Meanwhile, the market for traditional notebooks, which DisplaySearch defines as laptops with displays 12.1-inches and larger, will be flat year over year for the first time. And that’s interesting because one of the factors driving netbook sales, along with their lower price point, is screen size. Increasingly, consumers are looking for near-notebook-size screens in their netbooks.

“Mini-notes are forecast to continue to be a significant portion of the market. However, as display sizes of these devices have quickly moved from 7.0” to 8.9” to 10.1”, and now with the emergence of 11.6” and 12.0” mini-note products, it is clear that buyers want a light-weight device, but that they also want a bigger display,” said John Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch. “While these devices have certainly created a new market, our research indicates that they are predominantly used as secondary PCs by consumers, and are not replacing notebooks.”

Webcasters reached an agreement last week with Sound Exchange, the nonprofit organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to negotiate on behalf of performing artists, which says that large webcasters like Pandora earning more than $125 million a year will pay a quarter of gross revenues in royalties, or about 0.09 cents per song, whichever is higher.

Read the rest of this post of the original site

According to sources close to the situation, current and former employees of Facebook are now going to be able to sell a small portion of their common shares.

It is part of a $100 million add-on investment in the social networking company by the Russian investors who recently put $200 million into the company for preferred shares.

That investment a month ago by Digital Sky Technologies was valued at $10 billion, since those shares have various special rights, depending on what was negotiated.

The new tender offer by DST values the company at $6.5 billion for the common shares, or $14.77 a share. The last common share valuation of the company was around $4 billion.

The move has been expected for Facebook employees since DST made its first investment.

It will allow them to monetize shares, since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more.

Employees have 20 days to decide to take the offer or not and can only sell a small but unspecified percentage of their stock–in other words, they cannot cash out completely.

“I can afford a down payment on a house now,” said one longtime employee, who is typical of many. “But not a really big house.”

It is not clear, though, whether the leadership of Facebook, such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg or COO Sheryl Sandberg, is eligible to sell shares or not.

Facebook confirmed the DST investment, with a statement from Zuckerberg:

“While individuals must make their own decisions about participating in this program, I’m pleased that the price DST is offering is much greater than the price originally considered last fall. This is recognition of Facebook’s growth and progress towards making the world more open and connected.”

If fully accepted by those employees eligible, it will give DST 1.54 percent more of Facebook, for a total of 3.5 percent of the company.

That makes DST–based in London and Moscow–one of the bigger Facebook investors, with a stake larger than one owned by Microsoft (MSFT).

The software giant invested $250 million in Facebook for preferred shares in 2007, but the valuation was then $15 billion. That huge figure was due to a competing bid from archrival Google (GOOG) at the time.

In any case, neither DST nor Microsoft got a board seat or “special observer rights” in return for its money.

Here’s a video interview I did with one of DST’s top execs, Alexander Tamas, along with Sandberg, right after it made its first investment in May, while both were attending the seventh D: All Things Digital conference:

For free.

Which says quite a bit about the competitive pressures Microsoft (MSFT) is feeling right now, particularly from Google (GOOG), which first challenged Office two years ago and is now taking on Windows as well. “The fact that Microsoft is developing it at all is a response to Google,” said analyst Matt Rosoff of Directions On Microsoft. “This is a move that they probably wouldn’t have made if they didn’t have to, but there is enough competition bubbling up that they thought they needed a response.”

And a measured response that trumps Google’s offerings, which Office Web Apps will do on a few levels. First, it’s free of user-separation anxiety. Companies attached to Outlook, Word and whatnot will find in Office Web Apps the same familiar interfaces and functionality. No need to grudgingly replicate the Office experience as Google recently had to do with it Outlook synchronization tool for Apps, because Office Web Apps is Office.

Second, Microsoft’s approach offers enterprise an on-premises hosting option. Which means companies that aren’t comfortable running the suite on Microsoft’s remote data centers can run it on their own servers. And, as Gartner (IT) fellow Tom Austin notes, that could do much to distinguish it from Google Apps in the marketplace. “The hybrid hosting model removes a barrier to entry that Google cannot remove, so it is somewhat of a big thing,” Austin told Digital Daily.

“Interesting question is whether this hybrid hosting model is the Lockheed Prop-jet Electra of the era. Lockheed brought out a propjet at the same time Boeing and Douglas were coming out with turbojets (the 707 and DC-8 respectively). Boeing and Douglas won out, of course, but it didn’t help that the Electras had a problem with staying in the air….I am not saying that Microsoft Cloud-Office offering is a prop-jet Electra. I am saying firms will likely opt out of choosing the hybrid model because it’s less effective (like the electra).”

Toyota (TM) is considering close NUMMI, a Fremont, California vehicle-assembly plant that it has been operating jointly with General Motors. The revamped GM has decided to pull out of the venture, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (ergo, NUMMI) and now Toyota may close the doors on the operation, which employs 4,600 people.

“We need to determine whether it can be economically feasible to contract with NUMMI without GM,” Toyota said in a statement, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“According to reliable information, Apple will not follow the current market trend (by producing netbooks with screens about 10.2 or 10.1 inches in diagonal length.) Instead, Apple will produce screens with about 9.7 inches in diagonal length. Touch screen will be installed. Wintek will be the main manufacturer of the touch screen.”

Beyond screen size, there are no other specifications mentioned in the report. But it does include a price: $800. Which is $300 more than the $500-piece-of-junk price point Apple CEO Steve Jobs cited when he dismissed netbooks last October. “There are some customers which we chose not to serve,” Jobs said at the time. “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”

But will it allow Apple to ship an $800 one? Perhaps something with a P.A. Semi chip? Something that runs App Store apps and offers a sort of middle ground between the iPod touch and the MacBook?

UPDATE: Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster just weighed on these rumors in a research note. His thoughts, below:

On 7/13 Asian media reports suggested Apple is planning a tablet/netbook in Oct-09. Last week we spoke with a Taiwanese component supplier and continue to believe that Apple will launch a tablet, not a netbook, by early CY10. … We expect [it] to be a touchscreen device in the $500-$700 range (between the iPod Touch and MacBook).

[Image Credit: Adam Benton]

Why the hesitation? A little gun-shy after that ill-starred Vista deployment? Perhaps. Of those surveyed, 42 percent cited lack of time and resources as their reason for not upgrading. 39 percent said they had concern about the compatibility of Windows 7 with existing applications (click on chart below).

Always wise to wait for the release of that first service pack, right? That said, the fact that nearly 40 percent of businesses do plan to upgrade by the end of 2010 is noteworthy. That’s a high level of adoption for a new OS, especially in the current economic climate.

“Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.”

– LSD-inventor Albert Hofmann in a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs

This is, for lack of a better term, Google’s “Microsoft Moment”. (MSFT)

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Jeff Goldblum was the first to go.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Morgan Stanley’s (MS) European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Given his rank as the online retailer’s No. 1 reviewer, he would certainly know.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google (GOOG) exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.

Macgillivray is best known as the lead Google attorney on high-profile intellectual property cases like its fights with book publishers, the Associated Press and Viacom (VIA). Twitter has yet to find itself mired in that sort of thing, but give it time.

Macgillivray is just the latest Googler to land at Twitter. Earlier this year, the start-up nabbed Doug Bowman, the search giant’s lead designer, to join the ranks of several other Googleplex veterans, including, of course, co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.

There are lots of reasons to leave a big company for a scrappy start-up, but just to spell out one obvious one: If you’re into risk, there is a whole lot more upside at Twitter these days.

The company’s last funding round pegged its value at $240 million, and if it ends up being acquired in the next few years, that number could be much higher. But Google shares stalled long before last fall’s stock market collapse (click chart to enlarge):

[Image credit: Doc Searls]

OK. For the rest of you: The New York Times has unmasked the buyer of one of Brooklyn’s most expensive homes.

It’s not, as an astonishing number of people have speculated, actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Instead, it’s an unnamed Google (GOOG) engineer, who bought the place on Prospect Park West last year for $8.45 million.

At the Googler’s request, the Times isn’t naming the buyer, citing “office culture at Google” (more on the Times’s policy on unnamed sources here). But it’s going to be hard to keep this one quiet for long.

For starters, the buyers have already told the paper that “Harken Pretty,” the name of the limited-liability company they used to buy the nine-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot townhouse, is an anagram of their names. They also note that the Googler started working at the company prior to its 2004 IPO.

Assuming that the Googler is based in New York (he and his family are moving from Soho), that’s a reasonably small pool of folks to pick from. Maybe a couple hundred, tops. So this one’s getting out sooner than later.

Meanwhile, Curbed has a full set of pictures of the place, if you’re interested in that sort of thing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Note that these snapshots were taken prior to planned overhauls. The exterior will have to remain the same, per New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. But while the interior was good enough for its previous owners, actors Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, the new owners say the kitchen “had an inconsistent 1980s renovation.”

Power.com bills itself as a “social inter-networking site,” in which users can sign on to their other social accounts, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. It has some 8 million users.

That list once included Facebook. But the popular Palo Alto, Calif., site, which has more than 200 million active users, blocked Power.com and sued it late last year, accusing it of copyright and trademark violations.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Sources say Apple has formally requested a network access license to sell the iPhone in China, but the license is for a customized model in which Wi-Fi support has been disabled. If that proves true, then Apple (AAPL) has finally bowed to the demands of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which has been insisting that the iPhone run only on cellular networks.

As Matt Mathison, an analyst at Wedge Partners, notes, that’s a hell of a concession for Apple, which had no desire to customize the iPhone for the mainland market. “Apple was hellbent on having the iPhone be wifi-enabled,” Mathison told BusinessWeek. “The Chinese government has been just as adamant that it not be.”

Mathison added that now that Apple has conceded to Beijing’s demands, the iPhone may launch in China as much as three months earlier than expected. “We now expect it to come before the Spring Festival in [January] 2010,” he said.

Not so fast. At a joint T-Mobile and Google media event Friday morning, Google’s director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, said Chrome OS isn’t a substitute for mobile operating systems like Android, which have to solve many problems unique to mobile phones, such as managing battery life and ensuring calls don’t drop as a user is moving between cell towers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

My time-killing suggestion for the day: AdWeek’s “AdFreak” blog, which is packed with TV ads you probably haven’t seen. Did you know, for instance, that the Kool-Aid man was back?

Or perhaps you’ve wondered what a North Korean beer ad looks like (though honestly, you don’t need to go the full two-and-a-half minutes on this one; 20 seconds is fine):

Or maybe you want to see a guy doing a backflip in a wheelchair, as in this spot for Howstuffworks.com:

One word of warning: Don’t bother with the “Eat Canadian” ad, which is earnest and dull. Save that for Monday, as you’re easing into the week. Enjoy your weekend!

Best in show is a term you give to dogs, but I’m sure that wasn’t the implication here.

Shope is expecting a 3 percent quarter-over-quarter decline globally in PC units in the three months ended in June, and he notes that Gartner (IT) will unveil a preliminary read on June-quarter PC sales next Thursday, July 16. For the second half of the year, he sees an 8.5 percent pickup in PC units, which is certainly an improvement but below the 10.1 percent average increase over the last decade, he notes.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Today brings another Palm-related research note, this one from Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette. He claims that Pre sales are “robust.” According to Faucette’s channel checks, Palm is selling about 40,000 Pres per week, a “normalized” sell-through rate that he says will continue through August.

So who’s right? Piecyk or Faucette? Who knows? Until Palm (PALM) and Sprint (S) go on record with real sales metrics, we’ll have to use our imaginations. Which is pretty much what all these analysts appear to be doing right now, anyway. Honestly, they might as well be issuing research notes on jelly bean jar guessing games.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Palm and Sprint are not willing to release sales numbers right now. Reached for comment, Sprint told me, “We’re excited by the response to Palm Pre. Demand continues to be strong, and we are working closely with our partners at Palm to meet the needs of every customer as quickly as possible.” And Palm told me me to call Sprint…

Check out these self-reported behavior changes, via Gravity Tank, a Chicago consultancy that surveyed 1,000 heavy “app phone users.” That’s defined here as people who used either Apple’s (AAPL) handset or Google’s (GOOG) G1 phone from T-Mobile. (Click chart to enlarge.)

Of course, you’ll want to take this with big bags of salt. Because I’m not sure how many app users were really using an “Internet Tablet” to begin with. And I don’t see how monkeying around with likes of Ocarina and The Moron List is going to cut down on your caloric intake.

But! The fact is that app users think they’re watching less TV, etc., which at least means they value that stuff less.

So if you’re in the media business, the implications here are clear: Shoving your stuff into a browser won’t do you much good in a mobile world defined by apps. And the smarter media executives I know are scrambling to adapt.

I talked to a network TV guy yesterday who told me his company was making “tens of millions of dollars” from mobile right now but that pretty much everything it has done to date–carrier deals, licensing pacts, etc.–will have to be rethought and redone in light of the coming app world. He’s going to have to move very fast.

And if you’re not convinced, here are some of the folks Gravity Tank interviewed for a parallel set of “ethnographic” studies. If some of them seem a bit too much like the “I’m a Mac” dude from the Apple ads, bear in mind that these are iPhone users who agreed to be interviewed on camera talking about their love of apps. So that’s going to come with the territory.

gravitytank // Apps Get Real from Teaque Lenahan on Vimeo.

Also, apologies to readers viewing this on the All Things Digital app: Still no Vimeo on the iPhone.

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors. Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, August 2006

“Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire. I’m really looking forward to working with Steve and Apple’s board to help with all of the amazing things Apple is doing.”

–Google CEO Eric Schmidt, August 2006

Google chief Eric Schmidt has some words of advice for outsiders insisting he should recuse himself from Apple’s board of directors following the unveiling of Chrome OS, an operating system that will presumably compete with Apple’s Mac OS X: You can have my Apple board seat when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Speaking at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference, Schmidt, who has been an Apple director since 2006, said he sees “no issue” with him keeping his board seat. “I recused myself from iPhone because it was a direct competitor,” he said, acknowledging that he no longer participates in mobile phone discussions at Apple board meetings because of conflicts of interest. “But there is no change at the moment….I’ll talk to the Apple people. At the moment, there’s no issue.”

And if one should arise? If Apple (AAPL) should look askance at Google’s (GOOG) decision to launch its own OS? Or if the Federal Trade Commission probe into whether Schmidt’s seat on the Apple board of directors violates federal law picks up some traction? Well, does anyone really think that Schmidt won’t be able to keep his seat? C’mon.

As John Gruber noted over at Daring Fireball earlier this week, “I don’t understand why so many outsiders are concerned about this. If Steve Jobs and the other members of Apple’s board think Schmidt’s spot on the board poses a competitive conflict of interest, they’ll ask him to leave. If they don’t, then what’s the problem? Does [anyone] really believe he has a better grasp of Apple’s competitive position versus Google than Jobs? Does [anyone] think Jobs is too shy or polite to confront Schmidt?”

That’s at least part of the thinking behind Evian’s new advertising campaign, which has taken off on YouTube, thanks to a troupe of infants breakdancing and roller-skating across the screen. The campaign, called “Live Young,” broke last week and has gotten more than 2.8 million views on YouTube in the U.S., and another 2.3 million internationally.

“Live Young” begins with a baby tapping one roller-skate-clad foot and playing a version of Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (remixed by hip-hop producer Dan the Automator) on an old-school boombox.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Denton disclosed his new policy, which isn’t really a new policy but a revival of an old policy, in an interview yesterday with Nieman Journalism Lab. He’s tried this a couple of times before: Last year he experimented with paying readers $7.50 for every 1,000 page views they generated via submissions. And in 2007, he offered a bounty of $10,000 for anyone who could land an “unretouched” version of an image that ended up on the cover of a women’s magazine, and paid out for this shot of Faith Hill.

I followed up with Denton this morning and he told me that he hasn’t fleshed out his plans yet–they’re “half-baked” right now–but they’re likely to be of the Faith Hill variety: Payouts to winner of contests, sweepstakes, etc.

Paying for tips, interviews and exclusives is standard practice outside of the U.S. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, paid a source that helped it break the expense account scandal that’s been roiling that country’s Parliament.

But it’s supposed to be verboten for “respectable” American media, though that self-imposed standard has been eroding for some time. It’s increasingly common, for instance, for TV news operations to pay big “licensing fees” to sought-after interview subjects, purportedly for access to family photos and videos.

Paying for tips is also old hat for newspaper tabloids. And TMZ, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse, has made it well-known that it will pay for tips. It’s a very good bet that the Web site has been writing many checks during the past couple weeks of the Michael Jackson frenzy.

Ultimately, Denton says, he’d like emulate the TMZ model. “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.” Dream big!

TMZ boss Harvey Levin talks about his pay-per-tip policy in this interview with Kara Swisher:

It’s not often these days that you get any kind of public offering in the market for tech companies–so a lot of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are looking at the fall spinoff of AOL very carefully.

That’s because, even though AOL is widely considered to be an also-ran by Silicon Valley (same as it ever was, actually, even at the height of its power in the late 1990s), many are very interested in serving on its board.

According to many sources, exactly who will be on what will likely be a 10-12 member board of directors for the company is up for grabs, once it decouples from owner Time Warner (TWX).

Thus, AOL, with Time Warner’s top execs’ involvement, sources said, has compiled a list of about 70 possible candidates–picked, suggested and self-nominated–and is now proceeding to vet them and begin the process of asking people to serve.

It should not be a tough sell. After all, despite its recent struggles, AOL remains one of the major Internet sites, with massive traffic, several well-known products and a large advertising business.

In addition, people seem inclined to see what kind of overhaul new CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong can pull off and whether the former Google (GOOG) exec can work some magic.

He’s been formulating plans for what stays and what goes in the company as he tries to shine up the apple–or put lipstick on the pig, depending on your perspective–for investor consumption.

That includes keeping the access business, which many thought would be sold off, and putting many of the companies it has recently acquired–including its pricey Bebo social networking site–in a separate ventures unit, which will try to attract outside investment or sell off assets.

The strategy will focus AOL on several key areas, including media, local, “scaled” advertising and communications.

The jury is out on how successful Armstrong will be at innovating at AOL. But with almost zero IPO action and little prospect of any in the near future, it’s about the only such game in town as it moves to what is likely to be an October spinoff.

To help Armstrong sort through the choices, BoomTown is now compiling a suggestion list of fancy names I would recommend, and will do another post on that next, along with a general idea of what stays and what goes.

Until then, here are the broad outlines of what AOL needs to look for in a board:

One media mogul, one consumer electronics exec, one entrepreneur, one publishing exec, one Time Warner exec, one social networking exec, one advertising exec, one entertainment/Hollywood exec, one telecom/mobile exec, one consumer brand exec, one Internet mogul, and, of course, Armstrong.

And, as a definite requirement, given that there are way too many on way too many Internet company boards: No venture capitalists need apply.

An interesting variation on the “membership drive” and one that’s gotten Tagged in hot water with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy.”

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical–and illegal–behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged, for its part, claims this is all just a big misunderstanding. In a statement of its own, the company denied abusing its users’ personal address books, saying, essentially, it had their consent to do so.

“When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our ‘invite your friends’ language was confusing,” said Tagged CEO Greg Tseng. “…In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends.”

Oh, and next time you register for a social network, be sure to read its Terms of Service–especially the portions that are presented in ALL CAPS. They might be important. From Tagged’s Terms of Service:

“E) Notice Regarding Commercial Email

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM TAGGED, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY TAGGED FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.”

Especially departures, it seems, as the massive restructuring of the digital units of News Corp. (NWS) keeps shaking out.

Top engineer Max Engel (pictured here), who ran the social networking site’s open initiatives, for example, is leaving to join the new stealth start-up being helmed by ex-MySpace employees, including former COO Amit Kapur.

In a blog post on his Web site yesterday, titled “Farewell, MySpace…,” Engel did not say where he was headed, but noted:

“While MySpace presented opportunities through their scale and reach, I’ve spent the past 3 years at large companies, and now I’m ready to go small and give the startup life a try.”

In addition, while I was poking around on this story, sources also told me that there are more higher-level departures in the works, including those whom the new team of execs at Beverly Hills, Calif.-based MySpace had kept in place, despite a recent round of layoffs.

Those execs include Tom Andrus (pictured here), who was a key product exec in the last regime at MySpace, sources said, but is poised to go. His former charge was as SVP of product management under MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson.

While Anderson remains at MySpace, his role has been changed and product is now headed by Jason Hirschhorn, and Andrus reportedly decided recently that he did not want to stay at the company in a lesser role.

Andrus is also listed as a developer at Gray Ghost Ventures on LinkedIn.

In the longer term, sources said it is also likely that once he completes the work to downsize MySpace’s international operations–which were cut drastically–its head, Travis Katz (pictured here), will move on in the fall.

While some thought he would leave during MySpace’s international layoffs several weeks ago, he did not, given all the work involved in closing down a lot of operations there after 67 percent the staff abroad was cut.

Katz, sources said, is preparing to move to California in the next several weeks and is interested in working for a start-up, after many years at News Corp.

Lastly, on the goodbye train, is MySpace Music’s SVP Strategy and Global Marketing, Jamie Kantrowitz (pictured here).

She had previously worked as a top exec in MySpace’s international business.

Not everyone is bidding adieu, though, although they are moving chairs.

Dan Fawcett (pictured here), president of Fox Digital Media, is likely to be moving to work with News Corp. digital head Jon Miller as his general counsel and right-hand man at the Fox Interactive Media division.

The former GC, Mike Angus, has moved to FIM’s Fox Audience Network, run by Adam Bain.

FIM, of course, is being rejiggered into a new smaller unit, as I previously reported, and is likely to be renamed simply the Digital Media Group.

(Full disclosure: FIM is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones–owner of this site.)

In a wide-ranging on-the-record press conference, Messrs. Schmidt and Page described the origins of the combination browser/operating system.

“At the time, Google was a small company,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Having come through the bruising browser wars, I didn’t want to do that again.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.”

— Rupert Murdoch says News Corp. isn’t working on a Kindle of its own

As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm (PALM)–see the AllThingsD.com topic page on the Pre here–in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

Palm is trying to muscle into a market with multiple competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android from Google (GOOG) and many more.

In the session with Walt Mossberg and me, McNamee and Rubinstein talked about the new smartphone and its various features, including a controversial way of syncing with Apple (AAPL) iTunes.

Also, McNamee and I had a debate over the Pre’s mirror. Really.

Here’s the video of the full D7 session (along with a very funny intro video making fun of McNamee’s loose lips):

As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm (PALM)–see the AllThingsD.com topic page on the Pre here–in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

Palm is trying to muscle into a market with multiple competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android from Google (GOOG) and many more.

In the session with Walt Mossberg and me, McNamee and Rubinstein talked about the new smartphone and its various features, including a controversial way of syncing with Apple (AAPL) iTunes.

Also, McNamee and I had a debate over the Pre’s mirror. Really.

Here’s the video of the full D7 session (along with a very funny intro video making fun of McNamee’s loose lips):

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The latest installment shows the grave of Clippy, the oft-mocked help tool that has been absent from recent versions of the productivity software.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In the eight years since the upright, self-balancing “personal transporter” first debuted, this question has become a perennial during speculative-future parlor games, on par with queries like “When will soccer finally supplant football in the hearts of Americans?”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Read the rest of this post on the original site

To back up the claim in blog posts and Twitter discussions, Chinese Internet users and watchers pointed to Herdict Web, a four-month-old system run by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which aggregates reports of Web site accessibility into one database. On Wednesday, 12 reports on Herdict claimed Amazon.com was inaccessible in China, and as of the time of this posting three claim it is back up. The reports came from users all over the country, including people whose Internet service providers are in Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Ningbo and Tianjin.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Or as the release puts it: “Best Buy intends to utilize TiVo’s robust platform to deliver educational and marketing messages directly to consumers.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

• Week ending June 6: 3.43 percent
• Week ending June 13: 4.57 percent
• Week ending June 20: 5.35 percent
• Week ending June 27: 6.63 percent

“Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, the search engine has grown at an average weekly rate of 25 percent for the month of June 2009,” Hitwise explains. “Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engines have grown at an average of 16 percent during June 2009. Bing grew faster than the three other prominent search engines for the month.”

Impressive. But sadly, not enough for Microsoft (MSFT) to make real headway. Because Bing actually ended up losing market share during June, slipping to 5.25 percent from the 5.64 percent it had in May (click on chart below). Meanwhile, Google (GOOG) gained share, rising to 74.04 percent from 73.66 percent in May. And Yahoo (YHOO) gained as well, starting out the month with a 15.55 percent share and ending it with 16.19 percent.

Starz, which has the cable and Web rights to much of the Disney catalog, among other assets, says it will make some of those films, including “Wall-E” and “High School Musical 3,” available for Comcast’s (CMCSA) test, which is supposed to launch this month. Also available: TV series like “Crash” and non-Disney movies like Sony’s “Step Brothers.”

The idea is to protect cable subscription revenue by giving pay TV customers–but only pay TV customers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV and hope this keeps them from canceling their subscriptions. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who has been pushing a parallel effort he calls “TV Everywhere,” signed onto Comcast’s effort last month and offered up a handful of TV shows from his TBS and TNT networks; Comcast also has roped in Scripps, Rainbow and A&E.

I’m told Comcast will have a few more partners before it launches the trial, but the emphasis here is on “trial”: The cable guys appear confident they can handle the technical aspects of the program, but they’ve never tried anything like it before, so this is really a test to see if they can pull it off. And if that works, the real work will be the negotiations between cable programmers and cable providers over who gets what, when.

And just to be clear: The video is a joke. But the preroll ads that run before it–the two I’ve seen before are for Amway and some kind of fast food chain called Red Robin–are real. I think. Also not a joke: The New York Times (NYT)  is surveying readers to see what they’d think of paying $5 a month for Web access to the paper.

In related news, tomorrow is the first annual “Freelancers put on your pants day,” according to ASSME, which is a sort-of-serious blog/support group formed in the wake of last fall’s mass layoffs.

For Sprint, which is suffering from declining revenue and a thinning subscriber base, the move is a quick-and-dirty way of cutting costs and freeing up resources to focus on innovation and remedying the real and perceived issues with its services.

“This is about improving our customer experience,” Steve Elfman, head of Sprint’s network operations, said during a conference call this morning. “While we get the benefit of Ericsson’s expertise…we can focus our attention on bringing great devices, great services, great applications to them….We’ll benefit from the current scale and efficiency and expertise of Ericsson, and this will keep improving over time.”

Mr. Gates and his former lieutenant Nathan Myhrvold were walking out of the morning session when two reporters, including this one, asked Mr. Gates for a comment on the new Google operating system.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In the study, published in the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of a person’s Social Security number about 40 percent of the time, just by knowing his or her hometown and birth date. Given those two pieces of information, they could predict all nine digits of his or her SSN 8.5 percent of the time with fewer than 1,000 attempts.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

I have been testing three of these devices, the Power Monitor from Black & Decker Corp. (BDK), the very similar PowerCost Monitor from Blue Line Innovations Inc., and the more-sophisticated The Energy Detective 5000 from Energy Inc. In my tests, the Black & Decker model provided the most effortless electricity-tracking service. At $99.99, it is also the least expensive.

The devices provide real-time data about how much power you’re using across the house in terms that are easy to comprehend: cost per hour and cost per month. Turn on the microwave and watch the cost jump from 10 cents to 25 cents an hour. Turn off some lights and see the cost drop a few cents.

The firms say their customers have, over time, seen drops of as much as 20% in power bills by being more mindful of electricity use and making informed purchases. An independent Oxford University study in 2006 found that people getting direct feedback on their power consumption reduced use 5% to 15%.

After I began monitoring, my most-recent electricity bill dropped $10 from the month before—but that could also be due to my living in a city where air conditioning isn’t a summer necessity. I find myself thinking more about electricity, and even running back into the house to make sure the lights are out.

The monitors sold by Blue Line and Black & Decker are almost identical, because they’re both manufactured by Canada-based Blue Line. The Blue Line model costs $109, is a bit larger, and features a slightly longer range for the wireless signal that transmits power use from your electric meter.

Connecting these two devices to my electric meter was simple. First, loop a metal belt around the glass dome covering the meter. Then align a sensor attached to the belt on top of the glass to read the data collected by your meter. On my old-style meter, the Power Monitor’s sensor keeps track of how fast a dial rotates. The companies say their products work with about 90% of meters in North America.

The sensor you attach to the electric meter wirelessly sends raw data to a digital monitor that is kept inside the house. Before using the monitor, you have to enter data from your electric bill, but finding the right data can be tricky. Black & Decker’s instructions on this are relatively clear, and entering the data into the digital monitor involves a process similar to setting an alarm clock.

The digital monitors, about the size of a large remote control, can sit in one room or travel about the house. A button labeled “tare” on the Black & Decker model helps you calculate how much electricity is being used by any single appliance that you can turn off and on.

The Black & Decker model features a rudimentary display that only reports the aggregate power use for your house at any given time. It can’t go back and show you changes over time.

But the latest model from The Energy Detective, known as TED, connects directly to a house’s power supply for a more-precise read than the Black & Decker. It comes with software that graphs how use patterns change over time. The TED 5000 costs $199.

But installing TED requires turning off your home’s main power line and inserting a sensor into your circuit breaker—a process that the company says should be done “by qualified personnel only.” I sought help from a friend who has a lot of wiring experience, but after several hours, we were unable to make TED work. My issue was likely a decades-old circuit breaker. The company said my configuration is atypical and that problems like this are rare. A colleague has been using TED for several weeks after hiring an electrician to install it.

While TED 5000 offers many more advanced tools for sleuthing your home’s electricity waste than the other models, all of its sophistication won’t necessarily help the average user do much of a better job remembering to turn off the lights. For most of us, the large cost-an-hour sign on the Black & Decker Power Monitor offers the only feedback we really need.

And before buying any of these devices, keep in mind that many utility companies are installing a new generation of so-called “smart” meters, which not only measure real-time power use, but also offer two-way communication with the power company to help cut costs. And Google Inc.’s (GOOG) nonprofit foundation is working with power companies on a free service that connects data about your power use into an online widget.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation. Email Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Enter RealPlayer SP beta (realplayer.com), the latest in RealNetworks Inc.’s (RNWK) long line of media players that the company has churned out since 1995. RealPlayer SP—the SP stands for social and portable—is a free download that, once installed, grabs videos from the Web, converts them to the right format and transfers them to over a dozen portable devices. While other software programs perform two or just one of these tasks, the RealPlayer SP’s trio of talent makes it like a digital Swiss army knife.

After using the RealPlayer for moving several videos of all kinds to an iPhone, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Palm Pre, I felt like I had more control over my portable devices and the media they held. And the freedom of knowing that this player is compatible with almost anything—including Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) devices, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerrys, T-Mobile’s G1 and Sidekick, Nokia’s (NOK) N97 and certain basic cellphones—is a major plus.

Behavior Problem

My biggest problem with using the RealPlayer SP has to do with my own behavior. Most of the videos I watch online and share with friends are less than five minutes long. This means that grabbing, converting and transferring videos to a portable device using the RealPlayer SP—albeit a relatively quick process—could easily take more time than the length of the video, itself. And many of the longer videos that I would want to move to a BlackBerry or iPhone are copyright-protected and thus can’t be downloaded by the RealPlayer SP.

Another factor is that more devices now have their own built-in app stores for downloading content to the device, without plugging into a computer for transfers like with the RealPlayer SP. The iPod touch, for example, can now download movies, music videos and TV shows over Wi-Fi thanks to a recent $10 software upgrade.

Mac Version Coming Soon

The RealPlayer SP works only on Windows PCs right now; a Mac version is due out by the end of this year. Likewise, it doesn’t work on Apple’s Safari browser but does work on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome browser; I used all three with success.

If you’re not interested in using the RealPlayer SP for transferring videos to portable devices, you can still use it for downloading videos, saving them onto your computer and sharing them with friends via Twitter, Facebook or email. Tiny icons representing each of these sharing options appear in-line beside freshly downloaded videos. I shared videos of last week’s Congressional Luau at the White House via Facebook and Twitter, but the icon to share videos via Twitter doesn’t automatically shrink URLs to fit into a tweet. I shrunk the URLs myself, but this took an extra step¹.

And though I’ve mostly focused on the RealPlayer SP’s ability to grab, convert and transfer (RealNetworks calls these tools the Downloader feature in the player), it also works as its own media player or helps you discover new content.

RealPlayer SP Beta downloads, converts and transfers videos from the Web to a variety of portable devices.

A premium version called RealPlayer Plus SP is available for $40. Premium features include DVD burning, DVD playback (if your computer can’t play DVDs) and video conversion to a special format called h.264—though the free version performs these conversions for videos being moved to Apple devices.

I jumped around the Web visiting sites and playing videos, which prompted the RealPlayer SP to display a small “Download This Video” message above videos that aren’t copyright-protected. Downloading videos worked on most sites, including AllThingsD.com, Slate, YouTube, Salon and CNET. As expected, I wasn’t so lucky with videos from the New York Times, BBC and Hulu, which hosts loads of TV shows and music videos. That’s because videos from these sites were copyright-protected and didn’t allow for downloading.

A Glitch

In one instance with a WSJ.com video, only the short ad that played before the video was downloaded, even though the download prompt indicated that the WSJ video was obtainable using RealPlayer SP. RealNetworks says this is a glitch it knows about and plans to correct.

The RealPlayer SP’s ability to download videos and transfer them to devices, rather than just copying them onto computers, forced me to be choosier about the videos that I downloaded due to the limited memory of the devices. Because of this, I wished the RealPlayer SP Downloader had a better built-in way to discover downloadable content. Currently, a link to something called the RealGuide pulls up suggestions, but I had a hard time finding clips there that I wanted to download. RealNetworks says it plans to improve the video-discovery process in the future, including adding things like YouTube keyword searches built right into the Downloader.

The Downloader Window

When I did find videos I liked, I clicked on the prompt to download the clip, found the clip in a tiny Downloader window, and chose to move the clip to a device (there’s a list of all available devices) or share it via Twitter, Facebook or email. Transfer times depend on the length of the video.

RealNetworks provides simple instructions on making sure your device is set to transfer when plugged in. For example, BlackBerrys must be set to mass-storage mode, Palm Pres should be set to USB mode and Apple devices synchronize with the iTunes library, where RealPlayer’s converted videos are sent for transferring to iPhones and iPods.

RealPlayer SP can be a real help when it comes to putting the content that you want on your portable device. Its ability to assist from start to finish—finding videos, converting and transferring them—saves time and avoids confusion. To succeed, RealPlayer SP needs to do a better job of helping people find worthwhile videos to transfer, or they’ll stop using it after just a few tries.

Corrections and Amplifications

¹ Real Networks says its RealPlayer SP Beta’s Twitter video sharing capability has an automatic URL-shortening tool built in. This week’s Mossberg Solution product said the product lacked such a feature, because it never activated itself in our tests.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

In your review of the new iPhone 3GS, you said that AT&T had changed its upgrade policy so some buyers of the previous model could get the new-customer price earlier than planned. Can you explain this in more detail?

Almost all cellphones in the U.S. are subsidized by the carriers to bring down prices. Typically, existing customers—who have already benefited from a subsidy—can’t upgrade at the lower new-customer price (in this case $199) until they reach a point in their contracts where this subsidy has been recovered. These dates vary, based on a formula that takes into account things like the customer’s monthly spending rate.

When some early adopters of the 2008 iPhone model, the 3G, discovered they wouldn’t immediately qualify for this $199 “standard upgrade” price—the same as the new-customer price—they got angry. So AT&T made a concession, but only a partial one. It declared that any customer who had been told he or she couldn’t get the $199 price until sometime in July, August or September of 2009 would in fact now be able to qualify for that lower price starting on the first day of availability.

This concession doesn’t apply at all to owners of the original 2007 iPhone, or even every owner of the 2008 3G model. And it isn’t based on when you bought your 3G, but when the system told you that you could buy the new model at the “standard” upgrade price of $199. You can check the price AT&T or Apple will charge you for an upgrade by going to www.att.com/iPhone and clicking on “Check upgrade eligibility.”

I’ve recently heard that the new Palm Pre smart phone is unable to import data from the old Palm Desktop program. In other words, if you have Palm Desktop filled with data from a previous Palm model, you’ll be unable to get that data into your new Palm Pre. Is this true?

No. While the Pre isn’t designed to repeatedly sync with the old Palm Desktop software, Palm does offer a program, for Windows and Mac, that will perform a one-time import of your old data from Palm Desktop. It can also do a one-time import of data from certain other desktop programs as well, including Microsoft Outlook on Windows, and iCal and Address Book on the Mac. This program will help you move your data to one of the online services, such as Google, with which the Pre is designed to sync continuously. The software is called the Palm Data Transfer Assistant and is free at http://bit.ly/3lIaZ.

I am contemplating purchasing the 17” MacBook Pro rather than the 13” or 15” models because the antiglare matte screen is offered only with the 17”. How bad is the glare on the smaller screens and how cumbersome do you find the larger 17” MacBook Pro?

For a laptop of its size, the 17” MacBook Pro is remarkably thin and light. But I did find it cumbersome to use in coach seats on airplanes and to cram into small briefcases. As for the glossy screens, which are now the most common option on many laptops, they bothered me at first, but I don’t notice the glare now. However, both of these are personal issues. So my suggestion is to go to a store and see for yourself.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.