(photo: plastic lemonade)

First, Sen. Richard Shelby put a blanket hold on all executive branch nominees to extort the executive branch into rigging procurement to guarantee that the company he favored won a bid on a defense contract. Oh, and he wanted the FBI to build a crime lab in his state, too.

And now Sen. Lindsey Graham is copycatting, placing a hold on the closing of Gitmo hostage to extort the Department of Justice into not having a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And Graham's not being subtle about it. In a well-researched piece for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer breaks some amazing scoops:

Rahm had a good relationship with Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don't prosecute these people in military commissions I won't support the closing of Guantnamo. . . Rahm said, If we don't have Graham, we can't close Guantnamo, and it's on Eric!'

[snip]

Graham told [Mayer], It was a nonstarter for me. There's a place for the courts, but not for the mastermind of 9/11. He said, On balance, I think it would be better to close Guantnamo, but it would be better to keep it open than to give these guys civilian trials. Graham, who served as a judge advocate general in the military reserves, vowed that he would do all he could as a legislator to stop the trials.

Okay, Senators Graham and Shelby? This is the U.S. Senate, not middle school. This blackmail thing? Its not like, Oh, the cool kids are wearing Hello Kitty wristwatches and you need to follow the fad.

There is zero logical nexus between whether or not to close Gitmo and whether or not to have civilian trials, so the only reason for making the kind of statement quoted above, is quid pro quo. While I'm not suggesting that this is a Hobbs Act violation (read the link, trust me), it certainly smells just as bad.

Kate Martin, the Center for National Security Studies director, warns, We can't have a situation where political pressure forces the federal government to forgo criminal prosecution. That would mean the system is fundamentally broken.

Message for Rahm, from Marcy Wheeler:

Remind me. Didn't Rove and the Bush White House get in trouble for this kind of tampering with DOJ issues?

Really, the White House needs to BACK OFF and let the Department of Justice and the federal courts do their job. And a bunch of non-lawyers with ZERO expertise in this area should NOT be part of the decision making process, much less driving that process. Hasn't Rahm done enough damage to the President with his mishandling of the healthcare bill? Why do you want him to screw up something he knows even less about?

With each new milestone in technological evolution we've seen a company emerge as the clear leader. In the current landscape, we observe this happening in several key parts of the marketplace including networking, search and operating systems.

Cloud computing is a new disruptive force that makes us ask the question whether we'll see the future of the cloud dominated by a single company. In this multi-part series, we'll take a look at a handful companies and envision what the world might look like, if, in fact, they win it all. We'll also analyze what it will take for a new company to rise up and claim the leadership role in this chapter of computing.

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Dominance Happens: A Bit of Recent History

There has been a love/hate relationship with companies that dominate markets. On one hand, it's us consumers that make it happen. But when they become giants we cheer as governement regulators and competitors knock them down.

Microsoft has faced this issue perhaps more than any company in the past few decades. When the browser battles were in full swing in the late 1990s, Microsoft was taken to court by the Department of Justice for antitrust violations.

In this note released in 2000 - Technology, Market Changes, and Antitrust Enforcement -Microsoft evaluated the idea of whether it was consistent with public welfare for a company to "win" a technology market, and what it means to have a network effect in technology.

Microsoft makes the point that no technology company will hold a dominant position for long if it doesn't innovate and expand the market definition. Additionally, if a company doesn't find the right balance of trust and pricing between its customers new technologies will find a way into the market and cause customers to defect.

Point: A Dominant Vendor Will Emerge in the Cloud

Taking these factors into consideration, we believe there are several points that can support the argument that a dominant player in cloud computing in the future. Due to the nature of market forces a single vendor will emerge as the clear leader in offering cloud solutions.

• First mover advantage: We're already seeing amazing things happen at first-movers like Amazon that are defining product and pricing. This gives them an advantage in fueling further growth and by learning and iterating the solutions in the market. Being first in an infrastructure-driven business will help them reach scale that others just can not reach easily - and potentially price it where others can't match.
• Vendor lock: Once you get started with an infrastructure provider it becomes interwoven into business operations. By the current nature of the cloud (e.g. little standards, a lot of innovation) being first with leading solutions adds more momentum to the first-mover that wins strategic customers.
• Strategic synergies: When we look at the combination of cloud computing and collaboration, we see a natural fit in services that meet more needs and take more market share. It may just work out that bundling works also in the cloud and creates the network effect that Microsoft is famous for. Cisco is also partnering across the landscape, with a focus on preparing the network for the cloud. By making it easier to manage your cloud with Cisco gear, it will provide IT leaders a reason to expand their relationships today, and stay tomorrow.
• Acquisitions and Partnerships: Companies that buy their way into the market will be a big factor in putting momentum behind their offerings. Companies to watch: VMware, Cisco, Oracle. These companies are already showing that the race is on to win the cloud through aggregation of capabilities. Cisco has a blog dedicated to Cloud Computing, Oracle is going on tour sharing its ambitions for the cloud

Counterpoint: A Dominant Company Will Not Emerge in the Cloud

Perhaps no single organization will have the ability to create a dominant foundation in cloud computing. Instead, we'll see many types of solutions as equal peers in the market.

In a way, this runs against the grain of existing technology landscape and our history with successful innovations. Maybe that is why we love the idea of the cloud itself?

• It's too big to own: One big reason to doubt a single dominant force in the cloud is that it feels like owning the Internet. Even Cisco with its strengths can't make such a claim. Perhaps the cloud is the perfect market, where the barriers of entry are low enough that continual evolution will occur.
• It's a movement, not a layer: Another argument against the cloud having a dominant player is its fuzzy definition. There are many parts and pieces to it, and it's not clear today what it would mean to "win" the cloud computing market.
• Portability will keep vendors in check: If customers demand solutions where they can move from vendor to vendor freely, it will impact the landscape. Companies with cloud solutions in the marketplace could be required by these customers to remove barriers to moving data and services between different entities. Additionally, standards and best practices may emerge that allow companies and individuals to move freely between providers. In this world, it will become a fluid market that prevents vendor lock and promotes pricing and trust as brand differentiators.

A Glimpse at Potential Futures

We've compiled a list of companies worth reviewing as candidates as possible dominant players in cloud computing. We'll be looking at their brand and the available assets that could be leveraged to achieve this position. Finally, we'll take a fresh look at what it might feel like if they succeed and shape the brave new world of cloud computing.

The list of candidates we're analyzing includes: Google, Microsoft, Apple, VMware, IBM, HP, Cisco, Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, and our favorite, Insert new startup to our list by adding a comment below.

Please let us know what you hopes and fears are with the cloud computing marketplace. Any companies we should we add to our list (or remove)? What's your take: Is there one company today that is best positioned to win the cloud?

Photo credit: reddodo & savingfutures

• It's based on Android 2.1. The build currently being circulated is identified as 2.1 version 1, mirroring the update just pushed to the Nexus One last week.
• Google Goggles is now pre-installed (no matter how unhelpful it may be).
• The browser's now multitouch enabled, just like Google Maps 3.4. Huzzah! No Flash, but then again, we weren't really expecting that.
• Interestingly, the home screen's still got the same look as 2.0.1, meaning it doesn't adopt the Nexus One's rotating 3D grid of app icons -- it's still got the pull-up drawer tab at the bottom.
• No active wallpapers. Bummer!
• The news and weather widgets introduced on the Nexus One are included. Maybe certain capabilities of 2.1 are going to be restricted to devices with minimum performance benchmarks?

Motorola Droid's next update to be Android 2.1, includes multitouch browser originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

What a time we're living in. You can't even make fun of your competitors at your own company meeting without your words leaking out to the internet.

Apparently, this has happened to Steve Jobs, who lashed out at Google and Adobe at Apple's Town Hall company meeting held at their One Infinite Loop headquarters. Speaking to Apple employees, Steve Jobs voiced his expression with buggy Flash, lazy Adobe, and Google's fakery in the don't be evil department.

Although these words have not been (and will never be) officially confirmed, multiple anonymous people from the audience confirmed their authenticity to Wired.

Here's a couple of Steve's (inexact) quotes from the meeting: Adobe is lazy. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

When it comes to Google, Jobs is mad at them for trying to kill the iPhone. We did not enter the search business, he said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them.

Finally, his most interesting quote is about Google's don't be evil mantra. According to Daring Fireball, Jobs simply said: it's a load of crap.

Yes, I think we can safely say we were right when we said that a) the iPad and the iPhone aren't getting full Flash support anytime soon, and b) Google is now Apple's greatest enemy.

Tags: adobe, apple, Flash, Google, steve jobs, trending

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

You need a pile-o-data fast and you got nowhere to get it other than surf, bookmark and beg for interns to copy and paste for you. Where do you turn? Your IT department? Your hackery skills and your shared GoDaddy hosting account for bandwidth? Nah.

80Legs is ready to run a couple miles with your pile of data on their shoulders. You get to pick it up and work with it as you see fit.

Did I mention that they are now offering this as a free service? Well, up to a certain point it is free but for the many is plenty of room to get what they're looking for.

80Legs offers a unique service that will crawl the internet on your behalf and gather data from the links that you provide. They then take this unstructured data and make it available for further refinement to the customer.

Their value proposition lies in the ability to deliver this service efficiently and affordably. Like I said earlier, it would be difficult if not impossible for an individual run a service to crawl 100,000 pages quickly. 80Legs is offering this as a free service now and it's all powered by a 50,000 computer network.

The ability to put the data collection into another companies hands allows developers to think about what to do with the data. By freeing up developers more can be done with the data that is returned to them as they have time to think about new algorithms to run across the dataset.

An example of this would be simple search. Developers with more time could work on creating new layers to search that make it more valuable to the end user. Whether it is integrating advanced search functionality or returning results contextually depending on the page that a user is currently searching from.

If you're interested, the free Basic specs are below. Plus and Premium are listed on their blog.

80Legs Basic Plan:

• Free to use
• Normal crawling speed (up to 1 request/second/domain)
• Access to 80legs Web Portal
• 1 job running at a time
• Up to 100K crawled pages per job
• Low priority in 80legs job queue
• No recurring jobs allowed

[Via VentureBeat]

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80Legs, 50k Computers and a Web Crawler is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

On my way to the Audience Conference this morning I was fortunate enough to have the bus drop me right in front a Verizon store. The balloons were out and I knew that is meant one thing . . . Droid.

At 7:30 a.m. there was no line and I was able to go straight in the store where the associates outnumbered the patrons. That is saying a lot because in New York mobile stores are always busy.

It was obvious though that the people in the store were nerds of the first order, though. One glance at the khaki pants, bad leggings and dishevled fauxhawks let me know the IT department had arrived. My people.

I was able to avoid ending up on a list to buy the heralded Droid and step right up and start fondling it with my geek gloves. Geek gloves, btw, are similar to kid gloves but they hold a special reverence and care for gadgetry.

After a hands on I can tell you that the device is gorgeous, lighter than you would expect and blazing fast on Verizon's network.

Here's how it went down: I immediately flipped it open to expose the QWERTY keyboard to get my hot thumbs typing in URLs to load up some internet goodness. For sites with Android style sheets it loaded them right up without more than a 2 second delay. For full sites it took a bit longer but seemingly quicker than the iPhone. I know, I should have done some AB testing but the overly chatty associates might have asked me to move it along.

The screen is clear, bright and has a large surface area that is welcome to fat fingers like mine. I was able to press icons with the phone with ease and get them open quickly. Which was a surprise to see them load so quickly.

Since this is a cursory overview of the phone I can say that I have only one gripe the keyboard is shifted left. Which forces the use to type mostly with the left hand. I want two hand glory on this sucker to rip out blog posts.

All in all, I was happy testing it out and probably will pick one up in the next few weeks.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Droid Doth Be Here Initial Review is a post from: TechStartups.com

Facebook is really flexing its muscles today. First it acquired radically innovative social network FriendFeed and now it has announced that it's opened up search across all status messages, notes and shared links that users have marked as public. (Don't worry, yours aren't public unless you changed your own settings.)

Searching across all users, whether you know them or not, requires a couple of clicks - but the availability of the feature marks a dramatic turning point in the history of Facebook. For months the company has been pushing users towards being more public and less private. This is why.

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Google still can't index the contents of Facebook, because Facebook is positioning itself as a major competitor to Google. There is no RSS feed available for searches, even updates marked public are only public within the walls of Facebook, not on the open web at large. Developers can't build innovative new applications on top of the new Facebook search. It's a walled garden - why would you ever want to leave when Facebook can fill all your needs as a user?!

There's something creepy about this. We've asked before if Facebook is a cult and we've discussed how its privacy moves represent an agenda that praises privacy but doesn't support the kind of privacy people experience in real life. (You share different things with different people, depending on the context.) You probably joined Facebook because you thought it was a secure place to converse with friends and family. It may still be, but the company sure would like it if you'd please lift the lid and let the world search and view those conversations.

WASHINGTON A North Carolina man and six others have been charged with conspiring to support terrorism by training and traveling overseas to participate in "violent jihad."

Daniel Boyd and half-dozen of his alleged recruits in the Raleigh, N.C. area were charged with providing material support to terrorism.

The Justice Department in Washington said Boyd, who is a U.S. citizen, trained in Afghanistan and fought there between 1989 and 1992 before returning to the United States.

Boyd and the other defendants were scheduled to appear in federal court in Raleigh.

A newly unsealed indictment charged that Boyd, also known as 'Saifullah,' encouraged others to engage in jihad.

Boyd allegedly traveled to Israel in 2007 with several of the defendants, hoping to engage in "violent jihad," according to the indictment. The attempt was unsuccessful, though, and the men returned home, officials said.

Boyd was also accused of trying to raise money last year to fund others' travel overseas to fight.

One of the men, Hysen Sharifi, allegedly went to Kosovo to engage in violent jihad, according to the indictment, but it's unclear if he did any actual fighting.

Several of the defendants, including Boyd, were also charged with practicing military tactics on a private property in Caswell, County, N.C. in June and July of this year.

NEW YORK (AP) -- A former New York City police sergeant shot in the back by a fellow officer during a drug bust has settled a lawsuit against the city for $3.25 million.

Retired NYPD sergeant Dexter Brown was shot in the 1998 incident and sued the city and police department. It was revealed recently in court papers that the shooter, Det. Luis Lopez, was assisting in the arrest at a Brooklyn crack house. The city Law Department says the shooting was accidental and did not admit wrongdoing.

Brown walks with a cane and suffers chronic pain from damage caused by the shooting. The 45-year-old is retired on disability and cannot work. Brown says he feels vindicated his story came out. The settlement was reached Monday, as the trial was to begin.