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PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?
There was the freebie that no one will forget, the heebie-jeebies courtesy of Scott Guthrie, and a teensy bit clearer picture of how this cloud thingie should work.
Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?
The mysteries of just what Chrome OS is, and how much of an operating system it truly is, may be resolved today.
PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance
The effort to give users of the world's dominant Web browser the impression of quality, is a personal one for the man who leads that battle.
Nokia re-affirms its commitment to Symbian, sort of
Maemo won't necessarily be replacing Symbian in the Nokia N-Series, but that's definitely a place where it will be found.
E-book readers will be in short supply this holiday season
E-readers are hot this year, and a lot of compelling new products have been released, but are there enough electrophoretic displays to go around?
Sony looks to finally open a single storefront for downloads
Sony has had many different download portals for movies, music, e-books, and games, and now it's looking to make a single shop for all of it.
Tuning out the tablet: Time to give the endless speculation a rest
Wide Angle Zoom: Wishing and hoping and thinking and praying....won't put an iTablet on the market.
Five improvements for IT managers in 2010
If businesses are to improve their efficiency for next year, they need to stop and reassess the basic tenets of their job.
AOL's spinoff from Time Warner to shed 2,500 jobs
As AOL moves toward become an independent company again, it will cut nearly a third of its workforce.
Gartner: SMS-based money transfer will be bigger than mobile browsing, search
Gartner issues its predictions for the 10 things our phones will be doing in 2012.
Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today
Mozilla has released the latest beta its Firefox 3.6 browser software, just over one week after beta 2.
With YouTube Direct, now users can yank videos from big media
By Tim Conneally on November 17, 2009, 3:10 PM
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Google today announced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that lets media organizations directly connect with YouTube users to request and rebroadcast their YouTube clips.
The application allows custom YouTube uploaders to be built into another site, so users can submit their videos directly and track the viewing metrics in their own profile. Google highlights the rise of citizen journalism as a major reason for the program.
Continue reading With YouTube Direct, now users can yank videos from big media...
Pirate Bay closes down torrent tracker
By Tim Conneally on November 17, 2009, 10:58 AM
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After months of legal controversy which were followed by months of uncertainty about the future of the service, the Pirate Bay's popular torrent tracker has been shut down for good.
But it wasn't a court-ordered takedown or the result of regulatory shuffling, the old Pirate Bay torrent tracker simply became obsolete. As a result, the Pirate Bay is no longer running its old tracker, and has switched over to listing "magnet links," a method for locating DHT (Distributed Hash Table) or PEX (Peer Exchange) nodes.
Twitter to abandon 'politically biased' suggested user list
By Tim Conneally on November 16, 2009, 5:02 PM
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Twitter reportedly will be abandoning its suggested user list following some unfavorable attention it received last month.
When a new user signs up on Twitter, the site offers him a long list of suggested users he may be interested in following. The list consists of about 500 prominent users in various fields, including politics.
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iTunes Preview doesn't go far enough to create Web-based option for store
By Tim Conneally on November 13, 2009, 2:50 PM
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Yesterday, Microsoft launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile's Web component, a version of the store fully accessible through any browser.
I lamented that Apple had not yet created a similar face for the iTunes App store, even though it is the most popular download shop among the smartphone competitors. Users who want to browse the contents of the iTunes store, be it music, videos, or applications, must have the iTunes desktop software installed or otherwise browse it on their iPod Touch or iPhone (in which case they're almost guaranteed to have iTunes installed on their PC anyway.)
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Google acquires Gizmo5, builds IP telephony portfolio
By Tim Conneally on November 12, 2009, 6:33 PM
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Google today officially announced that it had acquired IP telephony software company Gizmo5, a service many users have already tried to use in conjunction with their Google Voice accounts to make SIP calls.
In the Google Voice blog, product managers Wesley Chan and Craig Walker said, "While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number."
Continue reading Google acquires Gizmo5, builds IP telephony portfolio...
Windows Marketplace for Mobile now available in browser, iTunes' App Store still not
By Tim Conneally on November 12, 2009, 10:48 AM
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Sure, Apple created the most popular and well-stocked mobile app store in the market, but does Apple provide a Web-based interface to it? No. Through Apple's official channels, you can only browse the store's contents in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod Touch.
There is an unofficial site hosted on Google App Engine which provides roughly the same experience Apple provides in iTunes, but it lacks search functionality, and if you try to download something, it launches the iTunes installer.
Bing vs. Google rematch on video search
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 11, 2009, 6:08 PM
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We've known that Microsoft still has work remaining in its itinerary to build Bing into a more competitive search engine -- we knew at launch time that not every feature would compete on an absolute par against Google. If it did, then MSN and Windows Live would have been far more popular. But when Microsoft steps forward to say, "Now, we really have something competitive in this department," it's difficult to give Bing the same number of "Mulligans" as we did at the beginning.
This morning, Microsoft rolled out some replacements to its old MSN Video search engine -- which had remained online all this time -- to produce Bing Video. Like Google Video and unlike YouTube, Bing Video is not a host; it's a search service for publicly accessible videos. So YouTube videos, although hosted by Google, should appear on Bing as well. The differentiator here, theoretically, should not be inventory, since both services should have access to the same material. Instead, it should be how the material is presented, and whether the search process provides access to not only what the user is looking for, but material that may also be pertinent, relevant, and interesting.
Bing gets geekier with new Wolfram Alpha integration
By Tim Conneally on November 11, 2009, 3:56 PM
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Since Microsoft's Bing search engine debuted, it's made a strong charge against Google, the search market's dominant player. It has had diverse and attention-grabbing advertising campaigns, its partnership with Yahoo is one of the biggest search collaborations of the last decade, and it regularly rolls out timely and compelling new features like the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Because of this, Bing has been steadily gaining traffic and revenue, according to recent figures by Hitwise and IDC.
Continue reading Bing gets geekier with new Wolfram Alpha integration...
How would you rewrite Google's '10 Things?'
By Joe Wilcox on November 11, 2009, 2:08 PM
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content behind a paywall and remove that content from crawling by Google search bots. Is Google doing evil to traditional media publishers like Murdoch, by making their content easily available for free? In August, over at my Oddly Together Website I tackled this topic in post: "Can You Charge for News? Ask Google."
As Google's might increases, it's reasonable to ask how the company's business practices are changing and whether or not it can stick to corporate philosophy "Ten things we know to be true." Perhaps the best known is No. 6: "You can make money without doing evil." But can Google does this? That's the question I pose to Betanews readers.
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For those who missed Google Voice beta, Ribbit Mobile opens in beta
By Tim Conneally on November 3, 2009, 4:58 PM
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Some of us missed the boat and never got in the Google Voice beta test group. With all the controversy the service stirred up among the media, the public, telecommunications companies, and the FCC, there's a distinct possibility that Google Voice as we know it could end up in regulatory limbo after being politicized and thrown into the "net neutrality" conflict.
Today, a beta of an alternative has opened up: Ribbit Mobile from Ribbit, an independent British Telecom subsidiary often billed as "Silicon Valley's first telephone company."
Continue reading For those who missed Google Voice beta, Ribbit Mobile opens in beta...
Could Google be killing Google Groups over and over again?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 2, 2009, 4:10 PM
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The death of Usenet has been proclaimed for well over a decade now, but the use of some derivative of the Internet's NNTP protocol for the trafficking of messages -- some of which are actually parts of legitimate conversations -- continues today. In fact, it probably can't really be stopped since, as is the case with a P2P network, no one really owns Usenet.
Since 2001, the Web's portal to Usenet has been Google Groups, the successor to the Deja.com archiving system. Google's plans to make something of Google Groups stretch as far back as 2004, with promises to make the experience more personalized and exciting. For the most part, Google Groups provides organizations with an expense-free system for broadcasting memberships to select groups on an opt-in basis.
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How useful is Google's 'Similar Images?'
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 30, 2009, 6:52 PM
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Let's face facts: The real reason you'd ever want a search engine to locate "similar images" to one or more you're observing at the moment, is because you're not certain of what you're looking for or what you want to find. A search for photographs that look like da Vinci's Mona Lisa is going to turn up more pictures of the same Mona Lisa. And while a search for photos that look like Paris Hilton will turn up more photos of Paris Hilton, a search for photos that look like other one-hit wonders like William Shatner will turn up pictures of folks we may have never heard of, like someone named Mike Vogel.
So while Google Labs' pre-built experimental searches for its first public incarnation of Similar Images, unveiled Wednesday, does demonstrate an uncanny ability to isolate Paris Hilton pictures from its index, the fact that most of those pictures are labeled "Paris Hilton" anyway suggests that these are not real-world experiments. In the real world, people are looking for a picture of that person in that show with the other guy with the weird hair, or a painting from an artist with the funky name. They're looking for the imaging algorithm to fill in the gaps for the information they don't have on hand, not to demonstrate the ability to mimic a successful search when the information is in front of our face.
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Google flexes Twitter integration with Social Search Lab
By Tim Conneally on October 26, 2009, 7:28 PM
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Monday, a new experimental Google search feature called Social Search was made live in Google Labs, following up on last week's announcement that Google and Twitter had established a partnership.
But the implementation of this Twitter data is much more conservative than many were expecting. Following the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, a lot of talk in the search community revolved around "Realtime Search," (a buzzword formerly known as "conversational search") where chatter (articles, blog posts, comments, forum entries, status updates, tweets, videos, and podcasts) on a particular subject is indexed in real time, putting searchers more or less directly into the conversations as they occur.
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Web search in a post-Twitter world
By Tim Conneally on October 23, 2009, 7:58 PM
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We all contribute to the news cycle when we post timely content online, even if it's 140 characters or fewer, and this week we learned that our little bits of information have substantive value when search giants Google and Microsoft announced that they will index our tweets and status updates.
But the sheer volume of content that we produce could be a problem, and Twitter users who find day-to-day value in the service may scoff at the idea that the "information firehose" of live content can be tapped and made searchable. It doesn't take extensive use to see that most tweets are in fact worthless, and that thousands of bots simply use Twitter as a tool for free promotion, by tagging links to a particular Web site with trending topics.
Twitter hooks up with Google, Bing
By Tim Conneally on October 21, 2009, 6:06 PM
11 Comments
WIthin hours of one another, Microsoft and Google announced that their respective search engines would begin indexing tweets from popular microblogging service Twitter.
Microsoft was first on the scene, when Redmond's President of Online Services Division Qi Lu announced the beta of Bing.com/twitter had opened at the Web 2.0 summit today. The beta provides a real-time index of tweets, and the ability to rank tweets according to its relevance.
Clever Adobe compilation trick sneaks Flash apps onto iPhone
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 7, 2009, 4:52 PM
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Up to now, Apple's prohibition against anyone's runtime modules from appearing on its iPhone without authorization has been one of two central reasons that Adobe's Flash video and Flash platform have not made their appearance there -- the other reason being simply that Steve Jobs doesn't like it.
But at its annual MAX developers' conference in Los Angeles this week, Adobe's engineers unveiled a surprise: It's planning a public beta release of Flash Professional CS5 that will go through a new and unique set of hoops to enable developers to write or export apps built for the Flash runtime, to run on the iPhone as native apps. The new Flash Pro will use a mechanism for Flash application developers to deploy their apps on the iPhone anyway, even without the Flash mobile runtime.
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Having purchased its competition, Google joins Flash video group
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 5, 2009, 5:01 PM
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Two months ago, Google announced its intention to purchase On2 Technologies, the producer of the technology behind the Ogg Theora codec that was the prime candidate earlier this year to become the open video solution for HTML 5. Google's engineers had come out in opposition to Ogg Theora, and that fact was cited by the HTML 5 working group as reason for its suspending efforts to incorporate open video for this version.
Whatever Google's reasons may have been for purchasing On2, not everyone in the company appeared to be interested in advancing the format. Today, that sentiment appears to have been made official, with the announcement during Adobe's MAX conference in Los Angeles that Google is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, established last year.
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Sitting out Google Wave
By Carmi Levy on October 5, 2009, 2:50 PM
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I've decided I won't be part of the 100,000 or so special folks who are already rolling up their sleeves and digging into the guts of Google's newest uber-desirable online application, the private beta of Google Wave. This will give some poor fellow extra opportunity to troll eBay, bidding $100 or so for an invitation.
It's not like I'm eschewing some exclusive community. Like Gmail before it, Google Wave accounts will eventually be freely available to anyone with a pulse. But unlike Gmail -- which remains in the limelight with regular updates delivered to a widespread base of users who passionately use the service -- Google Wave's lifespan likely won't be as charmed.
Flash 10.1 to bring rich Web apps to Palm Pre, WinMo, making iPhone an island
By Tim Conneally on October 5, 2009, 11:51 AM
34 Comments
It's quite easy for Adobe to throw around statistics about Flash, and you'll frequently hear members of the Adobe team say such things as "Adobe Flash is installed on 99% of PCs," or "75% of all online games are built in Flash," or "80% of all Web video is encoded in Flash." Though these statistics are dubious, there is little doubt about Flash's ubiquity.
But as mobile Web consumption has dramatically increased, mobile Flash technology has been struggling to deliver the full Web experience to resource-constrained devices. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously commented in mid-2008, the full version of Flash was too big, and Flash Lite was too small. What Flash lacked was a product "in the middle" that could fully deliver rich Internet content without also consuming a lot of CPU cycles.
Continue reading Flash 10.1 to bring rich Web apps to Palm Pre, WinMo, making iPhone an island...
Google bites Bing back, recovers all usage losses since spring
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 1, 2009, 3:52 PM
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If the last two months should be interpreted as Microsoft suggests, with Bing's gradual ascent in usage share against Google as a sign of Bing's inevitably catching up, then a similar interpretation of September's numbers from live analytics firm StatCounter should be taken as a sign of Bing's ultimate demise. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world's top three search services, Google's usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November's peak of 81.14% -- meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.
Bing's usage share in the US descended by 1.13% to 8.51% for the month of September, while Yahoo's dove 1.1% to 9.4%. Google's share among the top three has now climbed above where it stood in May (78.72%), when Microsoft changed the name of Windows Live Search.
Continue reading Google bites Bing back, recovers all usage losses since spring...
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