UberPulse

[Mobilize] Social Networks And Live Video

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:33:04 -0800

The two haven’t been married yet. But just listen to Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president at Facebook - where photo uploads are a popular feature today.

Video is the next “logical place to go,” said Palihapitiya at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

He pointed to the mobile video streaming startup Qik. “I think it is going to be really powerful.”

What if Facebook allowed people to share this with their friends? he asked.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[Mobilize] Coming Up: Multi-Billion Systems

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:19:03 -0800

What if billions of people could share photos and live accounts of news events and other goings-ons? Wouldn’t a clearer picture of the world emerge?

That’s the expectation of Marc Davis, chief scientist at Yahoo!, who says such “multi-billion systems” are the likely consequence of rapidly expanding cellular networks and improving handsets.

Whole new applications are possible, Davis said at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Every year more than a billion handsets are sold, expanding the 3 billion or so people connected on mobile networks. The proliferation is changing news gathering already. After the London terrorist bombings, people posted photos from their mobile phones on Flickr. The world got an immediate image of what happened.

“How we come to know what’s happening will change dramatically,” Davis said.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[Mobilze] Google Says Mobile World Opening Up But Provides No Openness Regarding Android Shipment Plans

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:14:21 -0800

(credit: TechFever Network)

The mobile business is being transformed by a new openness, says Rich Miner (pictured), group manager at Google.

But Miner was hush-hush about next week’s expected launch of Google’s Android-based cell phone during a keynote address at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Phones running Google’s Android software are expected to be announced on Sept. 23 and to ship in October. Miner said only that Google would release the Android software to the open-source community once the phones are available.

He spent most of his keynote explaining that the past year has been a transformative one for the mobile phone business. Apple’s iPhone hit the market, Google described its Android and applications developers got new freedom to write applications for once closed cellular networks,

Wireless carriers are going to find “their business models are going to have to change,” he said. They will need to take advantage of advertising and plan to get more “micro-payments” from an expanding audience of users instead of charging high prices for things like text messaging, he said.

The transformation is similar to what happened on the Internet, Miner added.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[Mobilize] Hot Mobile Startup Ideas From Industry Top Designers

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:37:30 -0800

(credit: TechFever Network)

The rapid evolution of the cell phone is destine to change our lives the way the Internet has since the public flood gates opened a decade ago.

So what imaginative applications are already doing this? Here’s the answer, according to a panel of industry designers at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco (pictured):

[ZendCon] AJAX Is The Most Exciting Holistic Programming Environment Ever! (video)

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:58:22 -0800

At the ZendCon developers conference yesterday, which is held at the same Santa Clara convention centre than DiskCon - making it a lot easier to cover both events -, I've attended part of the State of Ajax presentation by Ben Galbraith (pictured).

For the Ajaxian co-founder, and now part of the Mozilla developer team, Ajax applications are getting really close, both in terms of speed (thanks to faster Javascript interpreters inside of Web browsers) and graphical user-interface (GUI) capabilities that rivals desktop solutions like Adobe's Flash or Microsoft' Silverlight.

Galbraith also praised the rapid improvements of CSS (for GUI), HTML (with version 5) and Gears whose "goal is to look at the standards like HTML 5 and see where standards are headed and give developers a version that they can use today".

"HTML 5 is addressing the pain points that we have. CSS is getting better and the idea is that for those browsers that haven't implemented these improvements Gears can actually step in and provide the solution until it happens", Galbraith says.

[DiskCon] Western Digital CEO Urges Unity of Disk Drive Industry To Fight Off Flash Drive Threat. Believes 80% Of Netbooks Ship With Disks Not Flash. Targets $24 Cost Price For Entry Level Drives! (video)

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:28:49 -0800

Can hard disk and solid state drive makers work together? Maybe on some standards, intellectual property licensing or on a common nomenclature. But that's about it.

The two camps are just in such a fierce battle targeting the same market segments (consumer, desktops, enterprise...) albeit a different approach but with an underlying converging technology, that is hard to see how they can cooperate. And in this war, the consumer is the main beneficiary as prices should continue to drop while capacities increase.

Anyway, after listening to Sandisk talk about the netbook market opportunity for the SSD maker at lunch, it was amusing to hear from one of the leader of the hard disk drive industry, John Coyne, Westerm Digital CEO (pictured), that 80% of netbooks actually ship with a hard drive and not an SSD. Reality check anyone?

In his keynote tonight, Coyne also addressed the huge market opportunities in emerging markets, what he called the next 1 to 5 billion users. However, the industry should still continue to innovate for the "rich", the first billion users, that need faster and higher capacity drives.

"There are 2 [opportunities]. One is basically what we've been doing for years, which is addressing solutions for rich people... The other huge opportunity that we have as yet untapped is to focus on the next level of economic development", Coyne said.

[DiskCon] IDEMA President Sees Hard Disk and Solid State Drives Converge, Using Semiconductor Technologies (video)

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:46:28 -0800

At the DiskCon conference, I sat down with IDEMA president - also the show's organiser-, Joel Weiss (pictured) to discuss some of the changes his 22 years old trade organisation had to confront in the face of a consolidating disk drive industry that went from 60 to now only 6 disk drive companies!

To survive, IDEMA had to widen its scope from just being the association of disk drive companies and their suppliers (heads, substrate, platters...) to now include solid state/Flash drive companies like Sandisk and work on a common nomenclature. Weiss expects the DiskCon show to draw 1,600 to 1,700 attendees this week.

Although the IDEMA president does not see hard disk drives to disappear anytime soon, he does point to the industry's greatest challenge to stay relevant with the rise of SSDs.

"HDD companies need to continue to increase the capacity of their drives by 40% annually if they want to keep the SSD makers at bay. That means HDD companies will have to invest heavily in semiconductor technologies like lithography, the same than the ones used by SSD makers. But that will carry an initial cost of $2.5 per drive. And that's a lot in this industry", says Weiss.

[DiskCon] Sandisk Bets on Netbooks To Drive Solid State Disks Adoption

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:32:02 -0800

As expected at DiskCon, the disk drive industry conference being held this week in Santa Clara, there has been a lot of talks about drives. But not so much about the traditional magnetic spinning drive, as opposed to its Flash memory or SSD (solid state drive) competitor!

Case in point, was the conference's luncheon keynote by the general manager of Sandisk's SSD business unit, Rich Heye (pictured). In his expose, Heye is betting on a rapid growth of the consumer Netbook market that he estimates will reach 4 million units this year (from a mere 635,000 units in '07), 10 millions in 2009 and 33 millions in 2012!

"No consumer products have grown that fast!", said Heye.

Heye gave 2 reasons for "weeping of joy" when he looks at the Netbook market potential for his business:

1- Storage is the largest netbook line item (24% of the total cost of the machine vs 14% for LCD, 13% for the CPU+chipset and 6% for software) because most of the netbooks will use low-cost screens, CPUs and a free operating system;

2- And most of those low-cost small laptops will carry cheap 32 GB (the sweet-spot capacity for this category) pSSDs (Sandisk name for its consumer SSD line) instead of hard drives.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] Tesla To Unveil Its Sedan Next Year, Announces San Jose Plant

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:03:45 -0800

Tesla Motors offered new details on its planned Model S sedan Wednesday, saying the electric car will be unveiled early next year with a maximum 300-mile driving range.

The news from Chairman Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, came on the same day the company said it would construct a factory in San Jose. The Silicon Valley facility is to produce up to 20,000 cars a year, boosting the company’s manufacturing capacity from the 25 cars a week Tesla expects in November and the 40-car weekly pace anticipated for early next year.

The company presently makes a two-seat roadster costing more than $100,000 a year. The Model S sedan will start at $60,000 with options potentially bringing the price tag to $90,000.

Musk, speaking at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco, said he hopes to eventually build a $30,000 car, perhaps in a manufacturing agreement with one of the big three auto makers.

The first version of the Tesla sedan will have an option to extend its driving range to 300 miles, he said. Another option will allow a speedy recharge: 85 percent of battery capacity recharged in 45 minutes.

Referring to the Silicon Valley plant, he said: “This will hopefully be the center of the green car revolution.”

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

And The Winner Is Blu-ray, But Do Consumers Care?

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:21:30 -0800

The high-definition video-disc crown can safely be placed on Blu-ray’s head. The Sony-backed technology came from behind to dispatch its cheaper rival: HD-DVD.

But winning the war may being few spoils. Sales of DVD players have declined in major markets in North America, Europe, Japan and China after reaching 142 million units in 2007, according to in-Stat.

Part of the reason is market saturation. Another explanation is that consumers are soaking up hard-drive-based digital video recorders instead.

In-Stat now expected sales of Blu-ray players and recorders will reach 5 million units in 2008.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] A Renaissance of Learning

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:46:30 -0800

The pace of technological change is picking up. But the source isn’t what you might expect.

It’s not strictly computers, but the intersection of nanotechnology and synthetic genetics, where researchers re-engineer the code of life in microorganisms, said Steve Jurvetson, partner at the venture firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

In the next 20 years, this evolving science will offer disruptive innovation and give new opportunities for entrepreneurs, he said at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco.

One example today is the startup Genomatica, which genetically engineers microbes to produce chemicals from a variety of feed stocks.

“What may feel like 100 years out will happen in the next 20 years,” Jurvetson said.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

CallWave Launches Fuze Collaboration Service

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:03:00 -0800

San Francisco-based CallWave launched its widely anticipated Fuze collaboration and high-definition video conferencing service.

The company said Tuesday the service will go into beta testing and can be used from a computer or cell phone. Fuze also requires that participants have only a browser for access, simplifying its use, said Jeff Cavins, CEO.

“It’s our new growth path,” Cavins said.

CallWave also said it developed a version of its WebMessenger Mobile instant messaging software for Apple’s iPhone. The software is available at Apple’s App Store.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] Entrepreneurs Target 100 MPG

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:28:43 -0800

Silicon Valley spawned the technology revolution. But turning the tables on Detroit to design a car with revolutionary gas mileage is a challenge 100 times greater, says Ray Lane, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.

“It’s a huge problem to deal with,” he said at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference Tuesday.

Difficulties aside, several startups at the conference boasted that they were up to the task. Among them were:

Commuter Cars: designers of the miniature Tango, a boxy electric vehicle about half as wide as the Smart car and capable of 80 miles between charges.

Transonic Combustion: makers of a fuel injection system to improve the efficiency of gas engines. The company’s hope is to demo a car by the end of the year capable of 100 mpg at 50 mph.

Venture Vehicles: creators of the VentureOne, a three-wheel wedge of a car with the front wheel larger than the rear two. The vehicle anticipates up to 85 miles a gallon and is to reach the market by 2010.

EcoMotors International: builders of a diesel engine aimed at achieving 100 mpg by 2010.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] Maverick Geneticist Targets Oil Industry

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:10:00 -0800

The human race may have never experienced a greater challenge than today’s energy-based global warming.

But solutions exist in the least anticipated places – and not in today’s corn-derived ethanol.

Maverick geneticist J. Craig Venter, who helped map the human genome in the 1990s, says he is mapping several ways to solve the problem. But he says corn ethanol is not the way to go.

Second- and third-generation bio-fuels are much more promising, he predicted during an address at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco. And he touts a fourth-generation fuel that uses micro algae to consumes carbon dioxide (an global warming greenhouse gas) to produce lipids, or bio-diesel. He hopes to see production begin in the next few years.

The earth’s population will grow to 9 billion in the next 40 years, with demands for food, fuels and water rising in sync. “Humanity has never been faced with this challenge before,” he said.

Creative science is needed. Ambitious, too. "Our goal," he says, "is to replace the petro-chemical industry as quickly as possible."

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] Biofuels To The Rescue (Eventually)

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:31:04 -0800

U.S. companies will almost certainly produce biofuels in enough volume to help curb global warming from automobiles and other vehicles.

But it will take time and patience from a world eager to move away from the oil economy and its reliance on supplies of crude from the unstable Middle East.

“We will have the technology,” said biofuel booster and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. “We just have to be patient.”

Khosla, during an appearance at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco, said biofuels will quickly prove themselves less expensive than $100-a-barrel oil and within 10 years be cheaper than $50 oil.

According to a panel of startups at the event, bio-ethanol has come a long way from its initial reliance on corn crops. A second-generation fuel is being developed from non-food crops – wood clips and grasses, for instance, and stalks of food crops that typically get discarded. They come with high energy-yields and less water use; in some cases, genetically engineered microbes break down the material.

Algae also are being used, with high yields and low cost.

Khosla said he no longer supports obtaining ethanol from corn. “I do believe it will be expensive and will be blown out of the market on cost.”

Over the next couple decades, hundreds of bio-ethanol facilities (probably supplied by other kinds of plants) will be built across the country, went on William Roe, CEO of the startup Coskata.

Ask General Motors and it will say that until 2030 the only alternative to take a bite out of oil consumption is ethanol, added Roe, whose company received an investment from the car maker.

“You would have to see oil prices plummeting to put us out of business,” joined in Bruce Jamerson, CEO of the bio-fuel company Mascoma.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Network Traffic Is On The Way To Half A Zettabyte After Big 2007, Cisco Says

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:35:32 -0800

Online video and the explosion of IP messages around the world boosted computer network traffic by a whopping 55 percent last year.

Growth this year may be even more dramatic, according to Cisco Systems. And a compounded 46 percent growth through 2012 should lift the data flow to half a zettabyte.

That would be the equivalent of 125 billion DVDs, said Mike Capiano, a director of marketing.

Cisco made the point to show that new, more capable networks will be needed – linking routers and switches with high-speed optical equipment. And on Monday, Cisco showed off some of its new gear, a 7600 Series edge router with double the capacity and a new Mobile Wireless Router 2941 for cellular networks.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[AlwaysOn Going Green] San Jose Mayor Wants To Work With Clean Tech Startups

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:17:15 -0800

San Jose has ambitious green-tech plans – and it is eager to hear from startups with burgeoning technologies.

The Silicon Valley city’s goals are broad. It wants electricity made from renewable sources, vehicles that run on alternative fuels, more efficient lighting, water that can be recycled and to create jobs in the process.

Silicon Valley has changed the world before, Mayor Chuck Reed told entrepreneurs Monday night at the start of the three-day AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco. “I know it can happen again” and it will “make a lot of money for a lot people,” he said.

San Jose has to be cautious about picking winners, Reed said of his purchasing plans. “I hope people see us as a collaborator and potential partner.”

He promised quick city permits for companies eager to set up businesses.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Intel 6-Cores Chip: The Last of Its Kind Before Radical New Architecture. Should You Wait? (video)

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:27:36 -0800

This morning, Intel officially launched its 6-cores chip code-named Dunnington at a press conference in San Francisco's Regis Hotel. The new Xeon 7400 processor is targeted at 4-processors servers and is the last iteration of Intel's current "front-side bus" (FSB) architecture. Dell, HP, IBM and Sun are some of the "launch" partners for Dunnington.

Inspite of some great "number crunching" performance (50% increase in some cases, Intel claims) and a 10% power efficiency improvement over a quad-core chip, Dunnington's FSB architecture still creates a bottleneck when applications need to access large chunks of memory or input-ouput interfaces like the network card, the USB/Firewire ports, etc. An issue that VP and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise division, Tom Kilroy (pictured), tried to minimise pointing to Dunnington's large 16 megabyte memory cache subsystem, ideal for virtualisation servers.

"We made great strides in improving the bandwidth in these architectures [current front-side bus server chips]... [Dunnington is ideal for] database, virtualisation, ERP, performance crunching applications... Workloads that maybe don't require as much memory period then tend to move to 2 sockets...", said Tom Kilroy.

H-P Details Paradigm Shift Upending Business Computing. Cuts 25,000 Jobs!

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:30:41 -0800

It is no secret that corporations are turning their attention from traditional in-house software packages to more agile services delivered over the Internet.

But how they are making this transformation is less well known. Executives at Hewlett-Packard say they see four keys steps and major benefits when the change is completed – including at H-P itself.

With digital data doubling every 18 months and data overall doubling every five years, managing the information flow is becoming one of the modern corporation’s biggest challenges. Data is not only expensive to handle, but its careful use can lead to new revenue streams.

It seems clear the enterprise market is moving to services, said CEO Mark Hurd (pictured) on a Monday conference call discussing his company’s acquisition of EDS. (H-P announced it would cut 24,600 jobs over three years in the integration of the firms.) To get there, they will need to modernize their data centers by consolidating facilities and adopting standards-based servers and technology.

VMware’s Ambitious Expansion Plan

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:20:08 -0800

The virtualization leader took the occasion of its user conference in Las Vegas to unveil a strategy for extending its market into virtual datacenters.

The plan is to extend its flagship virtualization products into a “virtual datacenter operating system,” allowing businesses to pool servers, storage and networking into a single computing “cloud” and allocate resources more efficiently.

“The next generation of innovative technologies in the Virtual Datacenter OS will enable companies to realize the promise of enterprise cloud computing – where applications are automatically guaranteed the right quality of service at the lowest (costs) by harnessing internal and external computing capacity,” said new CEO Paul Maritz in a press release.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Women, Girls Sidle Up To Online Gaming

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:06:22 -0800

Women and girls at both ends of the age spectrum are coddling up to online gaming.

Overall, females playing online games in August grew 27 percent compared with a year ago to nearly 43 million, according to comScore. The number of players in the 12-17 year-old category and 55-64 age segment grew at substantially faster rates: 55 percent for the younger group and 43 percent for the older one.

Here’s an explanation from a comScore press release issued Monday:

“Contributing to strong growth in the category among younger girls is the increasing popularity of fashion and dress-up sites, such as Stardoll.com, DressUpGames.com, and I-Dressup.com, and virtual worlds such as Neopets and Gaiaonline.com. Meanwhile, the growth among older females is in part due to partnerships between women’s content portals and casual game sites, such as iVillage.com’s partnership with Pogo.com games.”

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[Open Hack Day] Xoopit Wins Best Overall Hack (video)

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:16:51 -0800

Yahoo's 24-hour hack-a-thon aka Open Hack Day 2008 finally wrapped up on Saturday evening at the company's Sunnyvale campus. More than 330 developers representing 12 countries attended and submitted 47 hacks.

The Xoopit team, including developer Jerry Su (pictured), won the top prize for Best Overall Hack for hacking the email media manager tool directly into Yahoo's email environment. Nearly 25 prizes were given out all together.

Here are some few fun Open Hack Day highlights:

- 400 pizzas, 106 dozen doughnuts and 20 cases of energy drinks and lots of beer were consumed over 24 hours!

- Nearly 20 tents were pitched on Yahoo!’s lawn

- More than 650 people rocked out to Girl Talk on Friday night

Check also the short video after the jump to get an idea of the crazy ambiance at the Yahoo Hack Day.

Juniper’s New Take On Firewalls

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:57:22 -0800

Juniper Networks is scheduled to introduce a pair of powerful new firewalls on Monday.

The new products, the SRX 5800 and 5600 services gateways, will be 2 to 4 times faster than the company’s present firewall and use less power.

But the Silicon Valley company says they also break new ground with a design aimed at providing more user flexibility. Both devices can grow over time with a customer’s needs and incorporate other services, such as intrusion detection or routing, by adding extra cards, or circuitry.

“We believe it is a new category,” said Michael Frendo, senior vice president.

The products target corporations and telecommunications service-providers. They are presently shipping.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large

[Open Hack Day] More Open House Than Developer Conference. Boosts Yahoo Morale! (video)

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:41:06 -0800

I've attended both Google I/O and Facebook f8 developer conferences which both were held in San Francisco and were much bigger than Yahoo's Open Hack Days, with more than 1,000 attendees.

When you compare with Yahoo's event that only attracted 300-400 developers, that makes you wonder if the Sunnyvale company is losing touch with developers. Well, according to Yahoo's head of its developer network, Chris Yeh (pictured), the smaller size event was actually done by design. And the fact that it's held at Yahoo's headquarters, favour relationships between re-energized Yahoo's own developers and third party programmers.

"This is our equivalent to the developer conference... For us the way we approach developers is very personal and one on one. This our approach to doing a developer conference. So there are aspects of that, like tracks with various experts talking about different products today but at the same time there's emphasis here on looking with people. So tonight you'll see many of our Yahoo programmers working with third party programmers to make sure they can build their hacks tonight. I think it's more of our style", explains Chris Yeh.

Check our video interview with Chris Yeh after the jump.

Inside Yahoo Open Hack: Code, Code, Code and Fun!

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:34:15 -0800

This our friends at MomentiMedia photo album of the Yahoo Open Hack. A developer event I found smaller and more personal then let's say f8 or Google I/O.

[Open Hack Day] Yahoo Takes Lesson From Facebook, Opens To Outside Applications

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:38:57 -0800

Following the lead of Facebook and other companies of the Web 2.0 vanguard, Yahoo took a big step toward opening itself up to third-party applications Friday.

Independent applications have been immensely popular on Facebook since the startup offered access to some of its programming interfaces, or APIs, last year.

Yahoo on Friday accelerated its efforts to do the same. “We need to move as quickly as possible here,” said David Filo, chief Yahoo (pictured).

[Open Hack Day] Yahoo Collects More Personal Data And Share It.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:06:05 -0800

Imagine an Internet company, such as Yahoo, collecting personal information on its users and making that data available to other people and third party developers.

Now stop imagining. Yahoo on Friday kicked off its ambitious “Open Strategy,” part of which includes the first-time collection of personal data from across its many online properties.

The company says the information – who a user is, who that person knows and what that person does – is only collected when a person allows it to be shared. And it is not to be used for the behavioral targeting of advertising.

But the program will let data be seen by other people – your friends may have access to your movie and music ratings, for instance.

And third-party developers writing applications to work on Yahoo would be able to use the information in their programs. Yahoo also envisions allowing consumers to take their own data and copy it to other Web sites for convenience.

Yahoo Open Hack Kicks Off

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:11:03 -0800

(credit: TechFever Network)

Mark and I are at Yahoo's Silicon Valley campus in Sunnyvale to cover the Web company's "Open Hack" event.

Think of Open Hack as Yahoo's developer conference - although the company has until this day not organised a single one per se! - as half hackathon a-la Facebook f8, half "classic" developer workshops.

Lots of code, beer, pizza and fun!

Mobile Companies Take Aim At Google’s GrandCentral

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:29:42 -0800

(credit: TechFever Network)

It is not hard these days to find companies with their sights set on GrandCentral. GrandCentral, of course, is the Google-owned company that hopes to simplify telephone communications by giving people one number and the ability to forward calls among their cell phones, land lines, etc.

At the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show in San Francisco, DiVitas Networks showed off its own plan for converging telephone calls onto one phone. The company’s software also manages a mobile phone’s ability to switch between the cellular network and WiFi wireless hot spots.

There’s a trend toward providing flexibility in how people communicate, said DiVitas CEO Vivek Khuller.

Newber, short for new number, also launched an application this week for Apple’s iPhone with a similar goal. It assigns a number to the iPhone and uses the iPhone’s location-determining technology to route calls to the closest nearby phone, including in a hotel.

The idea is to save battery life and minimize periods of bad reception.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Google Chrome: Fastest but Vulnerable to Web Attacks. So Stay Away From It, For Now

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:16:41 -0800

Today, Sunny Gosain (pictured), the VP of Development of software developer Compiere shared with me his perspective on Google's new web browser.

Fastest!

So let's start with the good news. For the open source ERP developer, Google Chrome is 5% faster than Firefox 3.0, 20% faster than Internet Explorer 8 and an order of magnitude faster than IE 7. But to be fair, Gosain admits that Compiere's Web application is still 20 to 25% slower than its native Java application running on the desktop.

Compatible!

Because Compiere is using Google Web Toolkit to convert its Java application into Javascript, Gosain suspects that Google developers have optimised Chrome for GWT code. Another surprise is that Compiere's Web application ran almost without any modification - just 1 line to change!

"That came as a good surprise as it usually takes a month to qualify our Web application and it's 10 million lines of source code for a new Web browser. We have to make sure the aesthetic of our application in the new browser, the client interactivity, the performance and the security. With Google Chrome, the rendering is pixel perfect", Sunny Gosain explains.

All In for Facebook

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:19:16 -0800

The popular social-networking destination decided this week to migrate the rest of its users to its new site design.

Almost 30 million of Facebook’s 100 million users already use the new design, which the company describes as cleaner and simpler. The rollout should be completed in a few weeks, the Internet firm said in a press release.

The new design was launched in July at the company's f8 conference for developers.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

YouTube: Do We Have Anything Else To Do?

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:18:17 -0800

Americans viewed 11.4 billion online videos during July, 5 billion of which were found on YouTube, according to comScore.

Three in four people online tuned into at least one clip and, in total, Americans spent 558 million hours behind their computers watching online video.

Google, which owns YouTube, was the leader with 44 percent market share, followed by Fox Interactive Media, owners of MySpace, with 3.9 percent, comScore said. So if you have some more spare time, check out the UberPulse video channel on YouTube :-)

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

PC Market Continues To Be Strong

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:59:41 -0800

The personal computer appears to resist the pull of this year’s worldwide economic downturn.

Research firm IDC said it now sees growth for the year of 15.7 percent in shipments from manufacturers. The firm had anticipated 15.2 percent in June.

Consumers continue to purchase PCs attracted by the growing popularity of low-cost laptops.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

[TechCrunch50] Is Vertical Social Networking Dead?

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:24:10 -0800

(credit: TechCrunch)

One might think so. But that didn’t keep a handful of entrepreneurs from promoting sites they hope will prove otherwise.

Several picked unlikely niches to address. Footnote plans to use Social Security death records to create profiles of deceased people that visitors, who pay a subscription fee, can embellish.

Closet Couture wants to help women get dressed by creating virtual closets of their clothing and putting them in touch with stylists (for a fee) and merchants. Birdpost intends to appeal to bird watchers, aiding them in finding new bird species to observer.

Perhaps the most promising is Causecast, which wants to connect non-profits with people who hope to make a positive impact on the world (and donate money).

Niche social-networking sites don’t often seem to work well, said Sean Parker, co-founder of Causes on Facebook and MySpace. Yet companies such as Causecast are addressing a “really important space,” with billions of dollars of transactions moving online in the next several years.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

6-Cores "Dunnington" Chip Impressive. Intel to Keep Server CPU Performance Lead Until 2010-2011 (video)

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:12:54 -0800

Following Sun Microsystems' virtualisation announcement this morning, I sat down with Nathan Brookwood, analyst at Insight64, to talk about Intel's 6-cores server processor dubbed Dunnington that the chip maker will announce next Monday in San Francisco.

Impressive performance chip... great mid-life kicker if you're already on Caneland. Otherwise you'd better off waiting for Nehalem in 2H09

"Dunnington is the first time Intel has done a multi-core chip that has all of the cores united as opposed to do a multi-chip kind of packages [what Intel did so far]... very nice mid-life kicker for enterprises that have already moved to Caneland [Intel's current multi-processor platform that will be compatible with Dunnington]. But if they didn't move yet to Caneland, then they might wait for the 8-core Nehalem [expected in 2H09]", Brookwood said.

[TechCrunch50] Making Money With Web 2.0 (Not Yet)

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:54:29 -0800

Making money from and sense of new media on the Web – video, photos and social interactions – may be the job of the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Up to now, few startups have figured out how to turn the public’s spiraling interest online social connections, video clips and sharing information into successful business models.

Don’t expect any quick change to this imbalance of audience and money. Still, several young companies took their cut at this intractable problem Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

[TechCrunch50] Web 2.0 Meets Business Market

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:21:44 -0800

(credit: TechCrunch)

If one thing is clear at this year’s TechCrunch50 it is that Web 2.0 is permeating the business world.

Entrepreneurs, having watched the rapid adoption of consumer Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are hatching companies to take and adapt these technologies for the corporation.

“I think there is a big movement toward the enterprise,” notes Keith McCarty, marketing manager for Yammer.

iPhone/iPod Touch Software Patch Fixes Call Drops, Applications Crash, Battery Life...

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:58:07 -0800

Last but certainly not least for all the iPhone 3G users, is the new software update dubbed OS X 2.1 that Steve Jobs announced for this Friday for the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

The patch will cost $9.99 for iPod Touch users that have not yet upgraded their device to the previous 2.0 software version.

"This is a big update, and it fixes lots of bugs", Jobs admitted.

With the new software expect fewer call drops and applications crash, better battery life, and faster back-up to iTunes.

New IPod Touch Is Thinner, Cheaper. Targets Gaming!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:51:49 -0800

Jobs boasted that the company is unveiling a new iPod Touch, a thinner device with built-in volume controls on its side (the #1 request Apple got for the iPod Touch). The device also has a speaker.

Apple's new iPod Touch machines will come with lover prices: $299 for 8 GBs, $299 for 16 GBs and $399 for 32 GBs

And the company billed it and the iPhone as emerging platforms for games. In that veins, the company demonstrated several games for the iPhone, and iPod Touch including a version of the Electronic Arts' "Need for Speed – Undercover" expected in November.

Separately, Apple said it would sell new, stand-alone headphones. They will come with volume controls on the cord including a feature to advance a song and will cost $29.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Jobs Unveils Sleek New iPod Nano, Classic. Adds Accelerometer. Same Price!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:36:24 -0800

Apple introduced a sleek new oval iPod Nano for the Christmas season. The device has a large curved screen and is the thinnest iPod the company has made. It also includes an accelerometer - just like the iPhone! - so pictures can be displayed sideways, and a feature that allows someone to shake the device to shuffle the music playing.

Apple said its new iPod Nanos would come in a variety of colors, from orange to blue and keep the same price, with the least expensive one selling for $149 (8GBs) and the more expensive at $199 (16GBs).

The iPod Classic, "the iPod that started it all", also is being upgraded for Christmas. It will now hold 120 GBs for the same $249 price. The larger 160 GB is being shown the door though.

Jobs, boasting a 73.4 percent market share for his iPod line, said the company has sold 160 million iPod since starting the product line.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.