for These Innovations?

So, what are you thinking about the upcoming releases of Windows 7, Office 2010, and Google Chrome OS?

Obviously, the money issue comes into play for Windows 7 and Office 2010, because consumers like you will have to decide if the products are worth the money to buy them.

Chrome OS is open source and will have free versions when it eventually is ready, so there's no money issue there.

I guess I just wonder, with all the economic uncertainly that lingers and people worrying about their jobs, houses, bank accounts and college funds, where do the newest Windows programs rank up on their scales of importance?

For the zaniest tech-lovers, they'll buy it right away and play with it.

What about the rest of you?

Tell us what you are thinking.

Will you be there at a midnight Windows 7 launch in your local Best Buy or Staples store, waiting to bring all of that exciting shrink-wrapped code home for your computer? Or will you wait another year to see what Google Chrome OS might be able to do for you in the future?

Push Notifications On The iPhone Are Great, But…

2009-07-13T11:47:00.000+05:30

Posted by MG Siegler on July 12, 2009
From: techcrunch

After being scarce for the first couple of weeks following the new iPhone 3.0 software rolling out, apps with Push Notifications are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And that’s great, because the feature is really useful. To a point.

The issue I’m noticing now is that if you have too many apps with Push Notifications turned on, the whole system becomes a lot less useful. You see, Push Notifications are basically Apple’s way to get around allowing third-party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. So apps can now send these push messages to your phone to let you know if there’s some kind of message or update that you should open an app for. But if you have a lot of push messages coming in, I’m finding that you either have to pull out your phone every couple minutes, or risk still missing notifications that you probably want to see.

The problem is that the Push Notification message indicators are not built for heavy use. If you have multiple push messages coming in to you phone, only the latest one will be shown on the screen. And even when you unlock your phone, it’s hard to tell which push messages have come in. Though you can set a badge on app icons to let you know there is a message, if it was overridden by another message, you are forced to open the app to figure out what it was.

And let’s be clear: It’s not like I’m using Push on a ton of applications. I’m basically only using it (regularly) on three right now: Foursquare (a location-based social network [iTunes Link]), GPush (which does push for Gmail, which sadly isn’t approved in the App Store, yet), and Boxcar (which does Twitter @replies and DMs [iTunes Link]). At one point, I had it on for AIM too, but that got to be too much to handle in and of itself.

Between just those three, I’m getting pinged every few minutes during the regular hours of the day (if not more often during peak hours). And while that’s fine, because I can change things like the audio notifications, I want to be able to see a full list of what has come in since I last looked at my phone. Google’s Android platform handles this in a much nicer way, with a top drop-down menu that breaks up your notifications (which are also a bit different since applications can run in the background on Android). Of course, that is only after you unlock your phone, but still, that would be much more ideal than the current iPhone method.

But better would be some sort of way to break up these messages when you still have the phone locked. I’m thinking first of all maybe breaking up Push Notifications, text messages and calls by colors, and displaying them in a list on the screen. Then then having some way to further break down Push Notifications on that screen, maybe placing the app icon next to each and saying something like (4) new Foursquare messages, like Apple currently does for text messages.

This guy did a nice mock-up last year, but that was before Push Notifications were even available. And Apple has been thinking about this too, according to its patents. A system that is something like this (right) is needed even more now.

Naturally, this should all be user-adjustable in the settings, but it seems like an easy enough thing to do. Because as many people are shortly going to find out, the current way of handling Push Notifications just isn’t cutting it unless you’re only using one app that gets messages once every few hours. And with more Push-capable apps coming everyday, the problem is only going to get worse.

Microsoft's Office head talks Google and more

2009-07-13T11:43:00.000+05:30

Posted by Ina Fried on 10 July

From: cnet

Stephen Elop is convinced that even in a world of free, browser-based productivity software, consumers and businesses will continue to pay for Office.

Microsoft will bow to reality with Office 2010, adding browser-based versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote. But, in an interview this week, the head of Microsoft's Business Division says that there is still plenty of life in the full version.

"At the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is not just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device," Elop said. "So, it's the best productivity experience across the PC, the mobile phone, and the browser."

At its worldwide Partner Conference on Monday, Microsoft will give people a feel for how this works and is expected to start broader testing of the first piece--the desktop applications.

As for Google, Elop said that most businesses still think of Google as a search company or are just kicking the tires on Google Docs. He shrugged off the fact that Google this week brought the products out of beta.

"I've heard that the word was dropped," Elop said. "I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name."

He also said it is too soon to have an opinion on Google's just-announced Chrome OS.

"We haven't seen it," he said. "We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog."

In a wide-ranging interview, Elop shared more views on Google as well as his perspectives on Office, business software, and the broader economy.

What are customers asking for from Office? What's the most common thing that large businesses ask you for when you're talking to them about Office?
Elop: You know, when you boil it all down, everything we do essentially in the division, when you're with a CEO or a CIO or whatever the case may be, the base conversation is about productivity. It's about how can you help me solve this problem, and that problem often is about the productivity of some aspect of their business, of something they're trying to achieve competitively, or whatever.

Certainly in today's economic setting, cost savings comes into it. How can you help me save money in getting what we need to get done? How can you help me solve these problems, but do so in a more cost-effective way?

You mentioned cost savings. How is the business environment relative to investment in software and other technology compared to, say, when we spoke in February?
Elop: You know, when we spoke in February, I think there were a lot of people who didn't know what was going on.

I think people may not agree as to what's going on in the economy right now. Everyone has different opinions. But at this point people have opinions. And because people have opinions about what's going on in their business or their part of the economy, on that basis they begin to make plans. The plans will be different than the plans they might have had six or nine months ago, but they can actually establish a plan, and therefore a budget, and decide, OK, in our business we're going to do this, we're going to invest in these ways, and so forth. I don't want to say there's increased confidence as much as there is less ambiguity in people's minds. They've decided what it means to them.

Now, at Microsoft, you've heard Steve (Ballmer) talk a number of times about how we view what's happened as being a reset in the economy, that it's not a bounce back to the way things were, but things have reset, and things need to stabilize here even more, and then we'll see things begin to grow as increases in productivity in the economy kick in.

The product lineup that you guys are going to have going into next year, what does that add to your arsenal, particularly Office 2010?
Elop: I think at the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is (not) just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device.

When people look at Office 2010 in the broadest sense, and that's both the client applications, it's the services offerings, it's the server products, it's the Web applications, all of those pieces together. Certainly what customers are recognizing as they've had pre-briefings and the early experimentation with the products is that we're at some form of generational shift into this world of software plus services, and Office 2010, I think, is surprising people as it relates to the extent to which we've fully embraced software plus services.

How do you see the balance of Web applications and desktop programs? You guys have obviously talked about it's not just about putting Office in the browser. What are the kinds of things that you think are best done via the browser, what are the things that are best done in a desktop program, and how does that inform sort of the way you guys have designed those two products?

Elop: First of all, it's helpful to look at specific scenarios. I'll just use a personal example. I was at my parents' home recently, I needed to edit a document, I hadn't carted my PC around with me. I had my father's PC connected to the Internet. I was able to use a Web application to quickly look at a document, make some lightweight changes, and pass that document along without interrupting the fidelity of the document, being a part of the collaborative experience with others at Microsoft. There's a specific scenario where the Web application played an important role.

imilarly, if you look in the mobile environment, there are scenarios related to, for example, taking a picture as part of some work that you're doing. You're unlikely to take a picture with a Web browser, or a notebook computer.

The second part of the answer, though, is that while there are specific scenarios that are best advantaged within each of the different ways of delivering our technology, the best experience comes from the combination of all of those things. So, we think less about the Web applications as standalone word processor things, and far more about it as a complement to the trio of the phone, the PC, and the browser environment. We think about the best experience being the sum of those things working well together.

Your preference, and certainly the way you guys are investing in the Web applications, is as an adjunct to the desktop, not a replacement. That said, how common do you think it will be that businesses license just the Web applications for at least a portion of their employees?
Elop: Well, we hope that it's very common to the extent that there are, let's say, workers in a business (where) today a company has said, look, there's one PC for 100 employees on a shop floor, or something like that. To the extent that they now license those workers for a lightweight browser experience in some way, shape, or form, and they're now part of the Office family, that's a positive thing for us. It brings them into the whole environment of productivity that we're trying to deliver.

So, those scenarios we think will be relatively common. It could be factory floor workers, it could be retail employees, and outlets around the world, and there are all sorts of scenarios that we think have been under-served from participating in the productivity experiences that some of these applications will serve to support.

I guess the other piece of that question is whether you expect that there will be a portion of customers that attempt to move some part of their workforce that has access to desktop Office to just browser-based versions?
Elop: I mean, by definition there will be some. Do I think it's a huge proportion? No, I don't. And the reason for that is because, particularly in that we're talking about the commercial setting, where we believe that the productivity experiences that we deliver in the rich client applications, with the Web applications as a complement to that, is still going to be a compelling experience that people are going to be saying, hey, I want people participating, for example, in collaborative editing of documents, in collaborative sharing of PowerPoint presentations, as examples.

For example, our multi-user authoring feature. There are examples like that which we believe represent improvements in productivity for these customers that are delivered through the rich client application. So while you'll always be able to point to some examples of someone somewhere making that decision, we don't believe that's going to be the dominating force.

How often do customers bring up Google apps in meetings, and is it usually when you're talking about the product, or when you're talking about price?
Elop: Customers are aware of Google in different ways. Sometimes just from a search perspective, sometimes they're aware of things like Google Docs and so forth. And our experience is it may lead to a discussion around what is software plus services, what is Microsoft's view on it. And the tendency is not, obviously in our conversation, to dwell on their price versus our price, or things like that, because it's two very, very different things.

When you put side by side, for example, the full range of on-premise and in the cloud services like Exchange, SharePoint, (Office Communications Server), and so forth, the full range of rich client applications and soon Web applications and so forth, combined with many years of enterprise support, of an understanding of how we're going to take care of mission-critical capabilities, it's a whole different conversation. And so that's why in the context of a large-scale customer who is engaging these things I think there's tire kicking, or they may look at these things, but there's a clear understanding that... enterprises have some very specific and far-reaching requirements that Microsoft over many years has figured out how to deliver.

Well, they're out of beta now, is that a significant move?
Elop: I don't know. I've heard that the word was dropped, I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name. I couldn't interpret what it meant.

As someone who has been in this industry a long time, what do you make of Google's announcement that they're moving into the operating system realm with Chrome OS?
Elop: Well, let me just challenge the premise of your question. They've announced a couple of times now that they're moving into the operating system business, because there's the whole Android thing, and now there's Chrome.

We haven't seen it. We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog. So it's very hard for us to know, without seeing what they're doing, to comment on it.

You have architected part of Office 2010 to run in the browser-based Office Web apps. If I'm not mistaken Chrome isn't one of the supported browsers, but it might, in fact, work in Chrome. Do you guys see Chrome as an important browser to develop for?

Elop: It depends on how you define important. From a market share perspective Chrome is very low. So I think we're driven by customers on these things. There are other browsers that have greater market share, and that's where we've concentrated our first efforts.

Shuttle launch delayed to assess lightning strikes

2009-07-12T13:32:00.000+05:30

Posted by William Harwood on July 11, 2009
From: cnet

Already a month behind schedule, launch of the shuttle Endeavour on a 16-day space station assembly mission was delayed at least 24 hours, from Saturday to Sunday, to give engineers time to evaluate the effects of multiple lightning strikes at the launch pad during a severe thunderstorm Friday.

Eleven lightning strikes were recorded within 1,800 feet of the launch pad 39A, and while the shuttle is protected from lightning-induced electrical surges, NASA managers decided more time was needed to make sure no critical systems were affected.

"We've seen nothing so far that indicates anything was actually affected by the lightning strikes," said Mike Moses, director of shuttle launch integration at the Kennedy Space Center. "So I fully expect this to be a positive story, but we have a lot of equipment that has to be checked and that's what takes time."

Assuming no problems are found -- and assuming predicted afternoon thunderstorms cause no additional trouble -- NASA will reset Endeavour's countdown for a launch Sunday at 7:13:55 p.m. EDT. Forecasters are predicting a 70 percent chance of acceptable weather.

Friday afternoon, however, severe storms rumbled across the space center bringing torrential rain and electrical activity. "It was snap, crackle, and pop out there," one official said.

"If you were here in town yesterday, you saw a pretty spectacular electrical storm here at the Cape yesterday afternoon," Moses said. "We have several different systems out there monitoring lightning and we have a bunch of different rules and regulations and guidelines. But the bottom line is, we took 11 strikes within the point-three nautical miles (1,800 feet) of the pad."

The fixed gantry at the pad features a huge lightning mast that is connected to the ground by a catenary wire system anchored on the north and south sides of the complex. Seven of the 11 strikes hit the wires and two of those were above the threshold that requires additional analyses.

"We don't have any attached strikes to the orbiter itself, to the external tank, to the SRBs (boosters)," Moses said. "But we do know from our camera system that we took strikes on the lightning mast, the water tower, the wires themselves. So there were seven different events.

"With a lightning event, you have the initial spike of electricity that you are worried about, but then you also have a very fast-moving electrical field, which causes a magnetic field that can induce voltage on circuits that aren't even connected to it."

Two of the lightning strikes Friday resulted in 110-volt surges in the shuttle's electrical systems, just enough to qualify the strikes as official "lightning events."

"Strikes that close to the pad kick off extensive data analysis to make sure there are no problems," Moses said. "We have a panel, called the E3 panel, the electromagnetic effects panel, they take a look and decide if that strength of strike was big enough to then cause concern for the integrated stack, the orbiter, the ET, the SRBs. And if it was, then our engineering review panel will then go off, gather more data, and determine if a re-test is required."

By early today, engineers had determined Endeavour's external tank was in good shape, as were the shuttle's main engines and associated ground systems. The shuttle's payload also appears unharmed, although additional checks are planned.

The additional day was required primarily to make sure the shuttle's sensitive electronics were undamaged, along with the critical pyrotechnic systems needed to safely operate the ship's twin solid-fuel boosters.

"Those two areas decided they did need a little more retest to make sure that their systems are good," Moses said. "Part of the problem is, that retest can take different forms. If you think about it, on the SRBs, one of the things we're worried about are the pyro systems to separate the SRBs away from the external tank. Well, you can't really go check that system and turn it on because you don't want to go fire off those pyros.

"So we have various levels of tests we can do on some circuitry, but you've really got to make sure you're really checking what you need to check. So the teams were pretty confident we have enough data on other buses (circuits) to know that that (pyro) circuitry was OK, but we weren't quite there this morning."

How Much Does Google Like Twitter?

2009-07-12T13:28:00.000+05:30

Posted by MG Siegler on July 11, 2009
From: techcrunch

That’s 44 accounts by my count. Where are all those Jaiku accounts?

Still think they have no interest in the micro-messaging service? Of course they do. It just may cost them more than a billion dollars to satisfy their fixation. And Microsoft is starting to get a fixation too. Remember when the two had a bidding war over a stake in Facebook?

Update: Interesting. As Habib points out in the comments, it looks like Google may have missed one of its own accounts in the region list: Google Arabia. That makes 45.

Microsoft aims for Silverlight at end of the tunnel

2009-07-11T18:44:00.000+05:30

Posted by Ina Fried on July 10, 2009
From: cnet

By next year, half of all devices connected to the Internet will have Silverlight, says Microsoft's Walid Abu-Hadba.

That will still be just a fraction of the number of phones and computers that have a version of Adobe's Flash, but Abu-Hadba said that it will be enough to really start changing the mindset of those who create content for the Web.

"It's a totally different game," said, Abu-Hadba, who leads Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism efforts. Abu-Hadba noted that Microsoft now has a set of features that can appeal to both those streaming large-scale Web video content, as well as software developers aiming to create programs that run inside of businesses.

His comments came following Microsoft's launch Friday of Silverlight 3, the latest version of its technology for rich media applications. The new version allows for programs that work in and out of the browser, supports up to 1080p streaming, and lets users pause and rewind a live video stream.

One of the areas where Microsoft still has work to do is on the phone side. Microsoft has long talked about offering Silverlight on phones, even hoping to bring it to Apple's iPhone, but today it is not commercially available for any phone.

"It's taken a little bit longer than we would have wanted, absolutely," said Abu-Hadba.

However, Abu-Hadba and fellow developer unit executive Scott Guthrie say that Microsoft has also taken the approach that it wants the Silverlight experience on the phone to match that offered on the PC, as opposed to having different versions as Adobe does with Flash. Also, Guthrie said, the landscape for the phone has changed dramatically, with more phones adding the kind of graphics chips necessary to do hardware-based acceleration.

"We want to make sure people have a 'wow' experience," Guthrie said.

Microsoft is beta testing its phone software for both Android and Windows Mobile and announcements are expected at this fall's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

"You are going to hear a lot more details about it later this year," Guthrie said. (For more on Guthrie's take on Silverlight 3, check out the video embedded below.)

For his part, Abu-Hadba said he doesn't wonder if Silverlight will be around 10 years from now, but rather whether his rival will. He said that Adobe has committed itself to moving from a design-oriented company to one that aims to offer a general purpose Web platform, something he said the company doesn't have the resources or experiences to make happen.

"I don't believe they have the assets or the organizational structure," he said. "That's what we do for a living at Microsoft."

Abu-Hadba said Adobe would be better off picking a specialty and sticking to it.

"I don't think they will exist in 10 years in the form they are today," he said. It's a bold statement, he agreed, but added how unthinkable it would have been to predict in 2000 that Sun Microsystems would go away.

TuneIn: A Media Dashboard For Your Twitter Stream

2009-07-11T18:34:00.000+05:30

Posted by Jason Kincaid on July 10, 2009
From: techcrunch.com

Twitter has quickly turned into one of the best places to discover new media — be it video, images, or links — as soon as it comes out. Videos that may take hours or even days to surface on sites like Digg can virally spread across Twitter in a fraction of the time. As Fred Wilson put it, the value of Twitter lies in “the power of passed links”.

TuneIn, a new startup presenting today at today’s RealTime CrunchUp, is looking to harness this media and present it in an easily searchable, consumable format.

Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels).

If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item.

TuneIn isn’t the first startup to do this kind of media aggregation: Tweetmeme has been using Twitter to surface hot articles, images, and video for quite a while.

Chrome OS for the clueless: What it means for real people

2009-07-10T15:08:00.001+05:30

Posted by Rafe Needleman on July 9, 2009
From: CNN

Late Tuesday night, Google, the company that became a tech giant through search and advertising company, announced that it's branching out into an unrelated direction, the operating system business. It will release next year the Chrome OS, a free competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating system. It will be targeted at Netbooks, a class of small, inexpensive computers, although eventually it will make its way to full-powered notebooks and desktop computers. It will be designed for accessing Web applications (like Google's own GMail and Google Docs), and it will take a lot of design and technology cues, as well as its name, from Google's browser, Chrome.

What does this mean to people who are thinking about buying a new computer now, or next year? Is the Chrome OS something to get excited about, or even wait for?

We won't know for sure what the operating system looks like until it comes out, which answers the second question handily: do not wait. If you need a new computer now, spend the money and get the use out of the machine while Google figures out how and when to get the Chrome OS out the door.

But to the other question: yes, this is very interesting, and potentially could cause some transformations in the computer industry, although they may be more subtle than Google--and Microsoft's detractors--hope.

Who cares about operating systems?

Computers need operating systems. Even computers that do nothing but run Web browsers need one. An Application like a Web browser--Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome--needs to run on top of a platform that gives it access to the hardware resources of the computer (the memory, the persistent storage, access to the networking and communications hardware, the screen, the keyboard, and so on); to peripherals plugged into a computer (printers, cameras that connect, memory cards); to the other software on the the computer (like the system for storing files); and lastly, to you, the user.

Or do they? What if you combined the operating system's functions with a browser's functions, which include accessing and displaying Web pages, keeping track of bookmarks and passwords, and connecting to computer-attached resources like Webcams?

Google is answering that question with Chrome OS. Google is saying, with this product, that the modern computer user spends so much time working with Web-based resources that the main control system for the computer should be the browser, not the operating system. Furthermore, Google sources tell us that the Chrome OS experience will bear little resemblance to existing way that users interact with their computer's main control program. A person familiar with the Chrome OS project told us, "All existing operating systems predate the Web, and the user interfaces are stuck in a desktop metaphor." The Chrome OS, we're led to believe, will be very different.

How? We don't know. It's a safe bet that the Chrome OS will lean more heavily on so-called "cloud storage" products--like Google's own productivity suites, Google Docs--that let users store their data and documents not on their computers but rather on the systems of the Web apps they are running. The great thing about cloud storage is that it's untethered to any individual user's computer. Log in to your Google Docs account from anywhere, and there's your whole workspace, right in front of you. It's liberating.

Google may also take a cue from its own e-mail application, GMail, which blends the traditional idea of having folders for e-mail with the concept of "labels." In GMail, you can drag messages into folders to file them, or you can drag folders (or labels) over messages to categorize them. It's the same thing, but the hierarchy people are used to in operating systems, where a file is in one folder at a time, and the folder may be nested in another folder, is simply not there. Folders and labels are interchangable and far more fluid.

But in Windows 7, Microsoft's next operating system, Folders are also less rigid than they've been in previous versions of Windows.

We can also expect that the Chrome OS will borrow user interface elements from Chrome the browser--like a tabbed metaphor for switching between "apps," and the mind-reading command line (address bar in the browser). It may also evidence Google's traditional obsession with clean (if not necessarily attractive) design and speed. The Chrome OS should be fast.

A ruse by any name

But under the hood, the Chrome OS will still be a traditional operating system. It will be an adaptation of Linux, a free operating system lovingly maintained, in various versions, by a global community of programmers. The Chrome OS will likely borrow the gritty bits of the operating system, the parts that connect to the computer's CPU, the memory, and other hardware. Google's most visible contribution, in addition to the human resources it puts on the project of working at the core of the operating system, will be in the user interface and how the OS handles user data and files.

Will users buy it? They haven't so far. The first Netbooks came with Linux-based operating systems, and users shunned them (or more specially, returned them to their points of purchase) in favor of computers running yesterday's version of Microsoft Windows, XP. Even though XP adds cost to a computer due to the high licensing fee that the manufacturers have to pass on to consumers, those consumers voted to pay the extra money for the familiarity of Windows.

The Chrome OS could well be better than any of the Linux variants that have come before it. It will certainly be cheap--Google says it will be free to manufacturers. Google also says it will be safer, thanks to technologies like "sandboxing" from the Chrome browser that prevent one app from infecting or stealing data from another.

But no matter how much better the Chrome OS is than Windows, users are still accustomed to Windows, and the first target market for Chrome OS, the Netbook category, presents special challenges. First, it's a small market, and second, many Netbook buyers get the machines as secondary, portable computers. They already have a larger laptop or desktop and they want a mini-size, portable accessory to go with it. For those users, a radically different operating system is a stumbling block, no matter how good it is by itself.

The stakes are big enough that it's worth the shot for Google. Google makes money through targeted advertising. The more they know about what you do, the better the ads you get will perform. If Google knows what you do at the operating system level, they can deliver you more specific advertising content. Also, a Google OS would likely lead people to Google services--and not Microsoft's or Yahoo's. Also, this is a long-term game. Google doesn't need to knock Microsoft off its peg tomorrow, or next year. But over time, the company may be able to chip away at Microsoft's pre-eminence as the leading operating system vendor, or at the very least force Microsoft to make its own operating systems more Web-friendly, which benefits the most popular Web service provider there is: Google.

Google needs to start spreading the word on the Chrome OS now, and not a year from now when the product comes out, to get developers and computer manufacturers excited about the platform, and working on compatible products. That takes time. It's also an area where Microsoft has an excellent track record; the Windows company spends a ton of money and energy on developer relations.

The most likely short-term impact the Chrome OS will have on the Netbook market is that it may encourage Microsoft to drop its prices on the Windows 7 licenses it sells to manufacturers. But until developers start writing major software for the operating system (games, photo editors, and major productivity suites like Office), it's very unlikely that Google will have much of an impact on Windows sales.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that Microsoft is hardly standing still. Its new Bing search engine is actually quite good in comparison to Google's most popular product, Google Search, and the upcoming version of Microsoft Office will have Web capabilities that put it in competition with Google's online word processor and spreadsheet.

A year from now, there will likely be Google Chrome OS Netbooks (and possibly larger laptops) available for sale alongside Windows-powered models. Will people like me recommend them? Maybe, for some users, in particular those on tight budgets and those with no or only limited knowledge of Windows or Apple's OS.

Building an operating system is a major project, but it's only part of the job. Even if the Google OS is fantastic, it will need to steal customers accustomed to using Microsoft and Apple devices. And even if those customers want to be convinced that Google's product is better, they may find it very difficult to make the switch.

Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While

2009-07-10T15:04:00.000+05:30

Posted by Jason Kincaid on July 9, 2009
From: techcrunch.com

Last Friday, a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle knocked out a number of popular websites, including Microsoft Bing’s recently launched Travel portal. The site was back up by Saturday afternoon, but not before Google caught the site’s placeholder “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” page and added it to its index (you can see the cached page here).

Now, five days later, “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” is the second search result offered when you search Google for “Bing”. It doesn’t take much to picture Google CEO Eric Schmidt cackling with glee over this.

This would be amusing enough on its own — It’s been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while I’m sure Google’s automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, it’s strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Google’s, but it’s no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.

But it gets even better: Bing’s Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Google’s, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.

This might seem like a trivial goof on Google’s part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browser’s integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for “bing” on Google every day.

Facebook: Less Errors, More Connections Please

2009-07-09T12:08:00.000+05:30

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Michael Arrington

From: techcrunch.com

One thing I’ll grudgingly grant to MySpace - the site works. That’s more than I can say for Facebook over the last month or so.

In the past Facebook has had desperately slow page views and occasional downtime. But recently, the site has become almost unusable for me. And no, I’m not just talking about the abysmal messaging system that still won’t let me properly sort through thousands of emails. I’m talking about a complete inability to create new “connections.”

My profile (no vanity URL for me yet) is near the 5,000 limit on friends, but it has a few slots to spare. And I’m a fan of only a handful of Facebook pages. But any time I try to add or confirm a friend, or become a fan of a page, I get an error saying “Sorry, you cannot create any more connections.”

The fact that there are limits at all on connections is absurd (MySpace doesn’t have this limit, neither does Twitter or any other site I can think of). And the fact that I can’t make new connections even though I’m under the limit is worse.

I know Facebook continues to grow at a breakneck pace - Comscore pegs them at 316 million monthly visitors and 122 billion page views. But the fact that MySpace, no slouch in the user numbers or page views themselves (122 million, 35 billion).

The fact is that MySpace has a different architecture than Facebook. News items from friends aren’t pushed to my home page into one feed, for example. Regardless, Facebook needs to address this on a technical level, not a policy one.

A Facebook employee, listening to my gripes, recently told me to switch my Profile to a Page, and they would transfer all my 5,000 friends and 4,500 or so friend requests over to that page as fans. But putting aside the fact that people may not be so happy to be labeled as “fans,” this still isn’t a good solution. I can’t have a two way connection with these people via messaging and chat.

Facebook either needs to ditch the idea of friends entirely and move to a Twitter follow model, or allow as many connections as I choose to create. The company now has 1,000 employees, I’ve heard recently. One of those bright and eager engineers should be able to fix this.

Am I asking a lot of a company that has grown faster than perhaps any Internet company in history? Probably. But if they want to be the next Google, it’s time to get organized.

Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome.

2009-07-08T11:52:00.000+05:30

Publish Date of News:7 July

Wow. So you know all those whispers about a Google desktop operating system that never seem to go away? You thought they might with the launch of Android, Google’s mobile OS. But they persisted. And for good reason, because it’s real.

In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,” Google writes tonight on its blog.

But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?

And it’s a genius play. So many people are buying netbooks right now, but are running WIndows XP on them. Windows XP is 8 years old. It was built to run on Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s. Google Chrome OS is built to run on both x86 architecture chips and ARM chips, like the ones increasingly found in netbooks. It is also working with multiple OEMs to get the new OS up and running next year.

Obviously, this Chrome OS will be lightweight and fast just like the browser itself. But also just like the browser, it will be open-sourced. Think Microsoft will be open-sourcing Windows anytime soon?

As Google writes, “We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision.” They might as well set up enlistment booths on college campuses for their war against Microsoft.

Google says the software architecture will basically be the current Chrome browser running inside “a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS. And applications developers will develop for it just as they would on the web. This is similar to the approach Palm has taken with its new webOS for the Palm Pre, but Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS.

nuclear-bomb-badger350What Google is doing is not recreating a new kind of OS, they’re creating the best way to not need one at all.

So why release this new OS instead of using Android? After all, it has already been successfully ported to netbooks. Google admits that there is some overlap there. But a key difference they don’t mention is the ability to run on the x86 architecture. Android cannot do that, Chrome OS can and will. But more, Google wants to emphasize that Chrome OS is all about the web, whereas Android is about a lot of different things. Including apps that are not standard browser-based web apps.

But Chrome OS will be all about the web apps. And no doubt HTML 5 is going to be a huge part of all of this. A lot of people are still wary about running web apps for when their computer isn’t connected to the web. But HTML 5 has the potential to change that, as you’ll be able to work in the browser even when not connected, and upload when you are again.

We’re starting to see more clearly why Google’s Vic Gundotra was pushing HTML 5 so hard at Google I/O this year. Sure, part of it was about things like Google Wave, but Google Wave is just one of many new-style apps in this new Chrome OS universe.

But there is a wild card is all of this still for Microsoft: Windows 7. While Windows XP is 8 years old, and Windows Vista is just generally considered to be a bad OS for netbooks, Windows 7 could offer a good netbook experience. And Microsoft had better hope so, or its claim that 96% of netbooks run Windows is going to be very different in a year.

Google plans to release the open source code for Chrome OS later this year ahead of the launch next year. Don’t be surprised if this code drops around the same time as Windows 7. Can’t wait to hear what Microsoft will have to say about all of this.

Resource Taken From:http://www.techcrunch.com/

Facebook Pledges Support For OpenID; But Will Anything Change?

2009-02-06T23:24:00.001+05:30

The OpenID Foundation has just announced that Facebook’s Luke Shepard will be joining the OpenID board as a corporate member, and that Facebook has made a $50,000 donation to the cause. The news marks the first time Facebook has officially signed on with the campaign, though some of its employees have been actively involved with improving the open standard for some time.

At this point it’s unclear exactly what change this will bring to Facebook. Facebook’s increasingly popular Connect product, which allows users to secure use their Facebook ID’s as logins across over 4,000 sites (including ours), is a closed and proprietary system. But it is also very well designed - members from the Facebook Connect team have given several talks in the hopes of improving the OpenID effort, and are holding an event on the topic next week. From Facebook’s development blog:

As we’ve launched and built Facebook Connect, we’ve been participants in OpenID efforts. One of our user experience experts, Julie Zhuo, presented at the UX Summit in October. Several of our engineers have been participating in meetups, and one of them ran as a community member for a board seat. We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.

Facebook is apparently “building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard”, but that too is ambiguous - many companies have signed on as “issuing parties”, meaning they’ll allow their IDs to be used elsewhere. But far fewer have been “accepting parties”, which means that accounts from other sites can be used to log-in to their services. OpenID has long been exploited by major internet brands who have pledged support to the cause (and reaped the positive press), only to put their plans on the backburner indefinitely. That said, even if Facebook doesn’t wind up implementing OpenID, it sounds like they’ll at least help make it a little easier to use.

Offline Google Calendar Is The Ugly Stepsister of Offline Gmail

2009-02-06T23:22:00.000+05:30

After announcing the offline feature for Gmail last week, Google allowed another feature to be viewed offline: Google Calendar. Unfortunately, the masses will have to wait for access. The offline access, which was built using Google Gears, is currently only available to users of business software package, Google Apps.

While the offline feature for calendars offers read-only access for enterprise users, it’s not nearly as useful as offline Gmail, where users can write and save emails that will be sent once online. The new offline calendar application doesn’t allow you to create, edit or delete events.

So what’s the next feature to join the offline party? And when will Google let consumers use the offline calendar?

SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop

2009-02-06T23:15:00.000+05:30

When I hear SEO, I think of brilliant quantitative guys shut-up in an apartment somewhere running A/B split tests and writing link-bait.

Search Engine Optimization is the way companies make it easy for customers to find their website using Google. Because search engines don’t publish their algorithms, SEO is mostly reverse-engineering.

Despite the guessing game, SEO produces quantifiable results. In a down economy, evaluating success by the numbers becomes even more important.

The very nature of SEO–unknown, constantly changing, and unethical spam tactics–seems diametrically opposed to enterprise culture. So I interviewed Stephan Spencer, president and founder of Netconcepts. Major clients include Cabela’s, HSN, AOL, SuperPages.com, Zappos, and Discovery Channel, among others.

What’s your experience with large enterprise and SEO?

When it comes to SEO, enterprise companies don’t seem to care or are clueless or both. For example, ConocoPhillips is #5 in the Fortune 500. Search Google for their brands like “76″ and the top 10 results don’t look like anything relevant. The top result is indeed the correct site, but it doesn’t seem that way from the search listing or the site itself — drivesavvy.com doesn’t even seem like it’s connected to ConocoPhillips from the domain name or from the look of the home page once you get there. That home page is a joke as far as SEO is concerned. There’s no text on it. Not even the brand names. Here’s what the site looks like to Google.

If I’m an enterprise, should I care about SEO?

It depends–but especially for large retailers, SEO is important. It’s sites like Bizrate, eBay, and Nexttag that keep showing up in the top of Google when searching for Long Tail queries like “yellow queen size flannel sheets”.

These results suck. Where are the brands/enterprises that carry this merchandise? Where is JCPenney? Target? LL Bean? Lands End? They might be advertising through PPC, but 85% of consumers click on the natural listings.

The problem is, these brands are not reaching us where we are at, or on our terms. They are failing to engage the masses of niche markets - at a time when they can hardly afford not to. Instead they’re spending ad dollars on intrusive or avoidable advertising media (PPC, display). The culprit here is difficulty of execution with traditional SEO.

Why is this?

Enterprise and SEO is like cognitive dissonance–SEO is nimble, experimental, dynamic, continuously iterating, never-ending process. A complete anathema to enterprise IT which is project focused, do it and forget it.

There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs is a marketing driven initiative but entirely reliant on IT execution.

Part of the problem lies in that the Fortune 500 enterprises rely on their ad agencies for the “interactive” stuff but the agencies don’t know how to integrate SEO requirements with branding.

Lastly, websites are seldom built with SEO in mind; developers/programmers didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s much like a house where the electrical wasn’t thought about until years later–a major mult-year project to redo it.

What are some examples of good and bad enterprise SEO?

EMC has a country selector as their homepage. But if you look in the Google cache, they bypassed the country selector so Google indexed the US site. Contrast that with Lenovo–nothing appears in the cache. When you search Google for “site:www.lenovo.com” their homepage is not the first result. If you don’t know SEO, this would never occur to you.

Examples of companies handling SEO well: Cabela’s (search Google for “hunting socks” for example). Another is CheapTickets.com (search for “disneyland tickets“).

Maybelline is an example of a major recognized enterprise/brand failing to account for natural search. The Maybelline site is all Flash and not friendly to spiders. Home Depot is another example, they have Endeca’s “Guided Navigation” which offers “infinite filtering” and the rampant duplicate content that results is a very big SEO problem (i.e. it results in duplicate content filtering and PageRank dilution). More on this phenomenon.

Okay–let’s say I’m an enterprise company, and I want to start an SEO initiative–where do I start?

First thing–what are your constraints? No sense hiring a firm to tell you things you can’t implement.

We did some consulting with a company in the kitchen small appliances industry. They called themselves “kitchen electrics”–but although everyone searches for “appliances” they wouldn’t move away from “electrics” on their website. Very frustrating.

Second–get references from partners who are doing well in SEO. Always get references.

Third–decide whether you’re going to bring SEO inhouse, or outsource it. There’s positives and negatives to both approaches.

At Netconcepts, we created a proxy server to rewrite webpages to be more search engine friendly–the enterprise builds their site, then tells the search engine bots to look at our proxy. We clean up the URLs, the data, etc to make it SEO optomized, without huge internal IT projects. It allows sites like Cabela’s to completely outsource SEO.

I also interviewed Jessica Bowman who advises companies how to launch an in-house SEO initiative:

Why does SEO in house fail?

In-house SEO is undergoing many of the struggles usability went through several years ago. It took companies several years to learn how to integrate usability into their product development. That same maturing process is happening with in-house SEO.

Companies fail in three areas:

1. Companies hire the wrong people. They try to save costs by hiring cheaply, but many of these novices struggle to pull off results and may not have managed large projects solo yet. There are also many SEOs who are great at providing recommendations, but lack experience in the challenges involved from recommendation-to-execution. I had two calls this week from companies saying, “We hired someone and our traffic fell.”
2. SEO person isn’t involved throughout the development process. There are many places in the development life cycle where things can go wrong, and SEO needs to be a stakeholder throughout the process to make sure that things go live search engine friendly. One thing I see happening a lot is that a company adds a change for SEO, but that might be later removed by someone who didn’t understand the SEO benefits. At a minimum, SEO should be reviewing the project plan to identify where SEO needs to be involved, wireframes and page designs, and page specifications to give SEO technical requirements to programmers.
3. There’s a human side of SEO. In house experts sometimes struggle to integrate their expertise into the enterprise workflow and secure long-term buy-in from everyone involved in the website. There is also a challenge that, in most companies, SEO sits in marketing–or occasionally in product management and these roles are not typically involved in development at the level that SEO needs to be integrated. Consistently, the companies I work with find the best results when their SEO person sits in the IT department. If you’re in marketing, it can still work, you just have to set up the right touch points with IT to ensure that everything goes live search engine friendly the first time it is launched.

10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

2008-11-19T00:03:00.000+05:30

PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.

Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.
1. Use an SQL Injection Cheat Sheet

Sql Injection
A list of common SQL injections.

SQL injection is a nasty thing. An SQL injection is a security exploit that allows a hacker to dive into your database using a vulnerability in your code. While this article isn’t about MySQL, many PHP programs use MySQL databases with PHP, so knowing what to avoid is handy if you want to write secure code.

Furruh Mavituna has a very nifty SQL injection cheat sheet that has a section on vulnerabilities with PHP and MySQL. If you can avoid the practices the cheat sheet identifies, your code will be much less prone to scripting attacks.
2. Know the Difference Between Comparison Operators

Equality Operators
PHP’s list of comparison operators.

Comparison operators are a huge part of PHP, and some programmers may not be as well-versed in their differences as they ought. In fact, an article at I/O reader states that many PHP developers can’t tell the differences right away between comparison operators. Tsk tsk.

These are extremely useful and most PHPers can’t tell the difference between == and ===. Essentially, == looks for equality, and by that PHP will generally try to coerce data into similar formats, eg: 1 == ‘1′ (true), whereas === looks for identity: 1 === ‘1′ (false). The usefulness of these operators should be immediately recognized for common functions such as strpos(). Since zero in PHP is analogous to FALSE it means that without this operator there would be no way to tell from the result of strpos() if something is at the beginning of a string or if strpos() failed to find anything. Obviously this has many applications elsewhere where returning zero is not equivalent to FALSE.

Just to be clear, == looks for equality, and === looks for identity. You can see a list of the comparison operators on the PHP.net website.
3. Shortcut the else

It should be noted that tips 3 and 4 both might make the code slightly less readable. The emphasis for these tips is on speed and performance. If you’d rather not sacrifice readability, then you might want to skip them.

Anything that can be done to make the code simpler and smaller is usually a good practice. One such tip is to take the middleman out of else statements, so to speak. Christian Montoya has an excellent example of conserving characters with shorter else statements.

Usual else statement:
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. if( this condition )
2. {
3. $x = 5;
4. }
5. else
6. {
7. $x = 10;
8. }

if( this condition )
{
$x = 5;
}
else
{
$x = 10;
}

If the $x is going to be 10 by default, just start with 10. No need to bother typing the else at all.
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. $x = 10;
2. if( this condition )
3. {
4. $x = 5;
5. }

$x = 10;
if( this condition )
{
$x = 5;
}

While it may not seem like a huge difference in the space saved in the code, if there are a lot of else statements in your programming, it will definitely add up.
4. Drop those Brackets

Drop Brackets
Dropping brackets saves space and time in your code.

Much like using shortcuts when writing else functions, you can also save some characters in the code by dropping the brackets in a single expression following a control structure. Evolt.org has a handy example showcasing a bracket-less structure.
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. if ($gollum == 'halfling') {
2. $height --;
3. }

if ($gollum == 'halfling') {
$height --;
}

This is the same as:
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1. if ($gollum == 'halfling') $height --;

if ($gollum == 'halfling') $height --;

You can even use multiple instances:
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1. if ($gollum == 'halfling') $height --;
2. else $height ++;
3.
4. if ($frodo != 'dead')
5. echo 'Gosh darnit, roll again Sauron';
6.
7. foreach ($kill as $count)
8. echo 'Legolas strikes again, that makes' . $count . 'for me!';

if ($gollum == 'halfling') $height --;
else $height ++;

if ($frodo != 'dead')
echo 'Gosh darnit, roll again Sauron';

foreach ($kill as $count)
echo 'Legolas strikes again, that makes' . $count . 'for me!';

5. Favour str_replace() over ereg_replace() and preg_replace()

Str Replace
Speed tests show that str_replace() is 61% faster.

In terms of efficiency, str_replace() is much more efficient than regular expressions at replacing strings. In fact, according to Making the Web, str_replace() is 61% more efficient than regular expressions like ereg_replace() and preg_replace().

If you’re using regular expressions, then ereg_replace() and preg_replace() will be much faster than str_replace().
6. Use Ternary Operators

Instead of using an if/else statement altogether, consider using a ternary operator. PHP Value gives an excellent example of what a ternary operator looks like.
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1. //PHP COde Example usage for: Ternary Operator
2. $todo = (emptyempty($_POST[’todo’])) ? ‘default’ : $_POST[’todo’];
3.
4. // The above is identical to this if/else statement
5. if (emptyempty($_POST[’todo’])) {
6. $action = ‘default’;
7. } else {
8. $action = $_POST[’todo’];
9. }
10. ?>

//PHP COde Example usage for: Ternary Operator
$todo = (empty($_POST[’todo’])) ? ‘default’ : $_POST[’todo’];

// The above is identical to this if/else statement
if (empty($_POST[’todo’])) {
$action = ‘default’;
} else {
$action = $_POST[’todo’];
}
?>

The ternary operator frees up line space and makes your code less cluttered, making it easier to scan. Take care not to use more than one ternary operator in a single statement, as PHP doesn’t always know what to do in those situations.
7. Memcached

Memcached
Memcached is an excellent database caching system to use with PHP.

While there are tons of caching options out there, Memcached keeps topping the list as the most efficient for database caching. It’s not the easiest caching system to implement, but if you’re going to build a website in PHP that uses a database, Memcached can certainly speed it up. The caching structure for Memcached was first built for the PHP-based blogging website LiveJournal.

PHP.net has an excellent tutorial on installing and using memcached with your PHP projects.
8. Use a Framework

Framework

CakePHP is one of the top PHP frameworks.

You may not be able to use a PHP framework for every project you create, but frameworks like CakePHP, Zend, Symfony and CodeIgniter can greatly decrease the time spent developing a website. A Web framework is software that bundles with commonly needed functionality that can help speed up development. Frameworks help eliminate some of the overhead in developing Web applications and Web services.

If you can use a framework to take care of the repetitive tasks in programming a website, you’ll develop at a much faster rate. The less you have to code, the less you’ll have to debug and test.
9. Use the Suppression Operator Correctly

The error suppression operator (or, in the PHP manual, the “error control operator“) is the @ symbol. When placed in front of an expression in PHP, it simply tells any errors that were generated from that expression to now show up. This variable is quite handy if you’re not sure of a value and don’t want the script to throw out errors when run.

However, programmers often use the error suppression operator incorrectly. The @ operator is rather slow and can be costly if you need to write code with performance in mind.

Michel Fortin has some excellent examples on how to sidestep the @ operator with alternative methods. Here’s an example of how he used isset to replace the error suppression operator:
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1. if (isset($albus)) $albert = $albus;
2. else $albert = NULL;

if (isset($albus)) $albert = $albus;
else $albert = NULL;

is equivalent to:
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1. $albert = @$albus;

$albert = @$albus;

But while this second form is good syntax, it runs about two times slower. A better solution is to assign the variable by reference, which will not trigger any notice, like this:
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1. $albert =& $albus;

$albert =& $albus;

It’s important to note that these changes can have some accidental side effects and should be used only in performance-critical areas and places that aren’t going to be affected.
10. Use isset instead of strlen

Strlen
Switching isset for strlen makes calls about five times faster.

If you’re going to be checking the length of a string, use isset instead of strlen. By using isset, your calls will be about five times quicker. It should also be noted that by using isset, your call will still be valid if the variable doesn’t exist.

Hewlett-Packard proves you can still make money

2008-11-18T23:50:00.000+05:30

HPQ shares jumped more than they have any day since 2002, after CEO Mark Hurd announced a fourth quarter profit of $1.03 per share, three cents above Bloomberg's compiled estimate. H-P nonetheless will extend its holiday vacation for employees from one week to two to cut costs. The best analyst quote is the simplest: "Despite worries about an economic slowdown, the company can still grow earnings." So what's your excuse?

Microsoft Beats Yahoo and Google to Social Inbox 2.0

2008-11-18T23:35:00.000+05:30

Exactly one year ago, I wrote about the race between Yahoo and Google to turn their e-mail and instant message systems into something closer to social networks. Both companies figured it was futile to take on Facebook and MySpace directly. So they rushed to develop new ways for their users to trade news, photos and so on with the people already in their address books and buddy lists.

The winner of that race is…Microsoft.

Thursday, Microsoft announced a complex new version of the Web sites and PC software that use the Windows Live brand. Over the next two months, the company will introduce dozens of upgraded features involving its e-mail, instant message, calendar, blogging and other services. It will also add some entirely new functions, including group collaboration and photo sharing.

A lot of the effort has gone into weaving the functions of social networks throughout many of these services. For example, the service has a “what’s new” feed, modeled after the Facebook news feed, that can publish short comments by users as well as links to when they take certain actions, like publish new photos. The feed will be displayed on the instant message client and on new profile pages for users. And after you send an e-mail to people who use the new feed, you will see their most recent updates.

Microsoft is also reaching out to draw in information from other sites. Users can add updates from their accounts on services like Yelp, Pandora and Flickr into their “what’s new” feed. They can also bring the list of their friends on other social networks into Microsoft’s new contact manager, called Windows Live People.

“There is not going to be one provider of software and services for the scenarios that are interesting,” said Chris Jones, a Microsoft vice president for Windows Live. “People will be members of many social networks. They will use many different sites to share, different e-mail providers, instant message providers and different types of devices. And in the end, the service that has value will be the one that helps them make sense of it all.”

Yahoo and Google, of course have all sorts of features that let people communicate and share information and photos. Google’s iGoogle personal page and an upcoming revision to the Yahoo home page offer ways to display information from various other sites. But for now, Microsoft offers a more unified approach to collecting information about people from a range of sites and using it in different ways.

Microsoft is not creating many ways to get information out of its systems, however. It doesn’t have the equivalent of Facebook Connect that lets people see their friends on other sites. And it is not enabling social applications from third-party developers on any part of this sprawling set of sites.

Mr. Jones said that the Windows Live profiles are meant to be simple, but they can have links to pages on MySpace or other sites that do allow applications. He said the company would eventually develop methods to export some of the data it keeps about users to other sites.

In addition, Microsoft is updating its SkyDrive service that stores files on its server and Windows Live Sync (formerly know as FolderShare) that keeps copies of files identical on two separate computers.

Microsoft takes a lot of heat, much of it deserved, for its plodding nature and overly complex software. Since the services haven’t been introduced yet, I can’t tell how well these new Windows Live features work. But the fact that the company is the first to actually introduce social networking features to its e-mail is a sign of Microsoft’s discipline, or maybe the lack of resolve at Google and Yahoo. Or both.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide

2008-11-18T23:25:00.000+05:30

Google’s PDF titled “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” includes basic tips for making sites more accessible to search engines. This 22 page document focuses on a variety of topics ranging from the creation of unique title elements to more advanced issues like navigation and redirects.

While none of Google’s “secret sauce” is revealed within its pages, the Google guide to SEO does provide a number of interesting tips for webmasters who are new to search. Included in the Guide are Google’s best practices for title elements, meta tags, URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text, headers, images and robots.txt. In addition, Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide provides a list of additional resources provided free from Google.

Google Analytics for Flash: Welcome to the Engagement Era

2008-11-18T23:09:00.000+05:30

The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it. The latter is being addressed today at Adobe Max, where Google is announcing Analytics Tracking for Flash, which will let publishers track metrics for their flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package.

Aside from the unique file format, one of the major differences between tracking Flash and tracking webpages is that Flash can be embedded anywhere – meaning that analytics software needs to be able to measure interactions from not just a single location, but from within an application, regardless of where it’s placed.

To demonstrate how Google Analytics now does this, the company has teamed up with web-based Flash creation tool Sprout. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.

Google and Sprout demonstrate how this works in the video below:

While Analytics for Flash is an interesting breakthrough in its own right, it also could be the dawn of a new era in marketing and how companies pay for advertising. As opposed to paying simply for clicks and for views, advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.

Sprout is currently charging clients based on a “pay per publish model,” meaning the client pays each time someone actually does something with an app – like customize it (with Sprout’s “remix” feature) or republish it to a social networking profile. Sprout is marketing this new approach through a product they are calling SproutMixer.

Although most of the widget platforms like Clearspring and Gigya offer their own tracking solutions, Google Analytics adding its own support for Flash tracking is a big deal – it’s a solution that any Flash developer can implement into their applications – without the need for a middleman. As such, it could have significant implications on how online advertising is paid for, and how the widget companies evolve their business models.

20+ Firefox Plugins to Enhance Your YouTube Experience

2008-11-18T22:55:00.000+05:30

There is no arguing that YouTube is the most popular video sharing site out there, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t things about it that annoy users. With that said, there are a wide array of plugins for Firefox to make the YouTube user experience that much better. Here are over 20 that will let you save your favorite videos before they disappear, stop them from autoplaying when you come to a page, and more.

What would you build an extension to change if you could? Let us know in the comments!
Download YouTube Videos

Ant Toolbar - The official toolbar for Ant.com includes a YouTube video downloader as well as a built in FLV player so you can play the videos you’ve snagged right from there.

Embedded Objects - This add-on will download pretty much any type of embedded file, including your favorite YouTube videos.

Fast Video Download - Fast Video Download works with numerous video sites and will also add a download link under embedded YouTube videos you find on other sites.

Flash Video Downloader - Besides allowing you to download your favorite videos from YouTube, this add-on will download flash videos from other sites and even games.

Flash Video Resources Downloader - Will let you download videos from most flash-based video sharing sites, will also let you enter a YouTube URL and be presented with the download information without needing to go to the page.

Magic’s Video - Downloader - Assists you with downloading FLV videos from around two dozen video sharing sites, including the market leader, YouTube.

Media Converter - This extension will allow you to not only download your desired videos, but it will also convert them right in the browser to the format you desire.

Sothink Web Video Downloader - Besides downloading videos from YouTube, Sothink will also let you capture videos in swf, wmv, asf, avi, mov, rm and rmvb formats.

Video DownloadHelper - Once installed, Video DownloadHelper’s icon will animate when you come to a page that has a video you can download. Once you start the download process, you can also choose which format you want to save the file as.
Tools

Better YouTube - Collects some of the most popular Greasemonkey scripts for YouTube that do things like give you an alternate player, a cleaner theater interface and more.

GoogleTube - This extension adds a YouTube icon next to Google search results that have videos associated with them. Click on the button and you can watch the videos directly on the search results page.

Groowe Firefox Toolbar - Gives you a toolbar that lets you search YouTube, Digg, Delicious and more.

Now Playing X - Allows you to feed videos you are watching to the Now Playing feature on messengers like Live, Yahoo, AIM, Skype and GTalk.

RickRadar - If you really fear being RickRolled, install this and it will evaluate pages. If it feels there is a high probability of Rick Astley being there, it redirects you.

TubeStop - Only has one job and that is to stop YouTube videos from autoplaying.

VodPod - Allows you to grab the embed code for a video and store it at VodPod.com and then publish it to your blog with just a click.

You Old Enough? - Tired of signing in to verify your age? This add-on will let you bypass the whole process.

YouPlayer - YouPlayer allows you to drag videos to your playlist and form your own list from around the Web. If you find anything you like, right click on it and you can choose to download it.

YouTube Cinema - Allows you to play all YouTube videos in a default that shows them in cinema view.

YouTube Comment Snob - This add-on allows you to hide comments from people with numerous misspellings, excessive punctuation, all capital letters, no capital letters and so on.

YouTube Tooltip - Allows you to hover your mouse over a YouTube link and see what the video may be before you click on it. Can also show author, ratings and number of views.

So, How’s That Digg Recommendation Engine Been Working For You?

2008-11-18T22:48:00.000+05:30

One of the biggest recent announcements from Digg, and one they put much emphasis on, was the recommendation engine; a system that learns from your digging habits and feeds you stories you might like based on what diggers like you recently found interesting.

After using it for quite some time, like most such ideas, I find it utterly useless. I use Digg in the following way: I check out the front page and the upcoming Technology section for interesting stories. The recommendation engine merely gets in my way, making me go through a couple of extra clicks to get what I want (whenever Digg doesn’t automatically log me in, which is often). The stories that the recommendation engine feeds me seem completely random; standard categorization by topics works way better, and checking only what’s recommended feels like I’m missing out on good stories.

In a way, Digg itself is a big recommendation engine: it’s a bunch of news stories and links selected by wisdom of crowds. The difference, however, is that Digg doesn’t care about my “digging habits;” it doesn’t try to guess what I’d like to read, it works as a collective hivemind that decides what it likes by itself. On the other hand, I’ve encountered many startups which are trying to learn from your web usage patterns and habits, and none of them did anything for me; in fact, the entire idea simply doesn’t seem to work, except perhaps for the most casual user who won’t notice the difference anyway.

This is just my opinion, though. I’m interested in what you think. How’s the recommendation engine working for you? Do you use it? Are the stories it recommends any good? Or do you skip it altogether? Feel free to answer in the comments.

Create an MP3 Mix from the Command Line

2008-11-18T22:39:00.000+05:30

Windows only: Looking for a way to create a mix of MP3 files to send to your crush but aren't sure what playlist format their media player supports or whether or not they'd know how to unzip a folder of individual tracks? Check out this tip using the Command Prompt interface in Windows:

Only one line of code is needed to join multiple mp3 files:
copy /b *.mp3 c:\new.mp3

The /b modifier is the trick, with the asterisk playing a wildcard to catch all files in a directory. To choose invidividual files, list the filenames separated by the + symbol. Yes, the conjoined files aren't easily separated and the recipient won't be able to skip from track to track. But it's super-fast to do, will play reliably in almost any environment and the listener is forced to think about the emotional arc the music describes—which, after all, is the whole art and science of music mix creation for those of us who remember the 80s. Any readers out there know a similar trick for Macintosh or Linux?

Google’s Voice Search Finally Hits The iPhone

2008-11-18T22:38:00.000+05:30

Google’s search-by-voice application is finally available on the App Store. To grab it, visit this link (the page still shows the old version, but you’ll download the new one). The application was originally announced on Friday, leading to widespread excitement that quickly turned to unrest as the application failed to make its debut on the App Store. The delay led to criticism of Apple’s App Store approval process, which apparently leaves all developers in the dark - even Google.

The app allows users to speak into their iPhones to submit queries to Google’s search engine, which can serve up both standard search results as well as movie showtimes, addresses, and other handy information. Voice detection seems to work pretty well, though it sometimes takes a few tries with long phrases and names (I was able to correctly search for the “answer to life, the universe, and everything” after only two tries). And when it works, it’s really cool - I’ll probably be using it on a daily basis.

My biggest issue with the app is that there is apparently no way to use the voice detection feature to call a contact, despite the fact that you can search through contacts using manual text entry. One of my biggest gripes about the iPhone is that there’s no way to make a hands-free call, and while this would still require at least one buttonpress, it would be an improvement. A free application called Say Who offers voice dialing on the iPhone, but it would have been nice to see the functionality integrated into the Google app.

Yang’s Stepping Down Adds $1.8 Billion To Yahoo’s Market Cap

2008-11-18T22:11:00.000+05:30

Jerry Yang is the $1.8 billion man. The stock market thinks Yahoo is worth that much more without Yang at the helm.

That’s approximately how much the market capitalization of Yahoo’s stock went up this morning, with the first trade after last night’s announcement that Yang would be stepping down as CEO. The shares were up nearly 12 percent in early morning trading. They opened at $11.94, compared to a close of $10.63 last night. (The $1.31 difference X 1.4 billion shares outstanding = $1.83 billion)

With Yang gone, the prospects of a renewed deal with Microsoft (at least on the search advertising front) are now greater. So are the prospects of finding someone who can take Yahoo, and hopefully it’s stock, in a new direction

The question is: Can Yahoo pick a CEO who will add more than that to Yahoo’s market cap? I guess Mark Cuban is out of the running.

Google: more Macs mean higher IPv6 usage in US

2008-11-14T00:14:00.000+05:30

At the RIPE meeting in Dubai two weeks ago, Google presented results from a study about how IPv6-capable "ordinary users" are. And the results are surprising. While an earlier study by Arbor Networks showed only 0.0026 percent of all traffic was IPv6 enabled, Google determined that world wide, 0.238 percent of their users' systems have IPv6 enabled and prefer to use IPv6 over IPv4 where possible.

The results were obtained by "enrolling" a small fraction of the users visiting www.google.* into the experiment. When displaying search results, these users' browsers were asked to perform a background HTTP request to a Google system with both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. The results were recorded along with the OS as reported by the browser and the geolocation of the user's IPv4 address. In addition to the 0.238 percent of all users world wide that have working IPv6 connectivity—which is increasing at a rate of several thousands of a percent per week—there's another 0.09 percent that have IPv6, but it doesn't work. So more than a quarter of all measured IPv6 users have broken IPv6 connectivity.

The results start getting more interesting when correlating IPv6 use with country. The top five IPv6-using countries (that generate significant traffic) are: Russia (0.76 percent), France (0.65 percent), Ukraine (0.64 percent), Norway (0.49 percent), and the US (0.45 percent). The notion that IPv6 is much further along in Asia is apparently a myth: China showed 0.24 percent IPv6-enabled users and Japan 0.15 percent. The reason Russia and Ukraine have so many IPv6 users is unclear, but for France and the US there are explanations. In France, there is an ISP that provides home routers that can easily provide IPv6 connectivity. This one ISP is enough to bring France into the top 5, even though the rest of Europe scores quite low.

In the case of the US, the relatively high IPv6 penetration seems to be the result of Apple's market share being much higher there than elsewhere in the world. It turns out that no less than 52 percent of all IPv6 users have a Mac and use 6to4. Apparently, those users have an Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station / home router, which has the 6to4 tunneling mechanism enabled. (6to4 creates IPv6 addresses from an IPv4 address and "tunnels" IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets.) In fact, no less than 2.44 percent of Mac OS users are IPv6-capable, compared to 0.93 percent for Linux and 0.32 percent for Vista.

Each of these three operating systems will use IPv6 if there's an IPv6 router, such as the Airport Extreme, available—well, it depends on the distribution with Linux—but Vista goes a step further and uses 6to4 when it's not behind a Network Address Translator. Only 0.03 percent of Windows XP users have IPv6, but on XP, the protocol must be enabled manually.

So apparently, if you give users an IPv6 router, a good number of them will start using the new protocol where possible. Experience at meetings where the network has IPv6 enabled, like the RIPE and IETF meetings, bears this out. This means that as soon as ISPs start making IPv6 available in cable/DSL modems, as well as vendors of aftermarket home routers, we should see the number of IPv6-capable users go up quickly. But then we'd still need IPv6 content to see actual IPv6 traffic—it takes two to tango. This explains why the Arbor IPv6 traffic measurement numbers are so much lower than these Google numbers, which just look at the IPv6 capability.

Microsoft Beats Yahoo and Google to Social Inbox 2.0

2008-11-14T00:13:00.000+05:30

Gmail Video Chat

2008-11-14T00:09:00.000+05:30

Google say they’re currently rolling out a video chat option to Gmail. I can’t see it yet, but according to Google, once it’s rolled out and you installed the Windows plug-in (and restarted your browser), you’ll see a “Video & more” -> “Start video chat” option at the bottom of your Gmail chat box. Contacts of yours who also installed this plug-in are supposed to show with a camera icon next to their name in the chat list. Once you contact a person, they’ll hear it ringing and can accept the video chat, and you can then see & hear them via the webcam.

50 Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers

2008-11-14T00:07:00.000+05:30

Most bloggers love their RSS readers. Not only that, but they also love to gain new RSS readers. It is such a joy when you wake up one day and see that your Feedburner count jumped by 200 or 300, right?

ways gain rss

Those days are quite rare though, and most people seem to have a hard time gaining even a small number of new RSS subscribers consistently.

Is there anything you can do about it? Any way to efficiently attract more RSS subscribers?

Sure there is. Many people wrote about this topic in the past, but I wanted to give my take on the issue too. I wrote those 50 ideas as they were coming to my head, as briefly as possible. Enjoy.

1. Have a big RSS icon. People are lazy. You need to keep that fact always in mind. If you use a little RSS icon, visitors might have a problem finding it. Most of those will just give up after a couple of seconds, so make sure the RSS icon is big and easily recognizable.

2. Display the RSS icon above the fold. Apart from using a big RSS icon, you must make sure that you display it above the fold. That is where most blogs have one, and that is where people are used to look for when they want to subscribe, so go with the flow.

3. Display the RSS icon on every page of your blog. When I started blogging I did this mistake. Only my homepage used to have an RSS icon…. As soon as I added it to every single page on the blog, the number of subscribers jumped.

4. Use words. Depending on your audience, just using an RSS icon might not be effective. If they aren’t tech-savvy, they might not know what that little orange thing is. In those cases, you can write a small message explaining that subscribing will allow them to keep updated with your posts and so on.

5. Write a post asking for people to subscribe. Ever heard the saying “Ask and thou shalt receive”? This principle works on most areas of our lives. Blogging is no exception. If you want people to subscribe to your feed, ask them to! Write a post about it, give them some reasons and you will see how they respond.

6. Use the FeedSmith plugin. Unless you hand code a lot of redirects on your blog, readers will still be able to subscribe to different RSS feeds provided by WordPress. This plugin will make sure that all your subscribers will be forwarded to the Feedburner feed, so that you can track them and control how your feed is formatted.

7. Offer email subscriptions. Like it or not, only a small percentage of the Internet users know about or use RSS feeds. Studies confirm that this number is below 10% around the world. Why would you want to miss the other 90% of the pie? If you use Feedburner, you just need to go on the “Publicize” tab to activate your email subscriptions.

8. Use an email subscription form. For most bloggers, an email subscription form will convert better than a simple “Subscribe via email” link. That is because Internet users are used to seeing those forms around, and typing their email address there is quite intuitive. The top of your sidebar is a good spot to place one.

9. Encourage readers to subscribe at the bottom of every post. Apart from having an RSS icon and email subscription form above the fold, it is also important to place them below each single post. Why? Because right after people finish reading your articles, they will look for something to do next, and subscribing to your blog is a good option. Additionally, if the article they just read was really good, they will be on the right mindset to subscribe and receive more of your articles in the future.

10. As few steps as possible. People are lazy (I know I mentioned it before, but it is worth re-emphasizing). The fewer the steps required for them to subscribe to your blog, the better. If you can reduce the number of clicks required, therefore, do it!

11. Use icons to offer subscription on the most popular RSS readers. One practical thing that you can do to reduce the number of steps required to subscribe to your feed is to use RSS reader specific icons (e.g., “Add to Google Reader” or “Subscribe on Bloglines”). Just analyze the most common RSS readers among your subscribers and add those icons to the sidebar.

12. Have clear focus on your blog. If you write about 10 different topics, it will be hard to convince people to subscribe to your blog. They might like your articles about technology, but they would hate to receive the house cleaning ones…. Having a clear focus is one of the most efficient ways to attract subscribers.

13. Publish new posts frequently and consistently. By frequently I mean publishing many posts per week or even per day, and by consistently I mean sticking with that frequency religiously. Those two factors will communicate to the visitors that your blog is active, and that subscribing to the RSS feed might be the best way to stay updated with it indeed.

14. Don’t exaggerate. While writing many posts per week or per day is usually a good thing, there is a limit to it. Many people mention that if a certain blog starts overwhelming them with dozens of new posts a day, they will just unsubscribe. The exceptions to this rule are the blogs on fast paced niches like gadget news.

15. Write valuable content. People will only subscribe to your RSS feed if there is some value that they can derive from it. This value might come from different different factors depending on your audience: it may come from the breaking news that you offer, from the deep analysis that you write, or from the funny things you say and so on, but it must be there.

16. Write unique content. You content might be valuable, but if people can find it elsewhere, they will have no reason to subscribe to your RSS feed. For example, suppose you copy all posts from a popular blog on your niche, say Lifehacker. You content would still be valuable, but it would not be unique, and most people would end up subscribing to the original source.

17. Don’t ramble or go off topic. If your blog has a clear focus as we suggested before, readers will subscribe to it for a very specific reason. If you then start writing about off topic stuff, it will annoy a great part of them. Just consider that a bad or unrelated post is worse than no post at all, since it might make some of your readers actually unsubscribe.

18. Use your RSS feed link when commenting on other blogs. Many bloggers have the habit of commenting on other people’s blogs. Some do it simply to join the conversation. Others because they want to promote their own blogs and generate some traffic. Either way, you can leave your RSS feed link instead of the website one to encourage people to subscribe to your feed (if you use Feedburner, they will be able to see your content anyway).

19. Run a contest. Contests are very popular on the blogosphere. If you have a somewhat popular blog, in fact, it is not difficult to raise some prizes and create one. By making subscribing to your RSS feed a requirement to participate, you could quickly boost the number of subscribers that you have. If you want to control who is going to take this action, use the email subscription method.

20. Offer random prizes to your subscribers. If you are not a fan of contests and competitions, you could always entice people to subscribe to your RSS feed by giving away random prizes. For example, if some company approaches you to donate some free copies of its product, you could in turn donate it to your subscribers

21. Write guest posts. Guest posts represent a very efficient technique for generating both brand awareness and traffic. If you guest blog on a popular blog on your same niche, there is also a good chance that a good percentage of that incoming traffic will end up subscribing to your feed.

22. Welcome the new readers. Whenever you manage to land a guest post on a really popular blog, or when you get mentioned on a larger website or mainstream site, it could be a good idea to write a specific post to welcome those readers. Use that post to describe your blog briefly, to talk a bit about yourself, and to encourage them to subscribe.

23. Go popular on social bookmarking sites. Some people say that the quality of the traffic coming from social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg and StumbleUpon) is very low. This is true to some extent, because those visitors will rarely click on anything on your page (including on the subscribe link). Because of the sheer amount of traffic that you can get on those sites, however, even a really small conversion rate could easily mean 200 or 300 new subscribers in a matter of 24 hours.

24. Explain to your readers what is RSS. As we mentioned before, it is estimated that less than 10% of the popular know about or use RSS feeds. Can you do anything about this? Sure you can! Write a post teaching your readers what RSS is, why it is good, and how they can start using it. It works particularly well on blogs that have a non tech-savvy audience.

25. Have a special “Subscribe” page with all the info and links there. Apart from writing a specific post teaching your readers about RSS, you can also create a special “Subscribe” page on your blog where you explain briefly how to use RSS feeds, and place all the subscription links, badges, and email forms. You could then link to that page from the sidebar, with a link that would say “Subscription Options” or “How to subscribe.”

26. Create a landing page on your blog to convert visitors in subscribers. If you are going to purchase some banners or other type of advertising, it is highly recommended that you create a landing page to receive those visitors on the best way possible. Use that page to describe your blog, to highlight your best content, and to ask them to subscribe. When doing guest blogging, you could use this page as the byline link as well.

27. Send traffic to that page using PPC. Pay-per-Click advertising, like Google AdWords, is one of the cheapest ways to send targeted traffic to your site. Depending on the quality score that you get (this is calculated from the AdWords side) you could start getting visitors for as low as $0.01 each. That is, with $100, you could send up to 10,000 visitors to your landing page. With a 1% conversion rate this would mean 100 new subscribers.

28. Write an ebook and ask people to subscribe in order to download it. Whether you like them or not, eBooks are a part of the Internet. Many people write them, many others download and read them. If the content and the promotion are well structured, you have thousands of people wanting to read yours. What if you then require people to subscribe first before they can download it? That would bring a heck lot of new subscribers.

29. Launch an email newsletter with Aweber. An email newsletter can be used to complement the content on most blogs. You send a weekly email to those subscribers with your insider views of your niche, with some extra tips, tools and so on. If you then choose Aweber for your newsletter, you can use the “Blog Broadcast” feature to turn those newsletter subscribers into RSS readers too (they will receive a weekly summary from your feed).

30. Offer a full feed. If your goal is to have as many subscribers as possible, then offering a full RSS feed is the only way to go. Many people get annoyed by partial feeds, and even if that does not discourage them from subscribing at first, it might make them unsubscribe shortly after.

31. Clutter your website with ads. This point is a funny/weird addition to the list, and I don’t recommend anyone doing it. I didn’t invent this though, and I saw some people in the past talking about it. The idea is simple: if you clutter your website with many flashy and intrusive ads, but offer top quality content anyway, some people might get an urge to subscribe to your RSS feed just to avoid the clutter on the website….

32. Don’t clutter your RSS feed with ads. Just as too many ads on your site can scare visitors away, too many ads or badges or links on your RSS feed can make people unsubscribe. Keep the RSS feed as clean as possible. That is what people expect to have when they subscribe to an XML file, after all.

33. Use social proof. Ever entered into a restaurant because the place was packed with people, or didn’t enter one because it was empty? That is social proof in action. If you have a good number of RSS subscribers already (I would say over 500), you could display it on your site using the Feedburner feed count widget. This might motivate people to give your RSS feed a shot.

34. Offer breaking news. RSS feeds are one of the most efficient ways to keep up with sites that are frequently updated with information that you care about. If you manage to break some news, or to offer frequent updates on popular topics (like stock market alerts), people would have a stronger motivation to subscribe.

35. Mention that subscribing to your blog is free. It might sound strange, but many people actually get confused with the “Subscribe” terminology. I received dozens of emails over the past year from people that wanted to know if there was any cost associated with subscribing to my RSS feeds! To avoid any confusion, it could be worth mentioning that subscribing to your blog is free, so instead of “Subscribe to my RSS feed” you could use “Receive our updates for free.”

36. Use pop-ups to encourage subscription to your newsletter. Darren managed to increase his conversion rate by more than 700% using pop-ups. Sure, they are intrusive, but they work like nothing else. If you already have an established and loyal following, perhaps using this technique wouldn’t hurt your traffic. We also did a recent poll on the topic.

37. Use an animated RSS feed icon to draw attention. Animated ads get a much higher click-through rate, exactly because they move around and draw people’s attention. You can use the same technique with your RSS feed icon, and make it an animated GIF to call the attention of the visitors.

38. Use feed directories. Don’t expect to receive hundreds of new subscribers by using this technique, but every small bit helps right? Some people use feed directories to find new RSS feeds and content to subscribe to, so if you have some free time you could submit yours on those sites. Here is a list with almost 20 feed directories.

39. Email first time commentators encouraging them to subscribe. Sending a personal email to your first time commentators is a kind gesture, and many will thank you for that. You could use this opportunity to remind them that they can stay updated with your blog via the RSS feed. There is also plugin called Comment Relish that can automate this process, although it becomes less personal.

40. Make sure the feed auto-discovery feature is working. Most modern browsers have an auto-discovery feature that tried to identify if the website you are visiting has a valid RSS feed. If they do, the browser will present a small RSS icon on the right side of the address bar. So make sure that your can see that icon while visiting your blog, and click on it to see if the right RSS feed will pop. On WordPress you can edit this part on the header.php file.

41. Offer a comments feed. If you have an active community of readers who often engage in discussions on the comments section of your blog, you could consider offering a comments RSS feed.

42. Offer category feeds. If you have many categories on your blog, you could offer an RSS feed for each of them individually. This would enable visitors that are interested only in specific topics to subscribe to them and not to the whole blog. At the same time this granularity could increase the overall number of RSS subscribers you have.

43. Run periodic checks on your feeds. It is not rare to find blogs around the web with a broken RSS feed. Click on your own feed once in a while to make sure that the link is working, that the feed is working, and that it is a valid XML document.

44. Recover unverified email subscribers. You will notice that good percentage of your email subscribers will never confirm their subscription. Some are lazy, some just don’t understand the process. This percentage can go as high as 30%, so you could end up losing many would-be subscribers there. Fortunately you can email those unverified subscribers and remind them about the problem. It works for some.

45. Leverage an existing blog or audience. If you already have a popular blog, newsletter, forum, twitter account and so on, you could leverage that presence to get new subscribers. People that already follow you in some place will have a higher chance of subscribing to you new blog, especially if they like your work or person.

46. Use cross feed promotion. Find some related blogs that have a similar RSS subscriber base, and propose to the blogger to use a cross feed promotion deal. That is, you promote his blog on your feed footer, and he promotes your blog on his feed footer.

47. Use testimonials on your “Subscribe” page. You probably have seen how most product sales pages on the web use testimonials, right? That is because a personal recommendation from a third party goes a long way into convincing a prospect. If that is the case, why not use testimonials to convince people to subscribe to your RSS feed?

48. Get friends to recommend your site and RSS feed on their blog. Even stronger than having a testimonial on your “Subscribe” page is to have someone recommend you on his own blog or website. Many of his readers will pay attention to the message and head over to your blog to check what the fuzz is about.

49. Do something funny or weird while asking for people to subscribe. People love blogs with a sense of humor. If you can make them laugh, you have took them half way into subscribing. Some months ago I published the Huge RSS Icon Experiment, and gained 300 new subscribers in 3 days.

50. Start a long series so people subscribe to keep update with it. Long and structured series of posts are not only traffic magnets, but also RSS readers magnets. If a casual visitor discovers that you are publishing a long series about a topic he is interested on, he will think about subscribing in order to not miss the future posts of the series.

Top Internet Marketing Blogs Super List

2008-11-14T00:05:00.000+05:30

There are several lists with the top Internet Marketing blogs around right? But I must confess that few go as deep and as broad as the one released by Winning The Web today.

top internet marketing blogs

Here are the factors that they took into consideration:

* Feedburner RSS readers
* Alexa Ranking
* Compete Ranking
* Technorati Rank
* Google PageRank
* Yahoo Backlinks
* StumbleUpon Reviews
* Delicious Bookmarks
* Outbound links
* Voting from the readers

Crazy huh? Anyway, Daily Blog Tips is ranked on position 16, which I am pretty proud about, especially if you consider the top blogs that are above us (and some that are below!). If you have some time do check it out.

MySpace Comes to BlackBerry

2008-11-13T23:48:00.000+05:30

Poor BlackBerry. It used to be the cool kid on the block, the hipster everyone wanted, and all the gadgets wanted to be. But then the iPhone came along, and now BlackBerry is always one step behind. Where the iPhone is riding a fixie with a top-tube pad, the BlackBerry gets around on a mountain bike. With fenders. \

And so it is with applications. The iPhone is all about the FaceBook, whereas BlackBerry has just got around to hooking up with yesterday's hot-thing, MySpace. Download the clanky looking application, called myspace for BlackBerry smartphones, and you'll be able to "share events and experiences as they happen".

BlackBerry even has its own MySpace page (welcome to 2004!) which is typically hard to navigate. Links fire you off to download pages and the BlackBerry store, but there is no way to actually preview any of the "features". If you do manage to navigate the labyrinthine maze and arrive at the support pages, you'll most likely end up at the same error page we did.

Microsoft Releases Major Update to Windows Live: New Applications and Third-Party Integration

2008-11-13T23:41:00.000+05:30

Microsoft just announced the availability of a number of new and updated online applications in its Windows Live suite: Windows Live Photos, Profiles, People, and Groups. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it will allow its users to integrate content from a large number third-party services, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Twitter, and Yelp. Microsoft will begin rolling out these new services to U.S. customers in the coming weeks and expects them to be available globally in 54 countries by early 2009.
New Services

his is one of the most interesting new applications, and we will publish a more in-depth review of it a little bit later tonight. Basically, this is Microsoft's answer to Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums.

Live Photos allows you to share your pictures with granular privacy controls, and thanks to the "What's New" feed, the new Live Photos service will also allow you to monitor the photos of your friends on Windows Live.

Windows Live Profiles is new Live Profile aggregates and displays your activity on Windows Live and third-party services. Somewhat similar to FriendFeed, users can choose to aggregate their activities on other services like Yelp or Twitter on this profile page as well. In the next few months, Microsoft will also integrate a large number of other third-party services, including LiveJournal, Digg, Last.fm, iLike, Seesmic, and SlideShare.

These profiles, together with the updated Windows Live Groups, are the hub of Microsoft's social networking strategy around Windows Live.

Windows Live People is the central address book for all Windows Live services. It integrates directly with your Hotmail contacts and it will also allow you to invite your contacts from third-party services like LinkedIn. Here, you can also organize your contacts into categories, and chat with them directly through the Windows Live Messenger for the Web.

Windows Live is an interesting new service which allows you to to send photos and other content such as news or traffic information to digital picture frames. So far, Microsoft has not announced a lot of details about it, but we know that the hardware partners include Navteq, ViewSonic, and RMI.

Windows Live Groups As rumored, Microsoft will also update MSN Groups and replace it with the new Windows Live Groups. These groups are tightly integrated with the other Live services, including the revamped Live Calendar, Live Photos, and SkyDrive.
Microsoft's online storage solution has been upgraded from 5GB to 25GB.

Microsoft is also releasing mobile versions of these new and updated services that should work on any mobile web browser.
This is Big

Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network.

According to Microsoft's PR materials about this release, its main mission in designing these new services was to give users a better way to manage their digital lives. Judging from what we have seen so far, Microsoft has definitely succeeded in creating a compelling set of applications that, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft's desktop applications, will surely drive a lot of new users to Windows Live.

AOL vs. Live vs. Yahoo: Fight

2008-11-13T23:33:00.000+05:30

A day after Yahoo announced what the new front page of Yahoo.com will look like, and a couple of days after AOL redesigned its front page, Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing, turning Live.com into a social networking hub of sorts.

It’s impossible to compare the three sites since neither the new Live nor Yahoo are live yet (the new Live.com homepage should be available later today at home.live.com), but the trend is obvious. The old, static (some would say boring) concept of a big web portal is dead: the social revolution is coming.

AOL is only dipping its toes into the new revolution, by adding the ability to check out various social sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Bebo and Twitter, directly from the front page. Yahoo, although currently in test phase, will go so far as to enable third party developers to create applications for the Yahoo front page; furthermore, users will be able to fully customize the site to their liking.

The new Live.com will fall somewhere in between. It will integrate about 50 third party sites, such as Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and LinkedIn, into the new homepage; users will be able to check out what’s happening on all of their profiles directly from Live.com. Furthermore, everyone who uses Live Messenger will automatically be connected with their friends through the site. One thing that still confuses me is naming; I don’t understand the difference between all the different iterations of live.com, home.live.com, windowslive.com and so forth. Regardless of the new changes, Microsoft needs to start making sense out of this mess before they completely confuse their users.

Regarding web portals in general, the paradigm has shifted. It is no longer important to have people click on various links on a portal, thus increasing your pageview count; all the major portals want to have their users’ undivided attention. They’re doing this by turning the portal into a social activity hub; a one stop shop for users who are dabbling with social networking but aren’t hardcore users and they don’t have time to open a dozen web sites each day. This, at least, is what AOL, Live.com and Yahoo are betting on.

Google Chrome Gets Bookmark Manager, Better Pop-Up Blocker

2008-11-13T23:31:00.000+05:30

Google's Chrome browser released an update to those signed up for "developer" udpates that adds a few nifty features, though most of them are already standard in other browsers. First, and most anticipated, is a stand-alone bookmark manager, which offers simple tree-nesting views of your bookmarks, and lets you edit and rename your bookmarks.

The "privacy" options have been updated as well, to give users more control over what gets suggested and saved by Chrome, and blocked pop-ups now nest in the lower-right corner, with a number to indicate multiple windows. Windows users using a standard beta installation of Chrome won't see the update, but you can subscribe to the Dev channel in Chrome to get the 0.4 update.

AwayFind Gets Urgent Email Through When You're Offline

2008-11-13T23:23:00.000+05:30

Just-launched webapp AwayFind provides a custom form that people can use to contact you via SMS when you're not checking email. In short, it acts like a filter that shields you from email you don't need to see when you're not checking your inbox constantly—but lets the urgent messages get through.

Here's how it works: You set up your contact page at AwayFind, and add a link to it in your vacation autoresponder. If someone urgently needs to reach you, they click the link, fill out the form and AwayFind pipes the message straight to your cellphone—without requiring you to publish your phone number. Here's what the AwayFind workflow looks like.

First, you sign up for an AwayFind account (free plan available), and edit the text that appears on your contact form. You can set AwayFind to ask for the sender's email address and or phone number, their contact preferences, category of message, and even set a custom verification question, like "What's my last name spelled backwards?". Also in your AwayFind account settings (but not pictured), you enter your phone number and test to make sure AwayFind can send you text messages successfully. Click on the image on to the left to see the full AwayFind edit form.

Then, when you're going to take an email vacation, you add a link to your AwayFind contact page in your vacation autoresponder. While you're not checking email, your autoresponder goes out to anyone who writes you. When Mr. HolyCrapINeedYouRightNow gets the auto-response, he clicks on the contact form.

Is Apple Building A Search Engine?

2008-11-13T23:19:00.000+05:30

We’ve received multiple (if thin) reports that Apple is working on a search engine of some sort.At first glance, the rumors make sense. Apple’s Safari browser has 6-7% market share, and currently uses Google as the search engine for both the standard and iPhone/iPod versions (unlike other browsers, you don’t have a choice).

They also have a suite of personal productivity tools through Mobile Me that bring some hard core users to their servers daily. All of that traffic and usage equates to a lot of searches, which can be monetized heavily.Also, Apple can’t be super pleased with Google’s competition to the iPhone with Android.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s also on Apple’s board of directors, sits out of discussions involving Apple’s mobile strategy, and rumor is he may leave the board.But one important fact that isn’t checking out - if Apple were building a search engine, they’d be hiring search experts and engineers. We’ve talked to a ton of them at all the big companies, and while some of them heard the same umors, none have lost search employees to Apple, or heard of any specific hirings.

That alone almost certainly rules out a full on search competitor. You can’t do it without people who know what they’re doing.Apple also loves the fees they receive regularly from Google for search marketing dollars earned from Safari. They obviously aren’t in the advertising business today, so even if they did launch a search engine they’d still heavily rely on Google or its competitors for the advertising piece.

So why invest all that capital into search?The answer is they’re not. But the rumors persist, and we believe they have a nugget of truth. Here’s what we think is really going on: Apple doesn’t like the search experience on its mobile devices, and may be building a radically different user experience which is much more visual than exists today. It will likely still be powered by Google results, but Apple may present it in a very different way that suits mobile users much better.

Cloud Computing Panel at Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-08T11:19:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, an all-star panel at the TechWeb/O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit took a closer look at the implications of the current shift towards cloud computing and discussed the possible business models around it. The panel featured Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch, Salesfore.com's CEO Marc Benioff, Google's Dave Girouard, and VMware's CEO Paul Maritz. The panel was moderated by Tim O'Reilly.

Moderator Tim O'Reilly asked the panelists about their companies' stake in cloud computing and how they thought about it in their specific businesses. VMware's President and CEO Paul Maritz sees his company's role as supplying businesses with the "underlying plumping" that will allow them to become more 'cloud-like' internally, and, through this, allowing them to leverage the external cloud as well.

Adobe's Kevin Lynch considers it his company's role to enable the "fourth generation of software" that will bring a fusion of cloud computing and rich desktop applications to users (by using Adobe Air, of course). At the same time, though, he also acknowledged that Adobe is looking at purely web-based applications with Photoshop.com and Acrobat.com, though he sees Adobe's focus as being on enabling technologies.

In contrast to this, Dave Girouard, who manages Google's enterprise business, sees it as Google's mission to bring users "entirely into the cloud" and not just to create a "cloud-like" experience. Girouard also used this opportunity to chastise the enterprise computing world as 'stagnant' and 'unenlightened' when it comes to considering the user experience for its clients and employees.

Saleforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff mostly talked about the importance of developers in building applications on top of Salesforce.com.