By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Microsoft should make Bill Buxton its front man -- the main spokesperson. Buxton,  principal researcher for Microsoft Research, has style, great enthusiasm and vision. In an alternate universe, Buxton founded a company like Apple; only better. Buxton is more visionary than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has better sense of good design (he is a designer, after all) and understands great design in context of the flow of history. Perhaps if Buxton had more ego, he would run a company as successful as Apple, or Microsoft. But humility is part of his appeal.Buxton stormed the Microsoft MIX10 stage today, bringing along hearth of wisdom and loads of energy. His energy is simply intoxicating. Last year, Buxton kicked off the MIX keynotes. This year he ended them -- and not with enough stage time. The first keynote, yesterday, started with sedate Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, talking Windows Phone 7 Series. Today's keynote began with Internet Explorer 9 team leader Dean Hachamovitch debuting the new browser, which is available as developer preview.Hachamovitch, like Guthrie, is a competent  speaker. By comparison, Buxton is dynamic, enthralling -- and he tells great stories about great design. Buxton roams the stage like a caged tiger, but his ferociousness is insight. Scattered grey hair and lean build give him a stereotypical mad scientist look, and he rambles like one, too. I look at Buxton and think of Uncle Monty from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. "Some of you might say I'm hysterical," Buxton joked today.Microsoft should have made MIX10 Buxton's birthday bash. He turned 61 last week. Buxton shows that excellence knows no age -- that Baby Boomers have user interface design and user experience (UX) wisdom that tech-savvy Gen Xers and Net Gen-ers need to understand. Today's cutting-edge technologies are descendants of earlier generations' bleeding edge tech. Decades, sometimes centuries, of refinement define many established technologies' UX. Take the design of AAA batteries, for example (mine not Buxton's). Bill Buxton is principal researcher for Microsoft ResearchBuxton's personal mantra reveals something important about his design philosophy. From his Website:Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the 'things' that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.This philosophy defines the differences between his approach to good design and UX from Apple's. Buxton sees good design as an expression of culture and history rather than the personality of a single designer or company. For Apple, good design is about "the things that we sell." Buxton is an expert about natural user interfaces and their historical contextGood UI design is often about human usage context, and understanding longstanding design interfaces requires some understanding of historical context. Buxton used the example of buttons on a woman's shirt. He called the buttons wrong, because of their placement. But why are they that way? Buxton explained that when buttons were introduced, women didn't dress themselves. The buttons were correctly positioned for the person doing the dressing. Men dressed themselves, so the buttons are on the right, rather than the left."Do it naturally," Buxton commanded the MIX10 audience, referring to user interface design. While Microsoft and some other tech companies treat natural user interfaces as something new, Buxton made clear they are something very old. Natural user interfaces are varied, depending on function. Buxton demonstrates a natural user interfaceBuxton asked: "What the heck does natural mean?" One of his answers: "It's the ability to acquire skills." Good natural user interfaces affect the skills that the users have acquired. He answered with another question: "How well does it [the user interface] reflect me, the end user?"Ultimately, a good natural user interface must address four human skill sets: Motor sensory skills Cognitive skills Social skills Emotional skills Stated differently, good natural user interfaces answer the question: "How do people function?" He emphasized that it's not technology that is changing but people. Good user interface design isn't about technology. It's about people. The message is particularly important for MIX's developer audience. Demonstration of what Buxton calls a "pen and touch" user interfaceSadly, Buxton could only briefly touch on one of the most important natural user interface challenges facing Microsoft and many other technology developers: Mobile devices. Development of applications for mobile must have a "sense of place," understanding changing contexts, he said. Mobile devices are all about usage context.Buxton joined Microsoft about four years ago, after running his own Toronto-based design firm (Yes, he ran a company in this universe). Before Microsoft, Buxton was perhaps better known for being chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront -- from 1994 to 2002. He is one of Microsoft's best hires in years. While Buxton talks about putting user interface design in context of human use, it's his ability to put UIs in cultural and historical context that makes him so unique among technologists. Microsoft should set up a mentorship program under Buxton and his research team for all product managers. To Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer I ask: Do you get it? Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Google's first attempt at directly selling an Android-powered mobile phone is already being called a flop thanks to reports from mobile analytics company Flurry that estimate sales to have been around 135,000 units in the first 74 days on the market (compared to 1.05 million Motorola Droids, 1 million iPhones.)However, Google's approach to selling the device is vastly different from the more common methods employed by wireless carriers: it has been primarily sold unlocked for $529 directly from Google, or for $179 with a special T-Mobile plan. Since the device was released, there's been a "Coming soon: Spring 2010" section that shows Verizon Wireless and Vodafone as the next US and European carriers.Today, Google expanded the device's compatibility in a different direction, and rolled out a version compatible with AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. It is now the second Android device on AT&T behind the Motorola Backflip. Rogers currently offers a goodly amount of Android devices, including the HTC Dream and Magic (known as the G1 and MyTouch 3G in the U.S.) LG Eve, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and soon the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.So instead of a CDMA version as expected, today we've got a device that supports 850/1900/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands, and one that supports the 900/AWS/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands used by T-Mobile.Selling the device unlocked is unlikely to greatly expand its popularity, as it still only appeals to a niche audience. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews The 300+ page National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission submitted to Congress today contains some logical goals, some ambitious ones, and some that are sure to cause a good deal of conflict between industries. One of the most contentious issues also happens to be the most important aspect of the broadband plan: the re-allocation of wireless spectrum for the use of mobile broadband. Last October, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said that our consumption of mobile broadband has grown so quickly that we are almost at a bottleneck, and that more wireless spectrum is needed for it immediately. The plan, therefore, says that it will increase the 255MHz-3.7GHz spectrum available to "terrestrial broadband services" (aka non-satellite) by at least 300MHz in the next five years, and 500MHz within the next ten.But where will all of this wireless spectrum come from? Of the 300MHz due in the next five years, 120MHz will be coming from the broadcast television bands.It's no secret that the radio and television broadcast industry is still sitting on huge chunks of unused wireless spectrum, and the recent transition to digital broadcast freed up a significant amount of spectrum in the 700MHz band that was auctioned off to mobile network operators in 2008. By re-purposing the wireless spectrum for mobile Internet services, the FCC says it increased its value to about $1.28 per megahertz/pop. Right now, the FCC estimates that the spectrum the broadcast TV industry has is only worth about $0.11 to $0.15 per megahertz/pop. In short, the spectrum is ten times more valuable for wireless broadband than it is for broadcast television. This is due to a couple of factors. Firstly, it's because only 10% of the population is estimated to still rely on free over-the-air broadcasts. Secondly, it's because broadcast TV licensing has interference protection built into it, which leaves significant amounts of spectrum intentionally unused. So to get this extremely valuable wireless spectrum, the FCC is going to try a multi-pronged approach to restructuring the broadcast TV industry:1.) Update the rules on TV service areas, distance separations, and revise the table of spectrum allotments starting at the 6MHz channel.2.) Fix the licensing framework so two or more broadcast stations can share the 6MHz channel (The commission estimates that two HD video streams or several SD streams can exist within that channel.)3.) Get government approval so broadcasters who have voluntarily consolidated their channels will be able to share the profits of the remaining spectrum that is auctioned off. If that is not approved, then other methods of restructuring the broadcast industry must be explored, such as by transitioning to a cellular broadcast architecture (smaller, lower power transmitters that cause less interference than the big broadcast towers) or by auctioning off "overlay" licenses where licensees must negotiate directly with broadcast TV stations to clear out the bands. Some of these alternative methods would be a little more forceful to broadcasters."We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis," Dennis Wharton, Executive Vice President of the National Association of Broadcasters said in a statement yesterday evening. "However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised. Moreover, as the nation's only communications service that is free, local and ubiquitous, we would oppose any attempt to impose onerous new spectrum fees on broadcasters."Now that the value of the wireless spectrum has been clearly proven and outlined, television broadcasters who have faced declining ad revenue and declining viewership could be standing before a huge pile of money. The 700MHz spectrum block alone garnered more than $19 billion from wireless network operators in 2008 for a little under 100MHz of spectrum. License holders in the bands to be vacated are holding very strong cards indeed. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews The 300+ page National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission submitted to Congress today contains some logical goals, some ambitious ones, and some that are sure to cause a good deal of conflict between industries. One of the most contentious issues also happens to be the most important aspect of the broadband plan: the re-allocation of wireless spectrum for the use of mobile broadband. Last October, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Americans' consumption of mobile broadband has grown so quickly that we are almost at a bottleneck, and that more wireless spectrum is needed for it immediately. The plan, therefore, says that it will increase the 255 MHz - 3.7 GHz spectrum available to "terrestrial broadband services" (a.k.a., non-satellite) by at least 300 MHz in the next five years, and 500 MHz within the next ten.But where will all of this wireless spectrum come from? Of the 300 MHz due in the next five years, 120 MHz will be coming from the broadcast television bands.It's no secret that the radio and television broadcast industry is still sitting on huge chunks of unused wireless spectrum, and the recent transition to digital broadcast freed up a significant amount of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that was auctioned off to mobile network operators in 2008. By re-purposing the wireless spectrum for mobile Internet services, the FCC says it increased its value to about $1.28 per megahertz/pop. Right now, the FCC estimates that the spectrum the broadcast TV industry has is only worth about $0.11 to $0.15 per megahertz/pop. In short, the spectrum is ten times more valuable for wireless broadband than it is for broadcast television. This is due to a couple of factors. Firstly, it's because only 10% of the population is estimated to still rely on free over-the-air broadcasts. Secondly, it's because broadcast TV licensing has interference protection built into it, which leaves significant amounts of spectrum intentionally unused. So to get this extremely valuable wireless spectrum, the FCC is going to try a multi-pronged approach to restructuring the broadcast TV industry:1. Update the rules on TV service areas, distance separations, and revise the table of spectrum allotments starting at the 6 MHz channel.2. Fix the licensing framework so two or more broadcast stations can share the 6 MHz channel. (The Commission estimates that two HD video streams or several SD streams can exist within that channel.)3. Get government approval so broadcasters who have voluntarily consolidated their channels will be able to share the profits of the remaining spectrum that is auctioned off. If that is not approved, then other methods of restructuring the broadcast industry must be explored, such as by transitioning to a cellular broadcast architecture (smaller, lower power transmitters that cause less interference than the big broadcast towers) or by auctioning off "overlay" licenses where licensees must negotiate directly with broadcast TV stations to clear out the bands. Some of these alternative methods would be a little more forceful to broadcasters."We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis," Dennis Wharton, Executive Vice President of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement yesterday evening. "However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised. Moreover, as the nation's only communications service that is free, local and ubiquitous, we would oppose any attempt to impose onerous new spectrum fees on broadcasters."Now that the value of the wireless spectrum has been clearly proven and outlined, television broadcasters who have faced declining ad revenue and declining viewership could be standing before a huge pile of money. The 700 MHz spectrum block alone garnered more than $19 billion from wireless network operators in 2008 for a little under 100 MHz of spectrum. License holders in the bands to be vacated are holding very strong cards indeed. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.This afternoon, Microsoft lifted the curtain on the first Internet Explorer 9 technology preview for developers. Initial demos at MIX 10 in Las Vegas by IE9 team leader Dean Hachamovitch reveal a minimum of end user features at this point -- the preview is described as a lightweight frame on top of a highly improved chassis."We are committed to updating the preview every eight weeks," Hachamovitch told developers today, just after a demo (along with Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky) of various graphics-oriented tests and games that the IE9 preview rendered with extraordinary precision. It is not a complete browser by any stretch of the imagination, but it's purpose is to show developers where the company is going with the new chassis.HTML 5 is the message of the day, almost the first word (or abbreviation) out of Hachamovitch's mouth. At the time of this posting, Hachamovitch promised an update of the platform preview to come later, that will attach compliance with HTML 5 video standards. That's browser-based rendering of full-motion video, for the first time in IE.FURTHER DETAILS FORTHCOMING Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The British House of Lords has passed a bill that might, if enacted into law, put the UK's Parliament at odds with the European Commission over how best to enforce copyright anti-infringement laws. Called the Digital Economy Bill, it would charge Internet service providers with the task of keeping track of suspected file sharers and copyright violators, and reporting on them to copyright holders as well as to the country's Office of Communications (OFCOM).As the bill is currently written, OFCOM would be charged with determining the "initial obligations" of Internet service providers with respect to suspected infringers, provided those obligations meet the specific guidelines. It would be up to OFCOM, should the bill be enacted, to determine all the specifics -- the "fiddly bits" -- such as how ISPs monitor their customers ("subscribers"), at what stage it becomes necessary to report on their activities, how long they retain information on those customers, and what else they do with that data. In the UK, regulations enacted by a regulatory body such as OFCOM are called codes.Specifically, the bill would require that OFCOM "makes provision about how internet service providers are to keep information about subscribers; that it limits the time for which they may keep that information; that the requirements concerning subscriber appeals are met in relation to the code; that the provisions of the code are objectively justifiable in relation to the matters to which it relates; that those provisions are not such as to discriminate unduly against particular persons or against a particular description of persons; that those provisions are proportionate to what they are intended to achieve; [and] that, in relation to what those provisions are intended to achieve, they are transparent." (This page from Parliament.UK contains the exact text of this section.)ISPs would be indemnified from any responsibility for the infringing activity, but only if they fulfill their obligations as OFCOM would define them. Those obligations would include, according to the bill, expedient response to requests from copyright holders, as well as some sort of "technical measure" to punish the "relevant subscriber." As the bill is written now, it appears the fuzziness of "relevant subscriber" may be intentional, so as not to imply that the customer must first be found guilty of charges."A 'technical obligation,' in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against some or all relevant subscribers to its service for the purpose of preventing or reducing infringement of copyright by means of the Internet," the bill reads. "A 'technical measure' is a measure that: (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way. A subscriber to an internet access service is 'relevant' if the subscriber is a relevant subscriber to the service...in relation to one or more copyright owners."From here, the bill proceeds to the House of Commons, where elected officials will debate whether it would be fair, under the terms of the last paragraph, to punish suspected subscribers prior to their hearing in court. Liberal leaders there were quoted by the BBC this morning as having indicated such a law would be contrary to the EU's Technical Standards Directive.Last week, in a near-unanimous vote of the European Parliament, a resolution was adopted to compel participants in the multi-national Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to report to the EU Parliament, and eventually publicly, on terms being negotiated between countries. Such terms might compel member countries in ACTA to adopt laws similar to what the House of Lords just passed.Ironically, this entire affair comes on the same week as MPs begin debate on a measure, first reported by the London Telegraph, to replace the House of Lords entirely with a second, publicly elected body of Parliament. The new upper house -- which may, the report states, be dubbed the "Senate" -- would include members who may very well be lords and landowners, elected for staggered terms of up to 15 years. Some say the Labour Party is unveiling the plan now in order to attract opposition from Tory leaders, who currently have an edge in public opinion polls. Painting the Tories as "pro-Lords" could, in turn, color them as "pro-establishment," and thus out of touch with modern-day British interests. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews The Federal Communications Commission is expected to deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress tomorrow, and today the commission released an executive summary of what the document will contain.FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called it, "An action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues."Some of the goals outlined in the summary include:* Having 100 million households connected at broadband of speeds at least 100 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink.* Having 1 Gbps connections in schools, hospitals and military installations in "every American Community"* Freeing up 300 MHz of wireless spectrum for mobile broadband use within five years, and 500 MHz in 10 years.* Establishing a nationwide wireless, interoperable public safety network for first responders.* Collecting and providing the best data possible about each network provider's offerings so that consumers can better choose their services.* Moving adoption rates from 65% to 90%."Based on the executive summary, it is clear the Broadband team recognized the importance of the mobile Internet to the economy and to meeting many national priorities. We applaud their commitment to providing everyone equal access to the most advanced wireless communications," said Steve Largent, President of CTIA - The Wireless Association.Of course, completing the plan was just a tiny fraction of the work needed to improve the nation's broadband conditions."Now comes the hard part: achieving the vision articulated in this plan," Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications said in a statement this afternoon. "Verizon will review the plan when text is available, and continue to work closely and cooperatively with the FCC and Congress to help meet the nation's broadband policy goals. It is clear that virtually all of these important goals will be achieved through private investment. So it is important that the policies enacted encourage investment and innovation across the Internet ecosystem."About half of the Plan's recommendations are addressed to the FCC, and the rest are for Congress, the Executive Branch, and state and local government, who will work with the private and nonprofit sectors. The full Plan will be released tomorrow. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Zune -- along with Expression Blend, Silverlight, Visual Studio and XNA -- may yet save Windows Phone 7 Series. During the kick-off MIX10 keynote earlier today, Microsoft product managers showcased features, development scenarios and, most importantly, user experiences derived from Zune HD. Perhaps Windows Phone 7 Series isn't a hopelessly lost cause after all. Microsoft's competitive postion would actually look good, if phones were shipping now and not in six to eight months.In September, I asserted that Zune HD should have been the Microsoft phone. The user interface and user experience (some of that derived from Zune 4.0 software) is exceptionally good -- particularly coming from Microsoft. Finally, Microsoft is carrying forward and extending a great user interface motif. Better: Windows Phone 7 Series is inheriting and extending the social sharing concepts imbued into Zune 1.0.Microsoft launched Zune 1.0 in November 2006 with marketing tagline "Welcome to my social." Zune distinguished from iPod by making music a more social and sharing experience. It was a visionary approach for the time -- sadly held back by Microsoft's limited commitment (Zune distribution in United States only) and iPod's huge market share lead.But social as executed by Microsoft was truly visionary in 2006. Many of the most popular social media/networking tools taken for granted today originated in 2006 or later. YouTube officially opened in November 2005. Facebook opened to the public in 2006 and Twitter a few months later. Most of the most popular or growing popular tools for community and self expression launched within the last three years: Disqus, FriendFeed, tumblr, Twine, Qik and USTREAM, among many, many others.Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program ManagementWhat differentiates Windows Phone 7 Series from iPhone is the same thing that made Zune so different from iPod: Social sharing. Sure, there are other mobile phone social sharing alternatives available, like Motorola's MotoBlur user interface for Android phones. Windows Phone 7 Series as social hubBut Microsoft is making social a platform that runs deep into Windows Phone 7 Series. I've repeatedly asserted that the smartphone will replace the PC as primary computing device. As the social hub for all communications, the smartphone already has replaced the PC for many people. Shazam detects music and provides tools for social sharingThat's communications within limitations. It's one thing to use Facebook on a mobile phone. It's a whole other order of experience interacting around disparate content repositories, which is the differentiating direction Microsoft is taking Windows Phone 7 Series -- and it's a path Apple has failed to follow with iPhone. Netflix app streams movies to Windows Phone 7 SeriesSocial is Apple's achilles heal, because it's not in the company's corporate DNA. Apple has historically only allowed social sharing where it has some control. The company has a deserved reputation for deleting negative forum threads, going back years. Try to comment on Apple's YouTube channel. Comments are disabled.Every aspect of the Windows Phone 7 Series UI reminds of Zune HDThen there are iPhone limitations to consider, such as truncated multitasking and (related) the fixed battery and battery life. Apple's idea of social interaction is the push notification. It's a weak compromise that Microsoft seems ready enough to exploit (granted, Windows Phone 7 Series has push notifications, too).Comics in this app can be dynamically and quickly resizedBy comparison, "Welcome to my social" is a platform on Windows Phone 7 Series. Social sharing and interaction are seemingly available from pretty much anywhere, including third-party applications.This Associated Press app packs real-time social sharing featuresI'm still not overly optimistic about Windows Phone 7 Series because Microsoft is restarting so late and from so far behind. That said, there's hope if Microsoft is willing to commit as much marketing -- and really loads more -- as Bing. What I saw today is encouraging. Finally. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews One year can change a lot.Today, Microsoft used the MIX '10 stage in Las Vegas to show off a lot of the applications that are currently being prepared to launch with Windows Phone 7 Series, and they are a far cry from the poor Windows 6.5 showing at last year's MIX event.The inclusion of Silverlight 4 and the XNA Framework into the Windows Phone platform has afforded developers a lot of power, and today's demonstration showed off how they can be harnessed to make Windows Phone stand out in the mobile crowd where it has lately faltered.While it included a number of attractive apps such as popular Twitter client Seesmic, location-based social network Foursquare, music identification service Shazam, and the Associated Press, a couple of demonstrations were real show stealers.Netflix was one of them. While the popular video rental service has applications across all mobile platforms right now, they are limited to accessing and modifying the user's queue of movie titles. The popular Netflix instant streaming service which has landed on everything from TiVo to the Wii has until now been limited to stationary devices. Thanks to Silverlight, streaming videos can now be watched on Windows Phone 7 Series devices. The cross-platform runtime was first used to bring the streaming video service to the Mac, and now it's brought it to its first official mobile application.The other standout wasn't really a single app, but more the Windows Phone gaming category as a whole. Thanks to the iPhone's popularity as a gaming device, games are increasingly being developed for mobile devices first and then being "ported up" to the console and the PC. Today, Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb showed off games -- such as The Harvest, shown below -- that could be played on a Windows Phone, PC, or Xbox 360. This means that no matter what platform you're playing the game on, you can unlock achievements, increase your gamer score, access leaderboards, and connect to your friends over Live.While a lot of this was discussed at the unveiling of Windows Phone 7 series, there were not full-scale demonstrations of gameplay like there were today. And unlike cross-platform ports of iPhone games; for example, games by Chillingo which have been ported to the Nintendo Wii and DS, these games can take advantage of the strengths of each platform with the XNA Framework. "Developers and designers can now build their code once and optimize it to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the phone, Web, PC or Xbox 360. Due to common shared libraries, controls and runtimes across these many screens and the cloud, developers now have the opportunity to reach over 1 billion customers," Microsoft's Charlie Kindel said in the Windows Phone developer blog today. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Despite an erroneous headline crossing wire services early this morning, which led blogs and even news services to believe Google had already begun a pullout from China, a Google spokesperson has clarified for Betanews today that no announcement has yet been made about any such pullout.Declining to speak further on the matter, the spokesperson reiterated an earlier statement, which the spokesperson says remains true as of this moment: "We are in active discussions with the Chinese government. We have also been clear that we will no longer self-censor in China."The confusion apparently stems from a statement that Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong made to the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, during a hearing on the subject of the alleged attacks on Google and other US online assets last January. Wong told the House, "Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China. If the option is that we'll shutter our [Google].cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that."Although earlier statements from the Chinese government appeared to corroborate Google's claims (as well as those made by US State Dept. officials) that it has been in negotiations with Chinese authorities about how to proceed, last week, a vice minister for information denied that talks between China and Google had even begun. In a statement issued through China Daily last Friday, the Information Ministry attempted to "clarify" the contradictory facts by literally stating they coexisted: Google has been, the MIIT now officially states, in direct talks with Chinese authorities, though in an indirect way. (Perhaps this means by e-mail.) No "headway" has been made through these indirect, direct talks, the Ministry added.Minister Li Yizhong issued what some took to be a threat, until one reads on to the bottom where another self-contradictory clause was added: "If you don't respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and you will bear the consequences," Li began. Then the small print: "If Google chooses to stay, that will be beneficial to China's Internet market and we welcome that," implying that it will be up to the search company whether it stays or goes. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Tools Customer Technology Preview from Fileforum now.As expected, Microsoft is opening the gates for the first (probably the only) Release Candidate for Silverlight version 4 today, for developers who have been playing with the beta in Visual Studio 2010 since last November. The message of the day for Monday from Microsoft is Silverlight 4 as the functionality platform for Windows Phone 7 Series. (The "other series," for now, isn't being mentioned -- at least it wasn't as of 10:20 Pacific Time this morning.)Last month, developers were informed that Silverlight 4 will be the application platform for WP7S. What we learned today is that Express editions of Visual Studio and Expression Blend will be distributed for free, starting today, for developers to build complete S4 apps from Windows-based PCs, and emulate those apps within Windows using a real virtual machine. Silverlight for developers itself is, of course, already free.Three example apps on Windows Phone 7 Series: the Music library, the Pictures library, and the Associated Press news reader."Using Silverlight, you can deliver awesome applications for Windows Phone 7," Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie told attendees. "It's fully hardware-accelerated; it enables you to build smooth, fluid UI; you can choose to use either the default look-and-feel of the Windows Phone app [light text on dark background] or...you can have a custom app UI yourself. What this means is, you can build killer applications for this device.Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie"Importantly, though, the Silverlight for Windows Phone programming model is the same Silverlight you already know today. It's the same programming model, it's the same code, it's the same set of tools. This isn't 'Silverlight Lite,' this isn't 'Silverlight Different,' it is Silverlight," Guthrie added, to the most applause of the day.At the start of today's demonstrations at MIX '10 in Las Vegas, Guthrie had shown off the Silverlight 4 Pivot control (shown below), which will also be made generally available to developers. It's a kind of grid for the arrangement of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects and thumbnails for presentation as lists or tables. "Deep Zoom" plays a role here, as transitions between thumbnails that are arranged in a heap chart or a grid are fluid and elastic, with every element appearing to effortlessly flow across the screen.What we haven't seen yet is the new Pivot control specifically being used on Windows Phone 7 Series, although we can assume attempts will be made. With Visual Studio 2010 (as of this moment in the Release Candidate stage, though that could change at any time), a developer creates a phone app almost the same way he'd build a dialog box, by dragging and dropping controls into place and attaching code.Guthrie's example was actually quite impressive: He remodeled a "Hello, World" app into a Twitter feed follower (above) by binding a list box control to the output of a Web service that contacts Twitter. The response from Twitter is wrapped in XML, and the list box control is capable of parsing XML output. Headings, messages, and avatar icons are attainable as properties. Although Guthrie inserted the layout code for the XML output from a pre-stored snippet, there were only a few lines there, and one can imagine the creation of that code could not have consumed more than a half-hour.We saw the application that Guthrie developed on the WP7S virtual machine, also released to developers today. This is important, because in lieu of a physical phone for developers to touch and hold (that's still a ways off, we don't even really know what the phones themselves will look like or what they'll be called), this virtual machine will be the only way many developers will be able to tinker with WP7S functionality for the first time.We did not see the actual transfer of the application to the phone itself. If it's anything like the way .NET Micro Framework apps are transferred from Visual Studio to an embedded device, experience could take on multiple new meanings. In place of direct information on this at the moment, there's a possibility that phone apps are transferred from the PC into a developer's cloud space, and then downloaded to the phone over the air.A similar "Express" version of Expression Blend will also be made available for "designers" (those who build an app visually rather than lexically), apparently with the ability to create SketchFlow mockups of Phone apps. SketchFlow was created a few years ago for Expression developers to generate semi-workable mockups of Silverlight apps on PCs.XNA Game Studio 4.0 is also being released for Windows Phones (we are not seeing the word "free" being attached here yet, though we may yet see something "Express"), with the promise of giving VS 2010 developers a single platform for deploying games on PCs, Windows Phones, and Xbox 360. It's important here that Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb cleverly demonstrated the existence of a game that he described as transported from Zune HD with minimal changes -- it's a way of admitting that Zune HD is not one of those seamless platforms supported by this latest XNA Game Studio.The apps demonstrations were rapid-fire this morning, which is actually a bit unusual for a Microsoft conference that typically demos tools and PC applications in a casual fashion. Helping WP7S to lay some claim to coolness, Microsoft's Jeff Sandquist successfully demonstrated a good-looking, easy-to-use version of an app/service made popular on the iPhone: Shazam. And surprise, wouldn't you know it, it just happened to successfully identify the song "I'm a Bee" by The Black-Eyed Peas (good thing it was censored a bit; this is, after all, a family-friendly conference). I wonder whether Shazam would have recognized the Neil Innes version?And while we're on the subject of family friendliness, what's a Microsoft conference without a little torture? Taking after the Nintendo Wii's implementation of "Mii's" -- the little people you create to look like you, or like someone, to play your games for you inside the Wii environment -- Scott Guthrie showed off a little Windows Phone "tool" called "Mannequin." It's a little doll you can dress up and manipulate using the phone's multitouch, whom you can carry around with you (be careful not to shake the phone too hard), and whom you can torture at your leisure.Which the typically shy Guthrie demonstrated with unusual and somewhat effervescent gusto. Wrapping his mannequin with a certain person's face, and forcing him to utter the phrase, "Phone developers, phone developers, phone developers!" he made little Stevey dance around like Howdy Doody. Using fine-tuning (seen here in the middle), the utterance can be made to sound like a malfunctioning Dalek.Certainly all of that is in good fun for the folks at Microsoft. But it's here that one suddenly realizes how highly unlikely it would be for an Apple demo to frame Steve Jobs in a similar circumstance. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Now that Microsoft has effectively restarted its mobile strategy afresh with Windows Phone 7 Series, third party developers need a way to dig into the platform. So today, Microsoft announced Windows Phone Developer Tools are now available as a free download at developer.windowsphone.comThe tools include: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio, a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator, and XNA Game Studio 4.0. There is also a Community Technology Preview of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone available as a separate download on developer.windowsphone.com today. This beta provides exactly the same visual development workflow for Windows Phone that was previously used in Silverlight and .Net application development.This was all wrapped up with the announcement of the official Silverlight 4 Release Candidate, which Microsoft says will complete an end-to-end development platform that uses Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications, and the XNA Framework for game development. A beta of S4 has been in circulation since October. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews At this moment, Microsoft is kicking off what is probably the most important MIX conference since 2006, with three make-or-break developments in key product categories taking the spotlight. Since January, the company has dished up a very cloudy picture of Windows Phone, and I don't mean in the sense of "cloud computing." That incomplete picture of the company's newly bifurcated roadmap was perhaps intended to spark anticipation and excitement, but instead in some quarters, it's sparked outright anger: What is the system that we now know to be Windows Mobile, supposed to become?Windows Phone, and Windows Other Phone. At CES, we were told to expect the future of Windows Mobile. Correction, we were told later, it's not Windows Mobile. That particular episode was reminiscent of a 1970s detergent commercial: No, Mrs. Clawson, you're not using Tide, you're using new improved Tide! So we had a cute little name change. Correction, no we didn't, because New Improved and Classic will co-exist. But will they be compatible? Well, suppose Classic edition is called "Starter Series," or something to that end. If you start at one end of the product line, that naturally implies you're progressing to the other end, and that implies compatibility, right? Sure. Correction, not necessarily.So what are the developers, developers, developers who comprise the audience of MIX 2010 supposed to do? How do they plan their projects? What do they develop for? Does Windows Phone 7 Series have a specific "interface," but for "Starter Edition" or "6 Series" or whatever it ends up being called, they use whatever the phone manufacturer decides? And whose apps marketplace does a "6 Series" app go to? Will we get answers today, or corrections?Internet Explorer 9 is expected to be demonstrated at length tomorrow, though we may get some glimpses of it today. It's probable that MIX attendees may be the first to get their hands on the early code, with MSDN and TechNet subscribers next -- it would be a surprise if a public beta were to be released first before the developers see it.What we expect from IE9 is more features under the hood than on top of it. Microsoft has been promising to build a more efficient and more standards-compliant browser this time around, but at this point, it would need a total replacement to become competitive in those departments against Firefox, Chrome, and now Opera. Some have advised Microsoft that a total replacement is indeed easy to do, if it were to embrace the open source WebKit engine used by Safari and Chrome (and soon to be partly embraced by Firefox). Adopting open source may be against Microsoft's genetics, but certainly its development team knows the browser field has become extremely competitive in the past year, and that Microsoft lags far behind.Expect a warm embrace of the concept of HTML5 -- the next generation Web language, whose first complete working draft was published earlier this month with Microsoft playing a role. But in terms of the broader concept of Web standards, expect the company to continue its policy of "cafeteria compliance" -- warmly embracing some segments, and with others (such as high Acid3 scores), casting doubt as to the legitimacy or authenticity or public acceptance. ("Who writes these standards anyway?" was one message we heard frequently at last year's PDC.)Silverlight will also be important this week because developers are expecting a cross-platform bonanza. Specifically, they've been led to believe there will be a breakthrough in mobile Web-driven video across a wide spectrum of new platforms, including this time Symbian. Last year at PDC, we saw the first glimpses of Silverlight video on iPhone, delivering the kind of quality developers know is feasible from Flash, if only politics didn't continue to stand between Apple and Adobe. It's ironic that Microsoft should have fewer boundaries between it and Apple than does Adobe...but not extraordinarily ironic, given the three companies' histories.The whole cross-platform question will come full-circle this week with the issue of Silverlight on Windows Phone. Developers already know they'll be able to use Silverlight as both an applications and video platform for 7 Series, but what does this mean for "Other Phone?" If Silverlight can run 1080-line HD video with .NET speed and efficiency on what we've called Windows Mobile 6 in the past, then why shouldn't it? Wouldn't any barriers preventing it from doing so, be artificial?These are the three questions which Microsoft may or may not answer this week, but we do know it will respond -- and how it responds could set the course of the company, and of Web development in turn, for the next several years. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Carmi Levy, Betanews I risk being tagged a curmudgeon, but I'll say it anyway: 3D television isn't ready for prime time. It isn't ready for your living room, either (or any living room, frankly).Headlines claiming 3D TV to be the greatest thing since the creation of 2D TV, are sadly more than a little hyperbolic, and I wish the industry would ease back on the PR push to get us to replace our still-new LCD and plasma televisions with 3D versions.I know this comes as a bit of a disappointment for vendors like Samsung and Panasonic, which last week started selling 3D TVs through US retailers. But anyone who ponies up a triple-digit price premium for the right to wear goofy, overpriced glasses to watch content that doesn't exist yet and can't be broadcast over conventional distribution channels is, to put it gently, gullible.Someday isn't here yetSamsung, Panasonic, and other television vendors have been working themselves into a tizzy over 3D TV ever since this year's Consumer Electronics Show, where 3D TV was the darling. Unfortunately, they're all in for a very hard lesson. Despite the headlines, breathless press releases, and similarly breathless product reviews, 3D TV has no immediate future in the living room. That may very well change, someday, but it'll take a whole lot of evolution -- in technology, content and marketing -- before 3D makes the mainstream leap from movie theaters to living rooms. Here's why: No content. While a growing percentage of top-grossing movies over the past couple of years have been 3D, the vast majority of movies and virtually all televised content remain conventional 2D. While Avatar has used breakthrough 3D cinematography to become the most successful movie of all time, it's an exception to the rule. How many other movies really need the full-on 3D treatment? No distribution. If you want to watch a 3D movie, you're buying or renting a 3D Blu-ray disc. Current-generation cable or satellite-based distribution simply can't support the bandwidth required by a 3D broadcast. Will this change someday? Certainly, and for DirecTV customers, who may have access to a grand total of three 3D channels by June, soon. But for the rest of us, the best you can hope for is a half-resolution 3D signal from your television provider. And don't be surprised if you're charged a premium even for that half-baked "solution." Either way, if you do the math, your fancy new screen will be yesterday's news by the time the majority of distributors get with the 3D program...assuming they ever do. No affordability. Every new technology carries a significant premium, and 3D screens are no different. Samsung's $2,899 package for a 46-inch screen, two sets of glasses, and a Blu-ray player seems rich in a world awash with sub-$1,000 sets. Want more glasses? They're $250 a pop, a figure which will be inscribed into your brain the moment you discover your five-year-old has left them on the living room floor just as the dog sniffed around for something new to chew. Economies of scale will, as they always eventually do, bring prices down. But do you really want to wear special glasses every time you watch television? As technology advances and potentially (or hopefully) makes glasses unnecessary, will your expensive new acquisition even be compatible? Don't count on it. No relevance. 3D has been around in one form or another for decades. It's had more just-about-finally-almost-here moments than any technology deserves to have. Despite the fact that it's finally moving past its cheesy/campy movie past and becoming an accepted cinematographic tool, television is an entirely different ballgame. We don't watch TV like we watch movies. The typical TV viewing session isn't an event. Watching the local news, Stephen Colbert, or the mercifully last few episodes of Lost will never qualify as events, either. And I don't want to see my local weather dude in 3D any more than I want to feel as if I can touch Mr. Colbert as he faux-grills his guests. Although 3D adds some value to some admittedly limited forms of entertainment (such as movies), it adds patently none to the vast majority of today's televised content.I understand the full-court press to move us all into 3D TV. Manufacturers are hurting. After spending most of the decade coaxing us out of our now all-but-gone CRT-based televisions and into bigger, flashier and, yes, more expensive LCD and plasma flat panels, they sat quietly by as we hunkered down though the recession. Now they want -- nay, need -- for us to have an entirely new reason to buy new stuff. There's always got to be a reason to drive the consumer need to replace things before their time. And if this year's reason doesn't take off, watch for next year's CES to carry an entirely different theme.When my Betanews colleague Tim Conneally called it kids-stuff in an article last week, he was uncomfortably (for vendors) close to the truth. For all the novelty value of watching a 3D movie on a properly equipped home theatre, the realities of content and economics mean it'll be a long time before any of this is as routinely workable as regular old 2D HDTV is today.Dreams don't always come trueIn the ideal world, vendors announcing products based on radically new technologies would be greeted by thunderous applause and near-universal approval from rapturous consumers eager to spend whatever it takes to remain current. In the real world, however, announcements are rarely met with such unmitigated adulation. Buyers who have seen and heard it all before are growing tired of overly optimistic vendor claims, and are rightfully challenging them. In many cases, they're simply ignoring them outright.That seems to be happening in my immediate circle of friends and colleagues, where no one has any plans to replace their current equipment with 3D anytime soon. Their universal conclusion -- which I share -- is it's too early, and too many additional pieces have to come into play before it becomes a reasonable and reasonably affordable choice for consumers. As hard as vendors have decided to push their 3D wares in 2010, they're dreaming in three-dimensional Technicolor if they think this is the year the mass television market moves beyond two dimensions.Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Now that buzz about Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC has quieted a bit, I'm ready to pipe in with some contrarian analysis. I agree with other pundits suggesting that the lawsuit is competition by litigation, where Apple hopes to scare off mobile manufacturers from licensing Android. Surely some handset manufacturers will pull back, but they would be foolish to do so. For other existing and potential Android licensees, the lawsuit is a get out of jail free card. Apple's patent case should embolden, not restrain them. There may never be a better time to license Android than now.Apple claims infringement of 20 patents related to iPhone's user interface. Engadget's March 2nd patent breakdown is a must-read clinical analysis. But there's more to competition by litigation than the actual patents. Lawsuits often aren't so much about what's right but what lawyers think they can prove; often the winner tells the more believable story, even in patent cases. Similarly, much strategy goes into lawsuits -- how they're presented, where they're filed and when. Then, of course, there is whom. In this case, Apple took on HTC and not Google. Now why is that?Apple's initial goals have little to do with protecting intellectual property as much as scaring away competitors. I hone in on this because Apple chose not to sue Google, Android's major developer, but instead the largest licensee of the mobile operating system. HTC's Sense UI gives Apple a bit more range to single out the one manufacturer, but based on various analyses of the patents that's more bark than bite.Why HTC and not Google?Why not sue Google? Eight primary reasons:1) Apple potentially gains more by scaring off potential Android licensees than engaging in a protracted patent lawsuit. It's easier and more effective to raise bluster (and loads of free press) by engaging HTC than Google. Meanwhile, Apple can drag out the lawsuit as a distraction for HTC and other (frightened) Android licensees -- for years.2) Apple doesn't want to take on Google, which already has come to HTC's defense. Google would fiercely fight Apple, understanding that mobile devices are the future of search and advertising. 3) Apple needs Google more than Google needs Apple. Unless Apple is willing to switch to Bing -- not a good idea considering iPhone buyer demographics -- Google search and maps are a necessary evil. If Google is willing to play tough with China, Apple is easy enough for Google to snuff off. Apple won't take on Google from a weaker position.4) HTC is somewhat disadvantaged, being a Taiwan-based company. Google has home-court advantage (like Apple), making it a much more formidable opponent than HTC.5) Patent lawsuits take years to resolve, hence Apple's separate complaint with the International Trade Commission. Again, Apple is using scare tactics to psychologically attack existing and potential Android licensees. So, this is quite similar to No. 1.6) The patent claims are likely not as sure as they appear. Since most of the claims are really about Android, Google is the more sensible target of any lawsuit. If Apple lawyers were truly confident of winning against Google -- and in reasonable timeframe, they would file lawsuit against the search giant.7) Android's open-source status creates all kinds of logistical and legal problems for Apple. The company really doesn't want to be labeled with a big Scarlet Letter as an open-source opponent. Apple has benefitted from open-source community development. It's a vocal group Apple doesn't want to piss off. Then there are all the nasty legal issues and potentially damaging precedents should Apple make a frontal open-source assault.8) The iPhone-Android phone market looks much like the Mac-Windows PC market did in the 1980s and 1990s. Apple unsuccessfully sued Microsoft for infringing on Macintosh user-interface intellectual property. The lawsuit dragged on for years, ending in settlement in 1997. But what if in the early days of the Windows PC, Apple had sued clone king Compaq instead? Compaq was more vulnerable to a UI copyright claim than Microsoft, and other DOS/Windows licensees would have received the message to back off. By attacking HTC, Apple hopes to prevent a repeat "us against everyone else" scenario.What Apple FearsApple has good reasons to fear Android. In the three months from December to February, Android's US smartphone subscriber share shot up from 2.8 percent to 7.1 percent. Worldwide, in 2009, Android smartphone market share -- based on sales -- rose from 0.5 percent to 3.9 percent, according to Gartner (The first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, shipped in late 2008). Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt asserted that 60,000 Android handsets are shipping by the day.All this circles back to my claim that the patent lawsuit is a bluff. My reasoning:1) Apple chose HTC, not Google. There is no immediate risk to any patent claims against HTC. Since the real claims are against Google, Apple may find the court -- or even the ITC -- reluctant to rule against an Android licensee in good faith. There is perceived risk, but none in the short term, which is long enough for a united Android front to do market damage against iPhone -- particularly in emerging markets.2) Apple filed against HTC and not other licensees. Apple had its chance to take on Android licensees, choosing instead to go after one. HTC is enough: If the claims are shaky. If Apple is looking for one case to establish precedent. If the more immediate objective is to scare off existing or would-be Android licensees. HTC being enough for this lawsuit isn't enough to legally or even logistically hurt other Android licensees.3) Apple is unlikely to sue other Android licensees anytime soon. A good legal strategy -- from cost and logistical perspectives -- is to make a single case. Rather than being afraid, existing and would-be Android licensees should feel emboldened by the HTC lawsuit. Behind the bluster, Apple has really given the all clear -- it's safe to go ahead; that's Apple's tell. Apple's bluff is meant to convince other licensees that they can't win; so they lay down their Android hands. Yes, Apple could file against other Android licensees, but the only immediate benefit would be to create more fear -- that licensees should fold their hands. Hardware manufacturers should look at Google's backing HTC; there is a heavy-sitting ally at the table across from Apple. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews One of Microsoft's major justifications for the Yahoo search deal is scale. CEO Steve Ballmer has repeatedly asserted that greater scale would allow Microsoft to improve search accuracy. Just last week he told Search Marketing Expo West attendees: "The ability to put together Yahoo's volumes and Microsoft's volumes and use that in a way that improves the experience more, let's call it all involved parties, we think is absolutely fantastic."But the scale argument presumes that Microsoft and Yahoo would combine search share. The deal is in place but not fully implemented, and already Microsoft's Bing is taking away search share from Yahoo -- not Google. In February, Bing's US search share reached 11.5 percent, up from 11.3 percent month over month, according to ComScore. Yahoo share declined to 16.8 percent from 17 percent during the same time period. In June 2009 -- the month before announcing their search deal -- Yahoo search share was 19.6 percent and Microsoft 8.4 percent. But Microsoft already was rising, because of the Bing launch and millions of dollars in supporting advertising. For perspective, Google search share was 65.5 percent in February and 65 percent in June 2009.The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal is a dumb idea, for three main reasons:1) Microsoft's marketing push behind Bing shows that share can be gained organically, without taking on the expense or logistical hassle of managing Yahoo's search business.2) Microsoft search share gains foreshadow the inevitable: Microsoft-Yahoo combined search share will diminish rather than aggregate. Combined share would have been 28 percent in June 2009; 28.3 percent in February. At first blush, the numbers might seem encouraging for aggregated share but the cost is declining Yahoo share. Cannibalization is inevitable.Also the ComScore share data is for search engines and doesn't include heavily searched cross-domains like YouTube. Americans conducted 9.9 billion searches at Google in February, 2.496 billion at Yahoo and 1.498 billion at Bing. YouTube (and a few other Google sites): 3.553 billion or about 30 percent more than Yahoo. If ComScore ranked YouTube like Google, Yahoo would be No. 3 in search share.I first warned about flawed combined search share math about a year before (May 2007) Microsoft gave up its hostile Yahoo takeover: "There is no guarantee a Microsoft-Yahoo could successfully aggregate search share." Bing is more likely to cannibalize Yahoo share than combine with it over the next 12 months. In July 2009 I predicted: "Combined Microsoft-Yahoo share will be less than 20 percent within 12 months of the deal's closing." We'll see.3) Search is -- or was -- Yahoo's crown jewel. Yahoo started as a search engine and remained a contender even as Google gained share. As I asserted in May 2008: "Removing search would be akin to lobotomizing Yahoo." That's essentially what the Microsoft search deal will do to Yahoo.Yahoo's banner advertising business is still big, but its future is uncertain during the Microsoft search-take-over transition. Meanwhile, Google has added banner ads to YouTube and to mobile search.Yahoo is little more than a beloved brand without search, particularly with CEO Carol Bartz dismantling the company's other prized assets. You know, little things like disbanding the mobile group earlier this week. Would someone please take away the axe from that woman!So what do you think? Should Microsoft and Yahoo have cut that search deal? Please answer in comments. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Last week, I wrote a little article about Microsoft's four-color approach to QR black-and-white barcodes, the still-in-beta Microsoft Tag, which was also related to the company's first official Android application.I only briefly touched upon the many things that are being done with QR codes: advertisements that you scan with your cell phone camera to pull up related content on the Web, business cards that you can scan for an instant call to the card's owner, or boxes that you can scan for an instant Web-based list of contents.One area that I neglected to mention is tourism. For the last couple of years, more and more cities have begun to employ black-and-white QR codes as virtual tour guides. Historical sites and points of interest are being labeled with QR codes that tourists can scan with their mobile phones to obtain relevant information.One of the first places that started using these codes was San Francisco, where restaurants were tagged with QR codes in the front window that linked to Citysearch listings and user-submitted reviews. Likewise, New York City's Gotham Tours has slapped yellow QR stickers all over Manhattan which provide more information about famous locations in the area. The barcoding craze is now being picked up by tiny American towns that recognize it as a cheap way to keep tourists interested. This week, Long Beach, Washington (pop. 1,283 as of the last census) announced that it has tagged sites such as the "World's Longest Beach" arch, the "World's Largest" frying pan, the World Kite Museum & Hall of Fame, a gray whale skeleton, and a 20-foot tall bronze evergreen tree as scannable points of interest in its town. It may not be the most enriching stuff, but it has its uses.Today, the Northern Italian city of Turin (Torino), site of the 2006 Winter Olympics, announced it has joined in on the craze as well. But it's the first city to use Microsoft's four-color HCCB Tags instead of the more common black and white QR codes. With the TagReader app, users can scan Tags around the National Museum of Cinema, Palazzo Madama, Museum of Oriental Art (MAO), Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM), and the Borgo and Rocca Medioevale Museum. All of these launch mobile browser pages with text information, video, or MP3 content. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews A permanent injunction against Microsoft selling versions of Word that contain XML editing ability effectively remains in place today, after a shot-in-the-dark appeal by Microsoft of its appeals loss last December was shot down Wednesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.Although Microsoft is no longer distributing versions of Word or Office with an XML editor that a jury found infringed upon the patents of former development partner i4i, it made a face-saving effort to change the record of history. Such a change would have shown that Microsoft did not borrow the ideas behind a Word plug-in that i4i demonstrated, for its own purposes, knowing that i4i held a patent on those ideas.What may be more historically important about Wednesday's ruling -- which replaces the December ruling -- is that it may re-establish an older legal precedent with respect to patent infringement. Patent reformers, including Supreme Court judges, have been utilizing their own judiciary discretion with respect to a benchmark for damages. Legislation still on the table in Congress would change US patent law so that judges must estimate what a product would have been worth had it not been infringed upon, under normal market circumstances, in setting damages.The reason many damage awards by juries reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, using formulas that sometimes seem arbitrary, is because they agreed with plaintiffs' attorneys that the real-world damage is so great that any attempt to really estimate loss in monetary value is pointless. That was the case in the i4i trial, where in District Court, a jury decided there was no real formula for measuring the extent of Microsoft's transgression.The problem considered with the District Court trial was that the base of the damages award was set at $200 million, a figure which admittedly came from a rough estimate of how many copies of Word that Microsoft probably sold during the period in question (2.1 million) times the amount of royalties i4i contended it should have received for each of those copies ($95). Microsoft argued against that formula for numerous reasons, including the fact that not all 2.1 million users of Office or Word would even see the XML editor function in question. Weighing against the need to consider the validity of that strict formula was the notion that i4i had suffered irreparable injury, which the law literally defines as something the law cannot define.Specifically, i4i argued, Microsoft destroyed the relevant market, so that you couldn't measure it any more. Given that set of circumstances, how would it look for judges to go questioning the jury's formula on nickel-and-dime issues of royalties?"The district court concluded that there were inadequate remedies at law to compensate i4i for its injury," wrote Judge Sharon Prost for the three-judge panel. "The district court found that before and after Microsoft began infringing, i4i produced and sold software that practiced the patented method. The district court found no evidence that i4i had previously licensed the patent, instead finding evidence that i4i sought to retain exclusive use of its invention. It was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to conclude that monetary damages would be inadequate. In this case, a small company was practicing its patent, only to suffer a loss of market share, brand recognition, and customer goodwill as the result of the defendant's infringing acts. Such losses may frequently defy attempts at valuation, particularly when the infringing acts significantly change the relevant market, as occurred here. The district court found that Microsoft captured 80% of the custom XML market with its infringing Word products, forcing i4i to change its business strategy. The loss associated with these effects is particularly difficult to quantify. Difficulty in estimating monetary damages is evidence that remedies at law are inadequate."So the injunction stands, but not after tossing Microsoft the most hollow of victories: Sixty days, the Appeals Court decided, was not a fair amount of time for Microsoft to comply with the District Court's order, so it extended the period to five months...from the date of the order. That means the injunction now takes effect on January 11...two months ago.[EDITOR'S NOTE: On Microsoft's request, we changed our original headline, taking note of the fact that Microsoft did not file a complete appeal on December 22. What it did file was a petition for an en banc rehearing of the existing appeal, and that petition was actually granted, even though the revised opinion issued Wednesday effectively clarifies the Appeals' Court's earlier stand.] Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews A permanent injunction against Microsoft selling versions of Word that contain XML editing ability effectively remains in place today, after a shot-in-the-dark appeal by Microsoft of its appeals loss last December was shot down Wednesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.Although Microsoft is no longer distributing versions of Word or Office with an XML editor that a jury found infringed upon the patents of former development partner i4i, it made a face-saving effort to change the record of history. Such a change would have shown that Microsoft did not borrow the ideas behind a Word plug-in that i4i demonstrated, for its own purposes, knowing that i4i held a patent on those ideas.What may be more historically important about Wednesday's ruling -- which replaces the December ruling -- is that it may re-establish an older legal precedent with respect to patent infringement. Patent reformers, including Supreme Court judges, have been utilizing their own judiciary discretion with respect to a benchmark for damages. Legislation still on the table in Congress would change US patent law so that judges must estimate what a product would have been worth had it not been infringed upon, under normal market circumstances, in setting damages.The reason many damage awards by juries reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, using formulas that sometimes seem arbitrary, is because they agreed with plaintiffs' attorneys that the real-world damage is so great that any attempt to really estimate loss in monetary value is pointless. That was the case in the i4i trial, where in District Court, a jury decided there was no real formula for measuring the extent of Microsoft's transgression.The problem considered with the District Court trial was that the base of the damages award was set at $200 million, a figure which admittedly came from a rough estimate of how many copies of Word that Microsoft probably sold during the period in question (2.1 million) times the amount of royalties i4i contended it should have received for each of those copies ($95). Microsoft argued against that formula for numerous reasons, including the fact that not all 2.1 million users of Office or Word would even see the XML editor function in question. Weighing against the need to consider the validity of that strict formula was the notion that i4i had suffered irreparable injury, which the law literally defines as something the law cannot define.Specifically, i4i argued, Microsoft destroyed the relevant market, so that you couldn't measure it any more. Given that set of circumstances, how would it look for judges to go questioning the jury's formula on nickel-and-dime issues of royalties?"The district court concluded that there were inadequate remedies at law to compensate i4i for its injury," wrote Judge Sharon Prost for the three-judge panel. "The district court found that before and after Microsoft began infringing, i4i produced and sold software that practiced the patented method. The district court found no evidence that i4i had previously licensed the patent, instead finding evidence that i4i sought to retain exclusive use of its invention. It was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to conclude that monetary damages would be inadequate. In this case, a small company was practicing its patent, only to suffer a loss of market share, brand recognition, and customer goodwill as the result of the defendant's infringing acts. Such losses may frequently defy attempts at valuation, particularly when the infringing acts significantly change the relevant market, as occurred here. The district court found that Microsoft captured 80% of the custom XML market with its infringing Word products, forcing i4i to change its business strategy. The loss associated with these effects is particularly difficult to quantify. Difficulty in estimating monetary damages is evidence that remedies at law are inadequate."So the injunction stands, but not after tossing Microsoft the most hollow of victories: Sixty days, the Appeals Court decided, was not a fair amount of time for Microsoft to comply with the District Court's order, so it extended the period to five months...from the date of the order. That means the injunction now takes effect on January 11...two months ago. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Despite the fact that game console manufacturers still drive studios toward exclusivity for individual titles, so that a popular Xbox 360 game isn't available for PlayStation 3 and vice versa, developers within those studios are insisting more and more upon cross-platform flexibility and portability. While they may be restricted to one console, they don't want those borders to extend to computers or to handsets.For this reason, the Khronos Group has become more and more important to developers, and OpenGL is no longer being perceived as some kind of fallback standard, as in the phrase, "Your graphics use only OpenGL. Today, OpenGL is developers' ticket to portability between PCs, consoles, and handsets, and it's the only technology shining a ray of hope for cross-console portability should it ever become politically feasible.Today at the annual Game Developers' Conference, Khronos (whose principal members include AMD, Nvidia, and Sony) unveiled on schedule the 4.0 version of its OpenGL cross-platform rendering language for 3D virtual environments. To understand the significance of this event, you have to understand a bit more about the challenges that game developers are facing. Specifically, as screen sizes become larger on average, screen resolutions grow finer, and screens by number increase beyond one per system, the types of simplifications that made 3D scenes look "good enough" for older PCs actually look bad on modern systems. More finely-detailed systems make typical "fuzzifications" (my word for it, not Khronos') look more obvious.It's still too arithmetically costly to expect 3D games and artistic applications to be ray tracers -- they can't assume the shading values for a huge number of traveling photons in space in real-time. We've talked before about how some graphics cards, including the first DirectX 10.1 cards from ATI in late 2007, can track a few photons, and fudge the remaining shader values for the rest.But applying that type of calculation to OpenGL -- so it can be used with ATI and Nvidia (Intel? Maybe someday) -- requires the application to calculate how much...or more accurately, how little detail it can get away with, for certain points in space. Typically in OpenGL, developers have used lookup functions to determine the level of detail required to map any given area. As screen dynamics change, the number of functions required for a given space may increase, and their efficiency may decrease. As a result, it could take exponentially more time to make a scene look realistic -- to fuzz the focus of areas that are on the sidelines or out of range, or to blur regions that we're supposed to be flying by.Khronos' engineers tackled this problem by extending the research begun earlier in the last decade (PDF available here) by SGI, the company that originally got the ball rolling for OpenGL. Technically, the whole technique is called "level of detail," but another way to refer to it is shader simplification. Used judiciously, it's a way to make certain elements of a scene seem clearer by selecting which others appear not so clear. Screenshot of an early build of the Icarus Scene Engine, an OpenGL-based 3D scene editor that is itself rendered in 3D, using the OpenTK toolkit.As scenes are processed, OpenGL effectively determines the active level of detail for any given shader (the equivalent of what Direct3D calls a "pixel," which isn't always a "pixel" per se). OpenGL 4.0 expedites this process by realizing that levels of detail should be remembered, so that when a function looks it up from the outside, it doesn't have to be recalculated. Thus, top of the list on version 4.0's list of changes is the new textureLOD function set, which will not impact how developers use the API -- it's like a retroactive fix. The new functions recall levels of detail rather than recalculate them.These new functions are actually necessary for OpenGL to work (properly) on ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series graphics cards, which began shipping last year. Now developers are looking forward to ATI upgrading its 5xxx drivers to enable 4.0, now that 4.0 has enabled them.The result may be an avoidance of the exponential lags that developers had been seeing as resolution and screen complexity increased. Double-precision floating-point vectors will be supported for the first time, also signifying the new dynamics of 3D rendering. And now, cube map textures can be layered, potentially for more iridescent effects that will substitute for bump mapping. As one contributor to Khronos' OpenGL forum noted this morning, "I just had a look on the extension, it's so much more than whatever I could have expected! I think there is a lot of developer little dreams that just happened here."The first rollout demonstrations of OpenGL 4.0, along with its WebGL counterpart, were scheduled for late this afternoon, West Coast time. That's probably where we'll see our first screen shots of the final specification at work. We'll also learn more about just how viable the new edition is for cross-platform development. This afternoon, another forum contributor from Montreal noted the remaining political roadblocks to true cross-platform development: "As a cross-platform developer I would like to use OpenGL exclusively but it's commercially unviable to use it on Windows, due to the fact that OpenGL just doesn't work on most machines by default, which forces me to target my game to both DirectX and OpenGL. The OpenGL shortcomings on Windows aren't a big deal for hardcore games where the users are gonna have good drivers (although they are a cause of too many support calls which makes it inviable anyway) but it's a show-stopper for casual games...Until OpenGL isn't expected to just work in any Windows box, it is dead in the Windows platform. Do something about this please." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Namco, one of video gaming's most iconic brands, today announced a new cross-platform game engine called UniteSDK, which will let gamers play with one another irrespective of the platform they're playing their games on. A user playing a UniteSDK-based game on their iPhone, for example, will be able to play against a PC user, who will be able to play against a Mac user, and so forth. "Allowing gamers with the option to play anywhere, anytime and on multiple platforms will be a true milestone for Namco Networks -- wanting to play a friend that has an iPhone when someone only has a PC will no longer be a prohibiting factor," Kirby Fong, executive producer of web development and online gaming at Namco Networks said today. "UniteSDK allows Namco and in the near future, external developers, to create games that provide cross platform and cross game social community."Namco's first title built on UniteSDK is called Pool Pro Online 3 and will launch on PC, iPad, Mac, Android, Java, BREW, RIM and Windows Mobile. All of these platforms will be able to engage one another.In addition to allowing interoperability, UniteSDK also gives games the ability to support achievements, records, leaderboards, gamer profiles, in-game chat, buddy lists, one-on-one challenges, and tournaments.It's another move by a game company toward unifying the disparate platforms under a single interoperable umbrella. A similar move was made by Valve Corporation this week when it announced it will sell copies of its games for both Mac and Windows for a single price, and that all its future releases will launch simultaneously on PC, Xbox 360, and Mac. Namco's strategy however, has much more potential for revolution in that it makes community building considerably easier. When the platform is no longer a factor that separates players from one another, a community of gamers can get together, socialize, and play much more quickly. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews With just six days to go before the National Broadband Plan is due before Congress, the Federal Communications Commission today launched a pair of consumer tools -- an app for iPhone/Android, and a Web-based reporting tool -- to help inform both consumers and the Commission itself about broadband conditions across the US.The mobile application bundles the Ookla Speed Test (a.k.a., Speedtest.net) and Network Diagnostic Tool together into a single package simply branded "FCC Test." Users can check their downlink/uplink speeds and network latency against different US-based servers, and can then export the results as a .CSV file. The FCC says it may use the data collected from the Mobile Broadband Quality Test to analyze coverage and quality on a geographic basis across the US, but it does not endorse one particular testing application over another, so there may be more tests rolled into the app in the future.The Commission's Broadband Dead Zone Report is much less a tool than a simple complaint dropbox. On the page, the user confirms that they do or do not have broadband available in their home, answers one related question and then provides their address. This is intended to help the FCC determine where the demand for broadband is high despite low coverage."Transparency empowers consumers, promotes innovation and investment, and encourages competition," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in a statement today. "The FCC's new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country. By informing consumers about their broadband service quality, these tools help eliminate confusion and make the market work more effectively." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The nice thing about the Internet, or so I've been told, is that it has all this information. Perhaps you've noticed this lately, but the big problem has been that there's no one way to get at this information with any kind of consistency.Supposedly Google is the "portal" for most of the world's information, which may be why so many people find Betanews by typing "Betanews" in Google. In one respect, you might expect Google to have an interest in creating that consistent methodology for getting at information. On the other hand, given that so many folks depend on Google Search just as it is now, you could see how Google might very easily come to the conclusion that there's no new benefits to be gained through improving its software, just to keep the user base it already has.My friend and colleague Carmi Levy touched on that point this morning in Wide Angle Zoom, where he turned a reluctant thumb down on the Google Buzz social network experiment. You can call it "beta" or, as Google strangely decided this time around, not call it beta, but after using it for a while, it's difficult not to come away with the opinion that this is indeed an experiment...and you're the subject. But as Carmi also noted, different Google services are so inconsistent with one another that they may as well have been developed on different planets -- which suggests that Google may have been copying the Microsoft development model after all. Perhaps the best case-in-point example comes from Google Maps. Yesterday, to the delight of many, it added bicycle routes to its plotting options.If you're a biker, you know that there are peculiar distinctions between the routes you plan as a pedestrian, and those you use on a bicycle. In cities whose planning commissions have added lanes to boulevards by destroying sidewalks, you know that unless you enjoy motocross and frequent encounters with beat cops, you can't plant bicycle tires on the same places you can plant your feet. I grew up decades ago in Oklahoma, at a time where for most areas of the state, "downtown" was denoted by the presence of the stoplight. Before I could drive a car, I biked four miles back and forth from my first high school, and (sometimes) the ten miles back and forth from my second, at a time when that was considered a normal way for a kid to get around town. Even then, I distinctly remember there were spans of a few hundred feet or so every so often where, if the paved road ended and the granite rock paths began, I'd pick up my bike and tread on foot between people's houses. It helped to get acquainted with them first (see: "beat cops").The brilliance of the Google Maps experiment is that it accumulates the data that Google has gathered, not just through map scanning and satellite imagery and those strange cars you see cruising every little granite path, but through its advertising service as well. As a result, from day one, the bicycle route part of its service is capable of guiding cyclists using the tools that matter to cyclists: the landmarks they see along the way -- the gas station, the church with the tall steeple, the Italian restaurant. No service established exclusively for the purpose of mapping the world, for motorists or cyclists, would have ever assimilated information at this level of granularity; only through co-opting the advertising and location database with the mapping database could this ever be feasible from a business standpoint.When I tested Google Maps last year as a pedestrian/public transit dependent in Los Angeles, I discovered it was using a form of "reverse tunnel logic" to compile its suggested routes. Quite literally, it would have me traveling by foot one mile south to catch a bus that would take me 1.1 miles north; and it also would have had me scaling viaducts where there were drainage ditches below and barbed wire above. I pointed out to Google at the time that Maps appeared to fail to consider time and effort consumed as factors in assimilating its routes. The response I got at the time from Google was, thank you for your input but, well, you can't know everything about everything. As I've learned from experience, yes, you can. Living in Indianapolis, for example, I know there is a kind of "superhighway" exclusively for non-motorists, formed from the brilliant idea of paving over a disused railroad track. Named for the railroad that used to own it, it's called the Monon Trail -- a 16.7-mile stretch of track that's well kept, fairly well patrolled, and is the most foot-friendly stretch of asphalt I've ever traveled.Since it bisects most of the city north-to-south, there are a multitude of ways someone could get to the Monon Trail. Indianapolis is notable for having plenty of bike trails in certain areas of the city, and no way in hell a bike could get through in others. For my initial test of Google Maps for cyclists, I wanted to see whether it would make the same decisions I would, having lived here now for 18 years.With pedestrian maps, Google's suggested route is plotted in blue, with the relatively foot-friendly paths outlined in solid green, or dotted green for "better than most." If I wanted to walk from my house all the way to, say, Conseco Fieldhouse downtown where the Pacers play, Google Maps would try to plot the most direct foot route it could. Even though I know for a fact that walking the Monon Trail is much, much faster than down the side of a boulevard, the fact that the Trail is a half-mile out of my way means that Google's walking map won't suggest it.It is a very different story for cyclists, and here it's clear that someone at Google listened to my advice. It takes a little more effort to pedal west a half-mile to get to the Trail, but once you're there, the effort pays off with a four-and-a-half mile stretch of paved roads, overpasses, and relatively safe crosswalks ("zebra crossings"). Tunnel logic evidently was not used to compile this route, but rather an assessment of the time and even luxury benefits to be gained from going out of one's way -- the type of assessments Google Maps did not make last year in L.A.Here's what I mean: This screenshot shows the suggested route from one of my favorite neighborhood pizza joints to Conseco downtown. Now, Google knows that Allisonville Road recently added a bike lane (not a good one, it's in dotted green), that it leads to a nicely protected sidewalk down Fall Creek Parkway, and that would be the most direct route downtown. Indeed, if I were a pedestrian, that's the route it would suggest. But as a cyclist, I know that's not the route I want -- crossing onto Fall Creek over Binford Blvd. means running across ten lanes of traffic without a crosswalk, where motorists are speeding through on a shortcut to I-69.So Google Maps takes my bicycle (a vintage Takara racer, if you're interested) a mile out of my way, through a residential area, just to get me to the Monon Trail. And that's exactly right -- there's no question it's a lovelier, easier, and in good weather, faster route.Next: Seeing where you're going, and where you shouldn't go...Seeing where you're going, and where you shouldn't goPerhaps the most wonderful feature of this service, which pedestrians already discovered, is the opportunity to blend Street View with maps to let you walk the route ahead of time. This way you see in advance all the landmarks you'll encounter along the way -- the waypoints that let you remember in your head what to look for and where to turn. Here is where I encountered a little bug in the program, and you can actually see it if you look closely here. Street View should show you a blue line, coordinating with the blue line in the overhead map, to let you follow the suggested route. The overhead map, shown below, appears correct -- travel west on 54th St., and turn left at the Trail. The landmark at that turn is one of my favorite Italian restaurants in all the world, Mama Carolla's. In the photograph, notice the trail runs right alongside it.Notice also that the map's blue line has you making a left turn at Mama's onto the Trail (correct), but that Street View has you making a right turn. What happened here? A check of the turn-by-turn directions reveals that, for some strange reason, Maps wants you to travel down 54th St. for 72 extra feet, then make a U-turn, head back the other direction, and make a right turn. It's probably a little database problem, where the point of contact with the Monon Trail meets up with the street is off by a few feet. Nevertheless, if you printed off these directions so you could follow them from your bike, you'd be confused at this point.Here's also where you discover a problem that Google can't solve, at least not right away: You can't take a Street View walk down pedestrian trails. There's an obvious reason for this: Towns don't want Google going down walking trails snapping shots of people anonymously.The next best thing is to try to reposition yourself (the little orange man on the overhead map, who I've noticed isn't on a bike) on actual street intersections along the way. Here's where the software starts to fail: I should be able to just click on the blue path at an intersection where there's a photo. Instead, I have to drag the little man up in the air (he actually "flies" while this is happening, like a repositioned character in Peter Molyneux's game "The Movies") and deposit him in the vicinity of the blue line. Where it ends up dropping him, despite what the pointer says, could be up to three blocks out of the way.The problem here appears to be with the front end of the program, not with the fundamental design. If you'll recall earlier my statement that you can know everything, the way you do so is by listening and learning. Google Maps is, to its great credit, capable of doing this: In cases where I know full well a certain route is safer or better than another, I can drag the blue line where I believe it should go. Not only is that an easy way for me to plan my own route, but for Google, it's a source of new information: If Google is smart about this (and there's no reason for me to believe it isn't), it will learn from my changes and those of others, and may suggest safer routes for other Maps users in the future.But it can only do this if it gets its front end right first. The slightly incorrect portion of its suggested route for my trip downtown was a 72-foot diversion that actually does show up when you zoom in the map. But partly because the granularity of the line-dragging routine does not appear to be as fine as the map's own zoom capability, and partly because the U-turn is a three-step process which Google Maps presumes must lead from point to point to point in every circumstance, my attempt to simply shave off the U-turn in the directions was mistaken as a way for me to take a lap around the strip mall parking lot, shown here.Because Google is leveraging its massive platform in multiple areas to provide an exclusive service that wouldn't have been feasible on its own, little adjustments can have big consequences. Someplace within the Google database right now, there's probably the recording that some Indy cyclist weirdo suggested that instead of a simple 72-foot loop around the middle of 54th St., one should take a big two-block oval around the strip mall. As long as that little route-adjustment bug is in there, the validity of information Google is gleaning from changes that sensible people are making to suggestions everywhere, may end up not being very sensible. And as a result, over time, someone will probably be advised to walk one mile north in order to get on the route that leads her 1.1 miles south.Despite that little discovery, I can easily see where Google Maps will become an invaluable tool for bicyclists who want to explore not only their home town, but areas of the world they've never been. I can imagine a depression in car rentals across the country. I'm also imagining folks with their Android GPS-enabled phones in their pockets maybe someday getting spoken directions. "Turn left onto Monon Trail...No, silly, your other left." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Following up on last week's beta release of Opera Mini 5 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Opera software today launched Opera Mini 5 for the Android platform.With Mini 5, Opera Software has managed to make a cross-platform browser that provides an almost uniform experience across all the operating systems it runs on. Today's release on Android feels almost identical to the version I tested last week.However, with Android, we're taking a different look at Opera and its comparisons to other browsers. It's easy to say, "Oh, Opera is faster than IE Mobile, but not as comprehensive as Skyfire," when comparing browsers on Windows Phones. Everybody does that.Because there are four different versions of Google's mobile operating system in circulation right now, there are at least three different native Android browsers to compare Opera Mini 5 to. Android versions 1.5 and 1.6 have an older version (v. 4.0) of the Android browser, while Android 2.0 and up have a browser with a new UI and new features. Android 2.1 has the same browser as 2.0, but it is endowed with multitouch gestures. We tested Opera Mini 5 against the two main Android browsers.Opera Mini 5 on Android 1.5 & 1.6For devices that run upon the "Cupcake" and "Donut" builds of Android, Opera Mini 5 provides a number of different experiences from the stock browser. First, Opera provides an actionable address bar which can just be clicked upon to enter URLs. In Android Browser 4, the user has to tap Menu > Go to bring up the address bar. Secondly, Zooming in and out with the Android browser is done with the preview tool and magnifying glass buttons, but Mini 5's is mostly pre-ordained. If you set it to "mobile view," pages are formatted to fit your screen so you don't have to do too much resizing. However, Mini 5 defaults with mobile view off and full screen mode off, so your pages are first going to load very quickly, but will require zooming (done by double-tapping the screen, a gesture that Android Browser version 4 actually lacks).When considering Mini 5's interface alone, it's not a significant improvement over the stock browser. However there's much more to love about Opera than its UI, so we'll talk more about that later.Next: Opera Mini 5 on Android 2.0+...Opera Mini 5 on Android 2.0+Devices running Android 2.0 and beyond are generally equipped with stronger processors, so browsing with the stock Android browser is a tough experience to compete with. Fortunately for Opera Mini 5, the experience it provides on these devices actually holds up quite well thanks to some of the features it adds that Android lacks across the board. Principal among these is tabbed browsing. In all Android browsers, your browser tabs are a whole sub-screen which pulls you out of your current window and into a new one. In Opera Mini, browser tabs appear as an overlay in your main window with a rack of thumbnails that can be chosen from. This adds a lot to the feeling of continuity within Opera, and is an area where the Android browser suffers.Another major complaint about the Android browser is that it does not sync your mobile bookmarks with anything. They're currently something of a dead end. This has been a big argument in favor of the Dolphin browser, which offers that feature. Even better, however, is Opera Mini 5, which actually can sync to your desktop version of Opera with Opera Link. So if you're a desktop Opera user, not only will your Speed Dial screen be automatically populated, but it also gives you instant access to your bookmark folders and RSS feeds.The final issue to mention when talking about any of Opera's products is the addition of server-side rendering. Pages in Opera Mini 5 are digested on an Opera server before they hit your device's screen, so browsing is sped up considerably. Though browsing on a 3G connection is enjoyable on all Android devices, Opera Mini 5 can knock out pages appreciably faster. So what's the bottom line on this beta?It's a "Must Have" if:You're a desktop Opera user using Android 1.5 or 1.6.It's a "Must Try" if:You're in an area with poor 3G coverage using Android 1.5 or 1.6.For everyone else, it will be worthwhile to play around with it and see if you like what Opera does. After all, it is the most popular mobile browser in the world. Opera Mini 5 beta can be downloaded today in the Android Market. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Carmi Levy, Betanews So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and, more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social media darling service.Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.Maybe that's a little harsh. Maybe it sucks for me and not for others. Maybe other users absolutely love the thing because they feel it's already transformed how they connect to each other. If you're one of them, please let me know, because so far, no one I know has bothered using it to any great degree.And there, dear readers, is the core problem. Despite the fact that Buzz leverages our existing Gmail contact lists to give us a head start in the friend-population game, it doesn't seem to be translating into actual, sustained, meaningful activity.In the early going for Facebook, as you may recall, its friend approval process often left your universe as pathetically empty as a sixth grade prom dance floor. Google, by contrast, leveraged Gmail to avoid repeating Facebook's mistake, but its jumpstart philosophy doesn't seem to be resulting in anything remotely approaching an enjoyable party. Whenever I click on the Buzz link from Gmail, I feel like I'm right back in the sixth grade, down to the dim gymnasium with the lousy acoustics and watered down punch.There are so many reasons to rant on Google for foisting yet another social media failure on us, but for now, I've narrowed it down to these four: Conversation stream hijackers. Every time I sign in, there's a monumentally long conversation thread from Robert Scoble at the top of my list. Now, don't get me wrong: I've long been a fan of Robert Scoble and decided to follow him precisely because I appreciate his perspectives on the rapidly evolving social media landscape. But his overwhelming presence at the top of my Buzz feed is starting to annoy me. To his credit, he's recognized this flaw and has apologized for it -- though he really shouldn't, because it's not his fault that bad interface design allows uber-users to overwhelm the feeds of regular folks like me. Interface from hell. I wouldn't mind Robert Scoble's extreme ownership of my screen real estate if I had the ability to move things around to suit my needs. But Buzz's no-customization philosophy means you're stuck with whatever's there. You can't filter out users or threads that don't interest you. You can't prioritize the ones that do. You're stuck. And those things that look like overlaid folders? They don't work. For all the criticism that Facebook has received over the years for its revolving door of radical interface changes, at least we can eventually tweak that interface to somewhat reflect the things that matter most to us. Google Buzz assumes we all subscribe to the old Eastern Bloc notion of one size (badly) fits all. Inconsistency with other Google services. Remember the nasty old days of DOS when every app had its own interface and command structure, and moving data from one to another was the PC-era equivalent of Babel? Well, after a couple of decades of getting used to Microsoft's cross-application philosophy -- with across-the-board methods for printing, saving files, cutting and pasting content, among others -- it almost seems as if Google wants us to go back to the pre-Cambrian period. Every Google service seems to come with its own unique interface and, as a result, its own unique learning curve. While I understand that a social media tool like Buzz will necessarily have a fundamentally different feature set than, say, an RSS reader like Google Reader, there's no reason why some of the baseline conventions of Google Reader, such as the ability to expand and collapse conversations and seamlessly connect to and manipulate feeds, can't be adapted for use in Buzz as well. Using the two services side-by-side reinforces my belief that they may as well have been designed on different planets. There's no reason for this. Cryptic contact management. After years of finding friends in Facebook and identifying interesting folks to follow in Twitter, the Buzz approach to adding contacts is a major letdown. Not that I'm surprised, as contact management within Gmail has never been a Google strong suit. But it's particularly botched here, starting with a "Find People" routine that first forces you to scroll through the friends you're already following. Once you get to the Suggestions field at the bottom, you're faced either with a long list of people you don't know (maybe they sent spam to your Gmail account six months ago) or a really short list of people you don't know. "Load More" buttons are few and far between. Right now, I've got one under the list of folks I follow. Which means it's useless to me. I'd like to have one that helps me find new people to follow, but that's nowhere to be found. Similarly counterintuitive design decisions abound throughout Buzz.I'm apparently not alone, because the kinds of conversations that routinely happen on other social media platforms -- multiple back-and-forth messages that often pull in participants from near and far -- just aren't happening here. I fear Buzz may go down as yet another failed attempt by Google to figure out the social media Holy Grail.I've always thought of myself as a pretty tech-focused guy who can figure out the peculiarities of virtually any piece of software or, increasingly, Web-based service. But Google Buzz makes it such a frustrating, annoying process to get anywhere close to functional with people who matter to me that I've concluded my time would be better spent elsewhere. I'm not convinced spending hours fighting with Buzz's busted interface will do anything to get my "friends" to wake up and engage in this new environment. From where I sit, I doubt it'll change without radically invasive surgery to the product. Even then, I wonder if users already entrenched in Facebook and Twitter will even care enough to chime back in to Buzz.Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The danger with waging a populist political war is in potentially boiling down one's message to such a degree that it ends up insulting and patronizing the very people the message is targeting. The case in point could not be made clearer this afternoon in Washington, DC, as The Hill's Kim Hart first discovered: A handful of otherwise unnoticeable protestors outside the headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters erected an 18-foot inflatable pig, bearing the message, "Fair Pay for Musicians."The pig has become the mascot of the MusicFirst Coalition, the performers' rights agency that collects and distributes royalties. For the last few years, MusicFirst has campaigned extensively against the decades-old exemption of terrestrial radio broadcasters (as opposed to Internet radio) from paying performers' royalties. Stations continue to pay royalties to rights holders, which in the end, include many of the recording industry institutions also represented by MusicFirst.Dueling bills stalled on Capitol Hill would continue this exemption indefinitely, or compel radio stations for the first time to pay performers' royalties on a scale comparable to what Internet streamers such as Pandora and Last.fm reluctantly agreed to last year. In an effort to gather momentum to move pro-royalties legislation forward, associations that support MusicFirst have formed the Radio Accountability Project; launched a Web site, PiggyRadio.com; and produced a new 30-second television spot, all of which heavily feature the poor pig.The tactic appears to be to visually link radio broadcasters with two unpopular groups of citizens: the United States Government, and the executives of banks that accepted federal bailout money in 2008 and 2009 to remain solvent. Whether any substantive link between bankers and broadcasters actually exists is open for debate. Nonetheless, PiggyRadio.com clearly shows the corporate broadcasting pig feeding from an orange barrel marked "Bailout Funds." The theory is that, by not paying royalties, continuing to accept the exemption is virtually almost exactly similar to accepting a government bailout.However, one tactical error may have emerged today: In its invitation to the pig-out this afternoon (PDF available here), the RAP group estimated the amount of the "bailout" -- by association, the amount of royalties MusicFirst would receive from broadcasters -- as "billions." "These giant radio companies made more than $15 billion in revenues last year without paying musicians a single penny through a performance royalty," the RAP invitation read. "Worse, they have been using the public's airwaves to lobby and intimidate Congress on the issue. Specifically, here is what the broadcast corporations want: A bailout from the federal government in the form of billions for broadcast spectrum that they got for free and don't even use."Thus the National Association of Broadcasters -- its office windows covered in pink -- found itself today doing two things it never expected to do: explaining that its members actually have never requested federal bailout money, and buying sausage pizza for the handful of protesters (by one estimate, five) who accompanied the giant pig.NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton issued this statement this afternoon: "It's no surprise that [the Recording Industry Association of America] is now employing silly frat-boy stunts, given its well-documented practice of suing college kids to rescue a bankrupt business model. It also seems appropriate for RIAA to use an inflatable pig as its mascot, since its foreign-owned members would be the biggest beneficiaries of performance tax pork. RIAA is losing this issue on Capitol Hill and in the court of public opinion, and today's demonstration represents a new low in a campaign of utter desperation."Wharton then went on to suggest that the recording industry at least buy a sausage pizza for "the scores of exploited musicians who have had to sue their record label to recoup allegedly unpaid album royalties." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews FileMaker Pro 11 left beta testing for general release on Tuesday, adding a host of new capabilities for better productivity in database use, faster database creation, and easy production of eye-catching charts. Now updated for Microsoft's Windows 7 and Apple's Macintosh native Mac OS X "Cocoa" platform, FileMaker Pro is the only software in its category that runs on both Windows and Mac, noted Ryan Rosenberg, vice president, marketing and services for FileMaker, Inc., in a briefing for Betanews."We're number one on Mac, and number two after Microsoft Access on Windows," according to Rosenberg.With so few rivals for FileMaker Pro on either platform, why is the Apple division adding so many new features this time around? "We want everyone to become a database user," the VP responded.In contrast to FileMaker's Bento personal database program, a Mac-only product targeted at consumers and very small businesses, the division's flagship FileMaker product is designed mainly for "knowledge workers" at mid- to large-sized businesses.Rosenberg said that FileMaker, Inc. now eyes expanding the adoption of FileMaker Pro among both advanced database users and novices, who might have been performing tasks such as invoicing using spreadsheets instead.Like Bento, FileMaker Pro requires no familiarity with programming languages. In recent releases, the product has gained external links to Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases.Rosenberg also contended, though, that FileMaker Pro has long contained a number of features -- such as Web publishing, for example -- still unavailable in the Windows-only Microsoft Access. He then argued that, on the whole, FileMaker's interface is smoother and easier to use.Key enhancements in FileMaker Pro 11 include: FileMaker Charts for quick production of colorful bar, line and pie charts. Quick Find, an intuitive, iTunes-like search engine for database information. A Quick Start screen for making new databases, managing files, and finding help resources. Quick Reports for setting up data in a similar way to the popular pivot charts in spreadsheets. Snapshot Links for easy sharing of the most up-to-date database query results with co-workers and business partners. Layout Folders allowing advanced users to capture and reapply their favorite layouts across multiple types of reports. Inspector, a "master tool palette" for controlling layout objects and properties. A new Invoices Starter Solution, one of 31 template-based built-in solutions for performing specific tasks.Rosenberg also acknowledged a certain amount of "cross-fertilization" between FileMaker and Bento, even though the two database programs are geared to different audiences."Features such as Quick Reports have been heavily influenced by Bento. But it really goes both ways, because Bento was originally based on the FileMaker product, anyway," he observed.The new FileMaker series actually comes in four flavors: FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Server, and FileMaker Server Advanced. Rosenberg said that FileMaker Server Advanced has been enhanced to remove limits on the numbers of supported users, while adding the ability to set different permission rights for various groups of users. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Yesterday, Samsung launched its 2010 line of 3D TVs, which includes LED, LCD, and plasma screens between 46" and 65", with prices that start at $1,999 and go up to $6,999. Today, Panasonic added its products into the mix at a launch event in New York City with partners Best Buy, 20th Century Fox, and DirecTV.The event marked the debut of a 3D home theater package that will sell exclusively at Best Buy that includes a 50" Panasonic Viera 3D plasma TV (VT20- $2,499), a Panasonic 3D Blu-ray player (BDT-300 - $399) and one pair of active shutter glasses for 3D viewing. It's comparable to the package Samsung announced yesterday, except that it comes with one fewer pair of 3D glasses. The whole package will go for $2,899, starting today.Panasonic said it will also launch 54", 58", and 65" models later this year.Unfortunately, there is still no new content available for the 3D systems, and therefore no really compelling reason to rush out and upgrade your HDTV to 3D right now, especially if you're not particularly fond of Pixar-style "family fun" films. Early adopters will only be able to enjoy the 3D experience on a couple of features, such as Dreamworks' Monsters vs. Aliens which was announced at Samsung's CES press conference this year, and Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which was announced at about the same time.Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Executive Vice President of Marketing Mary Daily also appeared at the event today, to announce that the studio's first 3D Blu-ray title will be Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, another animated children's movie.Panasonic's partner DirecTV appeared at the event today, and it is expected to launch at least three stations in 3D which will include sports and music video content, but those won't be until June at the earliest.DirecTV says it is working with AEG/AEG Digital Media, CBS, Fox Sports/FSN, Golden Boy Promotions, HDNet, MTV, NBC Universal, and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. to develop 3D programming that will debut in 2010-2011. All of DirecTV's 3D channels will also carry the Panasonic brand for a year.More electronics manufacturers will be showing off their 3D TVs in the coming months, but content is still lagging behind, and there has yet to be a mostly live-action 3D movie that takes advantage of the new 3D Blu-ray spec, or even one that is made for adults with a taste for movies a little less lighthearted. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Windows Mobile phones continue to bleed US subscribers, with Android devices picking up most of the lost subscriber share. Can you say free falling? Today, ComScore released standard handset and smartphone data for the three-month period of November 2009 to January 2010. ComScore designates the platforms by vendor. Microsoft smartphone subscriber share fell to 15.7 percent from 19.7 percent three months earlier. Meanwhile, Google rose to 7.1 percent from 2.8 percent during the same time period.What about iPhone, for which American bloggers and journalists are seemingly obsessed? If Apple is gaining smartphone subscribers, it's not substantially showing in the data. Subscriber share rose from 24.8 percent to 25.1 percent, which is statistically negligible. Meanwhile, Research in Motion slightly climbed -- to 43 percent from 41.3 percent.There were 234 million mobile subscribers ages 13 or older between November and January, according to ComScore. Nearly 43 million Americans owned smartphones. The number of smartphone owners increased by 18 percent compared to the previous three months.The data is obviously bad news for Microsoft, which is making a major mobile platform switch to Windows Phone 7 Series. First devices aren't expected until late third quarter at the earliest. Next week, T-Mobile is planning a launch event for the HTC HD2. Unfortunately, the Windows Mobile-powered device, considered one of the hottest smartphones on the market, isn't eligible for Windows Phone 7 Series. Can Microsoft gain lost share despite the HD2's non-upgradability? Future ComScore data will tell.But the numbers aren't good for Apple, either. Huge growth marked iPhone's first three releases. Questions to ask now about iPhone's stalled subscriber growth:Has Verizon Wireless "There's a map for that" counter-AT&T advertising hurt iPhone sales? Is Verizon's other marketing campaign -- for Droid -- slowing network churn to AT&T for iPhone? Are AT&T's well-publicized network problems (dropped calls and failed connections) hurting iPhone sales? Is Android benefitting from the increasing number of handsets, which are available through all US major carriers while iPhone is tethered to AT&T? Do smartphone buyers perhaps care about multitasking, which Apple hobbled on iPhone but is available on all other major competing platforms?My answer is "Yes" to all five questions. Carrier subscriber data is revealing. During fourth quarter, AT&T gained 2.7 million subscribers for a total of 85.1 million. Verizon wireless subscribers grew by only 2.2 million, to 91.2 million, but beat Wall Street consensus of 1.5 million. Three months earlier, Verizon gained 1.2 million subscribers; 1.1 million in second quarter 2009. For third quarter 2009, AT&T gained 2 million subscribers; 1.4 million in second quarter 2009. Late-year AT&T gains are to be expected following release of iPhone 3GS in June last year. But Verizon's fourth-quarter surge is revealing and follows two major marketing campaigns and introduction of several Android-based handsets.Marketing is a factor often overlooked by iPhone-obsessed bloggers and journalists. Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year marketing iPhone. Verizon is spending $100 million on its Droid marketing campaign, which has helped raise Android smartphones' profile. Meanwhile, Verizon continues to club AT&T with aggressive advertising about network reliability. Verizon's marketing answer to Apple and AT&T is more bite than bark.Oh and what about Microsoft? When did you last see Windows Mobile smartphone advertising from Microsoft? The company plans to spend big on Windows Phone 7 Series, but that's months away.In early 2010, Apple changed tactics with iPhone marketing, and it will be interesting to see the affect on consumer perceptions.  Presumably to combat competitor counter-marketing about there being no real multitasking, newer TV commercials insinuate that iPhone users can do many things at once.Two of three newest iPhone commercials focus on families and feature female narration. That says heaps about where Apple sees the next big market segment for iPhone. Typically, gadget geeks (many of them male) are the first adopters of products like smartphones. Later, manufacturers tailor the products and their marketing for women and, more importantly, families. Timing is right if, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett asserts, "Women are the biggest emerging market."As for Windows Phone 7 Series marketing, it's too soon to guess Microsoft's approach or its effectiveness. As for Android, its future looks bright. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The European Parliament today overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution compelling participants in multi-national negotiations over the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to report on the status and substance of those negotiations, first to Parliament and eventually to the general public. This after a groundswell of public concern arose in the wake of documents purporting to be official ACTA material, the latest leaked by Wired last November (PDF available here from Wired), spoke of US negotiators' requests to include terms in the final Agreement that would force Internet service providers to police the content trafficked over their pipelines, or else face penalties.A statement issued from Parliament this afternoon records the final vote as 633-13-16 in favor of the resolution, the motion for which (DOC available here) was drafted just yesterday on behalf of six of the continent's political parties and alliances, including Greens/EFA. That motion referred to the leaked documents by name, effectively confirming their legitimacy.The motion warned that those documents referred to the institution of measures among ACTA members, including the EU, of criminal penalties for those accused of violating, or assisting in the violation of, intellectual property rights. The leaked Wired document, dated August 30, 2009, entitled simply "ACTA negotiations," indicated that US negotiators were not in a position to discuss even among other trade negotiators the substance of consultations with "a number of private stakeholders (bound to strict confidentiality clauses)" -- a group which presumably includes publishing and recording associations.Rather than provide colleagues with written documents, the August 30 document stated, US representatives were free to give an oral summary of their requested proposal, which would be an abbreviated version of the existing US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Clauses of the ACTA as US representatives proposed would narrow the legal definition of "safe harbor" as it pertains to ISPs, which today are protected from liability for IP violations under laws recognized as high up the chain as the Supreme Court. The ACTA, as discussed at the time, would only provide safe harbor to ISPs that instituted policies and installed technologies to deter IP violations, including the illicit trading of unauthorized files.Later clauses would clearly classify the stripping of rights management provisions from any software as an IP violation, punishable with both civil and criminal penalties. And in a telling bit of legalese whose economy of phraseology speaks volumes as to its intent, the leaked August 30 document included this provision: "'Fair use' will not be circumscribed."Last year, in an effort to diffuse growing public criticism (before legislators caught wind of it), the Office of the US Trade Representative issued a brief (PDF available here) discussing what it said could be discussed in public about ACTA negotiations. As to the matter of publicly revealing little things about, say, overriding the Supreme Court, the Office diplomatically gave credence to objections, while at the same time attempting to place them in a little box over to the side somewhere."A variety of groups have shown their interest in getting more information on the substance of the negotiations and have requested that the draft text be disclosed," the USTR document reads, referring indirectly to groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge. "However, it is accepted practice during trade negotiations among sovereign states to not share negotiating texts with the public at large, particularly at earlier stages of the negotiation. This allows delegations to exchange views in confidence facilitating the negotiation and compromise that are necessary in order to reach agreement on complex issues. At this point in time, ACTA delegations are still discussing various proposals for the different elements that may ultimately be included in the agreement. A comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet exist."The USTR paper went on to mention the need to empower judges to impose stricter penalties for IP violations, though by its authors' own admission, it leaves a gaping hole with respect to the broadening of the definition of what an IP violation is. Trade negotiations throughout history have been, by definition, confidential, and their secrecy has been mutually observed for centuries. However, the EP took issue today with the whole notion not only that certain elements of the negotiation should be kept secret from lawmakers, but that negotiators should continue -- as the leaked August 30 document and the USTR brief indicate -- to keep certain elements secret from themselves.According to this morning's EP statement, the resolution as adopted takes a strong stand specifically against the adoption of "three strikes" rules against IP violators, such as those being tested now in France; and also against the enablement, perhaps through deliberate imprecision (see "circumscribed"), of restrictions on access to media. Parliament now says the final ACTA "should not affect global access to legitimate, affordable and safe medicinal products, including innovative and generic products," according to the resolution.The USTR brief also refers to negotiations for a clause that would empower customs agents patrolling borders to seize any material believed to infringe upon intellectual property. Without being specific, "any material" could include a hard disk drive...or the computer or MP3 player containing a hard disk drive.The EP resolution took a stand against that as well, calling upon trade negotiators to provide "full clarification of any clauses that would allow for warrantless searches and confiscation of information storage devices such as laptops, cell phones, and MP3 players by border and customs authorities."The problem with today's resolution is that it may not be legally binding. While it takes a very public stand, trade negotiators may very well continue to argue that it's their duty to continue to safeguard the intellectual property of the private stakeholders who developed that IP...to protect the IP of the private stakeholders. While the resolution reminds European representatives of their duty to uphold the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, which include keeping Parliament abreast of negotiations, that treaty was only fully enforced last December 1. Since the ACTA negotiations began earlier, participants could argue that they've been "grandfathered in," for reasons which, to borrow a phrase, may not be circumscribed. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Different modes of travel often require different routes to be taken. If you're walking somewhere, for example, you're not likely to take a highway to get there, and you have the distinct advantage of being able to go through certain structures that cars cannot. The same goes for biking. When someone is planning to get somewhere by bike, they're going to demand different routes. This is why the Google Maps team today announced that it has added bicycling directions to Google Maps.Shannon Guymon, product manager for Google Maps said, "We wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done."Google has taken more than 12,000 miles of bike trail data from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's TrailLink.com database. The Washington, DC nonprofit has been collecting trail data since 2000, and has maps, pictures, descriptions, and listings for more than 30,000 miles of bike trails."The demand for trail maps and information has never been higher, especially as more people recognize biking as a viable, inexpensive and healthy alternative to driving," said Rails-to-Trails President Keith Laughlin today.But simply having the data on hand is completely a different matter from the whole business of machine-suggested routes. Google had to incorporate trail data into its routing algorithm, include metropolitan areas with designated bike lanes, and include roads that have been recommended by other cyclists, all the while taking into consideration the business about certain roads. All that is just to determine the most biker-accommodating paths according to safety. There's also the whole issue of hills."Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you're biking on," said Google software engineer John Leen. "Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you'll require and the speed you'll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion." Likewise, the algorithm avoids routes that have too much downhill travel as well so the ride is balanced.Today's launch of Google Maps for bikes is sort of the opposite of a development from last year, an Android app called My Tracks which targeted runners, hikers, and cyclists. Instead of suggesting routes, My Tracks collected live GPS statistics from the user's smartphone and mapped out total/moving time, (average) speed, distance, and elevation profile on Google Maps as the trips were being made.Google Maps for bicycles is live right now. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Tuesday evening, during an event televised over YouTube called Google Campfire One, Google executives lifted the curtain on its cloud-based Apps Marketplace for PC-based applications, with the promise of opening its online store with 50 charter vendors later in the evening. The Marketplace is designed to feature applications that integrate with the company's existing Google Apps, Gmail, and other cloud-based services.Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gondotra told attendees at the company's headquarters that the company plans to utilize very simple terms of service. Think of a garden, but more with clearly marked paths as opposed to walls. Extending the concept of the Android Marketplace from handsets to computing devices, the company is inviting developers to build applications using its Studio tool, then deploy those apps by way of the Marketplace. Each developer is asked to pay a $100 sign-up fee, and then give Google a 20% revenue share for sales, at whatever price the developer charges. (We have not seen yet whether there will be a price cap.)11:10 pm EST March 9, 2010 · "The Google Apps Marketplace...[is] a great way to discover, to find, and install applications into your business. But not just any applications -- applications that are deeply integrated with Google Apps...that enable a single sign-on, that enable different kinds of cloud-based software to share data," explained Vice President of Engineering Vic Gondotra to the Campfire One attendees. "Applications that integrate with the navigation, integrate with the user interface of the tools that your employees already know and love and use every day."The integration Gondotra spoke of will take place through a relatively simple XML-based manifest, the typical length of which is promised to be not very long. An actual Google Apps manifest (not the abbreviated version used in Google's slides) is pictured below.Each category in this manifest represents a point of integration with the Google Apps environment -- actually, with any online service that Google Apps is capable of reaching. Gmail is one of these places; tonight, the company's director of engineering, David Glaser, promised a theoretical level of integration with Gmail that would enable business apps developers to create Gmail plug-ins that would appear to match, or maybe rival, the functionality available in Microsoft Outlook.Glaser demonstrated the creation of an app manifest, which would also contain the "pages" (actually resources identified with URLs) that link to Google Apps' various points of integration. Perhaps the one that will be most often used is single sign-on, which will enable the identity of the Google Apps user to be shared with that of the custom app. Through the OAuth-based authentication protocol Google will use, developers will be able to deploy databases for their cloud apps using their own clouds, if you will, and then let Google's authentication pass through to the developers' clouds to validate users and enable the granting of permissions.Glaser outlined another point of connection: "If you've ever used Google Apps, you've noticed at the top left of the screen, right above your mail or your calendar, there's a nav bar. That means you're a click or two away from getting at any of the other apps in the Google Apps suite...Well, if you have an application, you probably want it to be a part of the same navigation model, part of the same nav bar, so your users are a click or two away from not only the built-in Google Apps, but also from your app. How do you do that? You put an entry in the manifest -- a few lines of XML, you tell us, 'Here's the string that I want to have show up in the menu, and here's the link that it should go to when somebody clicks on it.'"The keyword here again from Google is "simple," which is what will distinguish its cloud-based apps ecosystem from Microsoft Windows Azure in almost every respect. An app in Google's environment would appear to be leveraged on an existing Google App or service. As Glaser explained, a custom app will have its own home page, if you will; but as Gondotra explained, what makes the app usable in the first place is its connectivity with the existing hub that Google has in place. So the development studio for such apps (itself a Web application, pictured above running in Firefox on Google's favorite PC operating system, Windows XP) is specifically geared to generate this manifest and plug apps into the existing hub.That's not to say apps won't or can't stand alone on their own, or even pre-exist, as Gondotra told the audience: "We're not mandating that you have to build on a particular platform. You don't have to use App Engine, although we'd be delighted to see that. You may already have an existing app built on your own infrastructure, your own tools, your own hosting environment...It's very easy to integrate even that existing app into Google Apps."The ability for apps to stand on their own was exemplified this evening by charter partner Intuit's first entry into the Marketplace. It showed an online payroll application for small business that enables office managers to keep track of employees' payrolls, using tools that are also integrated into Google Calendar. (It's hard not to notice that Google's app development platform runs on Firefox, while it prefers to run the apps themselves on Chrome.)Among Google's list of 50 charter developers, we noted, was Zoho -- a company whose existing cloud-based apps had actually competed against Google Apps, while using many deployment resources actually created by Google.The exact terms and conditions that apply to Google's developers' agreement -- a $100 one-time up-front fee to enroll per developer (not per app), and a 20% cut of the revenue -- are not known as of this evening. Vic Gondotra did say, however, that Google will enable online resellers to promote and sell apps from the Marketplace, with 20% of the cut from resold apps also going to Google and the rest to their developers."Remember, with that rev share, you not only get to reach the 25 million customers, but you also get to take advantage of over 1,000 resellers who are not only going to be able to resell Google Apps, but may, in fact, be able to drive business directly to you," stated Gondotra. He did not say whether this resale operation would actually take place as part of Google's existing advertising platform, which may be why the early number of resellers (one thousand) is so high.A few years ago when Google premiered its online apps on a mostly free business model (with some subscription revenue attached for upper-level apps more recently), folks wondered how Google would turn this into a revenue center. Now we know the answer: The company wants to earn its cut not from its core apps, but from a substantial slice of your apps. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews After showing a prototype of its first electronic reader at CES in January, Samsung on Tuesday officially rolled out the new device, spilling all the details about the final feature set while also unveiling a new partnership with Barnes & Noble.Unlike other gadgets in the increasingly crowded field, the Samsung eReader lets people make notes in the margins of e-book pages, pointed out Vickie Cullen, a Samsung spokesperson, at a press event in New York City where the company launched a number of CE products including this device, 3D TVs, and a 3D Blu-ray player.Users of Samsung's eReader can modify the electronic pages by underlining words, for example, and they can use built-in voice recording functionality to produce audio memos and annotations. It's also able to read text aloud, but only with electronic books that support text-to-speech (TTS) technology.A reader can make notes in the margins through the use of a special electromagnetic resonance (EMR) stylus pen. In a demo at the event, we saw how you can easily make the brushstrokes wider or narrower or even turn the pen into an "eraser" by touching the tip of the pen to icons at the bottom of the screen.The eReader comes in a slider form factor with a six-inch E-ink screen displaying at 600x800 resolution in eight shades of grey. Cullen said that you can import drawings and photos in JPEG and BMP formats as well as other files downloaded from the Internet to a PC, using the eReader's mini-USB port. Other supported file formats include e-pub, PDF/a, and TXT.Slated to ship this spring for $299. Samsung's new device offers 26 GB of internal memory, plus an external Micro SD slot capable of increasing storage by another 16 GB.The product also comes with built-in speakers and Bluetooth technology for playing back music or TTS translation, she said. Readers can use the gadget's built-in Wi-Fi, together with Samsung's proprietary EmoLink technology, for sharing content -- including notes jotted in e-book margins, for instance -- between two devices.Samsung has also joined the growing list of e-reader makers now partnering with Barnes & Noble -- the arch rival of Amazon.com, the pioneer of the field. Through a new deal between Samsung and Barnes & Noble, users of Samsung's new eReader can use either a Wi-Fi or PC connection to browse, sample, and download content from B&N. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews At a press conference in New York City on Tuesday, Samsung unveiled new 3D products that include six HDTV series, a Shrek 3D movie, and a DVD player designed to handle 3D along with regular Blu-ray and standard DVD disks. Samsung's initial 3D TV line-up -- which requires 3D glasses for viewing - ranges from the LED 7000/8000/9000 Series to the LCD 750 Series and the Plasma 7000/8000 Series. Samsung also debuted the 3D-capable BD-C6900 Blu-ray player, a 3D-enabled release of Dreamworks' Monsters vs. Aliens along with the entire Shrek series, and a large set of Internet-downloadable applications for the 3D Blu-ray player and some of Samsung's 3D TVs.Kicked off by an ad campaign broadcast during Sunday's Academy Awards show, the first two 3D TV models from Samsung -- the 46" and 55" editions of the LED C7000 -- are already available in stores, said Dave R. Das, director, Visual Display Marketing, in an interview with Betanews at the event. So, too, are the first 12 apps for Samsung's 3D gear, with others slated for completion by the end of March, said Jason Han, senior manager, content partnership, CE Division.The remaining 3D TVs -- and the 3D Blu-ray drive, priced at $399 -- are expected to roll out over the next few months.The widget-enabled 3D apps will run not just with the new Blu-ray drive, but also the LED TVs, all of which are IP-capable. The first dozen apps include Rovi TV Listings, Yahoo, and streaming video movie apps from Netflix, Blockbuster, and Vudu, along with several games. One of the applications due out later this month is a Skype video conferencing app that will use a custom camera. The camera is slated to sit on top of a Samsung TV and to be sold by Skype. Although all of the apps released in March will be offered free of charge, Samsung plans to start selling "premium" apps over this summer, Betanews was told.Samsung dubbed the press conference "3D Wonder," and the name turned out to be apt for more reasons than one. Many of the journalists did marvel at the quality of the Samsung-supplied 3D experience, particularly during an airing at the event of a 3D Dreamworks' Shrek movie displayed on a huge "cube" of LCD panels.Yet some also wondered aloud whether, during the current deep recession, all that many consumers will be willing to invest in the 3D ware, which Samsung is pricing at the rate of $150 for a pair of 3D glasses and about $1,599.99 to $6,999.99 for a 3D TV. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews One month ago, Google put the word out that it was looking to build and test its own fiber-to-the-home networks in a couple of cities. The speeds would be up to 1 Gbps and the reach would initially be about 50,000 homes.Immediately, hundreds of cities began making pitches to attract Google's attention, some earnest, some outlandish.Topeka, Kansas unofficially renamed itself "Google" for the month and garnered a considerable amount of attention; Sarasota, Florida quickly followed suit and re-named its City Island "Google Island". Duluth, Minnesota's mayor Don Ness jumped into a 35 degree Lake Superior as a dual-purpose media event for Google Fiber and the Special Olympics; and 1,000 Morgantown, West Virginia residents last week held up signs saying "We Want a Gig" at the WVU-Georgetown basketball game.But the majority of the cities interested in getting Google Fiber haven't resorted to cheap publicity stunts, and are hoping that their answers to Google's Request for Information will be much more convincing."I think we're going to draw the line at silly stunts," Madison, Wisconsin alderman Mark Clear said today. City officials there are hosting a public meeting to gather ideas for their pitch and show the community's interest in the project.Juneau, Alaska has made the case that its isolated, mountainous location will serve as an ideal testing ground since it is both environmentally challenging and populous. Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley reminded us of Baltimore's historical significance as "that place from which our nation's railroads emanated, and the place that was the source of the first telegraph message ever sent." Kalamazoo, Michigan is using health care as its wager. The Kalamazoo Gazette's Editorial board argues that its modern health care facilities and its major medical corporations Pfizer and Stryker could benefit greatly from the fiber network.In just under three weeks, we will be able to see which approach worked. March 26 is the last day Google will accept submissions for its fiber optic trial, and it will announce which cities it has chosen shortly after. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews With the economic sinkhole of 2008-09 now a figment of many technology companies' past, most PC manufacturers are back on their regularly scheduled growth curve. Last month, Dell had indicated to investors that it was returning to that curve as well, reporting "product shipments...up at double-digit rates year-over-year" during its end-of-fiscal year 2010 earnings report.According to iSuppli, which tracks worldwide PC unit shipments, that Dell claim -- which not a single analyst even questioned at the time, according to Seeking Alpha's transcript of Dell's February 18 earnings conference -- gives "plus or minus" a whole new meaning. The market analyst firm's statistics on full-year unit shipments, published today, show Dell's numbers declining by 9.946% during calendar year 2009. Dell's fiscal 2010 began in February 2009, so iSuppli's numbers cover most of that period plus January 2010 -- in a quarter where Dell actually recovered slightly.Dell shipped just under 39 million PCs, which is beneath the psychological benchmark of 10 million units per quarter. In the last quarter, Acer topped Dell for the first time in quarterly units shipped; and this last quarter, put some distance between itself and Dell, gaining 1.5% of worldwide market share in the last quarter of 2009. Acer shipped 11.86 million PCs during that quarter -- almost 29% more units than for the previous year's final quarter -- and 38.48 million for the full year.What's Acer's secret? According to the breakdown by iSuppli principal analyst Matthew Wilkins, Acer doesn't waste its time selling desktop PCs in markets that don't want them. As a result, four out of every five units Acer ships are notebook PCs, and it can concentrate on selling those notebooks in heavier volume in markets such as North America.Dell's breakdown is a little fuzzier, with iSuppli only being able to ascertain that its mix of desktop PCs to notebook PCs has declined at a lesser rate than the rest of the industry. (Again, nobody asked.) Last February, Dell executives credited higher shipment rates in the storage systems segment (a non-consumer division) as contributing to the company's generally better revenue numbers. Perhaps that's the double-digit gain Dell was referring to. But the second quarter report credits the Mobility division with 31% of net revenue for fiscal year 2010, versus 25% for desktop PCs. Gross margin for Dell in its last fiscal year slipped to a minuscule 16.6%. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The window of opportunity may be closing for the first test of government mandated fairness and equal choice among Web browsers, with neutral results. There are a number of studies recently that say computer users in general have a tendency to automatically distrust notices that pop up on their screen. More attention was paid to those studies since last March, after Microsoft's deployment of Internet Explorer 8 over Windows Update was followed by a general downtrend in IE usage, interrupted by a brief respite in early October, according to global tracking data from analytics vendor StatCounter.If what Microsoft's security representatives have said is true -- that the key window for adoption of an update or patch usually comes a few days after Patch Tuesday -- then StatCounter's tracking data for IE usage in Europe could count as sweet revenge. Since Microsoft deployed its browser choice screen for European users, in compliance with European Commission directives, on March 1, StatCounter reports European usage share for all versions of Internet Explorer has stayed steady at about 46.6%, with negligible gains since the beginning of the month.This while Mozilla Firefox continues an unusual decline of about two points of European usage share since the first of the year, and relative newcomer Google Chrome ticks up at about one point per month.So far, Internet Explorer 6 usage remains rock solid at 6.37% as of yesterday, tied with Chrome 4 in usage share for Europe. This as the adoption rate of Firefox 3.6 among former users of version 3.5 has tapered off somewhat. Worldwide usage share of IE6 continues to decline at the almost invisible rate of a tenth of a point per week.Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market ShareThus far, there's no indication from StatCounter's charts that the browser screen has impacted the usage rate of any browser on the continent, one way or the other. The trends that had been in place, including the tapering off of Firefox 3.6 adoption, appear to be continuing.Anyone looking for a technical reason for this lack of a trend may not be able to point to faulty algorithms anymore. In recent days, Microsoft implemented a fix to the randomization of browser choices on its browserchoice.eu Web site, in response to a discovery that was validated last week by IBM's Rob Weir, that the JavaScript function Math.random used by IE wasn't shuffling browsers' positions fairly. The revised code now clearly employs a random shuffling algorithm, which creates arrays of pointers that exchange places with one another like shuffling cards -- an alternative that Weir and others had suggested.As Weir posted on Saturday, Microsoft's revised code is now about as fair as it gets, with each of the top five browsers getting 20% placement, plus or minus only a few thousandths of a point. As a suggestion for the future, Weir pointed out the irony of searching for proper programming methodologies using, ironically, Google Search."Several commenters mentioned that if you search Google for 'javascript random array sort,' the first link returned will be a JavaScript tutorial that has the same offending code as Microsoft's algorithm. This is not surprising," Weir wrote. "As I said in my original post, this is a well-known mistake. But it is no less a mistake. If you use Google Code Search for the query "0.5 - Math.random()" lang:javascript you will find 50 or so other instances of the faulty algorithm. So if anyone else is using this same algorithm, they should evaluate whether it is really sufficiently random for their needs. In some case, such as a children's game, it might be fine. But know that there are better and faster algorithms available that are not much more complicated to code." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 have lagged behind Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360 for most of this generation, and the PSP and PSP Go now face a serious threat from Apple's iPhone OS-based handhelds. Despite these factors, though, Sony has managed to set up one of the strongest Web-based storefronts for digital content distribution to its consoles. Offering full downloadable games, add-ons, XMB customizations, game trailers, and HD Hollywood feature films and television episodes for rent or purchase, the PlayStation Network is an attractive and easily navigable repository for media on Sony game machines. It's a shame that setting up and hosting online games for the PS3 isn't as simple as its store.Today, Sony announced the "Movies" section of the PlayStation Network has finally been completed, and HD content from all six major US movie studios (20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros.) is now available."PlayStation Network is the first and only service to deliver high definition home entertainment from all six major studios, directly to consumers for download," said Peter Dille, SCEA senior vice president of marketing and PlayStation Network. Sony did not give a number today of how many titles are available from these studios, but instead listed 19 releases that hit the US PlayStation store in High Definition today. The "completed" store will launch next in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews At CES this year, every major consumer electronics company involved in the HDTV market had floorspace dedicated to 3D TVs. They were convinced that 3D in the home is ready for widespread adoption, and the popularity of James Cameron's Avatar would kickstart adoption.Samsung today announced its full 2010 3D TV lineup, which shows just how expensive it's going to be to upgrade your home theater to the third dimension.The 3D TV lineup includes the LED 7000/8000/9000 Series (starting at $1,999.99, about halfway down the chart), the LCD 750 Series, and the Plasma 7000/8000 Series. The 46" and 55" LED C7000 will be available this month, and the rest will roll out at different points during the spring.But the TV is only one part of the whole setup. You will need at least a 3D-capable Blu-ray player, one pair of active shutter glasses for every viewer, and, of course, the 3D discs. Samsung will be selling its 3D Blu-ray player for $399.99, and its Blu-Ray home theater system for $899.99 this April.With the immediate point of entry at $2,400, Samsung could at least throw in some stitches to close the wound to your bank account. So the company announced a promotion program where customers who buy a 3D TV and 3D Blu-ray player will get two pairs of active shutter glasses and a 3D Blu-ray copy of Monsters vs. Aliens for free. Tomorrow, Panasonic is expected to unveil its 3D offerings for the year with a similar promotional tie-in with Best Buy. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews 12:02 pm EST March 9, 2010 · A spokesperson for Opera Software provided Betanews this morning with a summary of a complete blog post on the alleged exploit of Opera 10.5, published moments ago:"The original report about the Windows-only malformed Content-length header problem is not a security issue, but a variant of the issue, brought to our attention by Secunia, has a theoretical possibility of allowing arbitrary code to run. We have developed a fix for the problem, which is being tested, and are planning to release an update of Opera soon. Until then, if Opera crashes on an untrusted site, you should avoid visiting that site again."11:52 am EST March 9, 2010 · Though Opera, like all Web browsers, has never been immune to exploits, the news of the first serious exploit to affect its new and groundbreaking version 10.5 now has the company's representatives taking time away from shoring up the final Mac version of 10.5, to respond to what security firm Secunia is calling a "highly critical" exploit in the new product.Last Wednesday, purported PHP server-side exploit code for Opera appeared on a "gray-hat" Web site where such exploits are commonly found. The author's name is credited as Marcin Ressel -- who, contrary to blog reports, does not appear to be an engineer either with Secunia or Vupen Security (it could just be a made-up identity, for all anyone knows). In his code listing, Ressel left contact information for an e-mail address using the Polish .PL domain, along with a playlist of favorite music from a Polish streaming site.In the comments section of the code, Ressel describes the exploit as, "Integer overflow leading to out of bounds array access R/W [read/write]." The overflow is apparently triggered by a maliciously malformed HTTP response header; specifically, the Content-Length property is replaced with a bunch of '9's.An examination of the code indicates, by the author's own admission, it may not be very sophisticated. For example, the statement that generates the malformed header is capped with the comment, /*Generated by my own fuzzer*/ -- which could mean that he wrote a fuzzer, or that he happens to own an effective fuzzer. The code does appear to try to establish a stealth socket connection with the client, which the code presumes is Opera (it does test for operating system, but does not appear to test for browser brand).So the question is whether the exploit code, after generating an exception, delivers a malicious payload to the Opera browser. In a statement last Friday, Opera Communications Director Tor Odland told the Norweigian tech news service Digi.no all of one sentence: that Opera had confirmed the exploit was not harmful. And in a follow-up statement this morning on Twitter, Opera engineer Haavard wrote, "Our security guys are working on proper public information on Secunia advisory 38820." This after having tweeted earlier that no one on Opera's development team has been able to actually deliver a malicious payload using the exploit.The Secunia advisory, published last Thursday, states, "Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code." The keyword here could be "may," as opposed to "does" or "will."Ressel's comments indicated that while the exploit affected Opera version 10.5 for sure, he felt confident that it probably affected version 10.1 or earlier. The Secunia advisory made the same claim, effectively that older versions were possibly impacted. And while Vupen's advisory claimed its team had confirmed only that 10.5 was vulnerable, the term "prior" was used under "Affected Products." It might, or may, or will be nice for someone to actually try that out and see. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Should the next version of HTML, the Web standard that embodies how pages are laid out and constructed, include explicit specifications for inline, 2D dynamic graphics? There's valid arguments on both sides. One side believes that the ability to plot charts and animations would have been part of the original HTML standard anyway, had the technology existed on the back end in the beginning; giving HTML 2D graphics now, they say, plugs a hole left open for too long. Another believes the HTML5 standard should simply specify an API for plug-ins, to let separate groups of engineers evolve a methodology for plotting graphics at their own pace, and on their own track.From one angle, the debate appears as innocuous as this: Should graphics be considered within the scope of a markup language, or not? But any debate on the topic of Web standards development has never sustained continued viewing from one angle alone. From another angle entirely, one can't help but notice that the principal advocate of letting the so-called Canvas element be developed separately, is an engineer with Adobe, which has more than the average stake in the outcome of Web graphics development.When the Adobe stakeholder appears to agree with the co-chair of the working group, who hails from Microsoft; and the author of the would-be Working Draft document has ties to Google, it's not long before someone from Opera Software, quite literally, cries "Sabotage!"Last month, among members of the W3C's HTML5 Working Group, a dispute arose over whether the Working Group had the authority to declare the specifications for the Canvas element (not just the plug-in, but the component itself) part of HTML5. Adobe engineer Larry Masinter raised the point that he believed the decision had already been made to split Canvas 2D into its own First Public Working Draft (FPWD).Indeed, there was evidence to back Masinter up on this point, as other W3C participants were either working under the belief that Canvas 2D was on its own track, or noting that a dispute on that issue had yet to be resolved. During a W3C presentation last month, long-time project leader Philippe Le Hégaret acknowledged that a specific difficulty remained before the Last Call Working Draft -- the next-to-last stage on the diagram he was showing the audience -- could be completed."If you take a specification like the HTML5 specification, it's still in the Working Draft status," reads Yahoo's official transcript of the presentation. "We still have several open issues opened against the document. In particular, several accessibility issues that need to be resolved before we can move the document to Last Call."By "accessibility," Le Hégaret was using a keyword in the argument in favor of breaking Canvas out from HTML5: that letting a separate group handle it at its own speed, would make Canvas more accessible to its own developers.In an interview published by the W3C just last Friday, Le Hégaret corresponded with HTML5 Working Group Co-chair Paul Cotton, who also manages Web Services Standards Strategy for Microsoft Canada. In an obviously leading question (like I've never asked a leading question myself), Le Hégaret asked Cotton to explain what HTML5 has evolved to become, in the broad sense. "I agree that many of us use the term 'HTML5' very loosely," began Cotton's response, obviously agreeing with someone in the room."First, I believe that most people use the term 'HTML5' to refer to the HTML5 specification currently being worked on by the HTML WG," he continued. "The HTML5 specification defines the syntax and the semantics of the elements and attributes in the HTML markup language and several of the APIs that are used to process HTML documents. Recently the HTML WG has started to break the HTML5 specification into more modular and separate Working Drafts -- e.g., HTML+RDFa, HTML Microdata, and HTML Canvas 2D Context. The HTML WG is also publishing two additional documents to aid users of HTML5: the HTML5 differences from HTML4 specification and HTML: The Markup Language which is aimed at developers that produce HTML5 output. Each of these additional Working Drafts are still part of 'HTML5' and are all on track to become separate but related W3C Recommendations or Working Group Notes. I believe that the content of these WDs taken together will define the part of 'HTML5' being worked on by the HTML WG."That's how Microsoft's participant described the situation just last Friday. Last February 5, in the Working Group's public mailing list, Adobe's Masinter made it clear he believed Canvas 2D was being split into a separate Working Draft document, and that he disagreed with others' assessment that the WG's own director could somehow also include it concurrently within HTML5.A diagram of the typical evolutionary process of a W3C Working Draft, from a February 2010 presentation by HTML5 Working Group member Philippe Le Hégaret.The following Monday, it appeared as though Le Hégaret sided with the gathering consensus that Canvas is essentially already part of the understood scope of the broader document. However, he did suggest a kind of intermediate solution: the document modularization concept. "The scope of the [Working Group] charter says: 'This group will maintain and produce incremental revisions to the HTML specification,' and the deliverables indicates: 'a language evolved from HTML4 for describing the semantics of documents and applications on the World Wide Web.' I don't think it sets boundaries on what ought to be part of the HTML specification. Whether the figure, video, or data-* is inside the HTML5 specification or in an adjunct doesn't make a difference. We've been encouraged on several occasions to modularize the HTML specification itself, in fact. The Context 2D API was part of the HTML5 specification even before the creation of the charter and was accepted as such by the Working Group."As the minutes of the public meeting of the Working Group from the following Thursday, February 11, indicate, when one of the meeting co-chairs -- Microsoft's Paul Cotton -- stated that the requested changes (the "diffs") were being worked into the Call for Consensus document -- implying that all was going swimmingly -- Adobe's Masinter interrupted. "Do I need to repeat objections?" he asked. "The co-chairs are aware of the formal objection," Cotton responded.The other co-chair was IBM engineer and Apache contributor Sam Ruby. "It would be helpful to repeat the objection," Ruby said. "It would be helpful to people who aren't reading w3-archive e-mail," Cotton added, referring to the administrative mailing list for private issues among members -- usually points of order.But here, Le Hégaret made a bold statement: "We won't approve the [First Public Working Drafts] until the [Formal Objection] is resolved." What formal objection? Wasn't there a dispute over whether there even was an objection? Cotton asked Masinter and Le Hégaret to forward their objections to the public list for everyone to read; they agreed.Next: The search for a conspiracy theory...The search for a conspiracy theorySo how deep was this problem? According to the HTML5 document's designated author, Ian Hickson, it was the standards world's equivalent of a Senate filibuster: "The latest publication of HTML5 is now blocked by Adobe, via an objection that has still not been made public (despite yesterday's promise to make it so)," Hickson wrote. He cited a source who apparently wished to remain anonymous, for reasons he said had to do with belonging to "one of the secret W3C member lists," implying that the Working Group had a public agenda and a private one. This despite the fact that the differences between Masinter's and Cotton's perception of the matter may have been trivial at best.Later, in a blog post entitled "Sabotage!" obviously intended to raise the eyebrows of would-be news aggregators, Opera Software engineer Anne Van Kesteren essentially alleged Adobe -- the manufacturer of Flash, a proprietary graphics technology -- was blocking the forward progress of HTML5 on a technicality: "The objection to HTML Canvas 2D Context is spurious in particular since it has been part of the W3C draft of HTML5 since the very beginning," Van Kesteren wrote. "The scope question for that API has been raised two years ago and was resolved back then, involving all the layers of W3C, including its Director. That it is now decided to publish it is a separate document does not change the resolution of this decision on scope."But while the "sabotage" story was raging, the creator of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, called upon the W3C to implement an "annotation" to the Working Group charter to enable the modularity that Cotton referred to. "I agree with the WG chairs that these items -- data and Canvas -- are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area. On the one hand, they elaborate areas touched on in HTML4. On the other, these elaborations are much deeper than the features of HTML4, but also they form separate subsystems, and these subsystems have strong overlaps with other design areas. It is important (a) that the design be modular; (b) that the specifications be kept modular and (c) that the communities of expertise of the respective fields (graphics and data) be involved in the design process. I am asking the domain lead to annotate the charter in place to make these points clearer to newcomers."Calling the entire substance of the blocking/filibuster allegation "hooey" in a personal blog post two weeks ago, Larry Masinter revealed not only that he followed through with his procedural objection, but he essentially got what he wanted: a change in the charter of the Working Group so that it did encompass Canvas 2D, rather than having a charter that appeared to contradict its own work. But then Masinter's retort took on the broader, and more timeless, topic of what the devil is going on here anyway."Updating the charter to say these things were in scope was always a way of bringing them into scope," Masinter wrote. "That W3C wanted to save face and call it an 'annotation' and skip the normal W3C rechartering process -- well, so many exceptions were made for HTML in the first place, that's fine. What makes a 'standard' process 'open' isn't just 'everyone can read the mailing list.' Trying to follow the HTML standard requires withstanding a 'denial of service' attack; thousands of e-mails, messages, posts, edits to track every single month. No one person can really follow what's going on."I've worked on scores (more than 20 and probably more than 40) different working group charters," Masinter continued. "I think I really understand why working groups have charters, how the words in a charter are chosen carefully, and why it's important to keep things in scope. Is that being nit-picky? Yes, but that's what I do. And, I claim, it's what makes good standards: Follow process, pay attention to details. My perspective is that what makes a good standard is very different than what makes a good implementation guide. Many otherwise good software engineers (even those with a great deal of experience) really don't see it, since their experience and intuitions have served them well in building complex software systems, or leading open source projects."As of now, the HTML5 Working Drafts are officially published, with Canvas 2D among a handful of specifications broken out into modular drafts of their own, as Berners-Lee advised. And that prompted a note of applause last Friday from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Program Manager Adrian Bateman: "Just like good software design, loose coupling and high cohesion are good principles for defining web standards. That doesn't make them easy to apply and there is still more work to do to reduce the coupling between drafts. The group is working on improving the tools used to generate the documents to improve the cross-references, which will help towards this goal."Bateman's comments have contributed to blog posts today pointing to "rumors" that IE9, and Microsoft in turn, would come around to supporting HTML5. This despite the fact that its own man may be to thank for getting the whole draft put together prior to Microsoft's MIX conference next week. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Valve Corporation's Steam is the leading digital distribution channel for PC games. With over 1,000 titles available for purchase, an integrated social network and database of open game servers, Steam has attracted more than 25 million users since launching in 2003.Today, Valve officially announced Steam will be coming to Mac in April, along with Source, the 3D gaming engine used in popular games such as Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike.Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve said, "Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac. Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."John Cook, Director of Steam Development said, "We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews It's throw-Microsoft-a-bone Monday, not that I can promise much meat on it. Microsoft may have fallen behind in mobile, been talking about a three-screen strategy off of two screens, and clumsily competed as usual, but some early 2010 actions deserve at least a little praise. So here's where I give it.First, some context. There's doing right -- and there's doing right. Some of the stuff here I'll assert Microsoft did right I previously dinged the company for getting wrong. That's because what's right for Microsoft might be wrong in a greater competitive landscape, like taking right action A too slowly or not soon enough. With that introduction, here are 10 things Microsoft has done right in 2010 (so far), presented in no order of importance. Microsoft...1. Started over with Windows 7 Phone Series. Microsoft was right to start with a fresh new mobile operating system (if it's really as new as claimed). Windows Mobile -- now called Windows Phone Classic -- had run aground. I called Windows 7 Phone Series a "lost cause" because new supporting handsets aren't expected until around the holidays. The time horizon is simply too long. But matters would have been much worse had v7 been a makeover v6.x and delivered (as rumored) next year. Microsoft made the tough decision of building new.2. Put user experience before backward compatibility with Windows 7 Phone Series. I do hope this is a sign of more changes to come. For decades, Microsoft has prioritized back compatibility, often hobbling new products -- and so the developer and customer experiences. With Windows Phone 7 Series, existing 6.x devices will not be upgradable. From a Windows 6.x device sales perspective, the no-upgrade policy is nothing short of disastrous. That's a short-term sacrifice Microsoft makes now for possible long-term gain -- assuring a better user experience for Windows Phone 7 Series devices. Like many of the things in this Top 10 list, something done wrong also is something done right.3. Took down the Waledac botnet. In late February, Microsoft wrangling gained a court order to shutdown nearly 230 Internet domains alleged to have been used by cybercriminals. Microsoft scored a major triumph against a major botnet.4. Released Outlook Social Connector beta. Outlook is rapidly looking outdated, even with the spruced up user interface coming with Office 2010. Outlook Social Connector beta for Office 2007 mimics functionality built into v2010. The People Pane is a nice start, but Microsoft has got to expand its social circle beyond LinkedIn and in-company or outside-organization relationships exposed through Outlook (and other supporting Microsoft corporate software).5. Filed a complaint -- and encouraged others to do so -- against Google in the European Union. Google is rapidly becoming a dangerous monopoly, more so than Microsoft in the 1990s. While the EU's investigation is at best preliminary, the complaints are potentially more dangerous than some Microsoft Watchers suggest. A single complaint, made by Sun in 1998, led to the Europe's Competition Commission 2004 ruling that Microsoft violated local antitrust laws. A second ruling followed, leading Microsoft last week to offer a browser ballot box in Europe. Microsoft's own experience is lesson enough how potentially beneficial a competitive complaint can be.6. Killed Essential Business Server. EBS was a great idea in 2008 -- to offer midrange, midpriced server software for midsize businesses. But the weak economy and loss of the project's originator (from Microsoft to to the Federal Communications Commission) changed everything. Perhaps if Steven VanRoekel had stayed at Microsoft, EBS' fate would have been different.7. Extended .NET, Silverlight and XNA development across three screens, including Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft already had development pieces in place for two screens -- PC and game console. By supporting Windows Phone, Microsoft creates opportunity for developers to create games or other applications one time for consumption on multiple devices.8. Demonstrated Skinput. During last week's TechFest, Microsoft researchers showed off skin -- on the forearm -- as a natural user interface. Microsoft Research paper "Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface" offers a wonderful overview of the concept. My teenage daughter writes reminders on her arm nearly everyday. In California, seemingly everyone under the age of 35 has several tattoos. Why not use the skin even more functionally? The technology takes advantage of the varying acoustic properties of skin and bones.  Skinput is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that gives hope about future Microsoft innovation.9. Launched Mediaroom 2.0. Microsoft's living room strategy is a work in progress -- and has been since the debut of Windows Media Center nearly a decade ago. Slow progress is still progress -- and Mediaroom 2.0 offers much for telcos looking to deliver a television programming experience better than cable (as an AT&T U-verse customer I can attest to the better-than-cable experience). Then there is the coming Mediaroom support for Xbox. As aforementioned in No. 7, Microsoft already is preparing developers for delivering games across three screens.10. Set Office 2010 business launch for May. The timing is just about right for the first big wave of enterprises to deploy Windows 7. Traditionally, larger businesses deploy new versions of Office and Windows at the same time whenever possible. Microsoft simultaneously released Office 2007 and Windows Vista. But slow -- or no -- enterprise Vista migrations meant that simultaneous Office and Windows release didn't equate to simultaneous deployments. By offsetting Office 2010 and Windows 7 business launches by about 8 months, Microsoft gave business customers time enough to test and qualify Windows 7. Meanwhile, a very public Office 2010 preview allowed for additional testing, too. Many more businesses will now have the more logistically viable option of deploying both products simultaneously or around the same time. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Still racing for an LTE launch in the second half of this year, Verizon Wireless has been testing its trial 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks in Boston and Seattle since last August. Today the wireless network operator says it will be able to deliver speeds between 5-12 Mbps downlink and 2-5Mbps uplink at launch."Our LTE rollout plan positions Verizon Wireless to be a global leader in 4G LTE deployment. We are on track to deliver an outstanding wireless data experience to customers in 25 to 30 markets covering roughly 100 million people by year's end," Tony Melone, senior vice president and chief technical officer at Verizon Wireless said in a statement this morning. "As device makers, manufacturers and others around the world begin to introduce newer and faster products to take advantage of these incredible new speeds, Verizon Wireless will be positioned to offer our customers new and exciting products on the nation's first 4G LTE network."The first commercial deployments of LTE belong to TeliaSonera in Norway and Sweden, which opened for business last December. However, consumer equipment that can take advantage of the increased bandwidth continues to be seriously limited. Nokia announced it was the first to make an LTE modem, and TeliaSonera partnered with Samsung to offer a USB LTE dongle, but there are currently no smartphones or consumer devices utilizing the technology.Last year, Verizon CEO Dick Lynch said LTE laptop modems and handsets won't be out until a year after the LTE network launches. Meanwhile, the United States' fifth largest Network operator MetroPCS expects its LTE network to be completed in the second half of 2010 as well. Like TeliaSonera, MetroPCS has partnered with Samsung for its first consumer LTE device. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Still racing for an LTE launch in the second half of this year, Verizon Wireless has been testing its trial 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks in Boston and Seattle since last August. Today the wireless network operator says it will be able to deliver speeds between 5-12 Mbps downlink and 2-5 Mbps uplink at launch."Our LTE rollout plan positions Verizon Wireless to be a global leader in 4G LTE deployment. We are on track to deliver an outstanding wireless data experience to customers in 25 to 30 markets covering roughly 100 million people by year's end," Tony Melone, senior vice president and chief technical officer at Verizon Wireless said in a statement this morning. "As device makers, manufacturers and others around the world begin to introduce newer and faster products to take advantage of these incredible new speeds, Verizon Wireless will be positioned to offer our customers new and exciting products on the nation's first 4G LTE network."The first commercial deployments of LTE belong to TeliaSonera in Norway and Sweden, which opened for business last December. However, consumer equipment that can take advantage of the increased bandwidth continues to be seriously limited. Nokia announced it was the first to make an LTE modem, and TeliaSonera partnered with Samsung to offer a USB LTE dongle, but there are currently no smartphones or consumer devices utilizing the technology.Last year, Verizon CEO Dick Lynch said LTE laptop modems and handsets won't be out until a year after the LTE network launches. Meanwhile, the United States' fifth largest network operator MetroPCS expects its LTE network to be completed in the second half of 2010 as well. Like TeliaSonera, MetroPCS has partnered with Samsung for its first consumer LTE device. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews In late 2007, Cisco Systems Inc. acquired a WiMAX company called Navini Networks, consuming the smaller competitor's 70 commercial WiMAX deployments, all of the network hardware, and its portfolio of Radio Access Network (RAN) patents. Though Cisco was never exactly hot on WiMAX as a wireless standard, the company saw that the 4G standard was maturing, and made its move into the WiMAX base station business.At the time, Cisco senior vice president Tony Bates said, "Recently, the WiMAX radio systems to deliver broadband wireless have matured, customers are deploying live networks, and overall investment and demand has increased. Therefore, Cisco views this as the proper time to add licensed WiMAX products to our broadband wireless offer."Not two years later, though, Cisco says it is halting that business to shift its focus away from radios.A company spokesperson told FierceBroadbandWireless, "After careful review, our mobility strategy is to focus on providing a radio-agnostic IP end-to-end mobile multimedia services network. Cisco will continue to focus on the packet core and to also focus on investment in radio technologies such as femtocells and Wi-Fi. As part of this decision, we have decided to discontinue designing and building new WiMAX base stations. We believe the best way for Cisco to serve our customers is by delivering value at the edge and the core of our customers' networks."Rather than focus on a single, isolated radio technology, Cisco is going to push the network-agnostic IP core technologies it acquired last October when it bought Starent networks. Starent's technology supports a much wider range of access technologies such as GSM, CDMA, UMTS, LTE and even WiMAX, and already has a significant number of customers. This way, Cisco can offer technologies to whichever network standards are out there without suffering if one becomes less popular than another.Sai Subramanian, Director of Product Marketing for Cisco's Wireless Business Group recently said, "We expect to continue to be a significant player in the WiMAX market... just not in the access part of the network." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews "Who will buy?" is the question to ask now that Apple has turned on the advertising spigot. I saw the first iPad commercial three times during yesterday's Academy Awards program. No one should underestimate the power of Apple marketing for generating millions of initial iPad sales. Advertising will differentiate iPad from ebook reader or tablet competitors.For years, Apple advertised iPod unchecked. Competitors simply didn't aggressively advertise their MP3 players. So from about 2002 through end of 2004, iPod owned media player advertising -- at least in the United States. For a short time, Creative had a campaign, then nothing after 2005. No wonder so many people bought an iPod -- it seemingly was  the only choice.What other competitor will offer another choice to iPad through such aggressive marketing? You tell me. The first commercial is very benefits oriented, putting common PC-like functions in the lap instead of on the tabletop. Apple should be wary of consumer confusion. Some potential buyers might not easily understand the difference from iPhone or iPod touch. Whom that might be will become more apparent in a few paragraphs.I predict that within a few months of release, unless there is a shortage of storage cards, Apple will reconsider the 16GB model -- as it did the original 4GB iPhone; 16GB is the new 4GB, but for different reasons. From the start, summer 2007, 8GB iPhone quickly outsold the lower-cost 4GB model. Buyers wanted more storage. At $499, I expect the 16GB iPad to easily outsell the $629 16GB 3G or 32GB WiFi model. But in short order, many iPad buyers will find that 16GB storage is inadequate. They'll want more storage, which they didn't get at first because of price -- how affordable is $499 compared to $629. There are reasons why retailers use prices like $19.99 or $599. The six in $629 seems so much more than $499. I expect Apple to make price adjustments by summer. Latest. But only after an iPod touch price reduction or  introduction of 128GB model at $399.All this meandering finally leads to the question posed by this post's title: Who should buy iPad? With no backing data -- but a good sense about marketing -- I can see four consumer demographic groups that should buy iPad. I'm ignoring institutional segments like education or training; none of the four groups would fit nicely into analysts' survey spreadsheets. They are:People Steve Jobs's age or older. Apple's CEO may run a company producing hip products, but Jobs is middle aged. Jobs turned 55 on February 24. He's a Baby Boomer, and iPad is for his generation and that of his parents. It's computing made easy, with all the basics covered in a device simply and comfortably handled.Yesterday, a friend asked if his 85 year-old dad should buy an iPad. "Absolutely," I said. He was surprised because of my post "12 reasons why I won't buy an iPad." The iPad will get the dad on the Web with email and other connected features, serve up ebooks and provide applications that are easily chosen, purchased, installed and used.Apple's tablet isn't right for me, or many other people comfortable with technology and used to multitasking. In its first iteration, iPad is more a single-task device, which is right pace for many older folks (Hey, this isn't agism just the reality of aging). Among the Boomer-plus set, I expect iPad will appeal most to digital immigrants, meaning those people who didn't grow up with computers and aren't all that comfortable with them (Gen Xers tend to be digital resident aliens and the Millennials digital natives).The iPad as a device for the old (55 and older) could be quite good for Apple. According to a recent AdMob report, 65 percent of iPod touch users are 17 or younger. By comparison, 72 percent of iPhone users are between 18 and 54. Neither device has much pull with those 55 or older, 14 percent and 5 percent, respectively. The 55 and over crowd is a desirable market segment. Marketers assume this group has more  discretionary spending power because of savings and less pull by outside factors -- children, for example. Then there is the large number of Baby Boomers (in the United States about 77 million still living out of 309 million total population, according to Census data). The oldest Boomers reached retirement age in the Noughties.The Mac faithful. It's often called the cult of Mac for a reason. Anecdotally, this group can be relied on to buy pretty much anything new with an Apple logo.Mac wannabes on a budget. From a marketing perspective -- looking at Apple computing products as a range of features and prices -- iPad fills a gaping hole in the Mac product line between the $399 iPod touch and $999 MacBook. More importantly, iPad lets people pining for a portable Mac get one for less than $500. Suddenly, the cheapest, functional Mac portable is $499. The average consumer doesn't care about the operating system, whether iPhone OS 3.2 or Snow Leopard. Mac wannabes will care more about what the device can do for them. Apple has packed most of the basic, most appealing functions of the Mac portable -- including iWork -- into iPad. Then there's the App Store offering loads of fun applications that are cheap and easy to install.Niche buyers. Singly, niche buyers won't amount to much. Combined, they could be a sizable buying segment. Among them I see people interested in ebooks, gadget collectors (especially those obsessed with geek envy) and artists. To many artists, iPad should be a desirable canvas. Anthropologically, used together, the mouse and keyboard are an unnatural user interface. Human beings are tool users. We experience and interact with the world through five senses. The best tools are really extensions of the hands; the mouse and keyboard UI is neither. Hands, fingers and touch are especially important for experiencing and manipulating objects or surroundings -- and for artistry. Apple's tablet is the canvas for which many artists' hands will create. What will the hand and finger create on the touchscreen? Who knows, the answer might be a future iPad commercial. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Tim Conneally, Betanews The dispute between Cablevision, the United States' fifth largest cable company, and New York ABC affiliate WABC-7 was tentatively resolved yesterday evening in time for the Academy Awards telecast, and the ABC blackout for Cablevision subscribers did not last 24 hours."ABC7 and Cablevision have made significant progress and have reached an agreement in principle that recognizes the fair value of ABC7, with deal points that we expect to finalize with Cablevision. Given this movement, we're pleased to announce that ABC7 will return to Cablevision households while we work to complete our negotiations," a statement from WABC-TV said yesterday.Though resolved for the time being, this heated disconnection and re-connection is another example of the much larger-scale fight between content owners, local station affiliates, and the cable monopolies. There are many who believe this fight will only result in all of our cable bills going up.Broadcasters want to brace their weakened advertising revenue and shrinking viewership by negotiating higher retransmission fees from cable companies. These fees are frequently expressed as a per-subscriber charge, and the negotiating price thus far has been $1 per month per viewer.That's the retransmission price that Fox tried to get from Time Warner Cable late in 2009, and reportedly the same price WABC sought from Cablevision. On New Year's day, Fox and Time Warner reached an agreement on the fees, but the amount of money was not disclosed. Analysts at the time said the deal opened the door for a $5 billion increase in overall cable fees.According to the Federal Communications Commission, "Every three years, broadcast stations must decide whether to demand carriage on local cable systems without receiving compensation or elect to negotiate a retransmission consent agreement. In return for allowing a cable system to carry its signal, a television station may require the payment of a fee or other consideration (for instance, carriage of another programming service or advertising time). Any new or additional costs incurred as a result of retransmission consent agreements may be passed through to cable subscribers."Over the weekend, when it still appeared the Oscars would be blacked out for some New Yorkers, President and CEO of the American Cable Association Matthew Polka issued a statement, reading in part: "The Federal retransmission consent regime is a badly broken system that permits signal pulling and flagrant price discrimination against smaller cable companies that consumers should not be forced to tolerate." Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews After a Reuters report on Friday cited China's Industry and Information Minister, Li Yizhong, as having told an indeterminate parliamentary body that the government was in talks with Google over its claims of having been hacked in early February by a Chinese malicious source, a vice minister for the same government agency issued a statement through China's Xinhua news agency denying any negotiations have taken place at all.The denial was covered by Reuters as a request by the ministry for more information, so that China could prosecute Google's complaint. The Xinhua report itself (not a Google English-language translation of the report) states the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's position that Google never filed a complaint in the first place.Last Tuesday, Xinhua quoted a spokesperson for a key Chinese political advisory body, Zhao Qizheng, as strongly denying Google's allegations of Chinese malicious hacking, specifically the implication that the government was involved. But being consistent, Qizheng and the Xinhua report were careful not to call Google's accusation a "charge."If one reads the Xinhua reports at face value -- putting aside Reuters' interpretations of them -- they could represent China's attempt to call Google's bluff. Ever since the incident, the state-run news agency has reiterated that Google has threatened to pull out of the country, but has not done so. And a political cartoon published by Xinhua last Friday, entitled "Google and the Spooks," depicts the political association it would prefer Chinese citizens draw in their minds. It shows the familiar Google search page, with the logo embellished with Nixonian eyes and an American flag necktie bearing a National Security Agency seal.The prevailing theory, put forth last month in The New York Times, is that the perpetrators of the alleged incident may have been vo-tech students of a certain Ukrainian professor who has been suspected of online mischief before. While on the surface that might appear to exonerate the Chinese government, the Times' source, a noted intelligence research analyst, warned readers not to draw that conclusion too quickly, saying the Chinese "have a different model" for exploiting targets. That source may have helped the Times uncover that Google had been working with the NSA to determine the source of the incident. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Carmi Levy, Betanews Because removing porn from the App Store wasn't enough, now Apple's taking aim at software that helps iPhone, iPod touch and, soon, iPad users find Wi-Fi hotspots. Forgive me for cynically choosing to disbelieve the company's excuse -- that all of these apps use undocumented or private APIs and consequently must be removed for the sake of the platform's future. If Apple actually had a workable, believable strategy for approval, it wouldn't have approved any of these apps in the first place.The apps are -- or, rather, were distributed under the trade names Sekai Camera, Wifi-Where, and yFy, among others; and they made it easier for owners of such devices to find Wi-Fi networks and thus avoid using their more costly and often congested 3G connections. In the bad old days of wardriving, we simply walked or drove along a public thoroughfare and constantly refreshed our network lists to identify convenient and often free hotspots. The process was manual and tedious, and these packages automated the process of discovery just in time for Wi-Fi to become table stakes on handheld devices. With more end users than ever before seeking safe havens to avoid busting their carrier-imposed 3G data caps, Wi-Fi finders, scanners, and stumblers had finally hit the big time.Herding the subscriber sheepIt doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that Apple and its carrier-partners weren't particularly pleased with this trend. I'm going to assume the wizards at AT&T didn't much appreciate the potential long-term thinning of subscriber revenue, and quietly encouraged Apple to squash it before it became rampant. I'm singling out AT&T because it's such an easy target of consumer discontent, but this may as well apply to any other carrier in any other country. They're all cheering Apple's move because it tilts device traffic back onto their own wireless networks.Never mind that developers have been begging Apple to open up the API so that they don't have to get in through the back door. Never mind that tech-savvy consumers now have another reason to jailbreak their devices. Never mind that this is yet another example of near-Draconian (or maybe full-on Draconian) control over a platform that, despite its extreme popularity, remains a prime example of the risks of leaving too much control in the hands of one provider.What's to stop Apple from summarily choosing another category next week, or next month, or whenever, as a candidate for pruning? What's to stop Apple from deciding that developers, whose only option up to then was to creatively work around deliberately baked-in limitations in the SDK to bring consumer-friendly offerings to market, have gone too far and need to be taught a lesson?To be blunt, no one can stop Apple from doing whatever it wants. I've said before that this is Apple's playground, which means it can make the rules, interpret them as it sees fit, and change them on a whim. And developers and other stakeholders have no say in any of this. They simply have to hope that the elephant they chose to sleep with doesn't roll over in the middle of the night and crush them.I don't say this with malice or anger. It simply is what it is, and despite the platform's overwhelming success over the better part of the past three years, it leaves consumers and developers with a choice to either put up with Apple's model or seek alternatives.Please hold that thought for a second.A case of non-coincidental timingAll this comes just as Apple gets set to begin shipping iPads to an adoring public. Retail availability in the US is now set for April 3, and sometime toward the end of April in Canada. This means potential buyers are already deciding how much hard-earned cash to bring along when they wait in line overnight to buy one. Will they cheap out for the basic Wi-Fi version, or will they go full-on for a 3G-enabled iPad?The timing of the latest app takedown is no coincidence: Apple and AT&T clearly want to influence potential buyers to stretch for a 3G-capable version to at least hold out the potential of ongoing subscription-based revenue. Think of this latest move as a scorched-earth strategy for wannabe-Wi-Fi-only iPad users. I'm betting that around this time next month, Wi-Fi-only iPads will be only slightly more difficult to find than two-headed Lincoln pennies, as Apple's carrier-friendly/consumer-unfriendly supply chain strategy snaps into focus.Which brings us to the alternatives. As Microsoft is painfully learning, no platform remains dominant forever. Sooner or later, the conditions that allowed the market leader to become the leader in the first place will shift, and in so doing, will allow challengers to lay down roots and eventually outflank them. The incumbent's vulnerability to defeat in this manner can be influenced by how it treats its market. Do so with cooperative partnership and you stand a better chance of getting stakeholders -- namely developers and consumers -- to stick with you a bit longer. Do so with a cynical sense of arrogant protectionism, and they'll happily dance on your grave.The crack in Apple's foundation?Does this mean Apple's latest App Store move will lead to its ultimate demise? No. But does it shift a few more grains of sand in a different direction? I strongly believe that it does. And we all know how massive tectonic market shifts can begin with a few simple moves. It could be years before the rats begin to abandon any sinking ship with an Apple logo on it, but don't think for a second that seemingly small acts like this won't play an eventual role.The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad universe remains the place to be if you're looking to build mobile apps. Google's Android is a distant second fiddle, and RIM is barely out of the gate. But Google's approach -- open source and decidedly less school marm-ish in its definition of what developers can and cannot do -- may yet be the kind of landscape that developers will target if Apple's mercurial form of relationship building becomes too onerous. Apple's Wi-Fi move is pushing things with this sensitive audience yet again. At some point, they may yet decide enough is enough.Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010