In BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh.

Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo (YHOO) makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and most of all, innovative manner.

It is actually a process that was started under the previous leadership, especially President Sue Decker.

But now, after a number of reorgs, a wide swath of Yahoo is under Balogh’s purview–from search to open initiatives to product development to trying to fix Yahoo’s big problem of never quite getting its innovations out the door.

To explain all this, Balogh sat down with me twice–he is clearly a glutton for punishment–to talk about where Yahoo stood as it sought to dig itself out of its long slump and reemerge as the potent Internet force it once was.

While he successfully avoided the questions about Yahoo’s talks to do a search and advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), he did talk about his view of its new Bing search service (well done, but can it scale?–which is an engineer’s favorite schoolyard taunt).

He also addressed the bigger question of how Yahoo can stay relevant in the fast-changing Web 2.0 world.

To Balogh, copying trendsetters like Facebook is not the answer. For example, he noted that Yahoo is more a place where consumers do “one-way” follows of things important in their lives rather than wanting another social-network service (which Yahoo has tried and failed at, actually).

“We’re not going to be another social network,” said Balogh flatly, agreeing that that boat has already long sailed without Yahoo on it with a significant product–Yahoo famously failed to buy Facebook, well before Balogh arrived in early 2008 from VeriSign (VRSN). “But we can be a place where people make and manage the important connections they have.”

How this will all play out is one of the most interesting questions in Silicon Valley because–even after all the turmoil–Yahoo remains one of the largest sites on the Web.

About 500 million monthly unique visitors enter its homepage and course through its vast site constantly, from its search pages to its massive email and instant-messaging services and its popular suite of content sites.

No one says Yahoo is not big–what everyone says is that it has missed many major and critical Internet trends as it has become mired in a management morass and external battles.

Now, with new leadership in place, observers are waiting to see what’s next.

In this regard, it is important what Balogh thinks since he is perhaps Yahoo’s only person who even closely resembles a Web product visionary now that former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang has stepped aside and Bartz has taken up command.

While he typically shies away from the spotlight, he is not bashful about talking about Yahoo’s infamous lugubrious development process.

“We have pockets of great technology that we have to really put back together into a coherent infrastructure,” said Balogh. “We have to get the basics right and focus on those core daily experiences that make Yahoo extraordinary.”

That is easier said than done, especially when changes impact so many consumers and, of course, the bottom line. Choosing what key trends to attack is harder for a large public company like Yahoo, which has a lot to protect in its current businesses.

“There will always be a battle between new ideas and monetization,” said Balogh. “The question is how much do you push that line back and forth?”

That fine line will surely be tested with the rollout of its new homepage in the fall, a long project that has been codenamed “Metro.”

“It is not a radical departure, but we have given users more power to do what they want and also serve as the best of Web versus that is already inside of Yahoo,” said Balogh of the new homepage. “With technology, it is always a push-pull.”

Here’s my video interview with him, talking about all this and more:

The Justice Department probe of the Google Books settlement is heating up. On Thursday afternoon, the agency officially opened an investigation into the deal, which would allow the search sovereign to make millions of books available online.

“The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act,” wrote William F. Cavanaugh, a deputy assistant attorney general. “At this preliminary stage, the United States has reached no conclusions as to the merit of those concerns or more broadly what impact this settlement may have on competition. However, we have determined that the issues raised by the proposed settlement warrant further inquiry.”

The move is the strongest sign yet that the DOJ may block the settlement, which critics claim would grant Google (GOOG) a monopoly on orphaned works–copyrighted texts without an identifiable copyright holder. The notification, included below, is the first time the DOJ has confirmed the investigation publicly and said that it is indeed looking at possible violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Odd that the letter was filed this week inasmuch as the “fairness hearing” that will determine whether final approval is given to the settlement is still months away. Clearly, Google’s recent public relations offensive claiming the company is just as vulnerable to competition as anyone else hasn’t had much effect.

Reached for comment, Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker offered the following statement:

“The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions.

It’s important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S.”

2009.07.02 Order _ DOJ Letter -

Jeff Zucker runs one of the world’s leading media and entertainment content companies, which is also being caught in the throes of a major shift, due to the impact of the Internet over the last decade.

In this onstage interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Zucker talks about the state of the television business; the changing advertising market; the impact of Hulu, an online premium video joint venture the GE (GE) unit NBC launched with News Corp. (NWS); and precisely what he meant when he said that the Web was turning “analog dollars into digital pennies.”

Here’s the video of the full D7 session (the video does not include a short intro video done by NBC’s “Late Night” host Jimmy Fallon, which includes a ribald joke about Zucker marrying Courtney Cox):

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

– Palm investor Roger McNamee

Palm (PALM) seems to have satiated pent-up early demand for its new Pre smartphone, constrained supplies be damned. In a pair of investor notes issued today, analysts at Pali Research and JP Morgan say that sales of the Pre have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity.

“We have concluded our 3rd round of channel checks for the Pre,” writes JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster, who notes that demand for the handset is hovering at about 40,000 per week. “The gap between supply and demand has closed at Sprint and BestBuy stores, waitlists are eliminated or down, and most stores now have Pre devices in stock.”

Pali Research analyst Walter Piecyk also surveyed the Pre landscape and reached a similar conclusion, though he sees the slowing of sales as a bit more pronounced. “We believe that Palm Pre sales have slowed over the past week for Sprint to under 40,000 from 50,000-60,000 last week,” he writes. “…We suspect that if sales continue to moderate, Sprint would increase its marketing budget for the product. The marketing budget behind the product has been somewhat limited to date compared to the marketing push that Apple does.”

Indeed. And let’s not forget that Apple (AAPL) has a new handset on the market that’s been selling quite well. Makes you wonder if this ebb in demand for the Pre is somehow related.

Guess it’s looking like Palm investor Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion aren’t going to quite pan out.

Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marriane Wolk has scoured the Internet for intelligence on Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search engine Bing, and come up with the conclusion that the appeal of the new service, and its staying power, is uncertain. “The long term verdict for Bing and its ability to drive sustainable share gains (post Microsoft’s ~$100 million advertising spree) is still a long way from being determined,” she writes. Wolk quotes market share data from StatCounter showing that Bing has gained half a percentage point of share in Internet search since it appeared. She also found 13,000 news articles on Google news since the service came out.

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If you liked the “Mr. Creosote” sketch in “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life,” you’ll like this one. And if you didn’t…well, you’re like many other folks, some of whom complained loudly enough to get Microsoft (MSFT) to yank the ad, though it still lives in Google’s (GOOG) YouTube.

Microsoft’s explanation for the spot, and its removal, via an email to CNET:

We make a point of listening to our customers. We created the … video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it.

A reminder: These spots are not the work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the high-profile ad shop that gets associated with most of Microsoft’s marketing work these days. They’re from Indiana-based Bradley and Montgomery and they’re directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, for whom I’ve already professed my admiration.

These were Goldthwait’s first commercials, though, and it will be interesting to see if he gets another shot. And in retrospect, he did hint that this might be coming when he talked to Techflash after the first of his browser ads hit the Web last month:

Well, the folks at (Bradley and Montgomery), the agency that wrote ‘em, I would have to credit them with my involvement, and also Microsoft. I think they were trying to do something that was a little less mainstream, and I think that’s (what led to) my involvement. Normally the corporate world is very frightened of hiring the dude from Police Academy to direct their stuff, so I’m flattered and I was really happy. There’s a couple more coming up, too, so I’m actually looking forward to those being released, because I think they’re a little more nutty in tone.

Want to see for yourself? Have at it. But don’t complain to us afterward.

iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008–all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

[Image credit: Gizmodo]

About a year ago, Canadian Internet entrepreneur Justin Hartzman was planning to visit Las Vegas with some friends, and was trying to decide which shows and concerts the group should see. “After about 400 or 500 emails back and forth,” he says, he realized he needed a Web site that would aggregate all of the events in a certain area and during a specific set of dates. And thus the idea for TicketFlow was born.

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Impressive growth, though RIM’s still got a way to go before it catches up with its rivals. Opera continues to hold the top spot with a share of 25.4 percent, followed by Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone at 20.8 percent, Nokia’s (NOK) 19.3 percent and 14 percent for the iPod touch. Note as well that Android continues to flat-line, though presumably that will change with the release of new devices using the OS.

That distinction popped up this morning after Politico detailed an “astonishing offer” by the paper’s business staff to lobbyists–a chance to underwrite “salons” with D.C. bigshots, hosted at the home of CEO Katharine Weymouth.

A promotional flier Politico got its hands on also promised that the Post’s editorial staff would be part of the events, including one scheduled for July 21. But that part isn’t true, a Post spokeswoman told me via email this morning:

The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers.

As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.

We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that The Post should be leading these conversations in Washington, big or small, while maintaining journalistic integrity. The newsroom will participate where appropriate.

OK, so that’s cleared up. But let me play devil’s advocate: What exactly would be so wrong about getting the paper’s reporters or editors to to participate in one of these?

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the Post has been at the nexus of power, money and influence. In fact, Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was famous for hosting gatherings much like these at her house. And publications of all stripes, including this one, as well as Dow Jones, which owns this site, frequently charge fees to attend networking events where their editorial staffs participate.

And you’re likely to see more of this stuff, not less, as publishers search for revenue streams besides advertising to stay afloat. Any tempest you see about this today is going to look quaint in a couple of years.

UPDATE: The ensuing uproar has forced the Post to cancel the events altogether. Post execs are now busy pointing fingers at each other, although it seems clear a lot of the blame is going to be laid at the feet of the paper’s conference group and/or marketing team.

But note Howard Kurtz’s report on his employers’ reactions to the reaction: Weymouth (or her proxies) say she was OK with the idea, but not the marketing; Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says he was OK with the concept, but not this version:

Weymouth knew of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation. But, one of the executives said, she believed that there would be multiple sponsors, to minimize any appearance of charging for access, and that the newsroom would be in charge of the scope and content of any dinners in which Post reporters and editors participated.

Brauchli said he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences of the sort commonly staged by major news organizations.

But he said he made clear to the company’s marketing officials that Post journalists would participate only if they could substantially control the nature of any such conference. Brauchli said he was blindsided by the wording of these fliers and that they are an embarrassment to the newspaper.

In the old days, the fact that this story broke just before the long holiday weekend would help the Post. But this story will now have legs, egged on by stuff like this:

TiVo (TIVO) shares this morning are heading lower after the company said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted a request by EchoStar (SATS) to stay a contempt order imposed by a lower court pending the outcome of EchoStar’s appeal in the the patent dispute between the two companies.

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So this one doesn’t even faze me: Swedish regulators are looking into insider trading charges at Global Gaming Factory X, which saw shares jump several days before it said it would buy The Pirate Bay.

From Wired (via PaidContent):

AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange listing some 116 public companies, suspended trading in Global Gaming a week before the announcement as trading volume and share prices jumped without public news to account for it.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at AktieTorget.

Before the sale, average daily volume in Global Gaming was about 162,000 shares. From June 5 to June 18, there was little trading in the stock with an average price of about 9 cents. On June 22, shares nearly doubled to 18 cents with 1.2 million shares sold before trading was halted.

Trading resumed Tuesday, the day of the announced purchase, and shares closed at a high of 38 cents, with a heavy volume of 5.8 million shares traded. Trading closed at 25 cents Wednesday, down 13 cents, and the volume was nearly 7 million shares traded.

But I have a question: Why would anyone think that Global Gaming Factory X shares would be worth more once this news got out?

The company’s announced plan–to sell legal downloads to users who flock to the site for free downloads and to somehow resell bandwidth its users generate to the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) and AT&T (T)–is a nonstarter. If anything, you’d expect insiders to be dumping whatever shares they owned in advance of the news, right?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Swedish penny stocks are like U.S. penny stocks–murky caveat-emptor things that widows and orphans want to avoid. So it’s hard to get too worked up about this or try to puzzle it out. Still, if anyone wants to explain it to me, I’m all ears.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sirius XM said it will raise Karmazin’s base salary to $1.5 million from $1.25 million beginning on Jan. 1, 2010, and grant him an option to purchase 120 million shares at an exercise price of 43 cents a share. His reward for steering the company clear of bankruptcy after driving it right up to its very edge, I suppose.

Sirius (SIRI) investors who’ve seen their stock plunge to 46 cents from $2 a share can be forgiven for questioning the wisdom of such a move and wondering if perhaps there wasn’t a better use for a quarter of a million dollars at a time when the company is buried in debt. But there’s nothing much to be done about it now. Suffice it to say, the odds of Karmazin being forced out at this point are likely pretty slim.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Fee Increase Coming for Sirius XM Subscribers [Internal Doc]
• Sirius Founder: You’re 10 Years Too Late, Karmazin
• Call Me Mel “Save-My-Own-Keister” Karmazin
• Sirius-EchoStar-Liberty: Ménage-à-Blah
• Sirius: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Ergen
• A Bankruptcy Filing, Mel? Surely You Can’t Be Sirius…
• Sirius Rolls Out New 24 Hour Investor Keening Channel
• Sirius Debt Problems? Call EchoStar! No Upfront Fees!
• Sirius XM: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
• Your Report Card Is Your Stock Price? Guess Sirius Is Making Straight $.13’s…
• Trade You 77 shares of SIRI for 1 Month of “Sirius Everything”

“We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.”

– Twitter co-founder Biz Stone

By any measure, he is among the most important figures in technology of the last decade, a major influence on the way we use and interact with computers and mobile phones, a British designer who ranks with the Conrans and the Dysons. But have you ever heard Jonathan Ive, the Apple (AAPL) designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, talk about his work?

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What’s everyday life like at Silicon Valley’s most famous research center? To find out, I talked to YF Juan, a director of business develpment at PARC, and communications manager Linda Jacobson.

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Your average journalist usually begins his career with a pop, like a big bottle of champagne. He effervesces about his profession, intoxicating all who encounter him. The party goes on for years as the young journalist conquers deadlines, corrupt politicians, and hidebound editors.

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The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge–the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part–the part a machine can do.

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If the stories of other file-sharing firms that sold out are any indication, Pirate Bay’s move to sell itself and go legit might not play out so well. Here’s what happened to some of its peer-to-peer predecessors that were put up for sale.

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Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

Protesters on the streets of Tehran questioning the recent Iranian presidential election results have gotten support from a new breed of election watchers: Internet-enabled anomaly hounds who say the numbers don’t add up.

Fraud hunters are no newer to elections than conspiracy theorists are to the Internet. But unlike election monitors seeking voter tampering or intimidation, or local experts who critique faulty ballot design or study pre-election polling data, these statistical analysts don’t need to know anything about the dynamics of an individual race. Their toolkit is primarily statistical and can be applied to any numbers, voting or otherwise. The Internet provides quick access to election numbers and speedy dissemination of findings.

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Microsoft just announced in a blog post that it was “integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.”

Microsoft (MSFT) said it is not indexing all of Twitter in its new Bing search service–not yet, that is–nor has it made any kind of exclusive deal with Twitter to add this real-time feed.

Recent tweets will be prominently displayed near the top of the search page, but could also be spread throughout the results.

The feature is now rolling out, so might not be able to be accessed immediately. It will be updated every minute, said Microsoft.

Microsoft is the first major search service to do this on a regular basis, using public programming interfaces, or API’s, available to anyone from Twitter–and it is an aggressive move, which seems to be part of its major push by Bing (which is, in fact, seeing some share gain in yet another report released today).

But, all are moving in that direction. While neither Google (GOOG) nor Yahoo (YHOO) is regularly indexing any part of the microblogging service’s real-time data stream yet, both have been testing the idea internally.

All three, though, do index static Twitter profiles in some way in their search results. They also can show older tweets that have specific keywords in them.

The Microsoft effort is different, and, um–and I had absolutely no idea that the company was doing this–appears to include BoomTown tweets, as well as those from other tech bloggers like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and a “few thousand people to start.”

Still, in a mission-accomplished effort to creep me out, Microsoft’s Sean Suchter, general manager of its Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, noted in the blog, “starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.”

He then used my name and Twitter profile as an example, displaying some of my duller tweets of stories I had posted on All Things Digital.

(My testy roundelay with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld about the veracity of its Twitter-about-to-sell-to-Google post a while back would have been much more interesting, and pertinent too!)

In an interview with me this afternoon, Suchter described the addition of the specific tweets as a “first step” in adding a lot more real-time data to Bing.

“Given Twitter is the big gorilla here and it is a really interesting frontier for search, we thought it was important to get something out there,” he said. “It is also about us learning how users interact with it that will also be really interesting.”

Suchter said Twitter is aware of the move, but that Microsoft did not need any extra help from the San Francisco start-up to launch it.

Suchter said it would begin with a limited number of tweets for now and will not include search results of tweets about a person–although that is possible. And Microsoft, he said, was not able to index all of Twitter at the present time.

“We would like to grow this, because this area is so exciting, so we wanted to get the plumbing working to show we could do it,” said Suchter. “And since there is a lot of useful content in Twitter and in this real-time corpus, it has to be a big part of the search experience in the future.”

This is obviously a first shot in what will be a long war over real-time search among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–each of which has also been talking to Twitter about a variety of partnership deals that have yet to be struck.

Here is Suchter’s blog on the Twitter real-time data addition:

Bringing a Bit of Twitter to Bing

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like this:

The answer will include that person’s latest Tweets, along with an easy link to “See more tweets” from that individual.

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

And while we may not be famous, we are prolific, so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for all the latest news from Bing!

Sean Suchter, General Manager, Search Technology Center, Silicon Valley

Speaking of creepy stalking, please enjoy this nail-biting trailer for “Play Misty for Me”:

Now, a one percent increase in market share isn’t a spectacular achievement, but it is meaningful growth. More so since Google posted a slight decline in share in June, its third in as many months.

Google still rules search in the U.S., but Bing appears to be making some modest headway. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter.

Which is fine. Particularly when you’re coming from as far behind as Microsoft (MSFT). Of course, as I’ve said before, early successes like these are driven as much by marketing as by technological prowess and positive user experience. And right now, Bing’s got between $80 million and $100 million dollars behind it. But those dollars will only last so long.

And as Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt likes to point out, you really can’t expect to buy your way into the search market. “You don’t just buy it with ads,” Schmidt told Fox Business earlier this week. “You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer.”

Perhaps that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing here with Bing.

Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu this morning launched coverage of Palm (PALM) with a Hold rating and a $16 price target. He writes in a research note that the company is well-positioned in the smart phone sector with its WebOS software, but that the valuation is expensive; he also is concerned about ongoing operating losses and a weak balance sheet. “While we believe PALM is well-positioned with its webOS software and highly integrated hardware,” he writes, “we are concerned about its balance sheet and continued operating losses over the next four quarters as we don’t model profitability until the August 2010 quarter.”

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But if you’re part of the large group of people who think that nothing is really private on the Web and that everyone should see everything you do online, then you’re really going to like Facebook’s new privacy policy. It’s designed to get Facebook users to share as much as they can with as many people as they can–including people who aren’t on Facebook.

Facebook tries to explain the policy changes in a lengthy blog post here, and you can find a slideshow that accompanied a press conference the company just held here.

But that will make your eyes glaze over. Here’s the short version:

• Facebook is simplifying the privacy setting controls it offers users. So if you want your pals to see your keg stand from Saturday night, but don’t want your parents to be privy, you should be able to do that more effectively. The company is experimenting with different ways to present the controls.
• Facebook also wants to encourage people to use the “everyone” setting, which right now just means “every Facebook user.” But the company is going to eventually change that setting to mean “everyone on the Web”–meaning that Google (GOOG) users, marketers, whoever, will be able to find that stuff, too.
• Facebook wants to expand the amount of data its users share with the world because the company thinks that the more exposure data get, the more valuable the data become. But it is doing its best to tamp down complaints from users who accidentally end up exposing kid photos or bachelor party snapshots or whatever. Hence the new, improved privacy controls, which are being rolled out before “everyone” really means “everyone.”

I know, I know. That short version wasn’t that short. But you’re going to hear plenty more about this in the coming weeks. Consider this a first chapter.

The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang. That’s why we’ve been hearing about gdgt, in dribs and drabs, for many many months.

But as well known as Rojas and Block are, they’re still going to have to work hard to make a dent in the crowded field. In addition to the two blogs they created, the gadget spectrum includes everyone from staid players like CBS’s (CBS) CNET to rumor sites for Apple (APPL) obsessives, like MacRumors, to sites for real obsessives, like the handful of people who still own Palm (PALM) Treos. (And, of course, there’s All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg, who bestrides all of this like the colossus he is, and is also my boss. Hi, Walt!)

Rojas and Block argue that their site is different because it’s not going to be driven by editors but by the site’s users, who will gather there to swap info, stories, rumors, opinions, etc. In other words, Facebook for gadgets, though I gather they’d recoil if they heard that. The other pitch, though they won’t spell this out, either: Their site takes a bunch of features and content that you can find other places and presents them in a better way.

There’s a bunch of nifty features, like a gadget-finder that lets you find products via specs instead of brands, and the site seems to be pretty slick. But it’s better if you have a look yourself instead of having me describe it. And gdgt.com won’t really hit its stride until actual users start using it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about my upcoming phone dilemma: iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre or Blackberry Tour?

But as much as Rojas and Block argue that this is a community site, it’s their names and reps that have people interested in the project. And that’s what has convinced investors to plow money into an ad-supported Web site in an era when the economy sucks and there are way too many ad-supported Web sites.

The duo won’t discuss funding, but I’m told that last fall they were discussing investments of up to $1 million, but ended up taking less than that via a group of VCs and angel investors. I don’t have a complete list of investors, but people familiar with the company tell me that early-stage investor True Ventures led the round, which also included New York-based incubator Betaworks and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis’s name will resonate with longtime followers of the tech blog world: He was one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., which created Engadget as a rival to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, and hired Rojas away from Gizmodo. Calacanis eventually sold Weblogs Inc. to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL for a decent pile of cash, some of which I believe ended up in Rojas’s lap.

Click the image below to see a screenshot of what gdgt’s homepage ought to look like.

Looks like he was right.

LogMeIn became the fourth venture-backed IPO of 2009 this morning, hitting the markets with an offering that raised $107 million for the remote-services technology provider. Priced at $16 each, the high end of the stock’s IPO price range, LogMeIn (LOGM) shares spiked more than 30 percent to $20.90 shortly after the company made its public debut.

Great news for LogMeIn, which filed to go public in January 2008, only to see its prospects for doing so trashed by the econalypse. Great news as well for venture-backed companies hoping to go public. “The IPO window has cracked open a bit,’’ Emily Mendell, vice president of strategic affairs for the National Venture Capital Association told the Boston Globe. “I think the market has become slightly more stable.’’

It would certainly appear that way. Shares of SolarWinds (SWI), a network-management software outfit, are up 24 percent since their debut, and online restaurant-reservation service OpenTable’s (OPEN) shares have soared 52 percent since they began trading in May.

Clearly, we’re seeing something of an awakening in the moribund IPO market, although whether it will continue is anyone’s guess. “I think this is a temporary market window,” David Liu, a managing director at Jefferies & Co., told Forbes. “The economy is still screwed up….We’re telling our clients, if you can get on file and do something quickly, go ahead and do it now so you’re not caught flat-footed.”

The one exception to the drought: Companies that have something, anything, to do with mobile. The Jordan, Edmiston Group says deal volume increased 45 percent over the last year, and the value of those deals leapt by 38 percent.

Granted, we’re talking about fairly small numbers to begin with–the bank counted 16 mobile deals in the first half of this year, compared to 11 a year ago–but it still seems telling, and right. We’ve been hearing about the inevitable rise of mobile as an advertising, content and commerce platform for years, but in the last year or so, this now seems plausible, due in large part to the adoption of smartphones from the likes of Research in Motion (RIMM), Apple (APPL), and, perhaps, even Palm (PALM).

Remember “YouTwitFace,” the Conan O’Brien joke that took on a life of its own online? It could be a real Web site soon. On June 3, Mr. O’Brien brought back a popular sketch on “The Tonight Show” called “In the Year 2000,” in which he muses on the future. In one premonition, he said, “YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge to form one super time-wasting Web site called YouTwitFace.”

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Launched in early June, the plug-in provided a way to run Microsoft Outlook on Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange. Sadly for Google, the plug-in didn’t play well with Outlook, most notably making its data inaccessible to Windows Desktop Search. Now, after a few weeks of troubleshooting and some help from Microsoft (that must have made for some interesting conference calls), the company has found a solution to the problem and a fix has been released.

“We worked closely with Microsoft to address two issues that we shared recently, and we appreciate their help,” Google Apps Senior Product Manager Chris Vander Mey said in a company blog post Tuesday. “The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you can choose between the native Outlook search, which has been available since launch, and Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook.”

With that little snafu resolved, it’s now back to business for Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), with the former attacking the latter’s search business and the latter steadily encroaching on the former’s software turf. We now return you to our previously scheduled hostilities…

Back on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”

It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.

More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:

“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”

BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.

So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.

What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.

His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the world-wide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.

There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:

“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”

Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles; New York; Baltimore; San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Toronto, Lancaster, Pa.; Denver; Hamburg; London; Paris; Bangalore; Dublin and, this week, Tel Aviv.

But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.

During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Shields, and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spinoff of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).

It will be interesting to see what comes next–after the 100-day gathering in Dulles, which should come sometime after Armstrong’s July 15 deadline, of course.

Party on, Tim.

Not much of a surprise here, I suppose, given the level of anticipation that typically accompanies the release of a new iPhone. Nielsen says “anticipatory buzz” for the iPhone 3GS was near-deafening. “The new iPhone 3G S sent blog mentions up 1,226 percent week-over-week on June 8, the day of the announcement. After the initial announcement, buzz dipped but again picked up after the phone became available to consumers on June 19, with blog mentions more than doubling compared to the week prior.” The chart, below (click to enlarge):

Contrary to previous public statements by the company, Palm CFO Douglas C. Jeffries has not been registered as a certified public accountant in the state of California since 1984, records from the California Board of Accountancy show.

In an 8-K filing announcing his appointment last December, Palm stated that Jefferies “is a certified public accountant.” Likewise, the company until this week stated in a bio on its Web site that “Douglas is a CPA.” The company on Tuesday changed the wording of bio following a query on the issue this week from Tech Trader Daily; the new language reads “Douglas was formerly a CPA.”

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Why so reserved? Maybe it’s because Sony (SNE) is struggling through yet  another restructuring, so a big party would seem inappropriate. Maybe because Sony views the Walkman’s birthday as a lot of middle-aged people view their birthdays: Markers of bygone eras and missed opportunities. Or else it’s just Apple’s (AAPL) fault. Associated Press:

The manufacturer, which also makes Vaio personal computers and Cyber-shot cameras, hasn’t had a decisive hit like the Walkman for years, and has taken a battering in the portable music player market to Apple Inc.’s iPod.

Sony has sold 385 million Walkman machines worldwide in 30 years as it evolved from playing cassettes to compact disks then minidisks — a smaller version of the CD — and finally digital files. Apple has sold more than 210 million iPod machines worldwide in eight years….

The archival exhibit shows other Sony products that have been discontinued or lost out to competition over the years — the Betamax video cassette recorder, the Trinitron TV, the Aibo dog-shaped robotic pet.

I do remember hearing some Sony folks mutter hopeful words about a new line of Walkmans that came preloaded with music from Sony artists like Beyoncé and were supposedly flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart (WMT). But that was a while ago, come to think of it, and I haven’t heard about it since.

In any case, just because Sony’s being bashful about the Walkman’s history doesn’t make it less interesting. You can learn more about it at Sony’s online archive, which is compelling despite the fact that it’s a stilted corporate hagiography. Start reading at Chapter 17, part 2: “Listening to Stereophonic Sound While Walking.”

Last week, BoomTown posted a detailed piece on Yahoo’s plans for a massive rebranding and marketing push, which included the hiring of outside consultant Penny Baldwin (pictured here), who was a former top exec at Young & Rubicam.

And, yesterday, Baldwin became an official Yahoo exec, as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management.

Baldwin, said Yahoo (YHOO), “will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising.”

Said Baldwin in a statement, signaling that Yahoo is poised for an important brand makeover: “This is a seminal moment for the Yahoo! brand and for the business overall.”

While the company said Baldwin’s was a newly created position, it is not hugely different from the job that was held by Allen Olivo, who was SVP of global brand marketing until he recently left Yahoo.

Yahoo had previously described his job as “overseeing all aspects of its advertising and brand marketing strategy worldwide, including design and editorial.”

But, said many sources at the company, Baldwin’s purview is much larger, especially as it will involve a major overhaul of Yahoo’s image, which is likely to be rolled out as the Internet site also launches its redesigned front page in the fall.

In addition, unlike past Yahoo marketing execs, Baldwin has been described to me by many people at the company as much more colorful and bold in her style, and that she has been advocating more aggressive ideas about reinvigorating the Yahoo brand.

“Well, Penny is definitely not Yahoo,” said one Yahoo source, joking about the company’s quainter, yodel-focused and purple-toned image. “Which is probably a good thing.”

Baldwin reports to CMO Elisa Steele. It’s Steele, as I previously reported, who has been leading the rebranding effort at Yahoo.

It is aimed at repairing a damaged public image, communicating innovation and focusing consumers on what defines Yahoo in the years ahead.

Besides the hiring of Baldwin, Steele has also retained well-known (and pricey!) brand consulting firm Landor Associates.

Many themes have been considered to depict Yahoo going forward–most along the lines of Yahoo still being a key hub destination for Internet users.

Those possible directions were discussed at a recent off-site meeting of Yahoo’s top execs, led by Steele, who ran through the tangled history of Yahoo’s marketing efforts and showed off some rough ideas for the future.

One motto considered, among several: Yahoo as “your home on the Web.”

It is not clear how much Yahoo is prepared to spend on this rebranding effort. Microsoft (MSFT), for example, is in the midst of a $100 million marketing campaign around the recent relaunch of its Bing search service.

Here is the official press release about Baldwin:

Penny Baldwin Appointed to Senior Vice President of Global Integrated Marketing and Brand Management at Yahoo!

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jun 30, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE)–Yahoo! Inc. announced today that Penny Baldwin has been appointed to senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management. She assumes this newly created position immediately and reports to Yahoo!’s chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele.

Baldwin will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising.

“One of Yahoo!’s greatest assets is its brand,” said Steele. “Our integrated, global approach is critical to our success and we have a deep business commitment to fulfill our promise to our users, customers and partners. Penny is uniquely qualified to lead the effort and her leadership, experiences, knowledge and skills are excellent additions to the Yahoo! marketing team.”

She is a 20-year veteran of global brand strategy development and execution across all internal and market-facing touch points. Most recently, Baldwin served as Managing Partner of Young & Rubicam Brands, Y&R Advertising and Wunderman Direct Marketing. As agency leader and manager, she was responsible for leading the efforts of large global teams across industries. Her experiences span technology, retail, packaged goods, finance, travel, gaming, wireless communications, entertainment, healthcare and sports marketing.

Baldwin has worked with several Fortune 500 brands including Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, AMD, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, Siebel Systems and Hewlett-Packard, among others. She has also worked with leading brands including Cadbury, Schweppes, Foster Farms, Jacuzzi, Wells Fargo, DHL, AT&T and Palm.

“This is a seminal moment for the Yahoo! brand and for the business overall,” said Baldwin. “I am delighted to be part of the leadership team that will take Yahoo! to the next level as we evolve our brand strategy worldwide.”

“Microsoft recently took steps to address concerns raised by the case, but nothing about this will mean higher prices for Windows 7 in Europe.”

– Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Microsoft’s Windows business group, says the company is not punishing Europeans users for its spat with European antitrust regulators.

As most know by now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the software giant’s relaunch of its search offering, dubbed Bing, onstage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

You can see that here, as well as Ballmer demoing the product, which is Microsoft’s biggest and priciest attempt yet to catch archrival Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) in the search business.

It is a market where the typically dominant Microsoft (MSFT) is a mouse in comparison, although it is also trying to innovate.

That did not stop Ballmer from doing some roaring about Bing, in an interview with Walt Mossberg, as well as the status of other Microsoft products like its upcoming release of the Windows 7 operating system, an arena where Microsoft does rule.

Ballmer also talked about ongoing talks with Yahoo about a search partnership, and other Microsoft initiatives.

Here’s the video of Ballmer’s full D7 session (this video is missing a promotional video for Bing, which the audience saw, but that Microsoft did not give us video rights to use here):

When Sam Altman visits New York, he’s never alone for very long. Altman is the 24-year-old CEO of Loopt, a company that makes a “location-aware” app for mobile phones that tracks where all of your friends are and what they’re doing.

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Everyone’s coverage of the uprising in Iran has been Twitter-centric, for obvious reasons. But CNN, in an apparent attempt to look like they have real, non-Twitter newsgathering capabilities, has been regurgitating Twitter posts and attributing them to unnamed “sources.”

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Ask.com made the call last December to throw nearly all of its marketing resources into NASCAR in the first half of 2009, making it one of the rare brands to invest during the heart of the recession. Up against search-engine titans Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO) and MSN, the company’s leaders decided they had to be aggressive, harsh economic times or not. Six months later, a new head of the company is facing a new decision: Whether to stay in the sport.

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Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.

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“…Sales of his recordings through Sony’s music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980’s.”

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value. Let’s use Michael Jackson’s tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That’s $12 million a year.

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President Barack Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced this morning the launch of an “IT dashboard” that allows people to see how the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars on information technology projects.

Announced at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the IT dashboard, allows users to view data for various federal agencies, including major investments and dollars spent, as well to view the “health” of projects through graphs comparing planned and actual expenditures.

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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

The device, intended as a replacement for the Centro, Palm’s last PalmOS smartphone, is expected to feature a 2.6-inch multitouch display, inline keyboard, two-megapixel camera and 4GB of internal storage, among other features. Word on the street has it priced at $99 with contract, rounding out the lower end of Palm’s new webOS lineup.

And when will it arrive at market? No one seems to know, though Tavis McCourt and Justin Patterson at Morgan Keegan & Company speculate that we’ll see it sometime this fall. “We believe initial Pixie shipments will begin in the November quarter, although timing is still uncertain (we believe the goal would likely be a holiday launch),” the analysts wrote in a research note today.

“Although Pixie is unlikely to be a ‘hero’ product with massive advertising and subsidy support, its $99 price point should drive substantial volumes and we believe distribution can be broader initially if not exclusive. In general, we have used the Centro as a benchmark for the Pixie. At a $99 retail price point, the Centro peaked out at about 1 million units shipped/quarter with distribution at all of Palm’s significant historic customers. We have the Pixie ramping quickly to these levels in calendar 2010 as distribution ramps.”

That seems a reasonable expectation, especially if the Pixie isn’t exclusive to a single carrier. And at present, it’s thought that the device will be available, at least initially, from both AT&T (T) and Sprint (S).

So, as McCourt and Patterson note, Palm (PALM) could be poised for some significant gains in market share. “We expect Pre shipments of 2.2 million in 2010 (May 2010) and Pixie shipments of 1.2 million,” the analysts write. “Based on our bottoms up estimate, we forecast Palm will ship just over 7 million smartphones in fiscal 2011, which would likely represent about 4 percent of smartphone share, but a more meaningful–10 percent share of its core N. America market.”

[Image credit: Engadget]

The Obama administration has called for a $7.1 billion upgrade of the nation’s broadband Internet system as part of the Recovery Act, but it will be a tall order for the FCC to create a plan that satisfies both telecom companies and broadband advocacy groups.

That was the takeaway message at a panel discussion of the broadband initiative at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Monday afternoon. While more and more Americans may be getting broadband Internet service in their homes, monthly service prices are shooting up, leaving broadband advocates worried that low-income users could be left in the virtual dust.

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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.

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