Beta Software News

Apple iTunes 8.0: A closer look at 'Genius'

2008-09-22T14:50:00.011-07:00

Download iTunes for Windows 8.0 from FileForum now.

While Apple is pushing a major update to its client software filled with several new features, easily the biggest new one appears to be its music recommendation engine, called Genius.

This afternoon, the Cupertino company is billing its new Genius feature, premiering with iTunes 8.0 software, as a way to "create a playlist from songs in your library that go great together." Obviously, many times when companies make such claims, the reality may not match the hype.

So BetaNews set out to look into the feature, find out how exactly it works, and determine whether its recommendations are genuinely qualified. According to Apple, the work begins when Genius starts scanning your library of music. As the help file for the feature reads, "To create Genius playlists, iTunes uses anonymous information about your library and other iTunes libraries."

A user must go through several hoops to activate the feature -- apparently a pretty solid attempt by Apple to ensure the user realizes that some data from their machines will indeed be shared with the company.

Once the user accepts, iTunes gathers data from the songs in the user's library, and then sends it to Apple. It is apparently processed there and sent back, after which, iTunes activates the Genius feature.

To begin using Genius, the user clicks on a song he wishes to create a playlist for, then clicks on the Genius icon on the lower right of the application window -- which should be familiar to anyone who has used the Genius Bar Service at an Apple Store.

For the purposes of our test, we selected a track by Daft Punk from their 1997 album Homework, "Revolution 909." The results we got back were somewhat interesting, considering Daft Punk is very much dance music.

Some of the songs that seemed a little out of place were tracks like Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon," Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," and The Moody Blues' "Tuesday Afternoon."

While we're not exactly sure if it had to do with the relatively small size of the library, these results did not seem to gel well. In fairness, however, we selected several other Daft Punk tracks, and it seemed like the recommendations were more accurate for whatever reason.

Either way, clicking on a particular song within the playlist (or anywhere else within the iTunes client) pulls up the Genius sidebar. We found this to be one of the coolest new features.

Essentially, songs can be played and purchased directly from the sidebar, without the need to go through the iTunes Music Store. Additionally, the sidebar knows what music is already in your library, so it recommends new music from the artist you are playing, as well as recommended music selections around iTunes based on that track.

We found this feature even more useful than the Genius playlist, as it negates the need to move back and forth from your library to iTunes, and will also help the user find new music based on what she's already listening to.

Although it's not exactly specified, the whole idea seems born out of the "Just For You" feature that Apple first debuted with iTunes 6 in late 2005, and the MiniStore that debuted in January 2006. The resulting flak that Apple got for the MiniStore's communication back to the company may have a lot to do with why consumers must jump through so many hoops just to activate the feature.

It appears to us that Genius is definitely worth opting into. While the good old "Shuffle" option may be sufficient for most, for those who wish to have their music a little less random, Apple's latest innovation should do the trick.

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Google will provide TV ads to NBC Universal properties

2008-09-22T14:50:00.009-07:00

The latest platform innovation from Google enables advertisers to place bids for on-air commercial time that Google has already purchased. Now that time will come at a higher premium, with the entry of NBCU into the mix.

Google launched TV Ads last year, a means for businesses to selectively purchase television ad inventory using similar tools to what Google AdWords provides its clients for text ads, complete with minimum bids and budget maximums. After airing, customers can measure the efficacy of their campaigns. Google even provides the an Ad Creation Marketplace to assist in the creation of the commercial.

Beginning early in 2009, NBC Universal cable networks CNBC, Sci-Fi Network, MSNBC, Oxygen, Sleuth, and Chiller will offer advertising slots to Google TV Ads customers. Previously, Google TV Ads could be seen nationally on Dish Network, and locally on Wave Broadband in select California markets.

Google has created a YouTube Channel featuring many current customers who built their entire television advertisement campaign around the tools that Google provides. While the majority of these customers are ".com" services, there have been more noteworthy customers to use Google's system so far, such as Lenovo.

Google Gadgets for Linux appears

Sprint’s new pact with Google stresses openness

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Google Analytics will finally integrate blog tracking

HP may trump Dell with a 24-hour battery-powered EliteBook

2008-09-22T14:50:00.007-07:00

Tired of watching your laptop batteries conk out after two hours, even though the brochure promised four? Next month, HP expects to ship an EliteBook 6930p notebook that promises a phenomenal 24 hours of battery life without recharging.

Only about a month after Dell's rollout of Latitude notebooks with 19 hours of battery life, Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to ship its own high-end business laptop -- the EliteBook 6390p -- complete with a high capacity battery option able to deliver a full day of battery operation, without recharging.

First announced earlier this year along with more than a dozen other HP notebooks, the new EliteBook also boasts options that include solid-state drives (SSDs) from Intel and a mercury-free 14.1-inch IllumiLite LED screen. HP waited until this week, though, to announce the 24-hour battery life feat.

HP credits the machine's other components for helping to supply an entire day of battery use. The Intel SSDs, for instance, bring up to a 7% battery life increase over traditional hard drives. The IllumiLite boosts battery life a full four hours over conventional displays, officials said in a statement.

HP also touts Intel's X25-M and X18-M SATA SSD options -- slated for availability, too, in October -- with delivering data transfer rates nearly six times faster than those of HDs.

The EliteBook 6930p will weigh in at an astonishing 4.7 pounds, though conceivably, the high-capacity battery may bring it back to a weight on a par with the average notebook. HP has not specified the material it's using for its high capacity battery, nor has it revealed its own weight separately. BetaNews is pressing HP for more information.

The 6930p won't be so easy on the wallet. Although it is being sold for several hundred dollars in discounts through Web retailers such as OnSale.com and GloriaOne.com, the new EliteBook starts at $1,899 on HP's site, without either the high-capacity battery or other high-end options.

Mobile phone battery dead? Try dancing

Toshiba’s SSD-based notebooks double their capacity

Gigabyte’s low-cost Atom-powered portable gets a name

Dell tries again with its XPS 730 high-end desktop gaming system

Sprint confirms it's adding two HTC Touches to its 3G arsenal

2008-09-22T14:50:00.005-07:00

The HTC Touch Pro smartphone, coming next month in the US to Sprint.While Verizon Wireless has been busy with its ongoing campaign to convince you that "it's the network," Sprint -- whose network has not been its strong point in recent years -- is placing new bets today that it's really the phone.

Just in time for the CTIA show, Sprint has officially confirmed that it is adding two of the most intriguing new Windows Mobile-based HTC Touch phones to its lineup of 3G touchscreen smartphones, which already includes the original HTC Touch and the best-selling Samsung Instinct.

The Touch Diamond, which premiered last May, will go on sale later this month in the US for $249.99 (after the $100 rebate). It has a 2.8-inch screen and 3.2 megapixel camera. For $50 more, the Touch Pro adds an expandable microSD storage slot and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard; it goes on sale October 19.

Easily the most intriguing feature of both these new models is what HTC calls the TouchFLO interface, which is the manufacturer's spin on a method of making touchscreen gestures more intuitive and functional. The TouchFLO environment is rendered in 3D, so stored pictures, e-mails, and messages can be flipped through as though they really did live behind this miniature pane of glass. Sliders are big, prominent arrows that are not only receptive to touch, but to the amount of force the user's finger is applying; so spinning through a Rolodex-like array of pictures can be accomplished with a shove or a flick of the finger.

Obviously this functionality was inspired by the Apple iPhone's approach to flipping through contacts lists, where speed and force are both fully registered. But HTC's approach is to make that force more visible through 3D, in a compelling way that makes the user feel their phones are more receptive to them.

The addition of both Touch models will raise Sprint's position in the 3G smartphone stakes. New customers making their evaluations will be thinking like this: AT&T has the fashion advantage with the iPhone 3G, although connectivity on that model has suffered in recent days. Verizon Wireless will tout the reliability of "the network" as its strong point, although it's not only offering Samsung's Glyde phone (perhaps not as suave as the Instinct, but comparable feature-wise) but also the innovative LG Dare. The Dare may not have the screen real estate as other models, but VZW touts its UI as a principal feature as well, noting its innovative use of drag-and-drop to, for instance, move an open item or document to a tile that represents a function.

Sprint's Instinct was already a much needed shot-in-the-arm for the carrier whose comeback strategy new CEO Dan Hesse has made very clear to customers. Now, the carrier may be hoping that when customers try out the TouchFLO operating methodology in its stores over the coming months, they may call into question just what's supposed to make the iPhone so outstanding, besides its marketing?

Good vibrations

Google Gadgets for Linux appears

Qwest to resell Verizon Wireless services

Sprint’s new pact with Google stresses openness

Sprint Nextel tries again to hang onto some 800 MHz spectrum

Amazon opens its MP3 store to independent sellers

2008-09-22T14:50:00.003-07:00

Today, Amazon announced its indie publishing service CreativeSpace is now tied with its MP3 shop, allowing independent artists and labels to release DRM-free materials in Amazon's MP3 store.

Artists can set up an account on CreateSpace and sell their materials with no upfront charges; however, accounts are arranged in such a way that money is not directly distributed to artists. Instead, royalty checks are given out with expenses subtracted.

This method of distribution has been done before, but Amazon provides artists with a full set of account reports that can be updated daily, presumably leaving nothing a mystery. Royalties are only paid out when in excess of $20.

Artists do not have to sign an exclusive agreement to sell their material on Amazon, therefore retaining their ownership. Prices are also set by the artists themselves. To make tracks available, they can submit 320 Kbps MP3 or uncompressed (44.1 KHz, 16 bit) AIFF, or mail a master CD.

In addition to MP3 sales, CreateSpace also offers what it calls "On Demand Publishing" of print media (books), DVDs, CDs, audiobooks, and video downloads. An Amazon property since 2002, CreateSpace formerly offered the ability to publish HD DVDs on demand, but this service was discontinued in February.

The service promises the future ability to publish High Definition video content on demand, even though Blu-ray does not yet support disc-on-demand as a part of its format spec.

Amazon and CreativeSpace's openness to indie artists is a stark contrast to Apple's murky and often daunting process of making their art available for download on iTunes.

Google opens Knol website, a wiki with bylines

Borders Group reopens its independent online bookstore

Now part of CBS, Last.fm will get exclusive video

Google takes more baby steps in online privacy game

2008-09-22T14:50:00.001-07:00

Through a series of blog posts, topped off by two announcements this week about retaining user-related data, Google is inching along toward alleviating the concerns of many users and privacy groups, trumpeting each step along the way.

In one blog post on Monday, a Google legal and engineering team announced a "significant" shortening of Google's IP retention policies, involving plans to start anonymizing users' addresses on servers after nine months instead of the previous 18 months.

Then in another entry on the same day, Google's senior VP of operations, Urs HÃ¶lzle, said Google will soon start anonymizing IP addresses as well as other information collected through Google Suggest users, within 24 hours after each search is done.

Used in Google's new Chrome browser as well as in the Firefox Web browser, Google Search, and Google Toolbar, Google Suggest "guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time," Holzle noted.

"To provide its recommendations, Google Suggest needs to know what you've already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don't log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service," he wrote.

Now, though, in a change expected to be deployed within a month, Google will start to anonymize the logged data within about 24 hours "in the 2% of Google Suggest requests we use," according to the senior VP.

For Google searches themselves, however, IP addresses logged on servers will now be anonymized after nine months, as opposed to 24 hours -- but this is down from a previous level of 24 months. Before moving to the 24-month retention period, Google kept user data from searches on hand for an indefinite length of time.

"It was a difficult decision [to anonymize IP addresses after nine months] because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation," according to a blog post this week co-authored by three Google staffers: Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel; Jane Horvath, senior privacy counsel; and Alma Whitten, software engineer.

What's the reason for this confusing discrepancy in retention times between Google Suggest and Google searches? "In the case of Google Suggest we decided it's possible to provide a great service while anonymizing data almost immediately. But in other cases -- such as our core Web search -- storing data like IP addresses for a time is crucial to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam," Holzle maintained.

Meanwhile, on the whole, Google seems to have been growing more transparent in recent months about its reasons behind modifications to its privacy policies. Fleischer has been quoted elsewhere as admitting that Google only shortened retention to 24 months after having been pressured by regulators in the European Union.

"[But] some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit," Google's legal and engineering team wrote this week.

In the Viacom suit, the media entertainment empire gained access to YouTube's logs -- resulting in a Viacom boycott and angry postings by some YouTube users -- after alleging that YouTube and its owner Google committed copyright infringement by allowing unauthorized viewing of movie clips and sports highlights.

Meanwhile, though, Google has now agreed to retain users' data from the use of Google Search for only nine months, because, "after months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data's utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner," according to the blog from the legal/engineering team.

"We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work," they said.

In contrast, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP for search products and user experience, doesn't appear to have been as candid in July in her announcement of the addition of a link from Google's home page to Google's privacy policies.

"Today we're making a home page change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies. Google values our users' privacy first and foremost. Trust is the basis of everything we do, so we want you to be familiar and comfortable with the integrity and care we give your personal data," Mayer wrote.

Somehow, Mayer didn't mention that a coalition of 14 privacy groups had written a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt about a month before, demanding the link to privacy policy be added to Google's home page, and charging that, without it, Google was in violation of the California Online Privacy Protection Act.

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Virtualization: While Microsoft loses more time, VMware loses more execs

2008-09-22T13:50:00.019-07:00

We've been told virtualization is the fastest evolving sector of the computing industry. But now, VMware is running on autopilot without its key scientists, and Microsoft hopes another delay won't hurt it too much.

In advance of a major virtualization trade show in Las Vegas next week, two of the industry's key players will most definitely not be firing on all cylinders. Smartly diffusing a potential powder keg by letting the news out yesterday at its own show, Microsoft demonstrated live migration, a very long awaited key feature of its hardware-supported Hyper-V virtualization suite, only to tell attendees it wasn't actually coming to a data center near you until at least 2010.

While VMware is usually one to gloat when such news emanates from Microsoft, its typical post-demo retort seemed muted this morning, perhaps in the wake of even more of the company's heart and soul departing for greener pastures. This morning, as first reported by Virtualization.info, VMware announced the resignation of the company's chief scientist and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, making the fourth key executive from the era prior to its acquisition by EMC to leave. Rosenblum's wife, ten-year veteran VMware CEO Diane Greene, was ousted by the EMC-led board of directors in July, and replaced with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz.

Rosenblum's colleague, executive vice president for R&D D. Richard Sarwal, resigned from VMware just last week to return to his former employer, Oracle. And The New York Times learned that Paul Chan, VMware's VP for product development, already left the company last month without the company making a sound.

The bad news from two of the world's virtualization leaders could be the virtual equivalent of blood in the water, that could excite a growing pool of would-be competitors into a frenzy. If VMware has a plan going forward under EMC's leadership, it hasn't been very well articulated. And Microsoft's plan to capture the virtualization market from the bottom up may be seriously jeopardized.

While data server consolidation -- running more applications simultaneously on fewer server processors -- is the principal selling point for Microsoft's Hyper-V, data centers where processors are already clustered are already well past the whole consolidation issue. They're dealing with elimination of downtime -- not reduction, not minimization, but elimination. Data centers are effectively the modern world's supercomputers, and real-time processing is critical there; one second of downtime can ruin an evaluation.

For data centers that host so-called "cloud computing" applications, zero downtime is also critical requirements of service-level agreements (SLAs). Any downtime situation forces an entire network to reorganize its workload, and that takes time and resources. But with a proper replication scheme, live migration enables a network to simply throw a switch when a processor fails, moving an active virtual machine from point A to point B without anyone or anything ever noticing.

VMware has had live migration (called "VMotion") as a key feature for years, in wide adoption since 2005; while Microsoft has created stop-gap features -- even renaming one old feature ("host-level clustering") to look like a new stop-gap feature ("quick migration") -- to fend off VMware's main claim to superiority.

But if there's any bright light at the end of Microsoft's newly elongated tunnel today, it could come from the fact that the creators and engineers of what was supposed to be VMware's next great innovation -- the further development of a processor-level security platform for virtual machines called VSafe -- just exited through the back door. Rosenblum reportedly accepted a teaching post at Stanford University, so it doesn't look like any competitor will be gaining the benefit of VMware's former braintrust any time soon.

The question then becomes, will a gathering throng of very strong, very familiar-looking competitors -- including Citrix with its recently acquired Xen product line, Sun with its recently acquired Innotek product line, and Red Hat with its just acquired Qumranet -- hit the ground running in Las Vegas next week. More importantly, perhaps, which will be the first to attack this now vulnerable market from the top, at the data center level?

Red Hat: Virtualization will be free

Microsoft finally launches Hyper-V

VMware CEO ousted for former Microsoft exec

Red Hat buys virtualization specialist Qumranet

Plastic Logic displays newest e-book reader

2008-09-22T13:50:00.017-07:00

More than two years after debuting the concept, Plastic Logic will premiere its first demo model e-book reader at DEMOfall in San Diego.

Like most other E-books, Plastic Logic's Reader is built around E-Ink's VizPlex imaging film. This Electronic Paper Display (EPD) technology can be found in the Amazon Kindle, Phillips spinoff iRex's Iliad, the Sony Reader, and the soon-to-be-available Readius from Polymer Vision.

Until recently, Plastic Logic had only shown early prototypes, such as the one pictured in the video below, but the company is now showing off more complete working models. Plastic Logic's un-named reading device is about the same size as a sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper, with a display over twice the size of the Amazon Kindle, the device analysts have referred to as the "iPod of the book world." As the company's name suggests, the major difference it hopes to provide is in the screen's plastic substrate. making it lighter, more durable, and 100% more flexible than glass displays.

A demo of Plastic Logic's first e-newspaper reader device.

Founded by Cambridge University researchers, Plastic Logic has been working on its EPD reader for nearly ten years. After receiving $100 million in funding last year, the company will open its flagship manufacturing facility in Dresden, Germany in just over a week. Plastic Logic expects to be able to begin shipping its first EPD product in the second quarter of 2009, when it will also receive an official price. The company has thus far only said it will be "competitively priced," which would place it between $399 and $599.

Moulding at Mazda

Amazon goes down for the count twice

Are Microsoft’s newest webcams the last of a dying breed?

Amazon opens its MP3 store to independent sellers

Mozilla's Aza Raskin: The journey back to Ubiquity

2008-09-22T13:50:00.015-07:00

In an in-depth interview with BetaNews, the user experience chief of Mozilla Labs discusses a unique journey of discovery, backtracking through the groundbreaking work of his own father to rediscover the power of the command line.

He is the son of the man said to be the father of the Macintosh. As Aza Raskin told BetaNews, to this day, he still comes across papers or lecture notes or sketches that introduce him a little more to Jef Raskin, a man who passed away way too soon. And he continues his father's legacy, working now with Mozilla Labs to generate more sensible ways for people to use computers. A large part of his job consists of evangelizing a community of developers and users, generating interest in a new project called Ubiquity -- an experiment in endowing Firefox with a versatile, interpreter-driven command line.

In a 1986 interview for the book Programmers at Work, Jef Raskin said he had just started a company called Information Appliance. His goal, he said, was to advocate the ideal of building a computer that was as simple and as intuitive as a refrigerator. Here's an excerpt from Jef Raskin's interview with author Susan Lammers:

Have you ever noticed that there are no Maytag user groups? Nobody needs a mutual support group to run a washing machine. You just put the clothes in, punch the button, and they get clean. To do information processing, I don't want hardware and software; what I really want is an appliance to do my tasks. And what tasks do I do? Surveys show that 85% of all personal computer users use word processing, so I need a word processor, a wonderful word processor -- the best in the world. But I am sort of simple-minded. I can only remember ten or fifteen commands. That's why the system I have has only five. That way I can wake up at 3:00 a.m., get out of bed, go over to the computer, and just type out an idea.

Let's consider what it would be like if a computer company had designed a toaster. You wake up and you want a piece of toast for breakfast. The first thing you do is switch the toaster on. If it was designed by General Electric, you'd put the toast in and off you'd go, but no, this toaster was designed by a computer company. So what happens? First of all, it does a two-minute toaster check. Then you put in the system disk and boot the system. After that you put in your breakfast disk and then you type "Load TOASTED.CODE."

So, what happens next? Up comes the menu. It asks, "What kind of bread are you going to have?" If it is a California program, it'll say croissant, bagel, English muffin, whole wheat, and at the bottom, of course, white bread. They're labeled A, B, C, D, E, so you hit C because you feel like a muffin this morning. Nothing happens because you forgot to hit Return. You'd think the machine would be smart enough to respond to C, but you have to hit Return anyway.

Do you think it does anything now?...Of course not. It's designed by a computer company. It says, "Are you sure?" Now you're ready to throw it through the wall. Are you mad yet? Haven't you been mad at computers for years? But because you spend a couple of thousand dollars on it, you put up with all this stupidity, and so does the rest of the world. Millions of people go through nonsense like this every time they use a computer.

Twenty-two years later, we began our interview with Aza Raskin by asking him whether it had occurred to him that the work he was doing -- making a Web browser respond to commands -- could be interpreted as running against the grain of the visually splendid graphical environment his father pioneered.

AZA RASKIN, user experience chief, Mozilla Labs: That's an interesting way of phrasing it. I'd put it slightly differently: What we're exploring here, and what our community is exploring here, is not something which is terribly new.

Way back when we had the command line, the problem was, it was made by overly parsimonious engineers who were very interested in making things as efficient key-wise as possible. Which ended up giving us names like df and ps -aux [in UNIX], which just aren't very memorable to the average person, including me. [In my experience,] the command line options to TAR are about as much fun as bobbing for apples in a cement mixer. It's a singularly unpleasant experience.

In that headlong rush away from being able to type what you want to do, we lost something. We lost some of the expressiveness that only comes out of language. So moving back there, I think, is the right direction. But I should note that there's sort of a groundswell of people trying to do similar things. If you look at the URL bar as, in fact, a way of typing what you want to do...you used to type rc to go to your news and pine to go to your mail. Now you type nytimes.com to go to your news and gmail to go to your mail. And that's a command line that your grandmother knows how to use. If you look at [Microsoft] Word, and you do a command, "Print," there is a little box in there where you can type what pages you want printed: "1, 3-10." That's a way of typing what you want to do.

Typing what you want to do isn't at all nerdy, right? In fact, Google does this very well, where you type in a request for a movie and it'll return movies. If you type in weather, it'll return weather. Conversation is an incredibly natural way to communicate. So I think the melding of GUIs -- which are great for discoverability but bad for extensibility -- with language, which has an amazing power of expressiveness, is the right way to be moving the Web.

Here we're trying Ubiquity 0.1 while reading (or trying to read) an article in Paris Match about the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We'd like Ubiquity's help in translating the sentence, Ses partisans lui sont fidèles. So we type Ctrl-Space, followed by translate. Ubiquity responds with the phrase, "His supporters are fidles." Barack Obama might be interested to know that his loyal delegates are rapidly becoming violins. (And yes, if you're interested, Trop lent! means "too slow.")

Aza declines the characterization of himself as the "creator" of Ubiquity. Rather, he prefers to be described as the fellow who inspires others to do the hard work of making the code actually happen.

AZA RASKIN: Most companies [in making their] appeal will say, "Hey, we have a community that helps us, or works with us." But Mozilla's fundamentally different. We don't have a community; we actually are part of the community, and it's a very shared space. So there's actually no distinction between people that sit next to us, and people that sit on the other side of the world. In fact, if you look at Ubiquity, it's created from people in other countries, states, and continents...And you can see the proof of this. It's not just some empty talk in our commit log. People all over the world, 24/7, way before it was launched, were having a strong voice in making it. So the story is not, I think, Raskin comes in and takes these ideas; it's really a funneling, getting people to think about the problem the right way, and then it really harnesses this amazing groundswell of innovation from the edges, comes pouring in.

SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews: Well, when you say, thinking about the problem in the right way, is "the right way" in this case, how do we then extend the functionality of the browser using language? Or is "the right way" really more of a comprehensive question, "How do we reincorporate the expressiveness of language into the use and control of our computers?"

AZA RASKIN: That's a very sagacious question. There are multiple levels here. You could look at all of them. I think the first level we're looking at, yes, is saying, how do you incorporate language into the browser? And if you go a level deeper than that, it's saying, how do you empower everyday Web developers to enhance the browser at a fundamental level? How do we take that community of thousands who are making Firefox extensions, and turn that into millions?

That's part of it; the other part of it is to say, how do you solve some of the problems on the Web, which is that everything is dispararate, adding a map takes a lot of clicks...being able to plot things is very difficult to do. You do see data; the best user experience is to have that data displayed in a way that makes sense to you, not necessarily the way that made sense for the purpose of the author of the Web site. So I think we're going to see sort of a shift in thinking: Web 1.0 was all about making static pages that people went to; Web 2.0 is thinking about, how do you empower content providers to mash up data that then get shown to end users; and, dare I say it, Web 3.0 is about letting end users take whatever data they see, anywhere they want, take any service, and bring it to that. So it's gone from very solid, [where] the Web site owns everything, to, the Web site provides functionality for other Web sites, to everything being very user-centric.

The final question you asked, which is, "Is this a way about thinking more generally about computing?" I think if you fast-forward a number of years, that is an interesting thing to ponder.

SCOTT FULTON: If you fast-forward. But will we still be pondering it in those years?

AZA RASKIN: Well, I don't think so. Again, this is the strength of being at Mozilla, and the strength of Labs and our community: that we as Mozilla, as an open source project and as a meritocracy in our community, have a shared resource here. That puts our community in the very unique position to think about this, being unfettered from constraints like thinking of a business model. We can think entirely about the user experience of the Web, and the Web doesn't necessarily mean, "inside the Web browser." The Web means, access to the Web anywhere, at all times. It's that open Web with a capital "W" as opposed to the lower-case web of what you see through your browser. Engendering that innovation from the edges; plus that community aspect means, I think, Ubiquity and Firefox is in a unique position to actually make this happen not too far in the future; and I think the place you'll first see this happening is on mobile, where it's really painful right now to switch between tabs and context, and you really want to just answer your bar trivia questions.

Next: The danger of getting "buttoned out"...

Continued. . . 1 | 2 | Next >>

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Esquire 'beta tests' an animated magazine cover

2008-09-22T13:50:00.013-07:00

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, ever-urbane magazine Esquire will include "disposable" electronic paper display (EPD) panels in its October 2008 issue.

The same magazine that has featured John Wayne with angel wings, and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian, proclaims "The 21st Century Begins Now," with its E Ink cover insert. The display is provided by E Ink Corp., the company responsible for providing displays for every other commercially available "e-paper" device.

As the technology matures, we have begun to see it used in increasingly innovative ways, such as in Seiko's E Ink ring, and Lexar's JumpDrive capacity meters. Esquire's cover will not only be the first printed periodical to integrate the technology into its pages, but it will also be the first example of disposable E Ink displays -- although whether readers truly want to throw this one away, remains to be tested.

With a battery life of around 90 days, the optional E Ink cover will add only a $2 premium to Esquire's $3.99 cover price. With the standard cover, Esquire's anniversary issue will cost an additional $1 as well. Anniversary issues of any magazine typically run with premiums, though with an estimated circulation of 725,000, and 100,000 special EPD cover issues for sale, Esquire expects to in $925,000 extra revenue in October.

The first widely published magazine with E-ink's display technology: the October 2008 issue of Esquire.

In addition to the 10-square inch panel on the front cover, Ford Motor company will have an animated ad for its Flex "crossover" vehicle inside the anniversary issue as well.

Esquire's publisher, Hearst Corp., is one of E Ink Corporation's major investors, along with Intel, Motorola, Philips, and others. Hearst has a nine-month exclusive agreement with E Ink for the technology, so publications under its brand -- which includes 25 newspapers and almost 30 magazines -- will be the first and only places to find such technology. Popular Mechanics seems a likely candidate for the next iteration.

However, since Hearst is not disclosing how much money has been spent on the design and manufacture of these displays, nor is it saying how much Ford paid for its tie-in E Ink advertisement in the issue, this could have been such a burdensome undertaking that we may not see a repeat any time soon.

A Wii ‘problem’

Yahoo beta tests new search results concepts in India

Yahoo Buzz social news service receives update

Yahoo’s SearchScan irks some Web site owners

Evidence Samsung and SanDisk are in merger talks

2008-09-22T13:50:00.011-07:00

The company that holds patent rights for a breakthrough flash memory technology is apparently discussing the possibility of being acquired by the world's biggest flash producer. It's come down to this.

Flash card manufacturer SanDisk issued a statement early this morning, essentially using a bull-horn with trumpet accompaniment to awaken the world to the news that it does not comment on rumor and speculation. That speculation, it said, concerns news emerging from the Korean business press this week, indicating that it and leading flash memory producer Samsung are in merger talks.

"SanDisk periodically has conversations with multiple parties, including Samsung, regarding a variety of potential business opportunities," the statement reads. "We evaluate all of these opportunities, but maintain a policy of not commenting on market rumors or speculation."

The tone of the statement itself is probably the clearest validation to date that the memory developer is in talks with the memory producer. A report on the South Korean service eDaily this morning, local time, claims to cite Samsung spokespersons as confirming that negotiations are in the works, at least with regard to a timetable for further partnership extensions, perhaps more; but English-language services have not been able to officially corroborate the report so far, beyond Samsung's own bull-horn and trumpet treatment.

The problem at hand is the effort to make the NAND flash business model work. Flash memory has already evolved way past the commodity phase, and has entered the level of ubiquity. Although water is an equally ubiquitous commodity, enterprising manufacturers have found a way to bottle and sell it for profit. Flash memory producers have yet to discover an equally clever mechanism, for two reasons: 1) When embedding flash in consumer devices, the "bottle," in this case, typically belongs to someone else -- like Apple (one key exception being solid-state disks, or SSDs); 2) when selling flash as a card, royalties apply to such an extent that they could usurp what little margins producers may receive.

In this case, the technology with the obvious potential to remake, and perhaps replenish, the ailing flash industry is multi-level cell (MLC), where the binary digits or "bits" that we're so accustomed to in DRAM, are replaced with units that can assume multiple states -- 4 or 8 or 16, and so on, instead of 2.

It's SanDisk that holds a number of key MLC patents. But it's not a major manufacturer of products that could make use of MLC, besides mere memory cards whose retail prices have already sunken below the giveaway point. SanDisk counts on royalties as a provider of revenue, and Samsung is one of SanDisk's main clients. Of the approximately $400 million in royalty revenues SanDisk is likely to receive in 2008, a full 90% of that could come from Samsung alone.

That is, if Samsung wants to pay. In March 2007, Samsung decided on its own that it didn't really want to pay as much as it did, despite a 2002 agreement between the two companies that set royalty terms. While Samsung paid 2% of sales revenue from MLC ships to SanDisk, it paid another 6% to the SD Card Association, which in turn distributed a chunk of that change to SanDisk as well. Samsung decided it didn't want to pay the extra 6%.

While a lawsuit might seem like the obvious option from SanDisk's perspective, keep in mind that Samsung is close to providing half of the world's flash memory, and such a suit might only drive Samsung to find alternative sources.

So last December, rather than fight, SanDisk reached a cross-licensing agreement with Samsung that enabled the SSD manufacturer to produce so-called OneNAND memory technology which involves MLC, with SanDisk sharing some kind of stake in the revenue. It was a very short-term agreement, though, expiring in August 2009. If the agreement is allowed to elapse, and Samsung decides again to set its own royalty rates unilaterally at 2% or so, SanDisk's only option may be to fight. And if it fights, that 2% will be more like 0%.

With SanDisk's stock value remaining in the tank, and with overall revenue from NAND flash sales expected to decline worldwide in 2010, according to iSuppli estimates, acquisition at this point may be the only way for SanDisk to survive. Thus the trumpets and bull-horns.

Qualcomm, Nokia deal ends long legal battle

Evidence Samsung and SanDisk are in merger talks

iSuppli: 1Q 2008 DRAM revenues fall 39 percent

Report: OLPC buy one, give one deal returns

2008-09-22T13:50:00.009-07:00

Internet retail giant Amazon will be running the One Laptop Per Child "Give one / Get one" (G1G1) program for this year's holiday season, confirming announcements made in May.

Matt Keller, director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at OLPC, recently told IDG that Amazon will be handling the sales of the G1G1 program due to its size and ability to handle a large volume of customers. The program will be roughly the same as last year's, where customers buy an OLPC XO to donate to a developing country and get one of their own in return.

According to rough OLPC data posted in July, nearly half of the total units moved were because of the original G1G1 project (OLPC told us this afternoon it was "more than 185,000"). This means that of 400,000 total XOs placed, nearly 100,000 went to donors.

Demand for the unit was actually much higher, but due to mounting negative circumstances, many orders had to be canceled.

This explains, at least in part, why OLPC enlisted Amazon's help. Last year a major problem with OLPC's order and shipment software rendered the project unable to meet North American customer demand in a timely fashion. In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, an OLPC representative said that Amazon and OLPC's B1G1 deal will not be limited to the United States and will "ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion." Furthermore, it will still be a Linux-based XO, and not a dual-boot version as some had rumored.

Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman of OLPC, said in May that this iteration of G1G1 will focus on post-conflict countries such as Afghanistan, but customers will be allowed to choose from a list of countries where their donation may be sent.

OLPC faces ‘vicious’ rivalry in laptop market

Gates: Yahoo deal unlikely

Nearly 7 years after original, a new Windows XP goes gold

Amazon goes down for the count twice

Evidence Samsung and SanDisk are in merger talks

2008-09-22T13:50:00.007-07:00

Qualcomm, Nokia deal ends long legal battle

Microhoo talks on again–or not

Evidence Samsung and SanDisk are in merger talks

iSuppli: 1Q 2008 DRAM revenues fall 39 percent

Analysts: Online news viewers rising as newspaper readership falls

2008-09-22T13:50:00.005-07:00

Newspaper readership is down -- especially among younger adults -- and so is newspaper circulation. But online TV viewing is on the rise overall, with news the most popular content category.

Consumers seem to be getting more of their news online these days and less of it from newspapers and traditional broadcast TV, suggest the results of some industry surveys.

About 20% of US households now use the Internet for TV viewing, almost double the online viewership as two years ago, according to a study released this week by The Conference Board and TNS.

In tracking online viewing across types of content, the survey found that the largest number of people (43%) tune in to news. Other results tallied included 39% for drama shows, 34% for sitcom/comedy shows, 23% for reality shows, 16% for sports, and 15% for user-generated content.

Almost nine out of ten online TV viewers do their viewing at home, while smaller percentages do so at work or in other locations, such as the library or a friend's home. The most popular methods for viewing content turned out to be streaming video (68%) and free download (38%).

Without mentioning alternatives such as digital video recorders (DVRs), the survey cited being able to watch broadcasts at their own convenience as the top reason why viewers watch TV online. Other reasons included a lack of commercials and "portability."

Conversely, results of a survey released in July by the Readership Institute showed a small drop in local newspaper readership in the US from the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2008, with a larger decline among younger adults aged 18 to 24.

Although the authors of the survey suggested that seasonal factors came into play, the total number of newspaper "non-readers" uncovered by the survey amounted to 36%.

Still, those who do read newspapers spend an average of 27 minutes per day reading it during the week, and 57 minutes on Sunday.

"The weekday findings are similar to previous results, [but] the weekend time spent, while similar to results from the last four studies, indicates a drop of 7 percentage points from our first study in 2002," according to the authors.

Meanwhile, on the newspaper circulation side, a report published this week by the UK's Media Guardian showed that, from August 2007 to August 2008 in that country, "serious daily papers jointly lost 3.99% of their [circulation sales], the middle market pair lost 5.03% and the populars lost 2.63%."

Yet although these particular surveys cover a lot of ground, they don't touch at all on other news delivery mechanisms, such as news magazines, radio, online newswires, and specialized Web sites.

AMEC study shows CO2 savings

Adobe Flash to deliver NFL games in full

Study: BitTorrent blocking common on Comcast, Cox, StarHub

Microsoft buys a shopping service for $486M, but will only keep part

Red Hat buys virtualization specialist Qumranet

2008-09-22T13:50:00.003-07:00

The Linux vendor will now add KVM to its existing hypervisor-based approach to virtualization, an advantage the company envisions as providing as complete a portfolio as VMware, Microsoft, and Xen.

In a move that gives Red Hat new ways of managing Windows and Linux desktops, the Linux vendor on Thursday acquired virtualization player Qumranet.

With the buyout, Red Hat obtains Qumranet's KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform along with SolidICE, designed to enable a user's Windows or Linux desktop to operate in a virtual machine hosted on a central server, officials said during a press conference.

Now joining Red Hat are the Santa Clara, California-based start-up's team of engineers, including the leaders of the Qumranet-sponsored open source KVM Project. That team was founded in 2006 to do development work around a new, Linux-based mechanism for splitting a single physical computer into multiple VMs.

KVM got started with a patch to Linux designed to let higher-level software take advantage of hardware virtualization features built into the latest Intel and AMD processors. Competing technologies to KVM use low-level software-based hypervisors, not built into the Linux kernel.

Red Hat's operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, already includes an embedded hypervisor.

"Red Hat will be one of only two companies in the world with a comprehensive virtualization portfolio," contended Paul Cormier, Red Hat's VP of tools and technologies, speaking during the press conference.

Red Hat: Virtualization will be free

Phoenix BIOS with hypervisor to premiere Monday in NEC laptops

Oracle boosts its own Linux with ‘templates’ to aid virtualization

Intel buys mobile Linux startup

Comcast challenges FCC's authority in sanction appeal

2008-09-22T13:50:00.001-07:00

In a filing Thursday with the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, the broadband service provider argued that the agency did not have the authority to impose sanctions in the first place.

The FCC's order did not fine Comcast, instead ordering the company to make changes to the way it handles traffic. Comcast had already agreed to make such changes on its own, including targeted throttling and a 250 GB cap on bandwidth per customer.

Comcast has made no secret that it believed the FCC does not have the authority to impose such sanctions. If the Internet is considered a telecommunications service, then its regulation falls under the Telecommunications Act, Comcast has argued, and it would indeed be the FCC's job to regulate it.

However, if the Internet is an information service, which opponents of net neutrality have argued -- and Comcast could easily be described as such -- then the regulation could actually fall under the Federal Trade Commission.

Another argument from Comcast is that there were no set rules for the cable provider to follow regarding control over its own network traffic. Moreover, it's arguing the FCC's sanctions against it were based on a list of network neutrality principles, not laws -- thus it had not broken any law.

"We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the Commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules," executive vice president David Cohen said in a statement. "We are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission's action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record."

The conundrum over what the FCC should be enforcing, and to what degree, may be attributable to FCC chairman Kevin Martin. Instead of aggressive enforcement and cooperation with Congress on legislation, under Martin's stewardship, the agency has preferred merely to draft broader principles, and only take action when necessary.

The chairman said he was "disappointed by Comcast's decision to appeal," when asked for a reaction to Thursday's filing.

Intel faces new antitrust charges in Europe: report

FPL orders wind turbines

FCC finds Comcast in violation of net neutrality rules for BitTorrent blocking

Outcry over BitTorrent blocking stretches to Canada

Adobe Flash to deliver NFL games in full

2008-09-22T11:52:00.003-07:00

The National Football League, NBC Sports, and Adobe have announced their collaboration on Sunday Night Football Extra -- full-length live streams of NFL Sunday night football games.

Delivered in Adobe Flash, the games are promised to include the ability for viewers to change their camera angles, as well as access live statistics, in-game highlights, picture-in-picture views, and live blogs from color commentators.

Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 or higher and Firefox 2.0+, IE7+, or Safari 2+ are required for viewing. NBC recommends a minimum 500 Kbps connection for stutter-free playback.

Running behind the scenes is Adobe Flash Media Server, supporting the huge number of expected connections. Adobe says its developers utilized the company's own Flex authoring environment, Flash CS3 Professional, and Photoshop CS3.

The technology was unveiled with the New York Giants and Washington Redskins season opener yesterday, but will officially premiere Sunday, September 7 at 8:15 pm EST, in a regular season match-up featuring the Indianapolis Colts hosting the Chicago Bears, from the Colts' brand-new Lucas Oil Stadium. The games can be accessed on snfonnbc.com.

While Adobe promises to "immerse" viewers in the games, the viewing window looks to be about the size of a default YouTube video. Since this affords low system requirements, it may make mobile viewing much more feasible than outright immersion...unless it's watched alongside the actual TV broadcast.

Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight ‘agenda’

Olympics set the stage for Web tech fight

AOL debuts new version of Web-based IM client

Analysts: Online news viewers rising as newspaper readership falls

Apple releases OS X 10.5.3, users report problems

An ad about nothing: First Seinfeld + Gates ad omitted Vista

2008-09-22T11:52:00.001-07:00

Just minutes after viewing the first installment of Microsoft's new $300 million TV ad campaign featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Chairman Bill Gates, BetaNews' Tim Conneally filed this video to record his first thoughts.

BetaNews' Tim Conneally shares his first thoughts on the premiere Microsoft + Seinfeld ad. (Do forgive Tim, he started out thinking this was next Tuesday.)

The premiere ad itself, entitled "Shoe Circus." (Tagline: The Future. Delicious. [Microsoft logo])

Gates: Yahoo deal unlikely

Bill Gates bids farewell to Microsoft

Plastic Logic displays newest e-book reader

Is BlackBerry Bold really having iPhone 3G-like issues?

Mobile phone video streaming service Qik opens public beta

Exclusive beta invitation from GameTap and BetaNews

2008-09-22T11:51:00.015-07:00

Broadband entertainment network GameTap is searching for people who love to play games to join its beta program. Sign up through this exclusive invitation before the spots fill up.

Whether you prefer action games such as Tomb Raider, strategy games such as Civilization IV, adventure games such as Sam & Max, fighting games such as Street Fighter Alpha 3 and King of Fighters 2003, or puzzle games like Bust-A-Move and Columns, GameTap has them all playable for free.

GameTap frequently adds new features, new game platforms, and of course more games. In turn, the company needs more beta testers to help try out and evaluate its new offerings. If you're serious about games and willing to provide detailed, top-notch feedback, GameTap invites you to join.

In order to be eligible for the GameTap beta team, you must be within the GameTap Gold service area (USA and Canada) and must have either a Windows PC (2000, XP, Vista) or an Intel Mac.

To apply, visit GameTap's beta site at beta.gametap.com and use the password: NuuanuPali. Please fill out GameTap's beta application with as much detail as possible.

Please note that not everyone who applies will be accepted and that your answers will be used to determine your qualifications for beta testing.

Big ideas on climate change

Microsoft extends the lifespan of Outlook Express, Hotmail anyway

Pandora launches a new beta of its desktop music app

Google Analytics starts tracking Chrome, with intriguing results

2008-09-22T11:51:00.013-07:00

Since Google Analytics started tracking Chrome on Thursday, the new browser is showing a browser share of 6% or higher on some Web sites -- including BetaNews. But that's much higher than the under 2% share reported by Net Applications.

A follow-up look at Net Applications' hourly statistics for estimated worldwide Web browser usage share, conducted at around 2:00 pm today -- showed that Chrome achieved its peak penetration of 1.73% of the world's HTTP requests on Sept. 5 at 4:00 am EDT.

Now, Google's own analytics engine is tracking Google's own browser -- and on at least some Web sites, including BetaNews, Google Analytics is showing a lot more relative usage for Chrome.

Google Analytics first added Chrome to its browser tracking capabilities on Sept. 4, but the intent to do so was already in place. In a blog post on Sept. 2, the day that Chrome entered beta, Jeff Gillis of the Google Analytics Team told Web site customers that Google Analytics would start listing Chrome as a browser in its reports "very soon."

A Google Analytics report run by BetaNews at about 2:00 pm on Sept. 5 gave Chrome a 6.83% browser share, in contrast to 42.85% for Firefox (all versions and platforms), 39.38% for Internet Explorer (all versions), 4.63% for Safari (all platforms), and 3.97% for Opera (all platforms). All additional browsers got lumped together under "other."

The big gap between the Net Applications sample worldwide and Google Analytics' results for BetaNews alone, may not be all that surprising given BetaNews' more technically-minded readership.

A similar discrepancy appears in browser share data for IE and Firefox. Although Net Applications is running hourly tracking reports on Chrome, Chrome hasn't appeared yet in its monthly browser report. But where BetaNews' Google Analytics' report shows Firefox as the number one browser, Net Applications' latest monthly report indicates the reverse, with IE in the lead.

Specifically, IE gets a 72.15% share, followed by 19.73% for Firefox, 6.37% for Safari, 0.74% for Opera, 0.72% for Netscape, 0.10% for Mozilla (those early experimental builds, non-Firefox), and 0.17 percent for "other," according to Net Applications' monthly report.

Five reasons why Chrome will crash and burn

Google’s Chrome is gaining users, especially in the wee hours

Google Chrome takes more than just inspiration from Mozilla

No ruling yet in TiVo vs. EchoStar patent case

2008-09-22T11:51:00.011-07:00

The judge presiding over the patent case between TiVo and EchoStar has delayed any ruling until possibly November, buying EchoStar some time and causing TiVo some short term duress.

TiVo's share value plunged 16.5 percent on Thursday as news of Judge David Folsom's plans broke, although it had rebounded nearly nine percent on Friday to nearly $8 in late afternoon trading.

Shareholders had been expecting a favorable ruling for the company, and Thursday's seemingly knee-jerk reaction could be interpreted as investors worrying that a delay in any ruling may be a positive development for EchoStar.

While a ruling may not come until November, the judge did indicate, according to Reuters, that he would like to have a ruling by October 1, but apparently could not guarantee it.

EchoStar already owes TiVo about $94 million, as determined by the original ruling in 2006. However, the DVR maker argues the company now owes $220 million additionally, figuring in the extra year and a half spent that the case was in appeal.

TiVo did not have much to say about the developments, only saying that "the court is considering the arguments that it heard today and we remain confident in the outcome." It is also asking the court to enforce a portion of the ruling which required EchoStar's Dish Network to disable its DVRs. EchoStar argues that this should not occur, since the company updated its DVRs' software to "work around" TiVo's patented technologies.

Either way, this ruling appears to be nearly the end of the road for EchoStar. With an appeals court upholding the judgments against it, and another refusing to rehear the case, its only remaining option is the Supreme Court. And that's not the most hopeful option, considering the relatively few number of cases the nation's highest court is willing to take.

Qualcomm patent ruled invalid in German Nokia case

WiMAX patent pool

Dish, EchoStar sue TiVo to keep their DVR offerings afloat

GraphOn adds Google to lengthening list of lawsuit targets

Is there a subsidized netbook in your future?

2008-09-22T11:51:00.009-07:00

True to words spoken by Dell CEO Michael Dell last week, Dell's newly launched Inspiron Mini 9 will soon be bundled with Vodafone's mobile broadband services in parts of Europe. Could a certain US wireless carrier be next?

Retail availability through Vodafone "in key European markets" of Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 -- launched just yesterday -- is scheduled for late September, according to a statement from the two new partners. The Minis will be sold through Vodafone's online sales outlets and brick-and-mortar stores, and will be bundled with mobile broadband.

The deal echoes earlier predictions -- though not too much earlier -- by CEO Michael Dell at the Citigroup Technology Conference last week, saying that telcos might start subsidizing ultra-portable PCs and netbooks, much as they already help to pay for cell phones. Mr. Dell said he expects netbooks will ultimately be resold by wireless carriers along with 3G services.

The Windows XP Home Edition of Dell's first Mini device is already available direct from Dell in the US, Canada, and Japan, as well as in some European countries, with an Ubuntu Linux version slated to follow.

With the new Mini 9, Dell is stepping into the netbook market later than competitors such as Acer and HP, though it now appears as though negotiations with telcos for subsidized resale could be one big reason why.

Will the industry now see any similar deals by Dell in the US market? If so, Verizon Wireless -- which is co-owned by Vodafone and US telco Verizon -- might be one likely candidate.

In a separate price promotion from Dell, through 6:00 am on September 9, US customers can get the Mini 9 -- which otherwise lists starting at $399 for the Windows-based edition -- direct from Dell for only $99 if they also purchase a Studio 15, XPS M1530, or XPS M1330 laptop.

Dell tests music player to renew iPod battle: report

Qwest to resell Verizon Wireless services

Do-it-yourself phone manufacturer declares its independence tomorrow

120 GB Zunes begin to appear in stores

2008-09-22T11:51:00.007-07:00

Microsoft has confirmed that it has begun to ship the newer high-capacity Zunes at a price that makes it quite competitive against the market-leading iPod.

The 120 GB Zune will sell for $249, the same price as the 80 GB Apple iPod. Internet reports say the devices began shipping to retailers this week, and Microsoft says the rollout will continue to additional retailers over the next several weeks.

Rumors that the higher-capacity device was coming was first posted by Zune enthusiast site Zunerama last weekend. From there, the story took flight and reports seemed to indicate the 80 GB model was being phased out.

Zune team member Cesar Menendez later confirmed to Zunerama that the device was indeed on its way.

Microsoft has not been able to gain much traction at all, with its market share still remaining in the single digits. While the introduction of flash-based players helped -- which are much more popular with consumers -- the device still is outsold by a factor of many times over versus the iPod.

While the 80 GB version included a pair of premium headphones, it appears from the unboxing reports done by various blogs that Microsoft has only included a pair of standard headphones with this model.

It's likely that in order to put the price at a level that would put it in direct competition with the entry level iPod classic, some concessions had to be made. Otherwise, all other accessories included appear to be the same as previous models.

Microsoft to cut Xbox 360 price tag

Eager iPhone 3G buyers begin all-night wait outside stores

More HTC Dream details revealed through FCC

Google's Chrome is gaining users, especially in the wee hours

2008-09-22T11:51:00.005-07:00

Download Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 Beta from FileForum now.

Less than day after its beta release on Sept. 2, statistics show Google's Chrome became the fourth most used browser on the Web, well above Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8.0 -- another browser that had shown big gains in recent days.

According to the latest market share statistics from Net Applications, Google's Chrome attained usage of 1.48 percent at 4:00 am EDT on Sept. 3, fell off some, and then peaked at 2:00 am on Sept. 4 at 1.57 percent.

At 1:00 pm on Sept. 4, usage of Chrome had dropped to 0.85% -- but that was still away ahead of beta 2 of IE 8.0, a browser that saw average usage of 0.24% on September 3.

BetaNews noted that Net Applications' numbers for Chrome can be somewhat misleading if you don't consider the hour of day. Chrome's share seems to soar highest at times when US business users -- as well as most consumers -- aren't all that likely to be surfing the Web.

Still, both Chrome and IE 8.0 Beta 2 have been making impressive progress, based on the statistics.

"With the release of Beta 2 on August 27th, Internet Explorer 8.0 usage share has started to jump. Within three days of its release, usage share was already 500 percent above the peak Beta 1 usage share," according to a report by Net Applications. Since Beta 1 was primarily a developer's preview, Beta 2 is the first release to have the new features intended for the final release. These features include a much improved address bar, private mode browsing, better tabs and improved navigation."

Meanwhile, spurred by the release of the iPhone 3G, iPhone Web browsing skyrocketed 58% from July to August, for an average score of 0.30% in August, says another report from Net Applications.

FOR MORE:

The Google Chrome EULA debacle: Whose content is it, anyway? by Scott Fulton
Review: The first Google Chrome beta by Tim Conneally
Analysis: How is Chrome tied to Android? by Jacqueline Emigh
Chrome's objective: to speed up the Web for Google by Scott Fulton
Google Chrome takes more than just inspiration from Mozilla by Scott Fulton

Google bows to keystroke privacy concerns

Google Chrome has Microsoft’s code inside, says MS manager

Google Analytics starts tracking Chrome, with intriguing results

The Google Chrome EULA debacle: Whose content is it, anyway?

Korea Times: Sony home video at the tail end of a Korean exodus

2008-09-22T11:51:00.003-07:00

Korea Times reports that Sony's DVD distribution arm in Korea has decided to stop selling discs in that country, making it the last of the major studios to do so.

A request for confirmation by BetaNews with Sony went unanswered as of press time. If the news is accurate, Sony would actually be the last of the major Hollywood studios to pull out of the South Korean market over the last two years, following Paramount, Disney (Buena Vista), Universal, and 20th Century Fox. It seems as if Korean consumers just aren't interested in DVDs any more.

Total revenues from the sale of DVDs in Korea in 2008 are expected to total 328 billion won ($290 million USD), down from a high of 773 billion won ($684 million) in 2002.

There's likely a very good reason for this, and it has to do with broadband penetration. According to statistics from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, South Korea ranks as the top country in terms of household penetration, with some of the highest data rates in the world.

Many Koreans have opted to take the download route when it comes to obtaining media. The Korean Film Council recently released data that indicated nearly half of all respondents claimed to have downloaded a movie, and that was not including those who may have obtained content illegally through P2P or other means.

If unlicensed downloaders were counted, the rates would have flirted with the 70% mark, said council representatives.

Koreans' moves away from physical media is sure to worry entertainment executives. With many media execs giving discs only five or so more years of viability, and the country's citizens living "two to three years ahead of anyone else," as the Korea Times put it, direct digital media could be the future of entertainment.

At the same time, data rates would need to catch up to that of Korea and other countries in order to make it viable. Right now, the US average speed is only about 2.3 Mbps according to a recent study, far too slow to make downloadable media viable.

The Long Tail of Services

YouTube agrees to share viewer data, without IDs and IPs

Sony, HP get behind an open format for digital audio

Analysts: Ad-supported mobile games are on the way