commentary

I think there’s a lot of truth in Linus Torvald’s derisive comment about innovation, and the software industry’s fetish with it.

I think that “innovation” is a four-letter word in the industry. It should never be used in polite company. It’s become a PR thing to sell new versions with.

In open source, we need more talented executors to achieve dominance. Sure, we can innovate, but that’s not really the point.

Microsoft’s problem now isn’t innovation on the web. I have little doubt that its online services are as good, or nearly so, as Google’s. It’s that it doesn’t seem to know how to execute a web-centric business.

These are incremental technology advances backed by good execution. Microsoft isn’t Microsoft because it makes “innovative” technology. It’s Microsoft because it tends to keep the trains running on time.

It was Edison who said “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”. That may have been true a hundred years ago. These days it’s “0.01% inspiration, 99.99% perspiration”, and the inspiration is the easy part. As a project manager, I have never had trouble finding people with crazy ideas. I have trouble finding people who can execute. IOW, “innovation” is way oversold. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be applied to products like MS Word or Open office.

It will definitely be striking if Google puts legal music online. Like DVDs, CDs here are almost always illegal copies and it would take some doing to find the legal ones in many cases. Perhaps they will share ad revenue from the search pages with the record companies. Something like the ad-supported free music we hear on the radio, but available anytime and as a high-quality file…

P.S.: The Journal
article includes a useful outline of the Baidu-Google competition in China.

The Wall Street Journal
describes Google’s possible plans thusly: “Vivendi SA’s Universal Music and about 100 other foreign and domestic record labels have been working with Top100.cn, a Beijing-based Web site that currently sells licensed music downloads for 1 yuan (about 14 cents) each, and Google. Together, Top100.cn and Google would provide free MP3 downloads with value added services, people familiar with the plans say. The new search options, for example, promise to give users free access to a database of information about their favorite artists–from concert listings to links to special ring tones.”

Baidu, China’s leading search engine, gets 7 percent of its traffic on a service that eases access to free music downloads. Google, determined to catch up after two years in what is now the second largest Internet user base on earth, may follow suit.

MIT students fight to keep card hacking material confidential

EA revises Take-Two acquisition offer, again

Listen now:

Torvalds to kernel hopefuls: Think ‘trivial

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

Report: Fees may sink Pandora soon

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.

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What recession? Gartner predicts IT spending growth

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

He wouldn’t comment on any plans to offer the service to Web searchers using PCs, though. Curiously, because Apple’s iPhone uses an ordinary search site,
iPhone customers actually can’t get the service, he added.

“The use case we imagine is somebody out and about who’s got to get the Mets score with the minimum number of clicks and inputs on a 12-key keypad,” he said. Google obtains the data legally through undisclosed content providers, he added.

It turns out Google actually launched the service a little over a year ago for mobile users in the United States, though Google didn’t announce it, said spokesman Michael Kirkland. When people type a team name into the search box, the service shows frequently updated scores for professional football, basketball, baseball, and hockey games, as well as for college basketball, he said.

It might be news to you, but mobile device users can find up-to-date sports scores through Google’s search engine.

Google's mobile search service shows how well the Red Sox are faring in Tuesday's game.

Mobile users also can get less up-to-date game scores through the Google SMS text-messaging service. Sending a text message with the team name will return recent scores and the schedule of the next game.

Derrick Eckhardt of the RotoNation fantasy-sports blog noticed the score of the Mets-Dodgers game displayed at Google on his BlackBerry on Sunday and shared a screenshot of the box score. He dug up some tidbits about Googlers showing some interest in the sports category, but it turns out the scoring service actually isn’t new.

Nor would Kirkland comment on the possibility of Google gradually expanding from a search engine to a much more general-purpose Internet portal. Sports is one of the obvious specific areas of focus.

There was also a sharp falloff in the acquisition of start-up companies by bigger corporations…There were only 56 acquisitions in the first three months of the year, down from 83 in the fourth quarter.

With those options increasingly off the table, investors must spend money and time nurturing–or altogether salvaging–existing companies rather than building new ones.

It was just a matter of time. Silicon Valley, which has remained largely impervious to the increasingly global economic downturn, is starting to feel the strain, according to The New York Times. It’s not that housing prices are in freefall (they’re not) or that people are being laid off en masse (they’re not), but rather that the exit opportunities have largely dried up. According to the Times:

Perhaps this just means that open-source companies will need to take longer to grow their businesses. Perhaps it means that we’ll see a few crack $100 million without being acquired.

During the first three months of the year, only five companies backed by venture capital investors went public on Wall Street…That is down from 31 in the fourth quarter of last year, and is roughly the same level as at the nadir of the dot-com bust.

I guess Oracle has already acquired everybody.

Regardless, I can’t help but feel that much as I like winning, I’d prefer that all software companies were doing well right now, both in their businesses and in their exits. The software industry will be a drag if all we can eke out is a few exits per year.

Open-source investments are at an all-time high, but let’s not kid ourselves. Open-source companies may be better suited to thrive in a down market, but their stockholders still want exits.

Carlson was unable to achieve his goal of getting Calacanis to belt out some Frank Sinatra. Oh, well. I’m sure there will be a next time.

I guess it was impossible to shake off that South by Southwest geek-turned-rock-star fever. On Wednesday night, New York’s new-media nerds had no problem taking center stage at a Chinatown karaoke outing.

Want backstory? It’s really quite a nice peek into the workings of New York’s oft-bizarre tech community.

Case in point: this video of two dudes and an unidentified female rocking out to Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Those guys, in case you don’t know ‘em, are a pretty big deal. The skinny one who looks like he should be fronting a garage band is Tumblr founder David Karp, and the Jimmy Kimmel lookalike is Silicon Alley Insider reporter Dan Frommer (whose bosses are loving the fact that he got caught singing on camera).

Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, currently at the helm of human-powered search site Mahalo, was in town to keynote at the Search Engine Summit conference. Through Twitter and Facebook, he organized a dinner outing with a few dozen local tech personalities to a restaurant in Chinatown, and afterwards, I think everybody planned on going home and playing with their computers. We’re geeks, after all.

But as the stragglers were getting ready to head out, a Dodgeball alert (believe it or not, a fair number of people in the New York tech scene never abandoned the where-you-at Dodgeball service for the more messaging-oriented Twitter) came in from Dealbreaker editor John Carney. He was headed to Mott, a karaoke bar a few blocks away, and wanted some backup singers. Nobody hesitated to join up. (Maybe it was because video blog hotties Julia Allison and Meghan Asha, who are working on a Web show together, were in attendance, and the dudes wanted to impress them.)

The growth estimates assume that Yahoo will see significant revenue increase from search, market share gains in display, and acceleration of international growth, he adds.

In the presentation, Yahoo reaffirms its first-quarter and full-year guidance of $1.28 billion to $1.38 billion and $5.35 billion to $5.95 billion, respectively. The company also expects to double operating cash over the next three years and projects 24 percent growth in search ads and 19 percent in display ads each year, Sandler notes.

To Wall Street, the motivation was clearly to send a message to Microsoft.

Mark Mahaney of Citi Investment Research also predicted that Microsoft will boost its offer. “Buying Yahoo may be Microsoft’s ONLY game-changing option in (the) Internet sector,” he wrote.

That could all be a leap of faith, particularly in light of predictions for slower online ad sales growth because of softness in the overall economy.

A snag in the Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations could be coming in Asia–The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet company that Yahoo owns nearly 40 percent of, is talking to investors about buying Yahoo’s stake so it could stay independent if Microsoft acquires Yahoo. “For Microsoft, gaining Yahoo’s Asia stakes was a key attraction when it made the bid Jan. 31, an offer now valued at about $42 billion,” the report says.

Yahoo executives began a series of meetings on Tuesday with the company’s largest institutional investors and showed them a presentation detailing the company’s three-year financial projections that illustrates “the broader picture of all the assets,” says a source familiar with the matter.

Yahoo is using rosy financial projections to bolster its case with shareholders in a “last-ditch attempt” to get Microsoft to up the ante in its bid for the company, analysts say.

“This is another step in the public negotiation between these two companies,” Clay Moran of Stanford Group Company wrote in a research note. “We believe this deal is turning friendly. But, Yahoo’s alternatives are dwindling.”

Yahoo representatives declined to comment.

Updated 5:20 p.m. PST with Alibaba looking to purchase Yahoo’s stake.

Under Regulation Fair Disclosure, Yahoo is required to disclose material information to all investors at the same time, so it filed the information with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to make it public.

The strategy is likely to work, Sandler predicted. “We believe that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal ultimately goes through, and that today’s argument could push Microsoft to sweeten its bid to avoid a hostile takeover which may alienate Yahoo employees,” he wrote.

“At the very least, this is a smart last-ditch effort by Yahoo management to squeeze a few more dollars out of Microsoft.” –Ross Sandler, analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Friend category
View, send, receive messages
Manage downloads
Set the vibration feature of the controller
Sign in to PlayStation Network
Register friends
Manage Bluetooth devices
Terminate the game
Music category
Use the system BGM
Work the system BGM operation panel
Settings category
Assign controllers
View profiles
Game category
Set audio devices
Use the voice changer

According to the site, you’ll be able to access the following features via the XMB during gameplay. But be warned: some games may not support this feature.

Last week we told you about the recent firmware upgrade the
PS3 was getting and touched on the arrival of milestone version 2.40. While Sony has confirmed the inclusion of an in-game XMB (cross media bar), the rest of the 2.40 update was a bit cloudy.

But now, CVG claims to have the final list of features that make up the much-anticipated upgrade. In addition to the XMB, version 2.40 will feature a trophy system that will let compatible games track your progress, similar to the
Xbox 360 Achievements. Instead of a score, you earn different level trophies as you progress.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s great that this kind of activity can be crowd-sourced (please excuse the jargon) so the community (please excuse the jargon again) can contribute to a project that reduces the amount of digitally uncharted terrain. Google has given us a way to help make a difference that, while small, could collectively become quite large.

That’s because, fundamentally, Google Maps is a service not just consumed by many but also repackaged by many through the availability of the Google Maps API (application programming interface). So until the day Google flips its Don’t Be Evil switch to the “off” position, Google Maps is in effect a public utility, and many can benefit from contributions to the service.

Overall, I think my first reaction will carry the day for me.

Google Map Maker looks slick, but it would be slicker with better satellite imagery. Parts of Iceland, one of my favorite places on Earth, are too coarse for any tracing.

(Credit:
Google)

But on the other hand, I can think of worthy causes in greater need of charity or free labor than Google. If we’re all going to be augmenting Google Maps with user-generated content, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too? Geotagged entries in Wikipedia show on Google Maps, but not Google Maps alone, at least theoretically.

Google Map Maker lets people add details to maps in some countries.

With the tool, people can using tracing tools to build maps in Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, and Vietnam, according to the Google LatLong blog. Also open for cartographic contributions are several Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Microsoft’s answer to Google and other competitors in the online application market entered widespread beta testing on Tuesday.

The free service, set to debut later this year, is aimed at Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets, among other services, that have emerged as popular alternatives to Office.

While Office still holds a commanding lead in the productivity application market, that has not stopped Google, IBM, Adobe and others from launching new services. For many users, those services might be preferable to Office’s large installation footprint and expense.

Users can sign up for the service starting today.

Office Live Workspace, a Web-based extension to Office that introduces online document sharing and storage, has been in a limited, private beta test since last October.

For now, users will still need a copy of Office to edit documents, although they can use Office Live Workspace to view and comment on documents within a browser window, create what Microsoft terms “simple” Web lists and notes, and of course share documents.