Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?

UPDATE:  Gina Tripani piles on.

Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service - Everything You Wanted to Know

Now some people assume that Amazon S3 is a storage service meant primarily for web start-ups who store data in-the-cloud but that’s not correct because just about anyone (home users included) can benefit from S3.

For instance, you may backup your large music collection or even your entire computer hard-drive on S3. Similarly, bloggers can use Amazon S3 to store web images without worrying too much about their bandwidth bills.

If you never had a chance to explore Amazon S3 before, read the following guide that makes S3 simple even for non-geeks. It has all the information and tools you would need to quickly get started with Amazon S3.

The followup post is here.

Bringing Down Bear Stearns: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.

[via Paul Kedrosky]

Webaroo Raises A $10 Million Round For SMSGupShup

webarooWebaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Plugged.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures.

Most of the quick analysis of Microsoft’s move was focused too narrowly on the entire Yahoo acquisition drama, and Microsoft’s attempts to challenge Google, but Microsoft’s own Don Dodge stepped in with an excellent post of where the real potential of the Powerset acquisition lies:

1. Powerset technology is more about indexing the content and understanding its meaning, than the query itself. This has enormous implications.

2. There are many lucrative markets for this technology…not just consumer web search.

The second point is worth noting first. Of course Microsoft will use Powerset to enhance its struggling consumer search properties, but incorporating Powerset into its many enterprise applications has as much potential as a consumer solution. The enterprise approach can manifest itself in two of Microsoft’s most critical corporate infrastructure properties, Sharepoint and Exchange. Once a clunky file sharing server, Sharepoint has evolved into a venerable knowledge management platform that can also handle many modes of collaboration. If Microsoft incorporates Powerset’s NLP into Sharepoint, that platform will emerge as a serious threat to many of the pure enterprise knowledge management, content management software vendors that currently dot these markets. Many of these vendors routinely sell their technology as a replacement for the inadequate built-in search for Sharepoint. A Powerset integration could change the equation. Additionally, incorporating Powerset NLP into Exchange, Microsoft’s anchor platform in the enterprise, could add a layer of intelligent search that has yet to be addressed by other vendors. While it may prove impossible to regain significant marketshare in the consumer world, Microsoft has a significant opportunity to consolidate control in the enterprise knowledge management arena. Powerset’s technologies could play an integral part of this consolidation.

Now, back to Dodge’s first point. Indexing and enabling textual search on content is a relatively old, and easy task. Grafting meaning to that index is where the game changes. Intelligent search, or search with an implied meaning, will return ‘answers’ as opposed to ‘results’. There is a significant point to be understood here. In the traditional mode of searching, search engines are designed to bring back the entire subset of content where there are keyword matches. This can result in hundreds, thousands, and often times hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’ that are returned. Google’s strength is identifying these hits and then representing the most popular results at the top of the result set. Intelligent search is different. In fact a good measure of intelligent search is how few results are returned. Since intelligent search first attempts to find meaning on indexed content, the resulting hits returned by an engine like Powerset should only include that content which is in context to the entered query. This can have a huge impact in enterprise deployments of traditional search, but as Dodge says in his post, the utility of receiving ‘answers’ can be extended beyond content search to include advertisement targeting, and other enterprise focused solutions.

While it’s too early to know exactly what Microsoft will do with Powerset, I think it is as important to watch the enterprise software angle on this acquisition as the consumer angle.

One day the GupShup spam control team noticed several messages that looked like gobbledygook to them. So they sent these suspected spammers account termination notices. They didn’t expect the response: messages not just from those senders but from many others, pleading with them not to terminate the accounts. It turns out the messages were in a language called Hmar, only spoken by some 65,000 tribal people living in the hilly regions of India’s northeast. There are now several Hmar groups on SMS GupShup; the tribal group sees this as a major communication channel. Being too small to attract mainstream media, the group also sees SMS GupShup as their main form of media and a way to save their language and culture from extinction as they assimilate into the Indian mainstream.

Amazing.

The newly released version offers substantial improvements over the beta application, including an improved interface, and a new premium service. More from their press release:

In addition to opening up the service, Evernote also announced details of its new subscription pricing. Premium users will benefit from an expanded 500MB monthly upload allowance, priority access to image recognition servers, stronger security options, and premium support. Evernote will charge $5 per month, or $45 for a full year, for Premium service. Free users will get a 40MB monthly upload allowance and have access to all clients and tools. These limits apply only to information added in a given month, not to the total amount of data that a user can store.

The latest release also features a completely redesigned Evernote Web user interface and a new version of the company’s Web Clipper bookmarklet. The new Web Clipper allows users to instantly save the contents and links of a webpage into their Evernote accounts, a feature popular among bloggers, researchers, and online shoppers.

Other features include public notebook Facebook and blog integration, PDF support, encryption, and automatic synchronization of notes, to-do lists, snapshots, and audio notes among all Evernote clients. In recent weeks, Evernote has also released major upgrades to its Windows and Mac versions.

I signed up for the annual subscription since I know I’ll be using Evernote a lot. Now that it’s generally available, I encourage you to sign up for a free version.