Bloomberg News

Apple intends to stay nimble on pricing of the iPad, possibly lowering prices if the newly unveiled tablet device fails to gain traction among consumers.

That was just one of the items in a note out Sunday night from Credit Suisse recounting meetings with Apple executives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Apple officials who met with CS analyst Bill Shope seemed to downplay the potential for some cannibalization of other Apple lines, which analysts have noted.

Apple wants the iPad to be the best device for a few key use cases. For instance, the company believes it could eventually be seen as superior to both handheld and notebook devices for browsing the Internet, using the App Store, and consuming mobile media (video, photos, and e-books). Nevertheless, in other areas, notebooks, the iPhone, or an iPod may be more appropriate. This clear segmentation of capabilities suggests that cannibalization may be less of a concern than most currently believe.

Shope also wrote that despite the seemingly aggressive pricing of the iPad the lower-than-expected price points range from $499 to $829 Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn't revving up the way it liked. While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated), Shope wrote.

Apple shares are up about 0.5%. On the year, they're down a bit less than 7%. And since the iPad was introduced on Jan. 27, shares are down about 5.5%.

For his keynote presentation, Steve Jobs shared the stage with a vintage Le Corbusier chair and small Saarinen table. Beyond the aesthetic compatibility of mid-century furniture and Apple design, what makes the detail notable is that in past years Steve always delivered Apple keynotes standing. Here, each time he went to demo an aspect of the iPad, the CEO sat downa subtle shift that speaks volumes about how this new device might fit in to our lives.

Not meant to replace computers used on desks or the phone that goes with you everywhere, it's an in-between device. The gadget's design makes it perfect to use in the living room, on an airplane or during morning commutes (as Apple illustrated in this video).

At first glance, the wide, black bezel surrounding the iPad's screen perplexed me; it seemed to be a step backwards from my long-standing belief that the evolution of screen technology is full-bleed. Upon using the device, however, it became clear that that the edge necessarily gives you a place to grip it without accidentally touching the on-screen interface. It turned out that the 9.7 inch, 1024x768 pixel screen looks so gorgeous that I quickly forgot about this concern all together, instead immersing myself in content.

For all intents and purposes, this 1.0 version of the iPad is a large iPod Touch, a development that lends the new device familiarity and ease-of-use. The iBook store and touch versions of iWork applications are a welcomed addition and the ability to run iPhone applications out-of-the-box is more necessity than benefit.

Pictures and videos really show off the beauty of the device's screen and benefits of its connectivity; the redesigned version of Apple's media apps are perfectly tailored to the postures and situations where we'll be using our iPads. And the touch-keyboard really does work well.

What I'm most excited about, however, is simply web browsing. While the lack of Flash presents an issue, sites built for modern computer-based browsers fit, look and perform beautifully on the iPad. Especially thrilling, was previewing how beautiful the upcoming Cool Hunting redesign looks on the device. (Pictured at right.)

UPDATE: We've been anxiously following Mobile Firefox for a long time. The mobile version of the web browser has also been known as Fennec for most of that time. While this mobile version of Firefox has already hit some platforms as both early alpha versions and release candidates, Android owners were understandably excited when Mozilla confirmed a version for their platform was under construction. Now it is being reported that there may not be very long to wait, as Mobile Firefox for Android may appear as soon as next month.

Mozilla is keeping mum on when the Android version may be released, but let's hope this rumor pans out. Mobile Firefox should bring some welcome features to Android including bookmark syncing with the main Firefox and screen panning.

Mobile Firefox already has some cool features that should make mobile browsing a great experience. Take a look at this from Mozilla:

• The Awesome Bar searches your history, bookmarks and tags to go to your favorite sites instantly
• Share your Firefox preferences, history, and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile
• Add-ons to make your browser your own
• Tabs that let you browse multiple sites at once
• One-touch bookmarking to quickly organize websites

There are other mobile browsers for the different phone platforms that have some of these features, that's not new. But hey, this is Firefox.

UPDATE: Our friends at Android Central were a bit surprised by this rumor of a February launch as we were. They asked Mozilla if this was accurate and got the kibosh put on it directly:

Android is on our mobile road map, but the German reports were a bit exaggerated. The Android version of Fennec is not yet in alpha so on the way is premature.

It's a tribute to how badly folks want to get Mobile Firefox up and running when rumors like these get bandied about.

We've been anxiously following Mobile Firefox for a long time. The mobile version of the web browser has also been known as Fennec for most of that time. While this mobile version of Firefox has already hit some platforms as both early alpha versions and release candidates, Android owners were understandably excited when Mozilla confirmed a version for their platform was under construction. Now it is being reported that there may not be very long to wait, as Mobile Firefox for Android may appear as soon as next month.

Mozilla is keeping mum on when the Android version may be released, but let's hope this rumor pans out. Mobile Firefox should bring some welcome features to Android including bookmark syncing with the main Firefox and screen panning.

Mobile Firefox already has some cool features that should make mobile browsing a great experience. Take a look at this from Mozilla:

• The Awesome Bar searches your history, bookmarks and tags to go to your favorite sites instantly
• Share your Firefox preferences, history, and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile
• Add-ons to make your browser your own
• Tabs that let you browse multiple sites at once
• One-touch bookmarking to quickly organize websites

There are other mobile browsers for the different phone platforms that have some of these features, that's not new. But hey, this is Firefox.

Editor's note: This a guest post written by Joff Redfern. Redfern is the co-founder of FlattenMe.com, a site for creating personalized storybooks. He was formerly a vice president of product at Yahoo, where he managed Yahoo Buzz and Toolbar.

Amazon Kindle: The Road Ahead

I'm a recent Kindle fan boy. I like the instant access to earth-friendly books, the paper-like display and the way it fits in my hand like a paperback. I've also deeply admired the crispness of the Kindle visionany book, any language, in minutes. But with Apple's iPad announcement the playing field on which the Kindle competes shifts and the disruptive technology itself gets disrupted.

If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry? Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.

As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravelwhich path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader . . .

For the same price, more is better

Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. I look to the evolution of my own personal technology habits for the answer.

When I wanted to manage my contacts I started with a paper-based Address Book, upgraded to a Digital Rolodex, upgraded to a Palm V, upgraded to a Blackberry, then upgraded to an iPhone. Fundamentally I was trying to solve how I manage and communicate with my contacts. With each upgrade I got more functionality yet the price point for each device was not radically different.

If consumers can eventually get an entertainment tablet that also has the core features of a great reader (screen, content catalog, ease of purchasing) at under $200 they'll want more.

Prices drop. Over time, price won't be a factor in the purchase decision.

Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489. That is pretty close already. What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?

Moore's Law and business model innovation will drive the iPad-like devices to sub-$200 pricing. Unrealistic? The retail price of the iPhone 8GB dropped ~83% in 3 years from $599 to $99.

Also keep in mind that entertainment tablets are using different math from the Kindle. The device pricing will be subsidized by multiple revenue streamsdownloads of books, music, movies, games, apps, advertising, and more. Today I can get a cell phone device for free, will my iPad be free some day?

Competitors are playing a platform war. Is Kindle?

Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world.

This Apple sizzle has drawn 100,000+ developers and publishers to its iPhone (and now iPad) ecosystem. These apps are already available to entertain us in all sorts of ways on the iPad beyond what Apple exec Scott Forstall showed today.

Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?

What would you do if you ran the Kindle?

Gallery: The Apple iPad

Continue reading The Apple iPad

The Apple iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In Flickr's App Garden it must be mating season as they are crushing hard on mobile apps today in their blog.

Mobile's now arrived, I guess. And it is so hot that Flickr is okay with public displays of affection now.

That, my friends, is awesome.

Flickr sits on mountains of EXIF meta data from images and right now the most important set is the rise of mobile devices shuttering away and uploading to the photo service.

For years if you were shooting mobile images and wanted to get them on Flickr the easiest way was to send them as an email attachment. Rudementary, but a very effective way of getting it done with low overhead . . . like apps.

The mobile apps come in handy to access phone features and override them. For instance if you are on a Windows Mobile phone and send an image it will be capped at a certain file size even if you have an unlimited data plan and most apps allow you to send full size images.

Another nice feature of the mobile apps is that many come with an ability to do some post work on the photos. It might be blur reduction, lighting, exposure, b&w conversion, etc. That was never going to happen with Treo 650 back in the day.

What might help Flickr more in these PDA moments with mobile would be to organize a tour of the App Garden. Because right now it is like a monsoon of slightly curated applications that are desktop and mobile commingled together. Not that cross pollination should be a concern but being able to find a certain variety of app without having to sift all the species could help out on the uptake.

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• Flickroom Enables Desktop Browsing of Flickr [Download] (lifehacker.com)

Flickr PDA for Mobile is a post from: TechStartups.com

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a Nokia N900 today for a little while. After the Wired Store NYC debacle I thought I owed it to you to at least do something techy cool.

So I cut my trip home short and went over to the Nokia New York Flagship store on E. 57th Street in search of a the elusive N900.

Turns out in a Nokia store, it isn't so elusive.

Once inside the store it is the first phone that is on display. Right behind the N900 was the previous big dog, the N97 and the puppy, the N85.

I made my way to the back of the store near the cash wrap, grabbed a blue stool and squared myself up with one of the two N900's available for customer hands on testing. Well, available for a blogger's hands on testing, one could say.

The phone is much lighter than I expected it to be for its size. The phone is thicker than an iPhone but weighs nearly the same. It doesn't feel cheap. I have to say, the Droid, feels kind of cheap compared to the Nokia smart phone.

Something that came as a surprise was how responsive the phone was to switching between applications. It was seamless. Which is a good thing because the phone has two levels of app nagivation one for inside the application you are using and a root level.

Take for instance you are using the web browser and have a couple of sites open. The first click of the menu will display all of your open pages as thumbnails on one screen (take that iPhone weird tri-page display). A second click will take you back to the root menu system.

The root menu system of the Nokia N900 like most devices is prescribed by Nokia's developers as what they deem to be the most important applications. However, you can modify this menu like you would on most other handsets. Say, you wanted to move the feed subscription app to the root because you're an RSS nut you could do that.

Browsing on the phone was a great experience. Pages loaded quickly on T-mobile and scrolling was a breeze. What did take me a second to get a handle on was the zooming in of the content. My first instinct was to put my iPhone knowledge in place and go multi-touch in an attempt to pinch release. That failed. The N900 reacts to the not so multi-touch double tap to zoom.

The QWERTY keyboard experience was better than I expected. I fired up the note taking application and tried my best to write up stuff that made me sound smart so that the next person to pick up the phone in the store would know that a genius had just been there. It's like random phone note graffiti and a keyboard test all in one. Back to reality . . . the keyboard was very responsive and I was able to type reasonably fast. Much quicker than an iPhone or Droid with its off center keypad.

I don't know what the battery life of this phone is like or whether T-mobile outside of the store location is as good as in it. But what I do know is that this phone, unlocked, wants to fill the smart phone void in my life.

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Nokia N900 Hands On is a post from: TechStartups.com

In the instant case, it is clear that Plaintiff had no actual notice of the Terms and Conditions of Use. Defendant has also failed to show that Plaintiff had constructive notice. . . Despite Defendant's assertion. .. [no] evidence submitted by Defendant refute Plaintiff's . . .statement that she was never advised of the Terms and Conditions and could not even see the link to the without scrolling down to the bottom of the screen - an action that was not required to effectuate her purchase.
...
[Plaintiff] therefore lacked notice of the Terms and Conditions because the website did not prompt her to review the Terms and Conditions and because the link to the Terms and Conditions was not prominently displayed so as to provide reasonable notice of the Terms and Conditions. Very little is required to form a contract nowadays - but this alone does not suffice.

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was born in 1767 and lived until 1848. You would think that alone would exclude him from using Twitter to communicate his thoughts, not to mention him using a computer or even electricity.

But that's exactly what the Massachusetts Historical Society is going to make happen starting Wednesday. The kicker's that every tweet will be formulated by President Adams (@JQAdams_mhs himself. How is that possible, you ask? A high school student browsing the archive of President Adams made a unique observation about his diary entries: they were the length of the standard tweet.

Here are two gems, courtesy of the Associated Press:

August 6th, 1809: Thick fog. Scanty Wind. On George's Bank. Lat: 42-34. Read Massillon's Careme Sermons 2 & 3. Ladies are Sick.

August 15th, 1809: Weather fine_ wind scanty. Lat: 44-13. Long: 53-40. This afternoon I found the Caboose on fire.

The concise nature of his entries, combined with the historical importance of his life, convinced the Massachusetts Historical Society to try a novel approach in teaching history to Generation Y. His trials, tribulations, and top books will all be tweeted out. On top of that, the MHS will tweet out maps showing the location of President Adams during his trip to Russia while he was a diplomatic representative of the U.S.

Our hat goes off to the Massachusetts Historical Society for trying this exciting approach to historical education. Also a thumbs-up to the student who discovered the possibility. This should be a great way to learn more about one of America's most important historical figures and the time in which he lived.

Tags: history, john quincy adams, twitter

Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about.

Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt.

New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies - plus industry pundits and reporters - should be made aware of. Glad to be of service.

TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are.

What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 5 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about Steve Jobs' or Rumors' when browsing for news on Apple).

TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described media nut' / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that's always a good way to start something that other people - like me - could also find interesting.

Bookmarked!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

Sponsor

Semantic Web and Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.

Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product that was launched this year was Wolfram|Alpha, a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and it's key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask for things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allows you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make your data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted in Part 1 of our interview that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how you can contribute your organization's data.

Bessemer Venture Partners is incubating the startup and put in most of the original $900,000 in seed money. The company has raised a total of $1.4 million to date and works out of the Bessemer offices.

We first wrote about MashLogic in October 2008 when it went into private beta:

MashLogic is a more direct approach. Users must download a Firefox plugin to use it, but there's no toolbar. Instead, you simply change the settings to tell it what kind of information you'd like to have included on web pages. Links to Wikipedia is an easy one. But it also has company links to LinkedIn to show you people there you might know. And a currency converter. Etc. It's like a frickin Swiss Army Knife for hyperlinks.

One setting I like - the ability to remove all links on a page, and then only MashLogic links appear. For a lot of sites, the user experience is vastly superior. You can also create blacklists of domains that won't show up in links on the page, even if the original publisher put them there.

Once you've got the tool configured, smart links will start popping up all over the place. Professional Athletes get their playing stats, Politicians get a real time poll of their progress towards the White House. Currencies are *zap* converted. You can even see a map for any street address.

Their goal is to save you from having to go back to the search engine to find the next thing you're intersted in but isn't linked on the site.

The site has evolved since October. It's now available for Internet Explorer in addition to Firefox. Also, any topic trending up on Twitter is highlighted and linked (at the user option), with additional information on who's tweeting about that topic. And if a Twitter username appears in the text of a web page (as they do in our comments), clicking on it brings up a box with that Twitter users information. Users can also post to their Twitter accounts. Here's how it looks:

MashLogic works with publishers to create slightly customized versions of the product that pull information from that publisher first. Users can customize away from those changes, but most don't. We've been distributing a version of MashLogic since last October and it drives a fair amount of traffic to us from people seeing TechCrunch and CrunchBase content linked from around the web.

It's one of the few products I've tried that I've stuck with over these last months. It definitely makes browsing and research easier. Try it, I think you'll like it.

Here's an interview I did today with founder/VP Ranjit Padmanabhan. After I butcher his name we see how it all works:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Samsung's Pixon 12: a dozen megapixels of cameraphone nonsense in June After failing to show at the Mobile World Congress event in February, Samsung's rumored 12 megapixel cameraphone has finally arrived. Meet the Pixon 12 and its 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a Sammy promise of fast shutter speeds and quick browsing.

Several years ago it seems like having a full flash website was all the rage, but since then lots of great web technologies (javascript, ajax, etc.) have been utilized to make highly interactive websites that often outperform their flash counterparts in both performance and utility. These days it seems like the majority of flash content comes from flash video players, and of course the king of all flash video players is YouTube.

When you upload a video you YouTube, by default, is it transcoded to a format playable by most modern smartphones (using built in media players, not flash). I couldn't tell you for certain, but in my experiences, it seems like the majority of YouTube's content is available in this format. The iPhone already has a dedicated YouTube application which makes it easy to browse YouTube's library and play videos. For phones that don't have a dedicated application, there is the www.m.youtube.com site for browsing the library and doing many of the things you would do on the full version of the site like rating and commenting on movies. Once you get past YouTube as the majority of Flash content, you start to break it down to other video players. Sites like Hulu, Netflix, and many others offer video through flash players as well, but don't offer nearly the amount of content as there is available on YouTube.

After videos players, I would argue that the second most common flash content is flash advertisements. These things are scatter all over pages these days, and unfortunately, those that design flash ads are not usually concerned with the efficiency of their animations, they just want to animate enough motion and colors to capture your attention. What this leads to is poor performance on the flash content that you actually want. For example, a website like Gametrailers will have a flash banner ad, or a box on the right of the video that plays a flash ad while you are trying to watch a video through a flash player, and flash generally splits the available resources between the two. I've seen the framerate on videos drop so low because of other pieces of flash content (like ads) playing on a page at the same time that they are unwatchable, and that is on a full computer. How do people expect mobile phones to handle all the flash content on a page these days, in addition to watching a flash video player? It is important to realize that if you are asking for full flash support, you are also welcoming all the resource sucking advertisements that plague websites. These ads aren't usually a performance concern for full computers (except the situation I provided above), but on low powered hardware they could be a serious performance ditch and that always leads to reduced battery life.

Aside from flash video players and flash ads, the remaining flash content doesn't seem to be in high demand (unless I'm missing something important). For example, there are lots of flash games out there, and they are lots of fun. But even if we did have full flash support on mobile phones, I don't feel like phones are equipped with the necessary control schemes to be able to manipulate that content. Do people expect to be able to play Desktop Defense with the navigation ball on their Blackberry Pearl? I don't think that it is realistic to expect mobile phones to be able to interface with flash content that was designed with a user, using a mouse and keyboard, in mind. Do people expect flash developers to adapt their flash content to function with the myriad of phone control schemes that are out there?

It all seems rather ridiculous to me, and I still don't understand what content there is that drives people to ask for flash on their phones. Flash videos players are great, but the majority of content (ie: YouTube) is already available to most modern smartphones. If other flash players want to bring their content to mobile phones, they could do so much more efficiently (for the phones) by following YouTube's approach. I don't quite see it being necessary to provide full flash support on mobile phones; what would be the benefit of doing so? Maybe providing a familiar programing environment?

One potential option that I see for the future is that phones begin using a Flash Lite' standard which provides programmers with a familiar programming environment, and makes it easy for popular flash player sites to create simple flash applications (like video players) that will launch from a link on a website into a Flash Lite application on the phone.

I don't think we'll see full flash support (ie: flash players, apps, and ads embedded directly into websites) in mobile phones for a long time because it just doesn't make sense when you weigh the content gain against the performance and battery life concerns, and isn't practical when you consider the logistics of controlling that content with various phone control schemes.

I've been using an iPod Touch/iPhone 3G for nearly a year now and I can't say that there are many times while using them that I've said to myself Wow I wish this thing supported flash. Sure, occasionally there is a video I want to watch that isn't hosted on YouTube, but on another flash player instead; is that justification to ask for flash on phones? In my opinion, the answer is no, but I want to hear the thoughts of others. When you are using your mobile phone for web browsing, what content do you come across that makes you wish you had full flash support?

Notebook Magazine have just done a full set of battery life tests on the NC10 Netbook and it looks like Samsung have once again worked their magic. The tests included continuous Wifi-on web browsing in battery saving mode which is a very reasonable test to be doing. Far better than the misleading 2001 Jeita test and much more real-life' than the Battery Eater Pro turn everything and and run it at full-steam' approach. The NC10 returned

• 12% screen brightness: 7hrs 34mins representing an average drain of about 7.6w which is just a little bit more than what I saw on the Q1 Ultra.
• 50% screen brightness, the duration dropped to 6hrs 30mins which is an average 8.7W.
• 100% screen brightness, the test result reduced to 4hrs 38 minutes which is 12.3 watts drain.

More after the break

What it highlights is something I've been saying for years. The CPU power drain is not the most important element in determining a devices overall efficiency. In these 10" screens, even the latest LED technology backlight can take a lot of drain. In this case, nearly 5W at full power which is nearly 50% of the total power drain of the whole PC! Obviously, as screens get smaller, the LED power required drops and when you get to a 4.8" screen, you'll see 1-1.5W average drain. If you were to attache that Samsung battery to the Aigo MID, you would see close to 20 hours battery life under similar conditions as the Wifi-on drain is about 3W.

As we move to lower and lower power processors, screens and other components need to follow and the OEM that has access to the best components and the best engineers is always going to have an advantage. Samsung keep proving that.

So how's the rest of the NC10? I was watching a live session at EeePCnews.de a few evenings ago and it was clear that people are really interested in this one. 3000 people watched Sascha, the lead guy there, do live testing and as the session went on you could almost sense people hitting the buy button as Sascha reported positive comment after positive comment! LaptopMag calls it their netbook of choice' right now. From what I've seen, I have no reason to doubt it.

Samsung NC10 links and info in the product database.

The Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., No. 07-1480-cv(L) & 07-1511-cv(CON) (2d Cir. Aug. 4, 2008)

The Second Circuit has issued an interesting and potentially important ruling that Cablevision's DVR as a service does not infringe copyright law. This ruling reverses the district court's summary judgment for the plaintiff and opens the way for Cablevision to roll out its DVR service offering in the Second Circuit.

The good news is that the opinion eliminates the odd regulatory distinctions between DVRs as a device and DVR as a service. The bad news is that to reach this conclusion, the Second Circuit has to override a lot of adverse precedent, and I'm not sure that other circuits will find this panel's arguments entirely convincing. As a result, it will be interesting to see if Cablevision interprets this opinion as a greenlight for a national rollout.

Thus, while the opinion is good news for DVR service offerings, the opinion leaves open a lot of questions that will have to be answered in the future. I think it's safe to say that this opinion is hardly the last stop in our journey.

Buffering Isn't Infringement

Cablevision's DVR service splits a broadcast feed into two streams, including a "buffer" copy that goes to a router where it is stored for no more than 1.2 seconds as the router looks to see if any consumers have asked for the program to be recorded for them. If yes, the data goes into their private storage areas; if no, the stream is discarded. The court holds that this buffer copy isn't fixed because it's not embodied "for more than a transitory duration."

To reach this conclusion, the court has to fight against a lot of precedent, especially the MAI v. Peak holding that a copy into RAM is fixed, even though that copy may be embodied for even less time than the buffer copy at issue here. The court says that MAI v. Peak stands for the proposition that these short-duration RAM copies can be fixed but are not automatically fixed. The court says that in MAI (without citing any actual facts from the MAI case), the software surely was resident in RAM for "at least several minutes" while in this case the copies exist for only 1.2 seconds, and this factual difference explains the different conclusion regarding fixations.

There is a major slippery slope problem with this conclusion. Is 3 seconds fixed? 10 seconds? I could keep going, and the court deftly side-steps this problem. Nevertheless, this holding offers some promise for certain types of web activity. First, this ruling might excuse copies made by scrapers/robots who download copyrighted pages to extract unprotectable information on the page. This case suggests that the copies made to download the page and perhaps to process it are not fixed, at least so long as they are flushed really quickly (1.2 seconds or less would be good). Second, this case seems to provide another defense to the otherwise problematic argument that web browsing is infringement; so long as the user hits the back button (and kills any local cache) really fast, no fixation of the web page. The opinion deliberately limits itself to Cablevision's system of overwriting the data, so that may limits its overall applicability, but this case creates a new category of copies that are embodied in a medium but are not fixed, and this offers some hope for defendants.

Users, Not Cablevision, Make the Other Copies

Even if the buffer copies aren't fixed (and therefore cannot support an infringement claim), Cablevision still stores a copy of the broadcasted works in its storage area, where users can download the programs. There's no fixation problem with these, so plaintiffs challenge these copies as both impermissible copies and public performances. The court rejects these arguments, concluding that Cablevision is a sufficiently passive entity that the users and not Cablevision are doing the legally significant activity. Thus, Cablevision is at most exposed to contributory liability for these user activities. Because the plaintiffs had waived allegations of contributory infringement, Cablevision gets summary judgment.

To reach this conclusion, the court ignores Cablevision's active role in setting up its systems and providing ongoing services, including selecting which broadcast channels are DVRable in its system. Instead, the court sees this fact pattern as identical to DVR as a device, where the DVR manufacturer isn't directly liable for how the DVR is used. This is consistent with the uncited Field v. Google case, but it conflicts with numerous copyright cases where the service provider's hosting of files gives the provider more legal responsibility over the system usage than a device maker would have. Similarly, the court distinguishes the coursepack cases on the basis that a human employee of the copyshop presses the "copy" button, because here the system works automatically without manual intervention from Cablevision.

Note, of course, that the court didn't discuss contributory liability, which also raises the ugly and risky question of whether Cablevision users are directly infringing by using the DVR as a service. I think there is helpful language in the Sony Betamax case about DVRing as a fair use, but I doubt anyone wants to see that battle relitigated.

Similarly, with respect to the argument that the distribution of the files from Cablevision's storage area is a public performance, the court says that Cablevision isn't "transmitting" as required by the statute because the user is making the legally significant action.

Further, Cablevision's delivery of the file isn't "to the public" as required by the statute. This latter conclusion is totally fine with me as a matter of common sense interpretation of those words, but it runs contrary to numerous messy and analytically questionable precedents regarding the central serving of copyrighted works to private spaces, such as Redd Horne and On Command. The court deftly tries to evade those, but after 2 readings I still can't figure out what the court said. Maybe the third time will be the charm. I think it has something do with the fact that Cablevision encoded each file delivery to its consumers so that each file delivery could be consumed only by a single playback machine. Let me know if you can figure out what the court was saying here and how it might apply to anyone else. Because the ruling seems to let Cablevision freely broadcast third party content to potentially all of its subscribers without constituting a public performance, I think there may be some exploitable holes here.

One more open question: this opinion makes me wonder if the MP3.com opinion from SDNY is still good law. I'd need to go back through that opinion, but as I recall, a lot turned on the fact that MP3.com tried to act as a proxy for its users. Here, the court treats such proxy activities as passive, and perhaps that analysis would fit the MP3.com facts as well.

Conclusion

I'm excited about this opinion because it eliminates some of the legal anomalies between DVR as a device and DVR as a service. In many situations, DVR as a service will be a better consumer experience, and it is unquestionably better for the environment, so I'm happy that this opinion tries to get copyright law out of the way to enable this result. At the same time, the appellate court set up enough conflicts with other precedent, and sufficiently caveated its opinions to address the narrow facts in Cablevision, that I expect this case resolved nothing definitively. That will have to wait the many cases in our future.

Even so, I remain amused (in a cynical way, not a funny way) that the broadcasters are still fighting against giving consumers what they really want, which is to consume their content at the time and place of the consumer's own choosing. Eventually, broadcasters are going to have to bite the bullet and post their content onto the Internet for viewers to enjoy at their convenience. There always will be consumers who want to consume the content upon first release, but after that, content that's unavailable to consumers is just wasting away instead of continuing to make money for the broadcasters.

Wide Variety of Mobile Phones Supported

Zimbra is already available on a host of mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry. Their latest support for the iPhone 2.0 platform will help to increase their market share. While the iPhone has progressed with its support with email, documents and more, Zimbra is looking to make it easier for its users to stay synchronized regarless of the platform.

Enteprise Capabilities

Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software provides users with enterprise class features including OTA synchronization of e-mails, calendar and contacts. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software will allow iPhone users to maximize their business functions on the iPhone. Additionally, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone will enable OTA photo-sync, so photos associated with iPhone contacts will sync with the Zimbra address book as well.

Zimbra has provided numerous ways for uses to access the Zimbra Servia via the iPhone including:

• IMAP / POP - Standards based access to email only
• Connectors - Use Zimbra's Connector for iSync (Mac) or Outlook (PC) to sync address book and calendar; combined with IMAP email it is a completely native UI solution. (Network Edition only).
• Mobile Web Browser - Zimbra Web Client is optimized for Safari on the iPhone; you can take advantage of iPhone's unique browsing capabilities to access your email, address book, calendar and more.

The users interface for accessing Zimbra's services via Safari on the iPhone is gorgeous and efficient. Zimbra makes great use of the screen real estate by providing a plethora of options right from the start. The new interface for the iPhone gets even better with a navigation menu at the top of the screen and important information right below it. This minimizes the number of finger tapping you'd normally have to do with the previous design.

Off to a Good Start

Zimbra is now approaching the same area territory Google is dominating at this point. However, the new Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 is looking to be off to a good start with more than enough features available from the iPhone to keep its users happy. Users can test Zimbra Mobile for iPhone by heading to Zimbra's Hosted Demo page.

That said, I still really like the looks of these. There will be four models of Es. The standard E is their 8.9-inch contender, while as the E Slim is a 12.1-inch MacBook Air challenger, only 0.8-inches thick. Then there's the E Video and E Video+, which offer more RAM, flash storage, webcams and bluetooth in the 8.9-inch chassis. The operating system will be Windows XP, apparently, but with an instant-on Linux-on-a-chip solution for rapidly booting up and checking your email or doing some browsing. And I'm still guessing that Ubuntu's Netbook Remix OS will at least be an option on these, given Canonical's past history with Dell.

The Dell E will be released in August in a variety of colors, starting at $299.

Dell and E Slim revealed [Engadget]

I would wager that most of the people who know they need an SSH tunnel also know the Terminal commands to make it happen. But if those people happen to be Mac users, it's quite likely they wouldn't be averse to having menu bar access, Growl integration, Bonjour capability and a nice GUI to handle their tunnels. And to those who just know they want secure browsing, email and other network activities but aren't SSH ninjas, such things might be even more attractive.

Code Sorcery Workshop's Meerkat is a handy application that provides all of the above tools and offers setup wizards to provide the right settings for the particular tunnel you need. It turns setting up a quick SOCKS proxy for web browsing into a 2 minute task. Setting up a tunnel for Mail is just as simple. Whether you're already using tunnels or looking to get some protection while browsing at the coffeehouse, Meerkat may be able to help out.

You can try Meerkat out for free with a time-limited demo. If it should become something you can't (or don't want to) live without, you can register it for $19.95.

Thanks, Mark!

ASUS has announced that the Express Gate distro a version of Linux by DeviceVM shrinky-dinkified into a small BIOS chip to give your PC a fast-boot alternative for non-intesive tasks will now be installed on all of their motherboards.

Express Gate allows you to boot up your PC within five seconds and access Firefox, Skype and media-playing apps. This quarter, ASUS will release four new Express Gate motherboards: P5Q Deluxe, P5Q-WS, P5Q3 Deluxe and P5Q-E.

Honestly, I could care less about this on a desktop: who turns them off besides ecologically-conscious hemp-huffing hippies like Joel? The environment? Never heard of it! But a laptop with this would be fantastic.

Asus to embed Linux into all motherboards [ZDNet]

Previously on Boing Boing Gadgets:

SplashTop Instant-On Web Browsing and Skype

Look out, Facebook slackers: Your information-technology department now has a way to ensure you're using Facebook for work, not play.

No more of this in the office

Facetime Communications, a Belmont, Calif., firm that makes software for monitoring employees' use of Web browsing, instant messaging, Skype and other online applications, on Monday announced a new feature in its Unified Security Gateway appliancehardware with software installed on it. The new feature will let companies allow workers to use Facebook and other social-networking Web sites but block them from using specific applications (translation: online services) within those sites.

In other words: Goodbye, Scrabulous. (For the uninitiated, Scrabulous is an online version of Scrabble that Facebook users can play within the Facebook site.)

Facetime Chief Executive Kailash Ambwani said the inspiration for the new feature came from chief information officers who said they had a problem: They didn't want people, say, playing Scrabulous on social-networking sites when they should be working, but they also couldn't block the sites because certain employees said they used them for workfor instance, human-resources types who wanted to screen job applicants using Facebook.

We don't know who is more impressive: the employees who persuaded their bosses that they use Facebook for workor Ambwani, for actually making the new product feature happen.

Asus EEE PC, originally uploaded by Josh Bancroft.

There's a new Intel marketing blog launching next week. I'll post a link when it's ready, but I've been working with the folks doing it, trying to help them do it right - get other bloggers in the community involved, get stuff into the hands of bloggers to use and live with, so they can write real opinions of it, rather than just doing it the standard marketing way. Good stuff.

Anyway, as part of these activities, I've got an Asus Eee PC on loan for a week or two to play with. It's a very small laptop that runs Linux, has a 4GB SSD (solid state - no moving parts) hard drive, wireless, a webcam, an SD card slot for expansion, etc. I've been on the fence about actually buying one of these for myself, since they're so popular (people who have them almost universally love them), and cheap, too (the 4GB model with webcam is under $400).

I've only had it for an hour or so, but it's already caused quite a stir in my cube neighborhood. As soon as I showed it to someone, people materialized out of thin air to come check it out. We were all geeking out, drooling, plugging it into and external monitor (which it handles beautifully), and putting it through its paces. Testing YouTube videos, web browsing, the web cam, Skype, etc. It was a moment of concentrated collective geek joy, and soon, we were all pretty much convinced that we needed one for our own. One guy even started shopping for one, right then and there.

So, it's going to be a fun weekend. I'll be putting the Eee PC through it's paces, seeing where it works well and where it doesn't. It's not a laptop replacement, but it's far more capable than, say, my iPhone, so it will be interesting to see how it fits into my gadget lifestyle.

Of course, I'll be taking photos, maybe even video, testing out the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), seeing how my 4 year old daughter Emma likes it, etc. And I'll have more news about that new Intel marketing blog next week. Intel is making a big push around mobile devices like the Eee PC and MIDs, and I'm lucky enough to have a front row seat.

The best part is, they WANT me to blog about it all. Sometimes I feel like I lead a charmed life

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Long before Apple's iPhone, another Silicon Valley-based company pioneered the consumer-friendly smart phone. That company was Danger Inc. best known for its T-mobile branded Sidekick (the Paris Hilton smart phone of choice) and its user friendly mobile OS and Internet applications.

As of today, Danger is no more. Instead, the company is being gobbled up by Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, responsible for overseeing the Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile and Microsoft TV product lines.

Of note, Danger was founded by Andy Rubin, Google's recently appointed Director of Mobile Platforms, following the search giant's acquisition of Android.

How will Microsoft utilize Danger's technology and expertise?

Consumers

Although successful in penetrating the corporate world with its Windows Mobile-powered smart phones, Microsoft hasn't, until now, shown much interest in developing a consumer-friendly offering. There has long existed the misguided notion that non-business folk aren't interested in doing much more with their mobile phones other than making calls, sending SMS or listening to music and taking photos. With the introduction of the iPhone, companies including sleeping giants like Microsoft are finally waking up.

Microsoft's press release describes Danger's customer base as young and enthusiastic, Internet-savvy and socially inclined, and that the team at Danger has a deep understanding of consumers and a hold on what people want from mobility.

Integration

Furthermore, the Entertainment and Devices Division is all about what Microsoft calls connected experiences, and it's in this context where the acquisition has the most potential. Microsoft cites Danger's mobile Web browsing, instant messaging, games, multimedia, and social networking applications, which in combination with MSN, Xbox, Zune, Windows Live and Windows Mobile technologies, it hopes will give the company a leg up in delivering industry-leading entertainment and communication experiences.

Zune phone?

How this will translate into tangible products is yet to be seen. While many are already predicting something along the lines of a Windows Mobile-powered Sidekick, alternatively, might we see Danger's technology and expertise used to deliver a Zune-branded mobile phone? Although fulfilling the company's connected experiences vision, the latter would imply that Microsoft is getting even more into hardware. Currently, the company sells its Windows Mobile smart phone OS and platform to various hardware vendors (which now includes Sony Ericsson) but doesn't produce handsets of its own. Likewise, Danger is pitched as a software and services company and offers a hardware reference design to partners including Motorola and Sharp.

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This is more than a cultural phenomenon, I think social media will soon become something that is integrated into our everyday life, as much as browsing the web or writing an email. As professionals, we must recognize this shift and develop our skills to stay relevant and close the gap between younger social media marketers and older PR pros.

The combination of this question and then reading the post made me think more about my current social media state and in general where we are heading in terms of our ability to process all of the different content. I believe that not only, as Larissa states, must we learn how to use all of these tools, but we must also learn how to better balance our input and output within the social media landscape.

Perhaps it is just me, but in the past few weeks I've found myself struggling to keep up with it all. Each day I find another blog to read, someone else to follow on Twitter, another friend on Facebook, one more social media tool to use, five more beta invites, another social media gathering (hey, I'm guilty here too). Yes, I know, you can choose not to follow/friend/subscribe/attend people/blogs/communities/events, and I do, but overall there is just a marked increase in social media content and with this enormous growth comes a needed moment to reflect on how it will be managed.

I have two questions for you before I talk tomorrow about what I've been doing lately to create my social media balance:

1) Have you gotten to your personal social media tipping point?
2) When you do, what do you do?

/kff

FUCK NEW ENGLAND

I've been spending too much time browsing shorpy.com's old photographs; even new pictures like this one are starting to look like fragments of time long past. Render this in sepia and these kids could be ruckus-raising juvies outside of Ebbets Field in 1920.

I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.

First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don't trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn't long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.

If you switch to a 7 day view, you will see that Blogcatalog overtook MyBlogLog 24th January.

The observant will also note when looking at a 3 year chart that MyBlogLog had much more explosive growth over a short 3 month period, were purchased by Yahoo, and since that time has been a little bit in decline which is a shame because I still love MyBlogLog, and if I have a choice between MyBlogLog and Google Analytics for stats checking, I am more likely to have a glance in MyBlogLog than Google Analytics.

BlogCatalog has had a much more gradual growth, working to differentiate themselves by introducing lively discussion forums and member groups, and bringing bloggers together to support good causes with Bloggers Unite.
The growth has been viral, "grass roots" growth, with from memory one mention on Mashable, one mention on Marketing Pilgrim, and very little if any coverage on large technology blogs. Blogcatalog would be a great example of what Guy Kawasaki was talking about yesterday.

Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbersany Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.

Some key recent enhancements (click through to see working examples on some of these widgets)

Blogcatalog Discussions & Groups

Discussion Forums and Groups

There are frequent enhancements to the features in the various discussion areas, the latest one being a new widget for the discussion groups you have joined - other features include practical enhancements to the discussion features, in many cases making them more useful than Facebook, where it is very hard to track discussion in the groups you join.

BlogRank Buttons (just released)

This was announced just a few hours ago

BlogCatalog ratings are based upon various metrics including votes using a widget on your site, voting on the site, visits from Blogcatalog to your blog, and overall Blogcatalog activity in various forms.

Communities Widget

This is a way to display your profile on other social media sites introduced in December. Quite simple, and useful if you don't want to give juice to the sites for reputation management.

On this one I am not sure who got there first, as MyBlogLog also launched a similar widget in December

There actually seems to be some bugs in the code generated, or maybe it is just my laggy connection, but I couldn't seem to get a version that displayed both the names of a service, and icons next to them.

BlogCatalog API

I am not that great a programmer but I have managed to play around with the Blogcatalog API and create some simple applications (still to be released) by combining data from Blogcatalog with data from other APIs. Blogcatalog has had their API available for some time.

MyBlogLog should have had their API launched months ago by my reckoning, and it finally entered beta a week ago. It seems like it might have more features than the current Blogcatalog API, but once you have opened up, opening up a little more isn't too difficult.
With wider adoption (the tech bloggers have been wooed by MBL in the past) the new MBL API is being greeted as the possible saviour of Yahoo.
Sure, it is possible MyBlogLog have more data stored, I am not sure what data Blogcatalog collect, have a wider audience, and MyBlogLog have the "social starfish" available via API, but it isn't much more work for Blogcatalog to allow access to that data.
MyBlogLog have however been working on infrastructure heavily for the last 12 months - I would hope their API is now ready for some heavy usage.

I would love to have seen some cool apps made with the Blogcatalog API by now

Support For Wordpress.com, Myspace, or Yahoo! 360 Blog?

This is something that MyBlogLog have had for some time, Blogcatalog announced support for Wordpress.com, Myspace and Yahoo! 360 yesterday.

Who knows, maybe you can even see my recent visitors in a feed reader, in fact that would be an interesting addition.

Tagging & Reading

Quite a few months ago I wrote about Blogcatalog parsing tags from your feed itmes and then listing your content on varous tag pages, just like Technorati. At the time they only offered support for a few blogs, using a specific format for tags and categories. I noticed a couple of months ago that they now have my blog being picked up and fed into tag feeds

In addition on your profile pages it is now possible to read the feeds of the blogs you have added to your neighborhood

Ok now for the big one

Blogcatalog SezWho Partnership

Blogcatalog today have just announced a partnership with SezWho, who provide special plugins to integrate with Plugin Systems on various blogging and discussion forums.
The good things from my perspective:-

• SezWho doesn't require any form of browser plugin
• This doesn't replace the existing comment system, thus a blog owner retains the content on their site, and if they choose, can remain dofollow. That isn't true of other replacement comment systems with similar features.
• No browser plugin is required - I often had problems using various browser based comment tracking with incompatibilities, and I also had problems with their plugins, though I must admit I haven't retried with cocomment recently, maybe that situation has improved. Comment tracking that required me to click a button was always awkward, and subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on individual posts just became a chore - we will see how this works in the long run
• Comment ratings - this could be likened to the thumbs up / thumbs down on SEOmoz where you gain points, but this is a distributed rating system that means you gain in reputation for leaving high quality comments across multiple blogs - I am not sure whether this gets gamed heavily, but Ihope that it will encourage better commenting, especially on dofollow blogs.

Warning:- I may be more inclined to just delete a URL from a spam comment rather than deleting them totally, so that other readers can also vote your comment down
yes, sometimes there is a little evil in me

Negative points?

• Only support for Wordpress self-hosted and Moveable Type - in many ways I would look on this as a plus, as it might encourage more people onto their own hosting, though I hope they can come up with a solution for my many blogging friends on Typepad.
• Installation is a little complicated for a novice, though there is a WordPress widget (regular readers know I don't like Wordpress Widgets though for SEO reasons)

I should also point out that as I am writing this I haven't tested the integration on this blog with the threaded comments, but I don't expect there to a problem, and by the time many people read this I will have everything up and running.

Setting Up SezWho

Log into Blogcatalog, go to your account and manage your blog

You will see just after the feed management section a big button to create an account on SezWho. |Click it, wait a moment or 2, and you will be issued an API key, and you will be given a link to click to download special versions of the SezWho plugins.

Goodbye MyAvatars

I have been using the Wordpress plugin MyAvatars for over a year now, but it is time for it to be retired.

MyAvatars uses images from MyBlogLog, and unfortunately on popular content it is starting to cause me problems on page loading times. This isn't something that was a major problem for me before, because I had a very fast connection, but it has started to cause me real problems, maybe because MyBlogLog switched over to the Yahoo image platform, or maybe it is a problem that always existed.

This doesn't prevent people viewing my content quickly, because avatars and widgets are generally loaded in parallel, but on a slow connection it can start to hurt a little.
When your total page sizes can reach over 1MB, and most of that is avatars on comments, it is time to reconsider.

One caveat, I am not sure if the SEZWho Blogcatalog plugin will add avatars to trackbacks, I will have to take a look.

Benefits

Big immediate benefit for Blogcatalog is press coverage, as SezWho are in California. I think it is a good match as both are heavily aimed at promoting discussion between bloggers, both on blogs and off them.

I am also not a fan of applications that try to do too much - SezWho seems to do just enough to be worthwhile whilst leaving me in control of content left on my blog, and commenter ratings will certainly help in making the decision on whether a commenter is generally well behaved. I don't mind short jokey comments or great post Andy if it is from someone legitimate, it is when someone comes in as a first time commenter, you rarely know if they are genuine.

About Blogcatalog & SezWho

My blog has in the last 9 months grown into quite an in depth resource on all things "Blogcatalog". I first started writing about them when they relaunched around April 2007 with an initial investment of $40000 to purchase the existing property.
Full coverage of Blogcatalog can be found by browsing my Blogcatalog tag.

Primary competitor for Blogcatalog is Mybloglog

SezWho when they received $1M investment from KPG Ventures back in October 2007 were given quite a luke warm reception on Techcrunch.

Competitors to SezWho include Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment

Specific Disclosure - I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial - I have given MyBlogLog extensive coverage as well, most recently in a joint interview with Ian Kennedy on Collective Thoughts

Further coverage no doubt on the Blogcatalog blog though the press release isn't posted yet.

Related posts

• Wordpress 2.1 Launch date set (1)
• Traffic Or Topical Community - What Comes First? (28)
• Supporting Your Most Valued Communities Without WIIFM (24)
• MyBlogLog vs Blogcatalog - Differentiation (41)
• MyBlogLog Spam Hack Update & Widget Performance | Linkbait Idea (2)
• MyBlogLog API - How Far Forward Are You Thinking (3)
• I Bet You Missed Some of These (March 07) (4)
• Exclusive: Blogcatalog vs Technorati? - Sharing The Love & Tagging (nofollow removed) (20)
• Blogcatalog
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• Blogcatalog Slam Dunks MyBlogLog? (29)

Check If Your Router's Supported

Upgrade Your Router to the Tomato Firmware

Now you'll need to log into your current router to upgrade. This process may vary slightly depending on what router you're using and the firmware it's running, but for the most part it's very simple. You can go through the old DD-WRT step-by-step here if you're using a Linksys router with the default firmware (just replace DD-WRT with Tomato and quit after step 2). Below I'll describe the simple update process from DD-WRT to Tomato (which is virtually the same as it would be for any other router with one small difference).

First, point your browser to 192.168.1.1/, the default admin page for your router. If your router has a username/password set, you'll need to enter it to continue. Next you need to navigate to the firmware upgrade section of your router's admin panel. In both DD-WRT and the default Linksys firmware, you'll click the Administration tab followed by the Firmware Upgrade tab. Now just click the Browse button and direct your router to the appropriate firmware file for your router in the folder you unzipped earlier.

See the README file included in the Tomato_1_13 folder to determine which version you'll need to choose at this point. If you're using the same WRT54GL router as I am, pick the file named WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin. Now just click the upgrade button and wait. Be sure not to turn off your router during this upgrade.

When it's finished, you're ready to start using Tomato. (Pretty simple, right?) Point your browser back to 192.168.1.1/ and log with "admin" (without quotes) as both your username and password. If you upgraded from DD-WRT, this may not be working for you. If the login isn't working off the bat, you've got one more thing to do: Perform a hard reset on your router. To do so, just find the little Reset button and the back of your router, then press and hold it for a few seconds. When your router comes back online, the "admin" username and password should work.

Boost Your Wi-Fi Signal

Tomato is a little low on documentation on this subject (okay, so it's low on documentation all-around), but the DD-WRT documentation suggests that an increase of up to 70mW would be "suitable for most users." A boost much above that could cause heat issues and considerably decrease the life of your router.

I can't attest to the certainty of damage beyond what the DD-WRT documentation says, but here is what I can tell you: I've been running my router with DD-WRT for over a year transmitting at 70mW, haven't seen any hiccups in performance and so far have seen no smoke. Even better, my Wi-Fi signal easily reaches to every corner of my apartment.

Track Your Bandwidth Usage, Set Quality of Service Rules, and More

A few weeks back I showed you how to set up Quality of Service rules on your DD-WRT router to ensure you don't drop Skype calls, lag on Xbox Live, and generally get your bandwidth when and where you need it. Tomato does all the same while providing even more granular control over how much bandwidth goes where... and, like the bandwidth reports, it graphs it all.

If you've assigned a domain name to your home server (like adam-lh.homeip.net), Tomato can send alerts to the service if you've got a dynamic IP address so that the domain will always point to your computereven if your external IP address changes.

For a few other worthwhile uses, check out these videos for setting up Tomato's Access Restriction rules (allows you to set up rules to block browsing of certain topics at certain times, for example), using the Bandwidth Monitor, and putting your router into Wireless Client mode.

As I said above, documentation on Tomato is slim, but this Tomato wiki is a good place to start if you want to figure out a feature.

So Which Is Better, Tomato or DD-WRT?

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who can't get enough of a good router. His special feature Hack Attack appears weekly on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

The latest issue of Wired Magazine has a great article on the iPhone: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. Very interesting behind the scenes details and analysis. Here's the summary:

The hosannas greeting the iPhone were so overwhelming it was easy to ignore its imperfections. The initial price of $599 was too high (it has been lowered to $399). The phone runs on AT&T's poky EDGE network. Users can't perform email searches or record video. The browser won't run programs written in Java or Flash.

But none of that mattered. The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers --- and potentially the carriers themselves. Consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. And, as with the advent of the PC, the iPhone is sparking a wave of development that will make it even more powerful. In February, Jobs will release a developer's kit so that anyone can write programs for the device.

From The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
Referenced Thu Jan 10 2008 08:53:16 GMT-0700 (MST)

Last month a Net Applications survey put iPhone browsing share--that is, how many pageviews on the 'Net are from an iPhone--is at 0.09%. That may seem like a small number, but keep in mind that that means that almost one our of every thousand pages viewed on the 'Net is seen on an iPhone. That's 50% more than all Windows CE devices combined--which have been on sale for a decade.

A ComputerWorld blog by Seth Weintraub put it this way:

Obviously this doesn't translate to handset marketshare. We know there are much more than 20 million Windows Mobile devices out there. The reason that Apple's browser marketshare is higher while its unit sales are much lower is explained easily by the oft-touted Mobile Safari browser and unlimited AT&T data plan. No guilt, pleasurable, full-browser surfing.

It's not just just Windows Mobile that is getting killed by iPhone. PSP, Playstation and WebTV combined don't even come close. The Sidekick, also, only has 1/5 of the browser marketshare. Symbian? About 1/10th.

And it doesn't stop there. Desktop platforms are starting to come into the iPhone's blast radius. Windows 95 has less than a quarter of the marketshare of the iPhone. And all of the Linux variants combined, just over five times (.57%) the market. Broken out over Red Hat, Novel, Ubuntu, etc, someone is losing to the iPhone right now. At this rate, the iPhone/iPod platform should be the third largest computing platform by the end of next year. Remember, the iPod touch is only three months old. Oh, and it is Christmas.

Not a bad first five months for Apple's new handheld OSX devices.

From iPhone browsing marketshare closes in on .1% | Computerworld Blogs
Referenced Thu Jan 10 2008 08:42:30 GMT-0700 (MST)

I'll say. These numbers are evidence of the fact that the iPhone is a better mobile browser than anything that's come before. This despite the slow network (and, frankly, the slow browser).

Imagine what these numbers would look like if the iPhone were a business device!

Tags: iphone apple wireless

This is not news, far from it.

Still, many marketers will discredit the efficacy of search marketing in lieu of more in your face technologies such as video or mobile. Furthermore, search marketing is generally no longer bucketed with other technologies we refer to as emerging, hogwash!

We have only seen the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engines. We are still in the stone ages of search as far as I am concerned. I am not saying that I am not satisfied with the current state of search engines, but in an exponentially growing world of content, there is only one thing that is certain; we will always need a way to find what we are looking for.

Online video and audio search engines are obviously what is top of mind for many technologists and media/marketing professionals, but what happens when the wealth of content available online becomes available on our set top box (and eventually everywhere where media can be consumed)?

What happens when browsing the web via a mobile phone becomes as common as browsing from your PC? You may not care right now how well your WAP pages are optimized for search, but you will soon enough!

Tags: search, video search, audio search, WAP, mobile, search engine

Comcast has entered the world of IPTV, officially launching Fancast today at CES in Las Vegas. Following a soft launch in August, the site now features full-length episodes of many popular TV shows, as well as the existing features the site had for browsing TV listings and purchasing movie tickets through Comcast-owned Fandango.

As for the selection the most important part of any IPTV offering in my humble opinion Fancast isn't bad. There look to be episodes from more than 100 different shows, many of which are currently on the air, such as Heroes, CSI, and Power of Ten. There are also 22 vintage episodes of Miami Vice for you Don Johnson fans, plus 32 episodes of Arrested Development.

The viewing experience features pre-roll advertising, sound controls and the ability to rate the video. At this point, there don't appear to be options for viewing in full-screen mode, or for embedding videos elsewhere. Fancast has also used tagging to help organize videos, for example, being able to see all videos that have been tagged drama or sitcom.

While it is missing a few features of NBC/News Corp competitor Hulu, Comcast's online viewing catalog has the advantage of including shows from all of the networks (minus ABC apparently) plus cable. Then, since it's integrated with Comcast, you can find out where to watch it on television if the episode you want isn't available online. You can also order DVDs via Amazon if that's your preference.

As the company says in a press release issued this morning, Fancast looks to provide an easy way to manage their entertainment experience as the number of viewing choices that are available across platforms continues to grow rapidly. For serious TV addicts, Fancast does appear to be on its way to being an excellent starting point, assuming you're a Comcast subscriber.

In addition to the launch of Fancast, Comcast made several major announcements regarding its cable service. Project Infinity is a plan by the company to exponentially expand Comcast's Video on Demand (VOD) offerings, for which there are already 275 million monthly views. Additionally, Comcast announced an expansion of their HD catalogs for both movies and TV shows.

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Several different image replacement methods have been proposed, each with their pros and cons. Some methods create accessibility problems, while others place restrictions on the type of image you can use or force you to use extraneous markup. No method that I am aware of is perfect.

What surprises me a little is that I still see people using image-based techniques that do not work at all for people browsing with images off. One of the tests I perform when checking sites for accessibility and universality is to simply turn off images in my web browser. In some cases that makes text disappear because an image replacement has been used that does not account for people with CSS on and images off.

In most cases you can and should use an image replacement method that avoids that problem. On the few occasions when I need image replacement I turn to either the Gilder/Levin Method as described by Dave Shea or, if the replaced text is linked and CSS support for IE/Mac is required, the Gilder Levin Ryznar Jacoubsen IR method.

A drawback that both methods share is that they require adding an empty inline element to the markup, but that's a small price to pay for making the text available to everybody. Another drawback they have in common is that they don't work well with partially transparent images, so if you have to use transparency you'll need to decide whether to adjust the design or hide the replaced text from people with images off.

In the end it's your call, but I hope this has at least made you aware of one problem image replacement can cause as well as a couple of methods that eliminate it.

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