iPhone-Gate

The Biggest Apple Leak Ever

A part of me hates giving this story more press than it already has because it's kind of blown out of proportion at this point, but the fact remains that this is a pretty historical event. Apple is an extremely secretive company and this is probably the biggest leak in its history. This is one of the biggest leaks in technology in a very long time (possibly ever) precisely because of Apple's often criticized techniques for keeping things under wraps.

What am I talking about? In a nutshell, a guy found the next iPhone in a bar and sold it to Gizmodo for $15,000. It's highly reliable given that Apple has asked for it back. Some people think this was cleverly orchestrated, but this is not the time Apple wants people to know about the new iPhone. Aside from cannibalizing sales in the short term, it deprives them of being able to jump start Apple interest at a time when it's likely to be low in the middle of the summer when the honeymoon with the iPad is over.

Briefly: much like the last iPhone update, there's not a whole lot here to get excited about. It follows in the footsteps of some ideas from the Nexus One, like a secondary mic, it has flash on the camera, probably better battery life (bigger battery), and it has a front facing camera. Any updates to the OS are still a mystery since Apple bricked it once they found out it was missing, but there's probably some interesting software there for at least video conferencing.

Given that Apple fired a guy for showing Steve Wozniak the iPad for 2 minutes before its release, it's surprising that they let this guy walk off the campus with this device. At the center of all this is a big debate about if Gizmodo is in the wrong here. They purchased a device that they knew didn't belong to the guy selling it and then offered to return it after posting all its details. To top it off, they exposed the guy who lost the phone and he's literally become infamous overnight shooting up on Google's most searched terms. Should they have exposed him?

I'm pretty sure that Gizmodo is actually in the clear here. I believe they're protected from being responsible for buying stolen merchandise and they did eventually try to find its rightful owner (Apple). Should they have broken the story? They feel that they had a journalistic responsibility to do so. As dirty as the situation seems, I think I kind of agree with them. Much like a corporation has to do what's in the best interests of shareholders, even if it's unpopular, a news organization must not withhold valuable information from its audiences. Of course, they've destroyed their relationship with Apple and may have ruined the career of the guy who leaked the phone. Even though it looks like Apple hasn't fired him given that Gizmodo has exposed who he is, any time he goes to apply for another job he'll always be known as the guy who lost a giant trade secret. I personally don't think they had the right to make the decision to reveal who he was. If the guy asked them to to protect him, then I think that'd be fine. They took it upon themselves though to make that call and really squeezed everything they could out of the story, so I thought that was kind of sleazy. Given that Gizmodo was banned from CES for using a TV blaster remote on the show floor, I don't know that this really does wonders for their reputation.

Things took a really interesting turn on Friday when one of Gizmodo's reporters had his house searched by the cops. According to Gawker's COO, this was an invalid search warrant, but no update on whether he got the stuff back that was confiscated during the search. I'm still unclear on what they thought they'd find by doing the search, but I'm sure we'll hear more than we need to hear about this as the week wears on.

Hitler Parody Videos Taken Down

They actually weren't taken down for why you may think - they were taken down for copyright violation. There was a pretty big meme on YouTube where people took a climactic scene from Downfall, the foreign film depicting the final days of the Third Reich, and added their own subtitles. Someone from the EFF actually made their own parody video portraying the producer of the movie as Hitler. It is kind of funny and tragic since they're being oppressive about fair use regarding a movie telling the story of the world's most infamous oppressor. It's definitely worth checking out and is another gentle reminder that fair use is still an implicit right granted in spite of the DMCA.

Paid Hulu Service

Amidst modest revenues compared to what NBC, News Corp, and Disney would like, Hulu is giving a paid model a shot. For $10 a month they're going to add the ability for you to watch episodes older than the last 5 for its shows for $10 a month. I think this would be a great idea if they were to also get more television shows in the process. With its current lineup though, I just don't see them making any money. Especially given that Netflix already has plenty of shows on DVD plus movies that you can rent from them for the same price (but obviously not all of that is available for streaming). I think it'll be a great experiment since they're not going to be taking away from what people get for free right now. If it'll get more companies to come to the table and let Hulu serve their content then I hope it works out.

Palm Loses Another Exec

I still feel bad for Palm. Even though they developed a great product in the Pre and botched its launch, they're still a worthy adversary to Apple and it's too bad that they're still lagging so far behind. They lost another executive last week (their VP of carrier marketing) and investor confidence continues to dwindle. The CEO made an appearance at the developer's conference Palm was running last week to combat rumors that he was going to step down. Good to see that someone is still sticking through things in senior leadership.

ACTA Made Partially Public

I haven't spoken nearly enough about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), but it's a very important issue to be aware of. In a nutshell, it's an agreement being negotiated amongst multiple countries in secret with the purpose of creating international standards for conterfeiting. The problem is that it's negotiated in secret and has had leaks of very predatory clauses, like 3 strikes where 3 accusations of digital theft, whether founded or not, could result in you not being able to ever get Internet access again. Fortunately, it has backed away from this provision.

In being made public we've discovered that it threatens to remove ISPs' safe harbor protection (i.e. protection from liability from illegal activity they're not aware of) if they don't actively police their customers. The EFF has posted their preliminary analysis and it's actually a pretty thorough breakdown of exactly what's wrong with it. It's definitely not good that it contradicts American laws and strengthens the DMCA. This is definitely the kind of issue to write to your congressman about - it could really hurt people that don't intentionally break copyright law or even people that are totally innocent. It's gestapo justice for content creators.

Microsoft Losing Money on Bing

Microsoft revealed a pretty good Q1 because of Windows 7, but saw net losses at over $700 million in its online services division, which focuses on online advertising and Bing. Even though Bing has grown, it's taking market share from Yahoo instead of Google, which isn't quite what Microsoft wanted. I was recently in a short discussion with someone about whether Bing makes sense. They argued that Microsoft should innovate instead of trying to compete where there's already a good solution. The point of our economy is to challenge good solutions to get better and better through competition. Google is a very real threat to Microsoft's online future, which is going to be very important to Microsoft as the trend continues against shrink wrap software. They definitely need a strong online brand so I respect them sticking it out with Bing, but I'm also hoping they have a strategy to cut these huge losses in the long term.

Closing Stories

I was on pager duty last night so I'm now at the point of my eyes involuntarily closing on me. Last week happened to be a big news week, but there are some stories that I don't want to close without mentioning.

Apple filed a patent for what looks like a way to buy digital concert tickets via iTunes. Not tremendously creative, but definitely makes sense for Apple.

Engadget received a leak that Dell is developing a phone known as Lightning on Windows Phone 7 for release in Q4. It has a Snapdragon processor, a 4.1" OLED screen, full Flash support, all the standard iPhone gadgets (accelerometer, compass, GPS), and, oddly enough, FM radio. What's with Zunes and FM Radio (I know it's not a Zune, but similar UI). Oh, and it actually looks nice:

Why are more computer science students caught cheating than in other disciplines? Better technology. Theoretically, that means there are more honest software developers out there than most other industries. I kind of hope that isn't true though, especially with things like building airplanes or practicing medicine.

If you use Windows 7, you must read this article from Maximum PC listing really useful tips and easter eggs in Windows 7. I learned a few nifty things from it, my favorites being the magnifying glass and the multiple-monitor settings.

Office 2010 is finally RTM!

Mashable has a couple of really cool videos showing off Ford Sync's integration with Android and Blackberry applications. It gave me one of those "wow the future is now" moments, as corny as that sounds.

We're running out of IP addresses!

Amazon isn't selling out people to North Carolina tax collectors. Just a heart-warming story to end with.

Stay dry this week, everyone!

Apple Patent Lawyers vs. the World

Apple Sues HTC

It's unfortunate that all these big negatives stories keep coming out about Apple because I'd much rather talk about other stuff. The news is what it is though.

In a way, this was bound to happen, but I guess it's been so long since Apple threatened to enforce its patents that everyone had forgotten. Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC for 20 patent infringements. The list of patents include things like swiping on a touch screen to unlock, turning off the phone screen when held near your face, and the idea that a foreground app can send off a background process to do work while the foreground remains responsive to user input. These patents would kill a lot of modern touchscreen phones, if upheld, but some of them are OS-level ideas that I'm pretty sure had prior art before being filed. Even though the lawsuit is against HTC, Google is verbally supporting HTC and some are speculating that legal advice is being provided behind closed doors. Apparently, lawsuits aren't so uncommon in the mobile phone space where it ends up in patent trading so that people can build on each other's ideas, but I think it's kind of sleazy either way.

Apple is not hard up for money and is not by any means getting killed competitively by HTC. HTC has surely cut into Apple's market share, but probably not by enough to warrant a lawsuit. Apple makes plenty of money, so they're not hard up for money. I see 3 possible motivations here (and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive): Apple wants to bankrupt HTC to eliminate them from the market, HTC has patents that Apple wants to take advantage of, or Apple wants to scare off other competitors from building on concepts that Apple has pioneered. Except for blatant ripoffs, most other big companies in tech, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, don't file lawsuits like this. Most patents filed are for purely defensive purposes. It's a little crazy to say that you can't act on an idea you have just because Apple had the same idea before you did. Not all of these patents are like that, but I think several are. If you have a touchscreen phone, it only makes sense that you need to gesture to unlock it because you have no physical buttons to do it with - why should everyone pay royalties to Apple for that? I'm all for Apple protecting themselves against people making exact iPhone copies, but I don't think HTC has done that at all. I think they've been doing their best to innovate, and lawsuits like this only hurt innovation and competition.

TiVo Premiere Announced

It's been well over two years since the TiVo HD came out and TiVo hasn't financially been doing all that hot. As I've said before, I have a TiVo HD and think that the user experience is unparalleled. My brother has AT&T Uverse and his DVR setup is the closest I've seen in quality compared to the TiVo, but it doesn't have the connectivity with external services (like Amazon VOD and Netflix) that TiVo does.

TiVo has finally revealed to the world the TiVo Premiere, which is a 320 GB HD TiVo with an all new, improved interface. What's really cool, and I was hoping would be included but will actually be extra, is the qwerty peanut remote:



I've always wanted a keyboard on my TV remote for searching, so that's a pretty killer feature. Still, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade for existing TiVo users. It's only $300 so it makes sense for new buyers to pounce on it, but it doesn't sound like the guts have changed much. I wish it would support Tru2way, but at least it supports Verizon FiOS. The new Flash interface (which will finally include a storage capacity meter) is getting rave reviews from reporters who saw it at the announcement, and it's probably the TiVo search beta currently available. Hopefully it's snappier than on the current hardware though.

Of course, I say it's not worth upgrading and I really want one. It hits a sweet spot, in my opinion, with storage capacity (at least for a single person) and I really want that new remote. It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to it.

Windows Phone 7 Game Demo

Microsoft showed off something at TechEd that has created a lot of positive buzz since about Windows Phone 7. They demoed Indiana Jones being played on the PC, then on a Windows Phone 7 device, and finally on the Xbox 360. What's unique here is that the game state is being shared between all 3 to provide a seamless gaming experience. Well, seamless except for that the graphics are drastically worse on your phone than on your Xbox 360, of course. Still, I'd be impressed with your phone having a mini-game that ties into your game progress instead of tying into exactly where you are in the main game. It's exciting that for the first time in God only knows how long, Microsoft is trying to innovate with their mobile platform instead of just replicating stuff that's already out on the market. The question now is whether or not December can come soon enough in a market as hot as the mobile OS market even with as unique a feature as this gaming experience.

Lifelock on Lockdown

You have probably by now seen an ad for Lifelock at some point. They claim that they proactively guarantee the safety of your identity for a monthly fee and even challenged that you'd get a million bucks if you could steal the identity of their CEO, given his social security number. Of course, someone did eventually withdraw money in his name but not sure if he ended up getting that reward money. Well, the FTC is investigating them for deceptive business practices and being too forceful in trying to gain new customers. Lifelock was unable to deliver on its promises because it didn't protect customers from the most common forms of identity theft, and they had almost no security for customer's private information on Lifelock's corporate network. It's ironic that their slogan is that no one else guarantees your good name because no one else can. It looks like Lifelock couldn't either.

Less interesting but more importantly, the US government has declassified part of its
cybersecurity plan, which excludes monitoring private traffic but does include deploying intrusion detection systems on federal networks, which I'm pretty happy about because that was my short-lived research interest in college. The basis of an IDS is that it tries to detect behavior that's uncharacteristic for a system and raise an alert for such behavior - it's preemptive rather than reactionary like most mainstream security software is. The plan also calls for improving the security of private critical infrastructures. With China threatening the likes of Google, we can use all the precautionary network security measures we can get.

AT&T Claims Tiered Pricing Inevitable

In the world of cell phones, we've always had tiered pricing on voice but almost always have had unlimited plans for data usage (not including text messaging, of course). Well, AT&T has already started rhetoric preparing people for tiered pricing, and it's a bunch of bologna. It shouldn't be possible for a mobile phone to use enough data to really put a heavy dent in AT&T's network, so I'm really skeptical that 3% of smartphone users could be using 40% of AT&T's network capacity. Maybe they should work on a better network - they have plenty of cash from all their iPhone users. The claim that they're in no rush to push out a 4G network, which means they want to charge people more to stay on a slower network than competitors like Sprint. It just doesn't make sense. To their credit, they claim no short-term plans of tiered pricing, but it's clear that they're not dealing well with the burden of so many iPhone users. It's just astounding that they don't believe the bigger bandwidth and reduced latency offered by 4G isn't going to help them out as much as sticking with their current infrastructure.

Hulu Loses Heavy Hitters

In the world of media conglomerates, Viacom is a pretty thirsty beast. Unfortunately, Hulu's revenues couldn't quench Viacom's thirst and so Hulu has lost their two biggest shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's odd that Viacom thinks that they can do better with these two properties than Hulu, which is a fairly established brand nowadays. It's well known in the mainstream, especially because of the recession as people cut out their cable providers. Contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, I don't think Hulu is in quite as deep of a hole as it may seem. Hulu still needs more time to grow revenues, and as other offerings gain success, I think Hulu will show that not only is having your shows available online is approaching a point of becoming vital, but no one does it more efficiently or effectively than Hulu. Of course, YouTube is probably Hulu's biggest competitor, but YouTube is definitely not as browsable for this kind of content compared to Hulu.

More Competitors to the iPad

I don't have much to say about either of these devices, but I definitely think they're worth knowing about. The HP Slate is starting to materialize by way of official video footage, and it's clearly proud of running Windows 7 and supporting Flash, which Steve Jobs is still trying to woefully will out of existence. While I can see the argument for HTML 5 being better in the long run and Flash maybe not being so vital on a small device, I think it's absolutely important on a tablet in the short term and it's definitely one of the things HP should capitalize on. More importantly though, the Slate will give you more freedom to run the applications you're used to if you're already on Windows 7 on your desktop/laptop. Whether or not people want that experience is yet to be seen though.

Meanwhile, a fresh leak has been dropped regarding the Microsoft Courier, which is a tablet that looks like a foldable booklet. The video footage revealed is similar to what we saw months ago, but still very exciting. Who knows if it'll ever become a reality - it seems more like a concept bred from a set of requirements than anything else.

Closing Stories

Ok, as much as I love my new laptop and how much easier blogging is on it, I have other things to do so I'm going to wrap this up with some quick stories I still think are worth taking notice of.

I have too much App1e negativity in this post already, so I'm not going to really talk to the heinous secret agreement Apple has its iPhone developers sign. It's so detrimental to the developer that I'm almost surprised that it's legal.

Real Networks gave up their fight for Real DVD, which aimed to legitimize DVD copying by replacing the DRM already on DVDs with their own DRM. I don't know if it kills the future of copy protection, but it could've created a major precedent so it's definitely a disappointing ending.

Gizmodo has an excellent article detailing the sordid history of Sony. I have a love-hate relationship with Sony - I love some of their products, but their vision is often misguided.

Props to YouTube for launching auto-captioning. That's an insanely awesome technology.

The Core i7 6-core Gulftown processor is finally out and I actually enjoyed reading this review. It's a fairly technical review, but it sounds like a great architecture.

The FCC has released a very capable tool for measuring your Internet speed with the added bonus that they can use your data point to help understand the status of broadband Internet speeds across the country. In addition to just down and up speeds, it even gives you latency! The URL is easy to memorize: braodband.gov.

Torrents are now legally available of free music from SXSW 2010. Check them out!

Popular Science has opened up the entirety of its 137-year archive for free!

I'm a big fan of these free, troubleshooting tools for Windows. If you only download one, definitely get the Blue Screen View one. My next vote is for WinDirStat, which is an application I've needed for years.

Last, but certainly not least, College Humor has a great video on the true use case of Google Wave: cyber sex.

Gone Phishing on the iPhone

Cybersecurity Shmybersecurity

There was a pretty good amount of security news last week but not much of anything else. Given that I'm kind of tired from yesterday (worked all day and night), I'm going to keep this kind of short since it was a slow news week anyway.

Network World kind of informally posted what they think the 10 best IT jobs will be in 2010. I don't know that they had hard evidence to back their list, but it's actually a pretty good list. Guess what's at the top of that list? No, not a shmybersecurity expert but a security specialist. The list has some other cool choices, like open source evangelist and service assurance manager (super important), but let's stick with security specialist.

Almost every week for the past several months I've had at least one security issue a week to talk about. Sometimes I don't cover them just because they get repetitive. Last week alone there were two biggies. Google was at the center of a corporate espionage attack a couple of weeks ago and so last week they teamed up with the NSA to get to the bottom of the attack, which is believed to have originated in China. It was so serious that Google decided that they're not going to filter search results in China anymore. I'm not sure if they've stuck with this policy or not since then, but they were clearly frazzled by this. Given that the accounts violated were active human rights supporters in China, it's very likely that the attacks originated within the Chinese government.

More recent than that was that a security flaw was discovered in the iPhone opening the door to phishing attacks. I wonder if this will make security on the iPhone a big deal like it is for Internet Explorer on PCs? It basically allows someone to easily modify your mobile configuration files over the air and make it look like it came from Apple. Someone who didn't know about this exploit could do something like connect to a malicious server instead of a VPN and have all their transmissions compromised.

With all these stories cropping up, it's not surprising that a security specialist would be in demand. Coming full circle back to this section header, a lot of people don't understand cybersecurity at all. However, it's not easy to understand if you want to be safe from every kind of attack you're likely to come across. Even the tech savvy get tricked. It's an arms race because the bad guys get more and more clever as we figure them out - like a polymorphic virus. I don't know if it will pan out since often things don't in a government as complicated as ours, but the House has approved legislation to authorize the NIST to develop a cybersecurity education program. This would be not only for the government but also for businesses and consumers to make our economy stronger against security scares. I hope that it ends up leading to real results, because it's something that we've needed for a long time now.

Superbowl Ads

Internet video has gotten really big. It's exciting. I remember blogging about IP TV a few years back and looking forward to a future where people control what they watch and have a much larger platform of content in the Internet. We're not quite there yet, but it's promising that 178 million US Internet users watched 33 billion online videos in December. It's crazy that 40% of those videos were on YouTube and 3% was on Hulu, which was the next highest percentage. The times have really changed from a world where the Internet wasn't a big deal and no one was using much of their bandwidth unless they were pirating stuff.

Anyway, it's cool that I could turn to Hulu for Superbowl ads since I missed the game. A couple of my friends had planned on doing that since they don't like football (I know, blasphemy). Hulu did this last year, too, but I think they improved this year with showing you how much people liked each video (at least I think that's new). I had the game on in the background and actually managed to catch the really good ads live because they happened to catch my attention. My favorites were definitely the eTrade one, the Doritos House Rules one, and the Megan Fox one. Honorable mentions though to Snickers and the Doritos Underdog one. Jeers to Prince of Persia (stop embarrassing good video game franchises, please) and The Backup Plan. Am I crazy or were the movie trailers last Superbowl much better? This year also saw Google's first Superbowl ad, and it was creative.

Let eBooks Grow

I don't want to talk to this too much since I have a vested interest in Amazon (I assure you that I have 0 insider knowledge on this thing), but I have something to say.

A part of me is stupefied by how book publishers are dealing with eBooks, but a part of me is glad because it's exposing them for the inane people they are. Amazon is selling eBooks from HarperCollins, for example, for less they pay HarperCollins and now Rupert Murdoch is bemoaning the death of paper books and wants to force prices of eBooks up like Macmillan does. When is this guy going to retire? He's so out-of-date he probably etches his notes on stone tablets. This is the same guy who didn't want Google indexing his news articles, mind you, because he can't see the writing on the wall. Book publishers have gotten away with over-charging people for books and under-paying authors for too long and these arguments with Amazon are only surfacing how shady they can be. I don't understand what's so wrong with trying to sell eBooks for less money than a physical version. It's all profit as a digital copy! First they didn't want a computerized voice reading their books on the Kindle, and now Amazon is offering them a better revenue split at the $10 price point but they're still recalcitrant! Whether they like it or not, paper books as we know them aren't going to last forever. I know you're clutching your copy of Catcher in the Rye and staring blankly at the screen but it's true! We don't even live in a world anymore where everyone reads newspapers on paper.

Ok, stepping off my soapbox. Thanks for indulging me.

Last Notes

Just a couple of items before I sign off here.

This is a really fun article about 18 gadgets that used to be high-tech. It's so enlightening sometimes to think about the past and how far we've come and how we got here.

The CEO of Sun resigned following the heels of their acquisition by Oracle. Kind of sad that Sun has fallen so far from grace, but it happens. At least he resigned in style via haiku.

Are relational databases dying? Very interesting thoughts from Computer World.

Enjoy the sunny weather outside while you can! I'll see you next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Paying for Hulu

Note: scroll down to yesterday's post for my impressions of the Palm Pre and review of Up. Consider this a continuation of that post - I'm not covering today's stories.

The Future of Hulu

There's not a whole lot really exciting stories from last week. just a bunch of little ones (not counting the Pre). There was a lot going on at E3, but I think too much for me to effectively condense down here. I was actually pretty impressed by G4's coverage.

What I want to start out with here is that Chief Digital Officer of Hulu has stated that he envisions premium subscription content on Hulu in the future. I guess this isn't really a huge shocker, but I find a couple of things really funny about this. It seems to somewhat parallel TV as we know it today where it started out low quality, free, and to a limited audience (black and white broadcast television vs. beta Hulu), then we got color TVs (compare to Hulu in HD), and now we're approaching what we know as cable TV today: content that costs you a bit extra.

The question is: will people pay? How deep is Hulu's market penetration? I think it's inevitable for this to happen, and I think that it's going to involve some messy interference from the cable companies. It may even result in breaking net neutrality to provide higher speed access to premium Hulu subscribers. Ultimately, if it's cheaper than what people pay for cable right now and it becomes available on more set top boxes (like Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand already are), I think it'll definitely do well. You could even rope in more subscribers by providing Hulu content readily available on multiple mobile platforms (aside from just the iPhone).

I think this is where the future of television is. Not necessarily in just Hulu, but online on-demand content. Just look at the Xbox 360. They announced a number of improvements at E3 to make your Xbox the center of your home entertainment experience, right down to having TV available on demand. Times are definitely changing, and the bar is constantly being raised as far as what entertains us - I'm excited to see what comes out of it all in the next 5 years. I mean can you imagine that just 3 years ago there was no such thing as an iPhone and now it's hard to enter a room without seeing a smartphone?

Google Wave and Squared

I briefly touched on Google Wave last week but didn't have time to watch the 60+ minute presentation that Google had put together on it. Mashable was kind enough to condense it down into its 6 key features, and it actually looks like a pretty awesome platform. I imagine that they'll try to integrate it with Android - can you imagine being away from work but still being able to collaborate in a meeting with your colleagues no matter where you are with this?

The real big Google story coming out of last week (there has to be at least one each week) was Google Squared, which allows you to get your search results in a spreadsheet format. This allows you to work with your results much like you would an Excel spreadsheet and may have been intended to help research into linked data. It's probably not a big deal to the average person, but definitely not a bad addition.

HDMI 1.4

The next version of the popular HDMI cable, 1.4, was revealed last week and should be available to device manufacturers next month so that we can start seeing cables and compatible products using them as early as next summer. I love HDMI because it's just one simple cable to handle your high definition video and audio, and it's easily affordable. 1.4 will support 3D, an audio return channel (think microphones), an ethernet channel (for Internet connectivity), higher resolution (up to 4 times that of 1080p), a system for automotive HD content delivery, and mnicro-HDMI connectors. The downside of all this is that it'll result in 5 types of cables instead of today's single type of HDMI, which gives way to manufacturers (like Monster) for confusing customers and charging higher prices for cables that don't cost more to make. I'm definitely disappointd in that decision, but I can appreciate how difficult putting together an international standard like this can be so I just hope that it ends up being as cool as it sounds right now.

Digging for Ads

Digg announced that they're planning to roll out an advertising system that takes the concepts of supply and demand further using the concept behind Digg: charging advertisers more money for ads that are dugg higher by people as being more interesting. I'm really impressed by this idea - they've taken an audience that is really anti-advertising and are trying to engage them in ads with an interface they already understand and enjoy. Facebook has played around with this, but I think that they bombard their users with changes and experiments so often that no one really cared.

The Rest

I'm running out of juice here (very exhausting day), but I have a bunch of quick stories that are worth mentioning (pared down from an even longer list!).

Dailymotion has launched a video platform to compete with Flash by allowing developers to simply use "

Microsoft Takes on Google...For Real This Time

Bing

Before I start, does "Bing" really give you that positive a connotation? Yeah, it was the last name of a character on "Friends", but that doesn't amount to much. Anyway, Microsoft has had a hell of a time trying to compete with Google's chokehold on search with Live Search and MSN, so they decided to try out something new in Bing. They're investing $80 to $100 million in advertising on it to try to make people aware that the search experience they have right now could be so much better with Bing. It actually isn't too bad of an idea since people really use Google for the brand name - it's not like they compared it to many competitors.

The reviews of Bing so far aren't that bad. It's a clean interface and it gives you a sidebar with smart spinoff searches that try to get at what you want (for example, type in a TV show and one of the things on the left sidebar will be "Theme Song"). The results aren't always on par or better than Google, but the search experience is definitely decidedly different. It tries to encourage you to help it refine down to what you're really looking for and has customized ways to do this for different subjects. Try a type of food and it'll have a Local tab that will let you filter by atmosphere, price range, etc. Try videos and you can play videos on rollover rather than having to open them in new tabs or hit "play" and wait for them to load. The little things like that are kind of neat.

The reason I decided to highlight Bing today, besides the fact that it was a slow news week, is that it's just funny that Google has been a big deal for over 10 years now and Microsoft still hasn't been able to put a sizable enough dent in its market share. To be fair, neither has Yahoo. I think search is a fascinating market because people are so complacent - they like Google only because it's familiar and simple. I don't know whether or not Bing stands a chance or not, but I think that a lot of advertising is definitely going to be necessary for it to get off the ground. If Microsoft were really smart though, they'd be going after mobile phones. Put out strong search applications and appliances for major cell phone releases soon after they come out and try pushing that. Mobile search is the one place people are going to be more picky because time is important to them. If you're searching for a restaurant nearby and your friend is driving, time is super important. Google has some great mobile applications, but I think it's somewhere that Bing can get their foot in the door and make a name for themselves if they can really answer users' mobile needs.

Microsoft's Netbook Limitation

This is another quirky Microsoft story: there are rumors that they're planning on limiting the cheap version of Windows 7 to laptops no bigger than 10.2 inches. This could, in effect, limit the largest netbook you'll see to 10.2 inches since any bigger and the manufacturer will not be able to keep a competitive price due to the Windows 7 licensing fees. Of course, they could sell Linux netbooks in any size, but people are going to be more interested in a familiar OS, and Apple hasn't shown an interest in netbooks because they think it's beneath them (seriously, they think they're too high-end to sell netbooks, I don't have the time to hunt for the article but they've said something to this effect), so that just leaves Windows machines.

Is this fair? To be honest, I think so. The fact that they're selling a cheaper version of Windows 7 to netbooks is already sort of a concession, and they have to protect themselves against the slippery slope of normal laptops being called netbooks and manufacturers shaking them down for lower prices. Also, any bigger than 10.2" seriously is a laptop. I have co-workers with 13" laptops and they don't call them netbooks because they're not designed for people with child-like hands (I kid, I kid - netbook keyboards aren't that bad).

Zune HD Announced

Here's a story I'm excited about: Microsoft finally validated all the rumors about the Zune HD by just coming clean about it. It looks pretty sexy, in my opinion:



It's a full-on touch screen mp3 player (like the iPod Touch) with a few important additions. It has an OLED screen, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that OLED screens are beyond gorgeous. It's shocking how great they look even in small forms. It allows you to output via HDMI, which is a very forward-thinking step with digital distribution growing in the HD realm since you can't otherwise carry digital copies of movies easily to friends' places. Playing on the HD name, it will also broadcast HD radio, which usually carries more artist and track information than you can get from terrestrial radio and is, supposedly, much better quality. I don't think it ever really caught on, but it's a neat little feature to throw in there. It's also WiFi enabled with a full web browser.

As you can tell, it's definitely a direct competitor with the iPod Touch much like the previous Zune was to the scroll wheel iPods. I really want this device to not fail miserably, because I like seeing companies try to innovate and compete with Apple. I don't think this is the most innovative thing Microsoft could've come up with, but it does look slick, and I'm really interested to see how it'll integrate with Xbox Live. If they handle it well, it could be a killer app feature. Microsoft has no handheld gaming system, so maybe they want this to be it? They'll be revealing more on the Xbox Live integration this week at E3, so I'm sure I'll have more to talk about next Sunday.

Pre Syncs with iTunes, and More Randomness

Yep, Jon Rubinstein announced last week at All Things D (a conference put on by the Wall Street Journal) that the Pre can sync with iTunes. I wonder how many rules they broke by doing that. There's no way that's sanctioned by Apple, and Rubinstein was SVP of the iPod division until he left in 2006 (and subsequently joined Palm's Board in 2007), so am I crazy or can't Apple just sue him for sharing trade secrets? I'm sure his NDA only lasted for like 18 months (which makes me wonder how he was allowed to work for Palm since he definitely knew about the iPhone before he left Apple), but it's still secret information as far as being able to have a third party device identifies as an iPod by iTunes. In any case, you can sync your Pre to iTunes until Tim Cook leads Apple's legal team to Palm's doorstep with pitchforks and torches.

The real shocker (for some, at least) is that Verizon claims they'll be getting the Pre in January. They are a CDMA network so it's not a huge technological leap. I think we already heard that Sprint's exclusivity would be short-lived, but I wonder how much of a boost the Pre will give them if people on competing carriers will be getting webOS phones (AT&T and Verizon, at least) before this time next year. Anyway, Verizon will also be getting the Storm 2 in January, which is supposed to be a huge improvement over the Storm, but I don't think improving over a terrible phone is a huge challenge. I've messed with a Storm and the haptic feedback thing doesn't help at all with typing.

Lastly, Gizmodo has a pretty comprehensive guide to everything you could want to know about the Pre if you know nothing about it right now (or not enough, in your own opinion). If you want to learn even more though, the manual and some other documents from the upcoming launch were leaked in the middle of last week.

H-1Bs Outnumber the Unemployed

The issue of immigrant workers is a very sensitive subject for a number of reasons. Adding fuel to the fire though is the recent revelation that there are more H-1B workers in the U.S. tech industry than unemployed Americans in tech. Apparently, the government has been going after companies with fraudulent visas. While I agree that it's unfair for subpar foreign talent to displace great domestic talent, but I don't think that's happening. I don't think there's anything wrong with highly qualified and motivated foreigners displacing lazy, stupid programmers. It's going to hurt us in the long-run to protect employees who suck at their job and would be better off in another industry. It's a delicate balance though because there has to be a cap, especially in education if talented Americans are getting sidled out of top programs by foreign workers. We have to give the people here who want to excel a fair shake, and doing that is really hard. It's not fair to read a headline that there are more H-1Bs than unemployed techies and become outraged, because companies shouldn't fire good employees because they're from abroad.

Identity Theft and Spam

I don't want to go too in depth on this because I could easily put together a entire post on identity theft, but I definitely wanted to plug New Scientist's story on the subject because it's a really well-written and exhaustive explanation of the dire situation we find ourselves in. "Identities", which are really just someone's credit card numbers, social security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name (to name a few) are traded readily online at fairly affordable prices. What really sucks is that even if you avoid phishing and social engineering attacks and all that stuff, the people you trust when you do business could be incompetent and lose your data. Thinking that you're going to go cash only and abandon plastic is not the safety net people think it is, it only is likely to make you less careful in situations where a credit card may make you more paranoid (in a good way).

What can you do about it? To start with, here are some Firefox extensions that would really help your cause. If you're not using Firefox 3, then that's your first problem. Those extensions are seriously awesome though and cover some of the most common attacks you could run into, like forms that go to malicious third parties, hidden Javascript code that could re-configure your router, password sniffing and cracking, and hidden trackers.

Semantic revealed last week that 90% of all e-mail sent over corporate networks is spam. 58% of this spam is coming from botnets, which means that there are a lot of people sending spam who don't even know it. It's a dismal statistic, but it's pretty rare to see good news in security, to be perfectly honest.

Hulu on Your Desktop

Hulu has released a desktop application to better jive with home media PCs and laptops with remote controls in the side of them. In other words, it's what Joost should've been if it had better content and was less CPU and memory intensive.

I've been so busy with work that I didn't get a chance to test drive it, but Ars Technica has some great thoughts on it and I always trust their reviews. It's interesting that they don't want to be a part of Boxee and yet the content providers are ok with Hulu's own homegrown desktop application. This is a big step towards putting a nail in the coffin of cable television as we know it (i.e. watching shows at a pre-determined time) and helping coax Hulu into the mainstream.

Final Notes

Ok, I've really got to get a good night's rest tonight so it's time to wrap up with some quickies.

Google Chrome now has extensions! It's long overdue and small in selection, but Google is aiming to make them easy to develop to help ramp up in comparison to Firefox's expansive add-on library.

Google also announced a new online collaboration tool called Wave (in beta, as always) at their I/O conference, and it seems like the next evolution of Google Docs.

Dell's earnings dropped 63% last quarter, but they're expecting a solid rise this winter due to Windows 7. It looks like until then they'll have to try to dial down their cost structure.

If your computer has become considerably sluggish, then this article has your name written all over it. It's a pretty solid article of easy tweaks to make your computer perform better (analogous to a tune-up for your car).

Have a great week everyone! I know it's going to be very long for me as I await the Palm Pre, and hopefully I'll be able to actually get one.

The Weather is Nice Outside

Summer Came Early?

Winter hasn't really ended yet in Seattle - evident in that it was snowing last Thursday. I'm going to use today's incredible weather as my excuse for not reviewing the Slumdog Millionaire Blu-ray. I do have it though (Amazon's magical ways somehow got it to me the day after release). For now, I'll say that I was disappointed with the Blu-ray but I'm still happy with it overall. I just don't have to time right now to go into details so you'll have to come back next week to learn more!

The time I would've spent going through all the special features and writing the review went instead to walking around outside today and putting together this short video from it, which is half just huge flowers and half cityscape (please click on the 'HD' in the lower right corner once it starts playing to see it in HD, or just click through to the YouTube page and watch it in HD there):



It was shocking how perfect the weather was. I used to consider T-shirt and shorts weather to be weather where you'd sweat too much wearing pants and shoes, but it didn't feel too warm at all out. It's funny how not only was the market packed but there were even more cars than usual going through Belltown. Not to get too religious here and divert from my typical tech focus, but it's really humbling to be one person witnessing such beauty from a higher being. I didn't think I'd enjoy it so much since I couldn't find anyone else free to go with me to the BBQ competition in the market, but it was nice and relaxing. I'm not even usually a big flower guy but when you see so many huge, colorful flowers it's hard to not stop and notice them.

Time Warner Screws 4 More Cities

Most of the nation already has a well-developed hatred for Comcast, and the rest turn their anger towards Time Warner Cable - the other massive cable monopoly. A while ago they tried out a tiered Internet program that charged customers by how much bandwidth they used, and now they're rolling it out to Austin (*tear*), San Antonio, Rochester, and Greensboro. I suppose this is better than it going out to all their markets, but it's not a good sign if they're pleased enough to expand this trainwreck. Having to pay $55 a month for 40 GB of bandwidth is an enormous price jump, especially in a place like Austin or San Antonio where salaries aren't as high as other parts of the nation to cover such a price gouge and may have people turning to DSL instead. I can see it doing one or more of a few things. People could cut out cable TV to get a beefier Internet plan, especially families with teenage kids and tech geeks. People could use the Internet less and less for rich content ending in a big lose for online on demand video services, Netflix streaming, YouTube and Hulu, and any other beefy sites. People may look into alternatives like WiMax (or, as I mentioned earlier, DSL).

People are definitely getting pissed about it whom are soon to be affected. If enough people get through to local government and complain to Time Warner, it's possible that they can nip this in the bud. It's sad that we have to encourage grassroots movements to get companies that provide major utilities to not spit in the faces of their customers. I don't know what's more reviling to me, their discouragement of the expansion of the Internet in our homes or the fact that they're trying to profit off the naivete of the average person who has no clue that Internet infrastructure costs are only going down with time and extra bandwidth doesn't really cost them extra money. If they want to start their lowest bandwidth plan for $30 at 100 GB and then charge $50 for like 250 GB, that I can understand. The rates they're intending to charge though are basically highway robbery. If you're going to be affected by these changes, please fight back. You're not just fighting back for yourself, but the other cities they may expand to if you accept it willingly.

YouTube's Upcoming Re-design

I don't like to usually talk about features and re-designs that haven't happened yet, but I just found it interesting that YouTube is planning on changing its navigation to focus on "Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos". What does this mean? It looks like they're feeling the pinch of not having had a lot of success with monetizing their content. While one side of that coin is keeping their number of unique visitors strong and engaged the other side is attracting advertisers to trust them and to display their advertisement with the desired brand image. With the first three tabs clearly delineated as premium outside content, advertisers may feel more secure not being mixed in with people hurting themselves and strange clips from other countries.

In my opinion, this is an extremely risky move for YouTube. I don't see it ending well, but it's really hard to predict how it'll turn out. I don't want to say it's a stupid movie because Hulu being locked up (to the point of the HTML being encrypted) has really painted them in a corner. Their PR has been really terrible since they denied Boxee the ability to stream their content, and plus there's the fact that they only have the last few episodes of any given shows. I don't know if YouTube can strike up much better deals than Hulu since Hulu is backed by NBC Universal, but they may be able to differentiate enough from Hulu while keeping a good reputation with advertisers to attract more content, money, and happy customers. I think this is the right time for YouTube to give it a try, but I definitely worry for them. They were built on user-generated content, and branching out in the online world is never as easy as it looks.

Microsoft's Brand Image

Typically, I'm not a fan of John C. Dvorak's columns. I feel like he often says crazy stuff just to get people talking about something. I guess that's not so bad, but I feel like I can't believe him half the time. Anyway, I still think he's a smart guy and occasionally agree with him, like regarding his article about Microsoft's brand image getting worse. When Songsmith came out, everyone was railing on how stupid it was. If it was some Silicon Valley startup though, you know everyone would be praising its creativity. Let's take a bad Microsoft product: Internet Explorer. If Safari was the same thing as Internet Explorer, Mac users would still claim that it's the best browser out there because they think it came from Apple. It's amazing how many ridiculous features Apple releases for the iPod and iPhone that no one uses and yet everyone seems to love. Who really uses cover flow? Come on.

I feel bad for Microsoft. They're really trying hard to improve their image, and I think Windows 7 is a big step in the right direction. I never thought before about how much the company who makes a product matters in its reception and popularity. I guess it's always existed in things like cereal and detergent and products like that, but I never thought about it really in software.

Ton of Quickies

Ok, I'm seriously about to cough up a lung here, so I need to wrap this up and get to bed.

Wikileaks put up some fun facts about Western countries that are censoring their people, like that Norway, Denmark, and Finland have an unregulated censorship agreement with their ISPs.

PC World has a really great article about old pieces of technology that used to be very popular but are now almost never heard of. A lot of them are actually still available, it turns out. Like did you know that MiniDisc got upgraded to Hi-MD? Or that Iomega still sells Zip disks? I thought it was funny that Circuit City made their list.

Palm Pre demos have been fed to us to keep us interested in the device with no release date yet, but some of the 3rd party developers are clearly taking advantage of the background processing ability that Apple refuses to put into the iPhone API. Taking a stance on development opposite of Apple is what's going to save Palm, if they handle it properly.

What are the 10 skills developers need in the next 5 years? The list is debatable, but I think soft skills, web development, and "development hygiene" will definitely be key.

Digg launched the Digg Bar. It never works for me in Firefox because my Firefox seems to have a huge bug where it can't load Digg at all, but I'm sure the Digg Bar is peachy. It gives you short URLs with a little toolbar to make sharing easier - no special add-ons necessary.

Conficker didn't destroy the world yet, but it has create an enormous botnet. Fun fun.

Samsung announced the world's first WiMax mobile Internet device: Mondi. WiMax will get you faster speeds than 3G (probably on par with DSL, I'd imagine) and probably better rates than normal phone data plans, but WiMax isn't available everywhere.

A friend of mine released a really cool add-on for Firefox last week that lets you check movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes really easily. Check it out! More cool add-ons here.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 could give the president the power to nearly shut down the Internet. Basically, he would be able to designate some private networks as "critical" and order the limitation of traffic to these networks in an emergency situation. The bottom line is that it's too broad and needs better language to keep from giving up too much power.

This Week in Digital Distribution

Note: I know about the big Facebook scandal from last week, but I'm not going to report about it since it's moot by now. Facebook changed their TOS to own your data for life due to technological issues, but reverted back. End of story :)

Netflix Dethroning Hulu?

Last week had some really juicy stories regarding online distribution that centered around Hulu and Netflix (but we'll throw YouTube in the mix just for fun).

Netflix has a base of over 10 million subscribers, and though only about 10% of their movies are available for streaming, they've admitted that they've seen a significant number of subscribers taking advantage of their streaming services. In fact, they've indicated that they may start rolling out subscriptions that are streaming only as soon as this year. I could even imagine them having tiers of streaming only plans for the amount of content available to stream while keeping the all-you-can-eat model. What's really giving Netflix a lot of power here is that aside from your computer you can get $100 Roku box to stream on your TV or use your Xbox 360, TiVo, or certain Blu-ray players to do the same. Once they get on mobile platforms, they're going to be practically unstoppable. While no one wants to necessarily play movies on their mobile phone, imagine a projector being built into your cell phone or even a large Internet tablet.

Enter Boxee. Nowadays, more and more households are getting DVRs (some being TiVos, of course) because people just don't have the time anymore to be home at pre-scheduled times to watch everything they want to watch, they like to watch multimedia on their own schedule. Boxee makes this a reality without having to get a cable or satellite subscription but rather by pooling together content from sites like YouTube, Netflix, CBS, and others, plus your own computer. It's essentially open source DVR software for your home media PC that doesn't really record TV but instead just takes advantage of what's available on the Internet. Unfortunately, they cannot bring in Hulu content. Why? They haven't really been told why, but they were told that they can't do it.

Of course, this is completely insane. We're entering an era where the idea of television as we know it is being completely transformed, and most of the big guys figured out that piracy was rampant a few years ago because of the lack of legal, online venues of distribution. Bringing in content via Hulu and iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand and such has helped alleviate the problem. While it hasn't overtaken traditional television viewing, we're in an economy where people are favoring getting their media on the Internet over getting cable or satellite, especially with HD channels coming in over antenna if they really want to watch traditional television.

They're starting to change their tune though of encouraging this with the Boxee situation and pulling content from Hulu. Hulu isn't the bad guy here, it's their vendors who are inept. So what's their endgame? It's probably just what you think: cable companies trying to preserve their bread and butter. Time Warner blamed billions of dollars in losses on the Internet, but what they don't get is that their prices are often outrageously unfair compared to just buying the episodes you want for $2 apiece or even renting/buying them on DVD. It's incredible how lazy some companies can be. It's absolutely inexcusable to not innovate in your industry and make your customers suffer for your incompetency. They need to look to the future and get their minds out of the past.

In effect, they're handing the reigns to Netflix. With TV shows on DVD and deals like the one they have with Starz, they're getting a heavy lead on Hulu, and it's not even Hulu's fault. It'll be interesting to see how much these cable companies suffer until they change their minds.

One last quick note: YouTube has been changing up their code a bit to kill off un-approved alternatives to the video download feature I mentioned last week that would enable viewers to download videos without having to buy them, once YouTube starts really rolling out paid downloads. What'll be interesting is if YouTube will work on integrating with TiVo and Roku and others to get themselves on people's TVs past just streaming but rather on the scheduled download model, which podcasts are often downloaded by through RSS readers or iTunes or other such software.

MWC 09 Randomness

I actually don't think I've heard of the Mobile World Congress and only found out about it a few weeks ago when my brother mentioned it to me one day. Apparently, it's somewhat of a big deal, especially now that smartphones are so popular. A few interesting stories came out of it last week.

Let's face it, Windows Mobile 6.5 has always been the weakest link in the Windows family. People who get Windows Mobile phones seem to not stay with them for long and reviewers have never been kind to the OS. Windows Mobile 6.5 is looking to change this trend with a much sleeker, iPhone-like, touch UI. What Gizmodo liked about it especially was that the lock screen had alerts and other useful information on it, but I just felt overall like they were trying to make usability more of a core value of the OS instead of an afterthought.

They also got their hands on the HTC Dream, aka the Android G2. The phone hardware is slimmer and it looks like the body makes more sense, but it is a touchscreen. So while it doesn't inherit the G1's terribly keyboard, it gives you an onscreen touch screen keyboard that you're likely to hate. I think Android is great, but I'm not impressed by this phone. I predict it'll be another flop and the torch for a good Android phone will probably never fall in the hands of HTC.

The last story I've got is for the Palm Pre: aside from copy and paste and tethering (using your phone as a modem for your laptop), it's now confirmed to have Flash. It has joined Adobe's Open Screen Project, which will help deliver Flash for the webOS. Given the wealth of Flash games and other rich content already out there, this would help the Pre take a huge stab at Apple's app store in having a wealth of application right out of the box.

Windows 7 RC Release Set

Neowin has learned from an insider at Microsoft (who I imagine would be in big trouble if they were discovered) that Windows 7 will have their first Release Candidate (RC) ready on April 10, 2009. It's unsure what has been adjusted aside from UAC (see my post last week), but it looks like it'll be a public release and I'm sure will keep buzz alive for the forthcoming OS. If you currently have the beta installed and start getting updates, don't get too excited: they're just test updates that do nothing.

There's only one problem with Microsoft's PR strategy though in hyping up Windows 7: they have to continue to deal with the fallout from Vista. While I like a lot about Vista, some of my stability issues make me miss XP. One woman misses it so much that she's suing Microsoft over a $60 charge to downgrade from Vista to XP on her new computer, which she downgraded to because of numerous issues she had using Vista. I don't see this lawsuit sticking, but it's just adding to Microsoft's woes.

The Yelp Scandal

I was tempted to pass up this story, but it's far too controversial to not quickly touch on. There are rumors that Yelp is threatening small businesses with negative user reviews to coerce them to buy advertising and that they allow businesses to convert negative reviews to positive reviews for $300 a month. Yelp denies these charges, but admits that they'll push positive reviews to the top for a fee. I love Yelp, so I hate to see this, but the fact they even allowing you to promote positive reviews is shady. Amazon puts reviews at the top based on a very interesting algorithm to help out customers make an educated decision. If Yelp continues to get bad press like this, I wonder if their street cred will fade away?

Final Notes

I'm running out of time here (it's past my bedtime), so I'm going to run through some final stories.

Vint Cerf let loose on some of his thoughts on the Internet and believes that downloaded content, rather than streaming media, is the real future of the Internet. As the father of the Internet, his opinions are definitely valued, and what I found most interesting was what he thought about how we'll interpret our current data and applications hundreds of years from now.

In the Pirate's Bay trial in Sweden, half the charges against them were dropped due to a misunderstanding of how torrents work. That still leaves all the charges related to them assisting in illegally making available copyrighted content.

I've talked about this before so I don't want to hammer in on it too much, but Gizmodo has a great article explaining why more megapixels are not always better. If the sensor is too small, you're actually probably shooting yourself in the foot. If you really need more than like 6 MP, then you need an SLR.

ReadWriteWeb has a fun pie chart on who's hiring in technology, with a lot going to the evasive "Other" field, but second place going to IT/Software.

Last, but not least, I'm a big fan of this short article about what programming language you should learn based on the job you're taking on. I've had the good fortune of interfacing with almost all of them over the past 6 months, so I definitely agree.

Alright, I'm going to watch a bit more of the Oscars before heading to bed. The production value in the show was really impressive and entertaining, but I was disappointed that Slumdog Millionaire won out in a couple of categories where I felt it didn't deserve it, even though I loved the film. Still: best award ceremony in years in presentation.

Since it started raining again in Seattle, I'll leave you with a glimpse of the beautiful weather we enjoyed last week.

Much Ado About Yahoo

I have to start out this post with a couple of random thoughts. First of all, this blog is awesome. I heard about it from a fellow UT alum on Thursday and it's apparently written by a girl who moved to NYC from Texas but missed the food so much (like we do here in Seattle) that she experimented to replicated some Southern staples in his kitchen. I checked out a couple of recipes and they looked pretty legit. I'm going to be combing the site later this week to add to my personal stash of recipes (none of which I take credit for, I just make them). The blog is just fun to read overall, so much so that I'm recommending it to anyone who likes cooking (my regulars know that I don't recommend blogs very often, but this is a gem).

The other thing I have to get off my chest is that it was fun watching OU whoop Texas Tech on Saturday. I never thought I'd ever support the Sooner, but for those 3+ hours I declared a personal, temporary truce with OU for the duration of the game since they played against us so respectfully, unlikely Tech. I felt like Tech played dirty against UT and Harrell was really arrogant coming out of the game. I always thought that Bradford was a much better QB than Harrell, as much as I dislike him, and I can't believe that so many pundits picked Tech over OU. It shows how terribly wrong the rankings are when the #2 team simply gives up in the second half when they're down 45-7. God forbid they'd learn from the first half or make some effort defending against OU's second string (yes, they did score on Tech). I'm satisfied with their loss, and implore the pollsters to please show some love for Texas because we had a stronger schedule than OU and beat them in a glorious game (for both teams). So please, don't let them jump us in the rankings!

Jerry Yang Steps Down

Trust me, I did not want to center another post around Yahoo. Unfortunately, when I looked at my long list of articles, the Yahoo ones bubbled up to the top. It's just a truly interesting story for the industry given that Yahoo is literally one of the first successful massive Internet companies ever. It garners them a soft spot in our nerdy little hearts, because I think a lot of people honestly want them to succeed.

I don't think it was a secret that neither Terry Semel nor co-founder Jerry Yang were in any position to effectively lead the company since the middle of last year, and now they're finally both out of the hot seat. Jerry Yang formally resigned early last week citing what I think a lot of tech journalists had already figured out: he was letting his emotional ties to the company keep him from making smart business decisions for it. It's ironic that he's going to be Chief Yahoo again in order to focus on "technology innovation" (among other things) because had he been doing that all this time Yahoo would not be the position it's in today. The company is not in ruin, but it's definitely not heading down a positive path though it is not beyond saving. They went down a path of unfocused products and a lack of competitive edge against Google. They've managed to hang on to being a far second place to Google as a search engine, but their revenues are not seeing real growth.

How did they get here though? Forbes has a surprisingly concise list of Yahoo's 5 biggest mistakes. It's amazing how many products Yahoo comes out with that people don't know about. I think that their terrible marketing strategy has led to projects being aborted that took a significant amount of investment and were not necessarily bad ideas. I was a beta tester for a service that allowed you to send mass text messages, and it really wasn't bad. It needed some work, but they could've made it work and instead chose to get rid of it. I have no idea why they did this and I'm sure they had good reason, but if you figure something like that after a product is developed then how much time did you spend in the design and planning stages? The next big mistake was not buying Google because it was too expensive, which is kind of funny since they didn't sell to Microsoft this year because they were offered too little money. That's irony for you. Hiring Terry Semel is not a surprise entry in the list either, he just did not drive vision for the company very well. One of the reasons I joined Amazon is because I had, and still have, faith in Jeff Bezos's vision. The next item is probably the least important on the list: they didn't beat Google to the punch to buy DoubleClick. Not that it wasn't dumb, but it's not like buying DoubleClick would make them a huge rival for Google. The last item is not accepting Microsoft's buyout offer earlier this year.

What do they do now? Get a competent leader who can inspire confidence in the company's employees and drive development for killer products. Figure out how to steal people from Google by any (legal and ethical) means necessary. Don't scoff at offers from better companies without a clear plan. Go back to simple UI designs. It's really the simple things that will bring Yahoo back on track to being an Internet superpower, and they have enough bright minds to make it happen. Good luck, Yahoo.

Amazon OLPC and CloudFront

I promise, this isn't an ad for Amazon. I just think it's great that Amazon is participating in the One Laptop Per Child program's "Give 1 Get 1" project where you buy a cheap OLPC for $400 and another one gets sent to a child in a developing country (they cost roughly $200 apiece). I've talked about OLPC before and why I think it's great in the face of people saying that giving computers to hungry kids is dumb, so I don't want to talk too much about that. However, to say something about it: it's a great inspirational and learning tool for these kids to help their communities and achieve better things in their lives than they probably had ever thought possible.

Amazon CloudFront is not so charitable, but is really cool. It's based in S3 and is an Amazon Web Service for efficiently distributing content to customers. They basically store your content (media or video games or what-have-you) in various spots geographically so that they can serve it to people near these endpoints faster and is designed to be extremely easy for you so that Amazon does all the hard work. It's still in beta, but an excellent idea. Everyone is saying that digital distribution is the future of music, movies, and games, so it only makes sense to make it easy to serve this stuff up at high speeds without increased infrastructural costs.

Windows 7 Media Center

Last week, Gizmodo posted a very brief video demo of Windows 7 Media Center, and it was pretty sweet. Please in the comments if you have found it re-posted somewhere else because Microsoft made Gizmodo take it down. It's basically Windows Media Center meets an iPhone in that it features intuitive touchscreen functionality through fluid motions that seem cool even though they can appear to be gimmicky at first. Some of the cool features are the fancy slideshows with music, well-integrated Internet channels, one-click access to TV (if you have a TV tuner card, that is), a thumbnail preview for seeking through an HD video, and other bells and whistles. The idea here is to have this OS on a small computer replace your DVR, and having attractive mainstream software for home media PCs could help spread adoption past just TV geeks (especially if sold in nice bundles).

Security Scoop

There were a couple of really interesting security stories last week. I was particularly impressed that Microsoft decided to give away their own home brew anti-virus software, Morro, aimed at developing nations. Are they being charitable? That may be a secondary goal, but that's not the primary motive here. The real goal is to provide a safe online environment for other PC users. These weakly protected machines are often early targets for viruses and worms and, as such, unknowingly become pivotal pieces of botnets. A botnet is a network of machines that can be controlled remotely and are often surreptitiously formed to bring down websites (for extortion, usually) or send out spam under the radar of most spam filters' first line of defense: blocking IPs. Anyway, Morro will replace Windows OneCare (which you probably have but don't know about) and takes a brute force stab at cleaning up the Internet. Security is an arms race and it's not like Microsoft is a security firm so don't expect this to fix everything overnight, but it's an interesting strategy and a great start to what will hopefully eventually replace Norton and McAfee, which I don't use because I don't think that they're better than free alternatives like ClamFree or AVG. You would think that Microsoft would know best how to quickly vaccinate computers for holes in Windows before they could release a patch, so if they play their cards right they can finally have a smack in the face to Apple's ads antagonize PC security by stating that Macs have security issues (they do, that's a fact) but Apple doesn't provide any free anti-virus software.

Europe recently got a new Visa card with a keypad to generate random security codes. At first, I thought it was dumb, but I actually kind of like it. It basically has a keypad on it where you enter your PIN, and it generates the 3 digit (maybe more, but on current cards it's 3 digits) security code usually found on the back of your card so you can use your card online more safely. Even if someone eavesdrop and steals your credit card number and security code, it'll be useless to them without your card's specific random number generator. There are a couple of issues with this though to keep in mind. It doesn't help in non-virtual scenarios. Your card will still swipe, from what I can tell, just fine. So if someone steals your card, they just can't shop online. It won't stop over-the-shoulder attacks, so someone can install a camera in a cyber cafe and spy on your PIN. What does this get them? If they can steal your card then they can use it online as much as they want (or until you cancel it). More importantly though, it's likely that the algorithm will be tied to your PIN so they can probably then create their own security codes as they'd probably have already spied your credit card number. I do not know how the security code is generated so maybe they'll be smart and not tie it to your PIN but rather just your account in a non-deterministic way. The biggest danger here, in my opinion, is the false sense of security it could create for people who shop in real life more than online or are still susceptible to social engineering attacks (like getting called by a charity for a donation, for example). Still, it's a noble cause so I give them props for creativity. It really isn't a bad stop-gap at all.

The last bit of security news is that those crafty Chinese pirates have cracked Blu-ray's far-from-ideal DRM to sell their own lower-resolution copies on the streets. They are ripping the content, re-encoding it as AVCHD (a compressed, 720p format), and then selling it. This is a threat to Blu-ray, but not sure if it's more of a thread to their sales than rampant DVD piracy. DRM will never keep pirates back, only slow them down a bit initially. The MPAA really should pour their efforts into stopping these syndicates rather than worrying about online piracy stateside, because I can almost guarantee that it's not nearly as detrimental as this kind of piracy is.

How Hulu is Surpassing YouTube

CrunchGear put up a very short post about Hulu's revenues being only 30% less than YouTube's this year and expected to at least match YouTube's revenues with less than a tenth of the viewership. It's worth talking about it though now that online advertising has become so important.

There's no question that the past decade has seen a complete transformation in advertising. It's no longer dominated by TV, radio, and magazines, but moving the the Web and, though somewhat in its infancy, to video games. When PC Magazine, probably the foremost print technology magazine in the world, decides that printing a magazine is no longer as profitable as its online articles, you know that the tides are changing. People's day-to-day habits are changing, and advertising is just trying to keep up. Even ad watchdog NAD (National Advertising Division) acknowledges viral marketing to be advertising that follows the same rules as other forms of marketing it that it cannot spread falsified information, like that cellphones emit enough radiation to pop popcorn. Another reason that online advertising is big is that it's measurable. When the economy is down like it is now, you want to see real results with your marketing budget, and TV don't cut it. They're expensive and cast a wide net without any accurate measurement of how many people see it or what they do with that information. With a banner ad, you can see a click. You can attach what are knowns as reftags (referrer tags) to links so that traffic can be attributed to a successful advertising campaign.

Back to Hulu and YouTube, why would advertisers favor a site with 7 million hits in a month over one with over 80 million hits? For the same reason that you won't see hardcore porn on MTV ripe with commercials: they have brand image to worry about. Do you want your detergent associated with a guy getting hit in the crotch? Or how about a Hoover vacuum ad rolling right after a cat riding a Roomba? Granted, that would be a great opportunity for Roomba, but how many of these are there and how easy are they to exploit? That's going to be the true test for YouTube. Conversely, advertisers know exactly what they're getting with Hulu because it's held to the same standards as normal television and they know what series appeal to what audiences. Yes, you could theoretically know that about a YouTube channel as well, but the content producer isn't under YouTube's thumb so they could deviate one day and post something detrimental to the advertisers or even mildly offensive (like curse words). Hulu is a much easier leap to make though since you know what you're getting and the improvement over television is that not only can people click on your ads to give you direct knowledge of how well your campaign is working, but you have accurate ratings of these programs and can get a much better picture of your audience than Nielsen can reliably offer.

YouTube can still be monetized well if Google can effectively filter out content for advertisers and reliably link tags for this content to advertisers, or even have more moderation control over certain YouTube channels to ensure the quality of its content (with a cut of the profit going to the channel owner, of course), but they have to be careful with it and they have to make sure that they don't alienate their audience. Since Hulu has had ads since it publicly launched, they had the luxury of not having to deal with this problem, but YouTube isn't so lucky.

The Remainder

To be honest, I'm a little tired from writing this post. I've spent my spare time for the past 3 nights working on it, and I think it's time for me to stop. Here's a quick wrap-up for the other article I had tagged to talk about:

Gmail now has themes! I don't think you can create your own themes yet, but I'm sure you will be able to soon enough as it appears to be powered by XML files setting variables for various images and colors. The mountains one though is especially cool though as it is dependent on your geographic location for the time so that it can show you an appropriate setting. Check out my current one:



Strangely enough, a Linux website posted a screenshot tour and little preview of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Its features include privacy mode (aka porn mode), web slices (to store away pieces of web pages for easy offline reference), Google Gears integration (for offline usage of certain web applications), and actual stability. IE8 was originally slated to be out before the end of this year but has since been delayed to sometime next year (before summer, I believe).

Intel has launched their Core i7 processors, which are purported to be 4-6 times faster than their current Core architecture, cheaper to manufacture thanks to smaller circuitry, re-introduce Hyper Threading for better parallelization of processes, and integrate a memory controller to increase processor bandwidth (the amount of stuff it can get done at once since it has this new venue for accessing memory).

Zune subscriptions can now keep 10 songs each month DRM-free. I actually never thought of this and I think it's a pretty clever way to try to save subscription-based mp3 sales.

Engadget has posted a review of the Blackberry Storm (formerly known as Thunder), including a video comparison with the Bold, and they weren't terribly impressed. Unlike the G1, it has to be compared with the iPhone and it never seemed to have a real edge over the iPhone with the list of complaints including that it's sluggish, there's a dearth of third-party applications, and that the on-screen keyboard's simulated tactile response doesn't improve it at all.

Wired put up a well-reasoned article that the reason the iPhone lacks Flash support is that it removes too much control from Apple. For example, a tethering application written for Flash could not really be held back by Apple because they can't block sites. Plus, Flash could always introduce security holes.

Gizmodo has a really great explanation of common video codecs and the difference between a codec and a container, and it's really useful for technical and non-technical users to read through. It will help explain why you may sometimes have problems playing videos you've downloaded online, or why not all videos can be played on your favorite mobile device.

Lastly, Network World's rundown of the top 12 myths about how the Internet works is a very interesting read and will likely provide useful tidbits to all but networking experts.

Alright, I'm on call this week so it's time to go to bed. I hope you all have a great holiday weekend! I'm a bit sad that I'll be unable to spend Thanksgiving with family, but Christmas is right around the corner so I definitely am looking forward to the vacation.