The Smooth DJ

All signs are pointing to yes. EETimes, reporting on Columbia law professor Timothy Wu's opinion paper scolding US cellular service providers, points out that Cingular asked Nokia to keep Wi-Fi off one of it's European model phones in order to sell it in America. Why? Carriers like Cingular and Verizon don't want you to make Skype VOIP calls (cheap long distance, no roaming and most of all, no billable airtime). And if you surf, you should be doing it on an expensive data plan, not your local coffee shop's free WiFi.

Could this mean Cingular nixed a would-be hot feature on the Apple iPhone? Most likely. And that's a shame. The iPhone is really a computer in disguise, and naturally people would have enjoyed using the touchscreen interface to surf the web on their home or neighborhood Wi-Fi network.

Wu's paper calls on the service providers to allow any device to connect. This would lead to cameras that can transfer files in realtime over the cellular airwaves, for example.

Skype has filed a petition with the FCC to open up the networks to third party software and hardware. Unfortunately, no handset makers signed on, most likely not wanting to jeopardize their carrier relationships. Don't be surprised if Steve Jobs chimes in down the road if the iPhone takes off. Apple loves to introduce new model products aggressively, and adding Wi-Fi to the second generation iPhone would be a quick hit. Steve isn't shy about nudging the establishment to more open standards, as he's demonstrated with his anti-DRM open letter in February.

Just like their plan to give away free WiFi, Google has a new patent search engine that other vendors like Thomson currently charge for. Still in Beta, use it now while it doesn't even have Ads popping up. One way for Google to improve this ap is to include batch search (which Thomson offers). Anybody who's been near a patent lawyer knows that you call up batches of reference patents at a time when studying prior art. Still, kudos to Larry and Serge for bringing us yet another free service.

Via Andrew Sullivan - This is genius. A simple yet elegant solution that presents text in columns speeding up reading times.

This reinforces the notion that design is everything. And in most cases, it's more to do with application and not technology itself.

Take a look:

The LA Times has a great article about Facebook's meteoric rise, and how it's becoming a more coveted place to work than even Google. Of course, their pre-IPO status doesn't hurt.

Facebook, intentionally or not, captures more behavior, tastes, and trends then any focus group or marketing study could ever dream. This power is their ticket to riches. $Money$ quote:

Microsoft Corp. last month took a small stake in Facebook that valued the company at $15 billion. The deal may have positioned Facebook's 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to one day supplant Google co-founder Sergey Brin as the technology industry's youngest self-made billionaire.

Jack Ganssle over at the EE Times has penned an excellent history of the Transistor. Nothing has had a bigger impact on human knowledge and accomplishment. You probably have over 500,000 in your pocket right now.

What is a transistor? It's just a switch, as in on and off. These two states are where binary logic comes from (1s and 0s). But there's more! It also amplifies signals like music from your radio or iPod.

A great list from the EE Times.

From Mashable today: Revver available for less than $500,000; Employees fleeing, including the founders.

So declared Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, at the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the 11th. And he has a compelling argument too. Internet connected mobile devices add *context* to the Internet, a kind of new dimension where data like time, people, and location are always available in real time. For example, you will have a smart GPS map in your hand, showing you where in the city all your friends are, and what they're doing as it happens. Called Maps 2.0, Nokia is already rolling out the beta next month.

Nokia even took a public jab at Google, a mobile device newcomer with lofty expectations:

While acknowledging that both Google and Nokia share "a similar vision" for "operator-independent cross-platform software stacks," Nokia's Savander added: "Google's Android is still a Power Point presentation."

Google announces AdSense for streaming video. Google made over $16 billion in ad revenue last year and just about all of it came from text ads. This move by Google opens up video ads to small fry advertisers. With localization by IP address and demographic available, Video ads are poised to be a serious money maker. Compared with TV commercials, they are 100% captive (no fast forwarding or channel skipping), and orders of magnitude cheaper to produce. Advertisers would be extremely foolish not to take advantage of them.

With rates as little as 1 cent per view, and 2-3 ads per video, YouTube alone will bring in billions based on sheer traffic. Shows like Chad Vader will command higher ad prices because of their popularity.

From Sharp, a way for two people to watch different things on the same screen.

Google Sites launches today.

• What: Creating multimedia rich wikis with point and click ease (note: Google doesn't use the word "wiki", but as far as I can tell, that's exactly what this is)
• Why: Sharing things with a team or just organizing information
• Why it matters: It's free. Say good bye to paying big bucks for Lotus Notes.

Sirius' 1-year wait to swallow XM is over. They got anti-trust clearance from the DOJ today. Maybe it took the feds a whole year to come up with an argument for approving an actual, ahem, monopoly?

To be fair, sat radio does have competition. And whether the combined entity, now with 17 million subscribers, can actually succeed remains to be seen. Both XM and Sirius were hemorrhaging cash. A superficial glance at their income statements shows more of the same if they join hands. Of course, this is before any cost cutting can begin, which will be their first priority.

As for the competition, sat radio certainly has reason to worry. Terrestrial radio now takes a two-pronged approach to reach listeners: 1) air wave broadcasting, and 2) online [streaming and podcasting]. Broadcasts are free to the listener, while the podcasts are light on commercials (and sometimes commercial-free, as in the case of NPR). Sat radio also competes with the docking of MP3 players - which can act as a kind of TiVo of the airwaves when synced to your favorite radio show podcasts.

Look for terrestrial radio to experiment with less commercials to entice listeners to drop satellite, while evening out the revenue with more sponsored air-time and ad-supported online content.

Not the rapper from Public Enemy, but Charles Darwin.

Darwin's complete works are now online, including his notes and sketches, like the first time he suspected species were not static.

I was listening to NPR this morning and they were interviewing the site's director, who said they got 7 million hits in the first week, and 14,000 downloads of the origin of species on the first day (along with multiple server crashes).

PS - Evolution is a fact.

Silicon Alley Insider's take at the most valuable pre-IPO web oriented companies. Number 1? Facebook, valued at $9 billion.

Money Quote:

Until Facebook discovers its own version of AdWords, therefore (a killer app that it can exploit better than anyone else), we don't buy the argument that Facebook is "the next Google." It may be someday, but not yet.

Not an iPhone killer, but to those who prefer a touch keyboard, the Blackberry 9000 seems to deliver. I'm surprised RIM doesn't have tighter control of their developer phones. How did this one end up on eBay?

Interesting point from Matthew Yglesias

It's interesting...that we're seeing the emergence of a bifurcated media landscape and political conversation. People over a certain age exist in a universe where it's almost as if the web doesn't exist and things like the nightly news, the daily paper, and the cable networks are utterly dominant. For people below a certain age, the nightly news is totally irrelevant, the daily paper is primarily a website, and things like blogs and web videos matter a great deal.

This is one thing people forget when discussing...that people who watched Nixon debate Kennedy on television liked Kennedy, but those who listened on the radio liked Nixon. In 1960 television was still a relatively new technology, and an older, late-adopter segment of the population didn't have it and listened to debates on the radio. That was a Nixon-friendly demographic, just as early-adopters of web technology today are Obama-friendly.

Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.

Engadget roundup here.

What's good: Faster. A lot faster. And the 8GB is now $199 (a $200 drop). Funky new social software aps. My favorite: Geo-tagging photos using the GPS.

Bad stuff: No cut-and-paste. No MMS and no Video recording (not a big deal to me, but probably a nice feature to have with a YouTube direct upload feature).

Shadiness: 2-Year AT&T Contract with data plans $10 more expensive than iPhone 1.0 (inline with AT&T data plans with other smartphones). That's $240 more in the total cost of ownership over the life of your contract. In total, you're looking at an outlay of $1900 ($80/month) on the cheapest talk plan. Of course, with taxes and fees and the stupid extra cost for SMS messaging, the total cost will be over $2K.

Does that mean we won't expect a major hardware update from Apple for two years (as to not piss off their customers who buy the iPhone 2.0)? Meh, I wouldn't bet on it. Apple flies through product development cycles in 12-18 months, and that's always been a big part of their competitive advantage.

So, iPhone 1.0 lasts one year and has zero resale vale - ouch! Some people spent $600 on that.

Released today. Download here.

I'm trying out Clipmarks below.....

clipped from clipmarks.com

What can I do with Clipmarks?

Post anything you clip directly to your blog.

It's by far the quickest way to update your blog with compelling things you find on the web. Supports Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal and more.

For the first time, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in number of unique visitors. What's surprising here is that Facebook has had an onslaught of international visitors, but still lags MySpace heavily in the US.

The international popularity is unexpected since Facebook has not done localization (although they do offer translations of the English interface - far from ideal). MySpace, however, has offices around the world and has attempted true localization of their platform (MySpace Japan, for example).

This is great news for Facebook, but the prize is winning the US visitor battle. Why? That's where online advertiser dollars live.

HatTip: TechCrunch.

I'm checking out the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. It's about social technology's impact on branding.

Check out Fastcompany's review here.

And from an interview with author Li, something I hope will happen sooner than later:

How will social networking look five years from now?

Instead of going to a certain place like Facebook or MySpace to be social with your friends, your friends will go to wherever you need them to be. If I'm reading a book review on Amazon, I'll be able to see my friends' reviews -- even if those reviews are written on a blog someplace else. There will definitely be platforms, but the key thing is they won't be walled gardens.

Techcrunch breaks down all the social aps.

A preview:

...you give the phone a hard shake (the accelerometers inside the phone will measure the movement). The dials will spin around a few times, and you’ll be presented with a suggested restaurant (you can shake again if you’re not satisfied).

To help you concentrate. From Simply Noise.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch warns MySpace and Facebook to get with the program and include location awareness on their iPhone apps. It seems the biggest obstacle for them are legal and privacy issues, however. The possibility of sexual predators and children-stalkers give them the heebie-jeebies.

This isn't rocket science. Just make location awareness opt-in with an extra layer of controls. First, one can turn "location" off and on at will. Second, one must invite people off their friend lists to participate - and those invites must be accepted. To protect young ones from predators, have the AT&T account holder give consent (usually a parent is paying the bills - I doubt any 13 year olds are forking over $80/month by themselves). Basically, the consent flag clears the phone number in question to use location awareness upon download.

It's silly to think location awareness on MySpace or Facebook puts you on the radar of 3rd degree acquaintances, rock bands, and people you've never met. It doesn't work like that, nor should it. We all have lots of friends on these SNS sites. Some of us, more than a thousand. How practical is it if your phone lights up telling you there are 40 people in a one mile radius of you, half of them you didn't even know were a "friend". That can't happen or the whole location awareness thing is going to flop.

If I have to send invites to friends to participate in the service, it's a whole different ballgame. I'd probably choose a handful of peeps in LA, and maybe some people I'd want to bump into if I ever saw them. Again, they would have to accept the invite. No harm no foul.

Can you imagine people in silicon valley with thousand plus friend-lists (and there's a lot of 'em) when they go our for lunch? Their location pings will go off the charts, and they'll have problems discerning who's actually around. For location awareness to work, users are going to have to limit who is and who isn't "aware-worthy". Hmm, maybe I just coined a new 2.0 term. You heard it here first.

Elaine Warner over at Compete.com offers a glimpse of her company's tools and the insight analytics can provide. It appears that RIM owners are 3.7x more likely than the average internet user (and more likely than owners of other phones) to check out Apple's website.

Ok, you might be wondering how she figured out what kind of phone internet users have. Me too. She just observed the visitor behavior at the OEM sites and made some logical assumptions: if they did things only a phone owner would do, like click on "my-account", they were counted.

Cuil, a new search engine launched today by ex-Googlers certainly got a lot of media hype: front page billing on CNN.com and HuffPo. So I took a look....

First impression:

1. The black screen homepage doesn't look too inviting. Then search results come back at you with a white background. That color transition isn't easy on the eyes.

2. Content wise, Cuil seems competent with popular search terms, although it did hiccup because of the deluge of hits it received today. I got a few goose-eggs when I cuiled my name and again when I searched "highspeed ADC" earlier in the day, although it seems to be behaving now. Cuiling "The Smooth DJ" didn't return my website, or much anything related to music or DJing, but strange pictures of women's underwear. Compare that to Googling the same thing.

3. It's hard to discern ranking of search results. The results page is arranged in columns with no number pairing. After nearly a decade of Googling, this feels counter-intuitive.