congresocienciadeinformacion.com

Google may be resorting to some of Microsoft’s most frustrating practices, using its strong products to prop up weak siblings, but at least those siblings promise a different mode of computing.

Sure, it’s still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn’t seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It’s as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.

But Microsoft doesn’t wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn’t seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.

I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.

commentary

The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google’s Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.

So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on
Mac announcement “like they’ve been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X,” as ZDNet’s Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple’s do.

And perhaps that’s the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don’t need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.

Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They’re big. They’re winded. And they could knock you over–if they could only catch you.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.

As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn’t help but agree with Larry Dignan’s assessment of the Nokia deal:

Apple offers a premium “desktop” experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the “desktop” with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture’s Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?

In his talk, Koonin listed a number of technologies that BP is exploring or funding research in, including biofuels, underground carbon storage, and various means of improved oil and gas exploration.

Carbon storage is a technology that could be an important option for reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but it also faces a number of technical challenges, such as safe storage, Koonin said.

But Koonin said that changing from BP’s core oil and gas exploration business is a slow process, given that demand for liquid fuels continues to go up.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Everyone from politicians, investors, and consumers tout the potential of solar and wind technologies.

At the same time, BP is investing a billion dollars to establish a biofuels business and is pushing into wind power. It has also done a handful of tests in carbon capture and sequestration, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored underground.

One of the most promising research paths is the intersection of biology and energy. BP, for example, is looking at how enzymes in cows and other ruminants can sequester carbon, he said.

“We’re trying (but) it’s not easy to change things…You can’t cut off the present,” he said. “Deployment of energy innovations (in the oil and gas industry overall) is very hard because of entrenched interests.”

“Beyond Petroleum was once an advertising slogan when I came in (in 2004). We’re trying to do something about it now,” he said.

BP is also researching energy storage for renewable energy and advanced photovoltaics, although Koonin predicted it would be decades before they would make a major impact on worldwide energy use.

But even BP, a company that changed its tagline to “Beyond Petroleum,” sees renewable energy as a very small piece of the global energy picture–a situation that’s not likely to change in the coming decades, according to BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin.

He said that climate regulations that put a price on emitting carbon dioxide would incent energy companies to invest in low-carbon energy sources.

BP researchers are exploring under-ice drilling in the Arctic, building more robust drilling platforms, more environmentally benign methods to extract oil from tar sands, and hydrogen production.

“The question is whether it will be high enough…It needs to be high enough to hurt to get people to do something different,” Koonin said.

“Technically, there are lots of opportunities in conventional fossil fuels,” he said.

He noted that Europe already has climate regulations in place, and the U.S. is likely to adopt its own. At the same time, he said “it was hard to imagine” the fast-growing economies of China and India having costly limits on carbon emissions.

BP is perhaps the most high-profile oil and gas company to take alternative energy seriously.

“The only way you’re going to get a shift off of this is through a price on carbon,” Koonin said. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would act the same way that a rise in gasoline prices has prompted many people to conserve, he said.

Koonin spoke here on Monday to Massachusetts Institute of Technologies’ energy student fellows, part of a campuswide initiative to promote technology innovation in energy.

Convergent: Digital and physical domain converge. You can wear online news on your body.

Viral: Because it’s social, it’s viral.

(Credit: Mooneythinks)

Instant: Merchandising in real-time, tangibly tied with world news.

Artificially scarce: The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section.

Customizable/hackable: The T-shirts are customizable. You can put your own headline on them simply by changing the text in the URL.

Personal: The message is clear — you are the news.

Social: The T-shirts are perfect conversation starters (”Why this headline?;” “Where were you when that happened”?) or outlets for political statements (”Clinton endorses Obama”).

CNN is now printing one-off American Apparel headline T-shirts. The new feature (in beta) allows you to order them from the CNN web site — with the headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it.

Pretty cool. CNN gets it. Their T-shirt campaign exhibits all the key ingredients of contemporary marketing genius.

As an extension of this morning’s news about Google Gears making its way to mobile devices, online office suite Zoho is taking advantage of the new technology to give people a way to view Zoho Writer documents on their Windows mobile phones while away from a data connection. It’s the type of situation that occurs frequently for commuters, and something that has historically given native software applications the leg up on their Web counterparts.

Zoho was one of the first adopters of Google’s Gears technology, adding it to its Writer word processing service back in late November–something Google has still not done with its own Documents and Spreadsheets service, despite hints it was the next service to get the Gears treatment back in January.

Users can view up to 20 of their latest Zoho Writer documents while connected, and view up to the last last five when in the Gears-enabled offline mode. According to CEO Raju Vegesna, an option to change how many documents you can load into the Gears cache is in the works. Also on tap is an offline editing mode to let you make changes or tweaks to your docs, although according to Vegesna more than 90 percent of users simply view documents on their mobile devices.

Vegesna walks us through the process of installing Gears and accessing the mobile version of Zoho Writer in the video embedded after the break.

In fairness to Google, it did better than its competitors, according to a JPMorgan report issued Wednesday morning. (ComScore’s paid-click numbers are not typically issued directly to public. We hear about them when Wall Street analysts issue their own reports on the data.)

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the ComScore results have any correlation to Google’s financial results. Similarly disappointing news earlier this year led to a significant drop in Google’s share price. In fact, since November, Google shares have dropped about 40 percent since hitting $747.24.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Paid-search clicks at Google were up 2.7 percent in March, compared to the same month a year ago. That means that growth for the full quarter was just 1.8 percent year over year, a rapid drop from 25 percent year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. (Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good take on the worst-case scenario for Google’s first quarter.)

What will Google's Schmidt have to say about the first quarter? We’ll find out Thursday.

Google’s first-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, just got a lot more interesting.

In total, the market wasn’t healthy. In March, it declined 1.5 percent. For the quarter, it managed 0.3 percent growth, versus a 15.8 percent increase in the fourth quarter.

On Tuesday afternoon, Intel executives signaled confidence in the coming year. IBM, another one of those tech bellwethers, reports its first-quarter earnings after the stock market closes this afternoon.

So far, there’s certainly no panicking because of the ComScore numbers. Google was up about 2 percent to $456.20 in midday trading Wednesday.

Late Tuesday night, those Internet traffic trackers at ComScore put out some lousy news: growth in paid-search clicks in the United States is slowing down.

Analysts and Google pundits are split on what the ComScore numbers mean. Google maintains that its deceleration has more to do with its efforts to improve the quality of its ad leads (which should drive up average selling prices) than a broader economic slowdown. But disappointing numbers at all the major search sites may indicate that there’s a broader economic explanation than Google’s improved quality control. Is the paid-search advertising business as immune to a sour community as Google executives like to believe? We’ll find out tomorrow.

Google, of course, is one of those big tech companies people closely follow in order to get a read on the health of the high-tech industry. We watch Google’s results more closely than any other Internet company for good reason: because of its dominant search market share, Google is a good indicator of the health of Internet advertising. A slowdown at Google can be a sign of big trouble ahead for smaller companies.

So by the end of this week, we’ll have a better sense of whether it’s time for tech companies to batten down the hatches.

At Microsoft’s MSN, the news was flat-out bad. Paid clicks in March dropped 15.1 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 12.3 percent. At AOL, March paid clicks dropped 2.3 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 5.8 percent–a noticeable turnaround from the 29.3 percent drop in the fourth quarter.

But competitors did worse. Yahoo paid clicks declined 3.1 percent year over year in March (all percentages are year-over-year comparisons), though for the quarter, paid clicks at Yahoo grew 5.4 percent, also marking a drop-off from the fourth quarter’s 9.8 percent growth.

Team Teamwork produced the mix, which features unique tracks by Spank Rock, Common, Aesop Rock, Clipse, and my personal pick: MF Doom. Most of the songs fit well with the background score; for example, in “Fumbling Over Words,” artist Edan Portnoy’s intensity melds seamlessly into the rumblings of the “Battle” music from OoT, but other tracks, like Common’s classic “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” just sound too silly over the theme from the Hyrule Marketplace.

Team Teamwork presents: The Ocarina of Rhyme

Stream the album above or download it here, and let me know what you think in the comments!

(Credit: 8Tracks.com)

If you enjoyed Eric Franklin’s post on 8-bit NES-style hip-hop, you’ll definitely enjoy Team Teamwork’s “The Ocarina of Rhyme.” It’s a mix tape of mashups that combines hip-hop tracks with the score to the Zelda game Ocarina of Time.

To illustrate his point, he recalled a commercial he was shooting for Nike in the late 1990s starring golfer Tiger Woods. Liman noticed Woods bouncing a ball on the edge of a club during breaks from shooting. Liman grabbed a shoulder-held camera and, away from the crew, asked Woods to bounce the balls while being filmed. Liman began to lose his patience when Woods blew the shot several times.

“Movies can get away without great writing because they are all about the spectacle,” Liman told the audience. “But with TV and the Web it’s all about great writing…Look at the (NBC Universal TV show) The Office. It looks like Swingers and for that I was using used-film stock. People don’t care. If they love the characters they will cone back. Look at Seinfeld…Why couldn’t Seinfeld come from someone with a digital camera shooting for the Web?”

“I told him, ‘I can’t believe that of all people you are choking under pressure,’” Liman told the audience.

LAS VEGAS–Director Doug Liman pulled no punches when sizing up the quality of storytelling on the Web.

Liman (right) speaks to a fan at NAB 2008.

Woods glared and then bounced the ball while transferring the club through his legs behind his back and finished by smacking the ball in mid air. The shot, which became a classic, was natural, unrehearsed, and driven by imagination rather than millions of studio dollars, Liman said.

“The reality is that the quality content isn’t there yet,” Liman said in an interview following the speech. “It’s no different than going to Sundance (Film Festival) this year and people saying, ‘The great independent film wasn’t there this year.’ That doesn’t mean it won’t be there next year. Given the direction the Internet’s going– with more and more people working in that arena–you’re going to see an Internet equivalent of Swingers.”

Liman praised digital cameras and other technologies for helping to improve filmmaking, but he reminded the audience that a good story is still key.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News.com)

But that doesn’t mean it won’t. He told the audience he believes it’s just a matter of time before a star filmmaker bubbles up from YouTube, iFilm, or one of the other online video sites.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News.com)

Director Doug Liman tells an audience at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 conference that he expects to see an Internet equivalent of Swingers.

Swingers, starring actors Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, launched the then-unknown Liman’s career. The 1996 film, about a group of unemployed actors trying to make it big in Hollywood, was made for $250,000 and grossed $6.5 million worldwide. Had the Internet been more of an entertainment force then, perhaps Liman would have made his mark online first. He said the Web is tailor made for helping talented filmmakers with limited funds build a reputation.

The Internet simply hasn’t produced any truly compelling stories, Liman, director of such hits as The Bourne Identity and Swingers, told an audience of several hundred Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 conference here.

Liman, who said he might have gone into technology if he hadn’t stumbled onto a movie camera at the age of 8, encouraged Web videographers in the audience by noting that “sometimes greatness comes from not having resources.”

With new Foster-Miller Talon and 510 PackBot models being introduced, the old PackBot models will be rotated out of use in combat.

Unfortunately, the CUGV can not entirely replace the soldier. Since it cannot take a sample of water, dirt, or vegetation to be brought back to a lab, a human will still have to go in for that.

“The CUGV detects ammonia, chlorine, carbon monoxide, oxygen levels, lower explosive limits, volatile organic compounds, gamma radiation rate and dose rate, temperature, and humidity,” Herschel J. Deaton, CBRN programs technical staff for Concurrent Technologies Corp. at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., said in an Army News Service story.

The new/old PackBot, called a Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Unmanned Ground Vehicle or CUGV for short, will be ready for field use this fall, according to the U.S. Army.

A CUGV PackBot at the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

Knowing what kind of contaminate is in the area would also help keep soldiers from needless donning of the Level A suit.

But the PackBot will still alleviate a lot of the time-consuming legwork leading up to that task by mapping out and identifying the contaminates in a given area, according to the Army report.

It’s been fitted with a lightweight chemical detector to sense nerve gas, among other things.

Soldiers from the 95th Chemical Company set up a robot control station.

It’s also fitted with a video camera for live feeds that can be taped by the person controlling the robot back at operations for analysis at a later time.

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

The iRobot PackBot can be sent in to a contamination zone for up to 4 hours if necessary, according to the Army report.

The U.S. military has been working on a new use for old PackBots that will save soldiers time and aggravation, though not replace them completely, when it comes to chemical warfare.

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

The Department of Defense ordered that the older models be put to good use. Through a program towards that end, the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson in Alaska has been testing out modded PackBots since 2005.

In the absence of a CUGV, a soldier has to wear a Level A airtight suit and self-contained breathing apparatus akin to scuba gear when going into a suspected contaminated zone. Because of the heat and the oxygen limitations in such a suit, he or she only had about 45 minutes to get to the site, inspect it, and get back to a safe area.

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

What recession? Gartner predicts IT spending growth

EA revises Take-Two acquisition offer, again

Also, a hearing in Boston is likely to resolve the question of whether or not students who found fare card vulnerabilities must turn over unpublished material to the Massachusetts transit agency.

The first handset with Google’s Android software, the HTC Dream, is now expected to arrive in November after passing FCC certification.

Dell refused ‘cloud computing’ trademark

Microsoft now says the server version of
Windows 7 will not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2. The move is surprising, given that in the past, Microsoft has used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as opposed to major changes to a product. CNET News’ Ina Fried explains.

Listen now:

MIT students fight to keep card hacking material confidential

Report: Fees may sink Pandora soon

Windows 7 Server to be ‘minor release’

Torvalds to kernel hopefuls: Think ‘trivial

It’s similar in many ways to Atlassian’s bounty program, which is giving away six $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.

But, if nothing else, they do call attention to a need: more plug-ins for Firefox and the Atlassian projects, in these cases.

The purpose? To encourage additional and improved add-ons for
Firefox, of course.

Mozilla has launched its Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some cool prizes in the offing, including a MacBook Air.

I personally am not a big fan of bounties because I don’t think they go to the heart of why many developers write open-source code in the first place: pride of ownership, experimentation, intellectual pursuit.

commentary

It’s not as if Mozilla is hurting for Firefox plug-ins. But it may be that it’s trying to remind developers to update their Firefox 2 plug-ins for Firefox 3, and this offers a convenient, relatively inexpensive way to do so.

Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.