Microsoft Needs To Go Nimble After Vista

I agree with Michael Silver in this article. The future will be in we based apps and that is where Microsoft should be focusing their efforts. Will this be the last major Windows release? Who knows but Microsoft do need to move into the web based apps area otherwise they will be left behind.

From the article
A day after Microsoft's chief executive said Windows Vista will not be the company's last big operating system, an analyst said the developer should rethink that promise.

"Windows needs to go more modular," says Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, on Tuesday. "Microsoft needs to be far more nimble with both Windows and Office."

On Monday, Steve Ballmer said that Windows is a "very long-lived platform" which will continue to evolve, drawing in even more features, such as natural language voice recognition. He intimated that Windows would become bigger, not smaller. "We've got a very long list of stuff our engineers want to do, a long list of stuff all of the companies here want us to do," he told reporters Monday. "There are so many areas where we need innovation."

That's not the move Microsoft should be making post-Vista, argues Silver, who is in the camp that holds Web-based applications, and by extension, Web properties like Google, are the future.

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iPhone Margins Closer to 20 Percent

20 percent multiplied by the millions of iPhones that Apple will sell amounts to a lot of cash. Sure it’s not the 50 percent reported earlier but don’t worry apple are going to do very nicely out of the iPhone.

From the article
Analysts are beginning to question earlier reported Bill of Materials costs on Apple's iPhone and are suggesting that the gross margins Apple will achieve may be much lower than predicted, and nearer the mid to high 20 percent range than the estimated 50 percent. In particular, there are debates about the cost of the display and related touch screen technology.

For instance , DisplaySearch (Austin, TX.) suggests the cost to Apple of the display approaches $60, almost twice that of other estimates due to the 3.5-in 320 - 480 display and the nature of the touch screen technology.

According to DisplaySearch Apple has followed its normal trend of eschewing the use of off-the-shelf displays for its innovative designs. The market research group stresses the narrow bezel around the display, as well as the thinness of the device, indicate that a standard display product would not meet Apple's aggressive design requirements.

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Zune Goes Discount, Causes $289 Million Loss for Microsoft

The Zune has to be one of the worst products Microsoft have ever made. I seriously doubt it will ever make money. The damage has been done with Zune 1. Do Microsoft really think that people will be the next release of Zune given how bad the original is.

From the article
We’ve been doing a lot of coverage on the Microsoft Zune here at the Gear, and there are good reasons for that. When the largest technology company in the country (world?) decides to go head-to-head with the de facto variant of the MP3 player, we have to report on that. When said company utilizes innovations (no matter how emasculated) like built-in WiFi, we report on that, too. We like the Zune—especially Blake, but you all know he’s a PC fanboy.

Sadly, we have to report that the brown brick cost Microsoft $289 million last quarter, hardly the numbers the company was hoping to post at this time. While we’re assured from our internal sources that the next rendition of the Zune (it’s not the Zune II) will address many of the shortcomings of the current model, and that the group has a roadmap to profitability in the works.

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YouTube Runs Into Patent Issues For Revenue Share?

All a bit vague really. I seriously doubt this persons claim but then you never know. Considering YouTube haven’t released many details yet I’m not sure how he can claim a patent on there plans.

From the article
Interestingly, I received a comment on my previous blog on YouTube Revenue Sharing concept. In that comment Ty Graham claims that he has the patent for the direction that YouTube is thinking about going. I am not sure of the reliability of this comment but as a blogger I feel that I should share this with you. Here is what he has to say:

“I live in Los Angeles. Anyone from youtube looking at this should contact me. I have a patent on this that pre-dates the direction you’re going in. I’m thinking it would be better to sell it to you and integrate the “big picture” into youtube instead of coming out with a separate service. My patent puts the nail in the coffin of any competitor of youtube. Seriously. I can be reached at gigaboy20 at yahoo.com”

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MyBlogLog Integrates Flickr

It hasn’t taken Yahoo long to make the first change. There will be plenty more to come so watch this space. I already thought MyBlogLog was excellent. I reserve my judgement for now as to wether Yahoo’s influence will make it even better or ruin it.

From the article
It hasn’t always been clear how Yahoo planned to tie together its many small social media properties. But it seems that MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo earlier this month (see Yahoo-MyBlogLog), is already seeing some integration with another slightly geeky Yahoo property: Flickr.

As first noticed by Graywolf on his account, you now have the option to add your Flickr photo stream to your MyBlogLog account, creating a more personalized profile page. Further integration with Yahoo’s social properties seems inevitable: posting of del.icio.us links and the ability to log in with your Yahoo account seem to be the obvious next steps. Less likely is integration with Yahoo Answers: that audience seems to skew younger, and might not merge well with the more mature blog writers and readers at MyBlogLog.

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Adobe’s Apollo Provides New Ground For Entrepreneurs

Sounds a very promising platform. If the Web 2.0 declaration that the desktop is dead proves to be false (which I think it will for now) then Apollo will succeed and we should see some great developments based on it.

From the article
Undoubtedly you’ve heard the term “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) with increasing frequency lately. Sometimes you hear about it in context of Ajax, sometimes with Flash, and now even Microsoft gets talked about as having an RIA solution with “WPF/E”. The reality is that this is still a very unknown subset of the technology world and anyone who tries to define it (myself included) is fighting an uphill battle. However, there is one technology which has sparked quite a bit of interest across the board, Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Apollo platform.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Apollo is a cross-platform runtime that is still in pre alpha and allows developers to build applications for the desktop using web technologies including Flash, HTML and PDF. While Web 2.0 has prominently declared the desktop dead, its demise has been greatly exaggerated which is why I implore you to take a look at Apollo. Mike did an interview with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about Apollo over on TalkCrunch and I recently interviewed Mike Downey, the Sr. Product Manager for Apollo. I also interviewed Kevin Lynch himself about Apollo earlier this year.

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YouTubers to get ad money share

A logical progression. There is a number of video sites already doing this and while YouTube is still the dominant player they could potentially have lost out to those who “reward” you for your work. It will be interesting to see what the final details of the revenue sharing scheme is. I say show me the money!

From the article
People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity".

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google.

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My Life As An RSS Junkie

Does this problem sound familiar? I subscribe to heaps of feeds and although it is a good way to track and keep up with all your favourite sources it sure does consume a lot of time. Information overload or something like that. Sigh…..I’m off to my therapist.

From the article
Like most addictions my problem started as innocent experimentation. I began dabbling in RSS years ago when it was still a relatively new technology. I told myself that it was a better way to keep up with the news. I rationalized that I’d save hours every day by using RSS to take a more focused approach to online reading and research. A few minutes with my feed reader was supposed to be like an hour or more of surfing the hundreds of the websites that I try to keep up with on a regular basis.

Well, that’s the way it was supposed to be. How was I to know that RSS would turn into the pervasive and addictive social menace that it’s become today?

In retrospect, I probably should have known better. I have a history of information addiction. Way back in the mid-80’s (pre-web, of course) I was program director at KFSR. At some point we decided it would be a good idea to subscribe to a wire service. One day some nice men came and installed a UPI wire machine in our office. This magic box was a sort of souped up a dot-matrix printer connected to some kind of dish mounted on the roof. The machine received current news updates from the sky and printed them out in real-time. Suddenly I had access to an unlimited supply of current news with no intermediary.

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Google Releases 'Testing on the Toilet'

Funny. I can see plenty of "toilet" humour coming as a result of this. I wonder what sort of blog posts we can expect. The mind boggles.

From the article
Here's a type of Google launch you don't see every day: Testing on the Toilet. This is a service that has been apparently been running internally for several months and teaching developers about testing during their 'down time,' so to speak. Due to the wild success of the program inside of Google, they decided to start a blog where they will post these weekly episodes so that the rest of us can print them out and have our own reading on the can. Is this a step towards Google becoming more open about their development practices?

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An Internet land grab is on

The stakes are high in the land grab. Getting popular or recognisable domain names can turn into a very profitable exercise.

From the article
Housing prices may be fizzling in the real world, but online, a virtual land grab is under way, with financial heavy-hitters snapping up what they see as the Web's beachfront properties: generic Internet addresses like Carbs.com.

Starbucks Corp. Chairman Howard Schultz, billionaire Ross Perot and Richard Rosenblatt, formerly chief executive of MySpace and its parent, Intermix Media, are just three of those attempting to build sprawling businesses around these Internet domains.

And the list is growing. ``As of late 2004, it wasn't obvious to us that you could turn domains into a real business, but that's definitely proving to be the case,'' said Jeff Horing, a venture capitalist with Insight Venture Partners in New York, which has one investment in this area.

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Microsoft to launch Vista with human billboard

An interesting approach. It certainly should get some attention. Will it be enough to really kick start a flood of people getting Vista?

From the article
Microsoft will kick off its Windows Vista launch activities with a human billboard in downtown New York.

The Cirque du Soleil-style performance will take place at 9 a.m. Monday at the Terminal Building.

"It's a billboard. It's marketing, except that it's made by people," Mike Sievert, corporate VP for Windows told CNET News.com late Wednesday.

Among those on hand for the marketing stunt will be around 80 families that extensively tested Vista.

The performance will kick off two days of activities in New York as the software maker touts its first consumer Windows release in five years as well as the launch of Office 2007.

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Fox Hunts Down YouTube Users

Watch out, the Fox is on the prowl. This is an interesting development and if Fox are successful in their quest then it will certainly send a message to others that uploading copyrighted shows without permission will result in a serious public flogging.

From the article
Twentieth Century Fox has subpoenaed YouTube, demanding that the site provides the details of users who uploaded four episodes of “24″ and twelve episodes of “The Simpsons”. The request is dated January 18th, but was only discovered today - it reads:

On or about January 8, 2007, Fox became aware that a subscriber (”the Subscriber”) of YouTube Inc.s’ Internet-based service uploaded pirated copies of the works onto YouTube, making it available for illegal viewing over the Internet to anyone who wishes to watch it. Fox has not authorized this distribution or display of the works. The subpoena request YouTube, Inc. to disclose information sufficient to identify the Subscriber so that Fox can stop this infringing activity.

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Rising Dead Pool Indicates Web 2.0 Bubble is Popping

There has been plenty of sites built on the back of the Web 2.0 bubble. All competing for there share. In the end though only the creme survive and those with nothing much to offer lose out as is happening with the sites that are joining the "dead pool".

From the article
The Web 2.0 "bubble" - where a thousand ventures can bloom and thrive - is starting to pop. In the last few weeks the number of startups to go belly up or teter on the brink has increased. TechCrunch is my yardstick for all things Web 2.0. Let's take a closer look at some hard data.

In all of Q4 2006 TechCrunch wrote about six companies/products entering what Michael Arrington calls the Dead Pool. These include Audioblogger (October 4), LiveLocker (October 16), Odeo (October 25), Shadows (November 22), Google Answers (November 29) and RawSugar (December 30).

Flash forward to 2007. In just January alone, already we have seven companies and products that have been sacked or are "in the grasp." These include FilmLoop (January 6), Browster (January 7), Insider Pages (January 7), Judy's Book (January 9), Findory (January 14), BitPool (January 19) and Performancing (January 22).

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New Google Groups Is Out Of Beta

Good to see significant improvements in this Google offering. Be sure to check it out if you haven't already.

From the article
The slick new Google Groups launched in October last year and available at groups-beta.google.com is now out of beta and moves to groups.google.com.

You'll find a cleaner homepage, search results that look more like web search results, topics that borrow a lot from Gmail's conversations. Each group has 100 MB storage space you can use to upload files or to collaboratively edit documents. Groups are much more customizable: you can change the colors and add welcome messages.

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Is Budweiser the next YouTube?

What makes Budweiser think they can produce a YouTube competitor? It seems that companies are all trying to get a slice of the online video business when they should really stick to what they are good at. I can't see this being a winner.

From the article
Anheuser-Busch is set to unveil an online hub for late-night TV-like videos on February 4, making it the latest consumer brand to believe it can entertain an audience of largely college kids as it's trying to sell them something in the background. A popular Web network is the ultimate subliminal advertising.

But Anheuser-Busch wants its project, called Bud.TV, to be legal. The beer maker said Monday that it has teamed with Washington D.C.-based Aristotle to verify that all of its Web site visitors for Bud.TV, who must register before entering the site, are of drinking age, or at least 21 years old. (Bud.TV will host content similar to late-night TV, the company said.)

By April, Aristotle's age-verification technology will also be used on all Anheuser-Busch sites, including Budweiser.com, the company said. "This initiative makes Anheuser-Busch the first alcohol beverage company to use an independent age-verification system for its Internet sites," according to the company.

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Lotus Notes Hobbled by Virus Upgrade

Don't you love upgrades. I'm sure this really pissed off Lotus Notes users. When are upgrades going to be throughly tested before being released.

From the article
People who use both IBM Lotus Notes and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise may want to hold off on upgrading to the latest version of the McAfee software.

Installing McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i on a PC that also runs the Lotus Notes e-mail client can lock people out of their mailboxes, the two companies have confirmed. Lotus Notes is a commonly used e-mail application, particularly in larger organizations. McAfee, the world's second-largest antivirus company, released VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i late November.

"The upgrade locks people out and is causing Notes errors where we can not even restart Notes, but need to reinstall," said one IT administrator for a California company, who asked not to be identified. "This issue has created a higher-than-normal demand on our helpdesk; the cost to our company due to this issue is increasing every hour."

McAfee and IBM have both published support notices on the problem. The issue affects systems running Lotus Notes versions 6 and 7, according to the notices.

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Do ‘You’ Matter?

I think ‘You’ most definitely matters. It is having a growing impact on the media and I feel the traditional media outlets are running a little scared. They are waking up to the fact that ‘You’ is very influential and they are starting to embrace ‘You’.

From the article
User-generated content is all the rage right now. But the thought of 'You' controlling the media and marketing world is little more than breathless hype.

The future of the media and advertising is here and its name is "You."

Time magazine named "You" the Person of the Year. Not to be outdone, the influential industry trade publication Advertising Age selected "The Consumer" as its ad agency of the year.

Average folks are becoming famous (well, for the requisite Warholian 15 minutes at least) by posting amusing videos on YouTube, which was also named by Time as the invention of the year. (Time is owned by Time Warner (Charts), the parent company of CNNMoney.com.)

And during this year's Super Bowl, commercials for Doritos, Chevy and the NFL will air that were either created by or inspired by ideas from everyday people.

But do "You" really matter? Yes. There is no denying that in this age of blogs, MySpace and photo and video sharing sites, it is a lot easier for you to get your voice heard.

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Yahoo's Big Miss

If Yahoo are to break out of there rut and become a major threat to Google then they need to start to innovate. It’s time they came up with there own stuff and also developed a product that is either (a) way better than what anyone else is doing or (b) create something new and cool that everyone wants.

From the article
Yesterday, we wrote about how, despite Microsoft's technology advances (in some cases better than Google), it hasn't been able to keep up with Google in terms of market share. The same story could be said for Yahoo as well. In fact, Wired News is running an entire article on how Yahoo "blew" their opportunity. After deciding not to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion (they felt the price was way too high), the company proceeded to buy Inktomi and then the key piece of their strategy, Overture. The idea was to recreate what Google had done internally. It wasn't hard to figure out what Google had done, but despite the supposed simplicity of "copying," Yahoo discovered that it's not so easy to just make your own Google.

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100 Million IE 7 Installs, Microsoft's Browser Still Loses Ground

The continued rise of Firefox. If you are like me you have downloaded IE7 just to see what it’s like but then gone back to Firefox 2.0. Microsoft try hard yet they just don’t quite pull it off.

From the article
Although Microsoft recently touted the 100 millionth installation of Internet Explorer 7, Web measurement firms said that the new browser is simply being swapped out for older editions and hasn't had an impact on Firefox's continued climb.

"[As of] January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation," said Tony Chor, an IE group program manager, in an entry on the team's blog. "Even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25% of all visitors to sites in the U.S. were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6.

"We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up AU [Automatic Updates] distribution, and with the consumer availability of Windows Vista on January 30, 2007," Chor added.

While Microsoft had the WebSideStory numbers correct, it didn't tell the whole story, says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with the Web metrics company. "[The growth of IE 7] seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6," says Johnston. "It's not eating into the Firefox share at all."

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Joost beta reviewed - TV just got a little smarter

Sounds great. I can’t wait to get my hands on this to try it out for myself. Is this the future of Television?

From the article
I installed it, I started it, and in 5 seconds I was watching television.

I did it for an hour before I remembered that I’m actually supposed to review the thing. I guess there’s no greater praise, but for those who like details, I’ve included the details as well. So, here’s what I think about Joost, the latest project from the authors of Skype, formerly dubbed as the Venice Project, for whose beta I was lucky to be invited a couple of days ago.

Joost is a streaming P2P platform for television. It brings you TV or near-TV quality content in an application that uses P2P protocols to fetch the content, but it’s not really transparent to the user, who simply has to start using it and needs not worry about how it does its thing. The app is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. It’s ad-funded, and from what I understand you won’t be able to simply share content on Joost like you can on YouTube. It’s TV in the old fashioned sense of the word - they give you content, you watch it; only on internet. It makes up for this with the quality of the content and the features of the software.

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iPhone != Newton?

I don’t have a problem with the way apple are marketing the iPhone and the phone capabilities. There is drawbacks to every gadget.

From the article
A lot is being said about the exclusive Cingular deal, no 3G, and the high price for a phone. How about short term positioning this as a true “pocket pc”? It has a PC O/S, wifi access for online use, great screen, etc… If Apple wants to sell this through their own retail channel, without all of the Cingular baggage, why not just sell it as an IP-based device and downplay the phone capabilities?

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Tollbooths for MySpace?

This is a delicate thing. MySpace (Fox) need to give great consideration to this and exactly how and when they would implement it. Done right and it will work well for them. Done badly and they could screw MySpace for good.

From the article
Lately, I’ve been thinking through an oft-discussed scenario involving MySpace… one that I have good reason to believe is now highly likely in 2007. What if MySpace suddenly decided to put up tollbooths and all the players within the MySpace third-party ecosystem had to start paying the mothership access fees?

Without doubt, a strategic shift in policy by MySpace along such lines could cause significant ripples, if not outright panic, among many of those vested in the MySpace economy.

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Google Reader May Evolve Into Read/Write App

Very interesting. It would seem that Google Reader is too become even more powerful. I like it as it is and even more features and ability will make it even more awesome and certainly be a wake up call to other “readers” out there.

From the article
The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats.

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HD-DVD Has Been Cracked: Now on BitTorrent

It was bound to happen. It will be interesting to see what action if any may be taken by HD-DVD makers and content producers. Just shows that it doesn’t matter what you make and how tough you make it to crack, someone will always end up cracking it.

From the article
The HD-DVD has been cracked, and high definition content is now being distributed freely over BitTorrent. We all knew this would happen sooner or later, looks it was “sooner”. The first HD-DVD to be uploaded to BitTorrent is Serenity, the Firefly movie.

It hasn’t even been a month since the HD-DVD ripper, BackupHDDVD was released and we’re already seeing high definition feature films pop up on torrent sites. Other than Serenity, it is rumoured that HD-DVDs of the movies Batman Begins, Chronicles of Riddick, 12 Monkeys and King Kong have been decrypted and consequently shown up on torrent sites. Yesterday, a handful of hackers figured out how to extract the unique volume key from HD-DVDs.

According to HDTV Blogger, the torrent is “a 19.6GB file in native EVO format that should play on PowerDVD and WinDVD with HD DVD playback.” Apparently, he got a “very, very nasty email” after posting about the first HD-DVD torrent. It seems the anonymous mailer was upset at the fact that he was bringing unnecessary attention to the P2P community. Looks like his plan just backfired.

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iPhone Not Running OSX

Is it running Windows? In all seriousness it probably is running OSX just a modified variety of it.

From the article
We know that Steve Jobs has said the iPhone won't accept third-party apps. The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available.

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AOL Online Music Sold to Napster

What’s left at AOL? It seems they are downsizing, restructuring or gone completely bonkers. Whatever it is, the AOL of 12 months ago is not the AOL of today.

From the article
In news yesterday, AOL shed more of its business by announcing that they are selling their online Music NOw business to Napster. Napster, surprisingly, has a few patents in their pocket, while our analysis of AOL shows that they had very little to offer other than customer accounts making the low-valuation of $43 per user as compared to Napster’s $328 logical.

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Online Poker? Evil! Playing The Ponies By Mobile Phone: Go For It!

I hate the government intervening and telling what I can and cannot do. I feel the same about the gambling. We are all adults and should be free to choose what we gamble on. It is interesting how the government only allows gambling on things that make them money or that they enjoy doing themselves.

From the article
Remember how the government made sure to effectively ban online poker because it was evil? As noted, they carved out a few nice exceptions for the type of gambling they liked, specifically lotteries and horse racing. Lotteries make sense because they're very profitable for governments. Horse racing seems to get an okay because... well... we're guessing that a lot of politicians like to play the ponies. So, it probably comes as no surprise that New York state is now letting people bet on horse races both online and via mobile phones.

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Sitemaps Are Valuable

I think people would be wise to follow what this article says. With Google being so vast it’s important to ensure you have taken all the steps possible to make sure that your site is properly crawled by the Google machine.

From the article
A sitemap is useful to let Google discover all the pages of your site. Even though it's not necessary to submit a sitemap if you use internal links properly, sometimes it's just to easy to obtain one. If you have a blog, your feed could be submitted as a partial sitemap. If you have a simple site, ROR Sitemap Generator will crawl it and generate a sitemap.

The sitemap protocol, developed by Google, and supported by Yahoo and Microsoft, is useful to create complex sitemaps that include information about the last update of a page or its importance. "Sitemaps enhance the current model of Web crawling by allowing webmasters to list all their Web pages to improve comprehensiveness, notify search engines of changes or new pages to help freshness, and identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and save bandwidth."

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Is Google Falsely Flagging Harmless Sites?

I would suspect something like what Google are trying to do is not an exact science. Maybe they get it right 90-99% of the time? There will always be the odd one that is falsely flagged. Maybe these sites should make a change so they don’t get flagged. I would rather Google try to flag sites than not at all.

From the article
Some Web site operators are complaining that Google is flagging their sites as containing malicious software when they believe their sites are harmless.

At issue is an interstitial page that Google presents when a user clicks on a search result link to a site that Google believes contains malware. The page cautions users with the words "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!" Google does not block access to the site, but a user must manually type in the Web site address to continue.

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20 things we don't know about the iPhone

As with a lot of new gadget announcements you never get all the details. Quite often the design might not even be completely finalised. Sure there is further information that we would like to know about the iPhone but what I know already I love.

From the article
Steve Jobs unveiled his breathtaking iPhone vision Tuesday, calling it a "magical" device that would "change the world" when it ships in June.

Jobs' use of the word "magical" hit the nail on the head. Jobs' keynotes are more than just speeches. They're magic shows.

A skilled magician makes you believe in magic. He makes you believe the magician has supernatural powers to, say, make people (or competitors) disappear. But there's no such thing as magic. The magician makes you believe by showing you one thing but keeping you in the dark about all the facts that might shatter the illusion.

Now, all this sounds negative so far, but I am in fact truly in awe of what I witnessed Tuesday. Steve Jobs is the Salesman of the Century -- nothing wrong with that. And Apple and Jobs have done everything right with the iPhone -- so far. I certainly want one, and am rooting for Apple to dominate and transform the handset industry.

However, I fear that the iPhone vision and the keynote were so flawlessly executed that Apple may have raised expectations that will be hard to fulfill. The things that might shatter this wonderful iPhone illusion are the things we do not know.

Here are 20 unanswered questions about the Apple iPhone:

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Apple's iPhone a threat to mobile operators?

I think the iPhone is a threat to anyone who makes mobile handsets. From my initial look at it, the iPhone seems to have most bases covered. It could prove to be a bigger success than the iPod.

From the article
Apple's new iPhone could challenge the hopes of Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel to grow their own mobile music stores.

While it's obvious that mobile handset makers such as Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola or LG, which all make music-playing handsets, will see the new iPhone as a threat, wireless operators and Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, which have built their own virtual stores for downloading music, might also be threatened by the new product.

Mobile operators see multimedia applications, such as music and video downloads, as a major money maker. And for more than a year, the largest players, including Cingular, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, have been building services that allow customers to download music and video and take it with them on the go.

Sprint launched its music service more than a year ago, and it claims to have sold more than 11 million music downloads over its wireless network. Verizon, which launched its VCast service last year, claims to be selling more than 1 million downloads per month. And Cingular has even launched its own music service through a partnership with Napster, Yahoo Music, XM Satellite Radio and eMusic.

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Wii Outselling PS3 in Japan

A little surprising. I thought the Japanese were really into the Playstation. Sony must be scratching their heads over this one. Just goes to show that more features doesn’t always equal more sales.

From the article
Apparently the Japanese console consumers are sinking their teeth into the modest Wii and are not as interested in the power-packed PS3. In fact, the Wii is outselling Sony's new console by a factor of almost 2:1. The number of PS3s sold into the Japanese market (466,716) falls well short of the million Sony had planned for the end of 2006. 989,118 Wii consoles have been sold in Japan in the same time span.

'Both Sony and Nintendo are projecting selling 6 million consoles by the end of March. Sony expects to start shipping the PS3 to Europe sometime that month as well. Straggling far behind Sony and Nintendo in the Enterbrain survey was Microsoft's Xbox 360, which had sold 290,467 since its Japan debut in December 2005.

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MySpace Blocks MySpace Tracker

Once a big site has it in for you it’s pretty hard to fight back. While it’s good to see that someone is suing MySpace over the blocking of some widgets I somehow think they will end up losing.

From the article
MySpace blocking an external service is becoming a pretty common event - Stickam, VideoCodeZone and ClustrMaps are among the services that seem to have been permanently banned - insert any of these URLs in your profile, and the link will be replaced by “http://www…”. Even YouTube and Revver suffered temporary blocks in their early days, although we’re not sure why. Meanwhile, the founder of Intermix (and therefore MySpace) Brad Greenspan thinks this amounts to censorship, and is suing MySpace over the banning of various widgets.

So it’s not a complete surprise to hear from our widget-tracking unit Mashable Labs that another one has disappeared: Trakzor, the MySpace tracker we covered back in September, appears to have been blocked. Trakzor allowed you to see who was visiting your MySpace profile, provided the visitor was a Trakzor member. If they weren’t, it just displayed their location. It’s similar, in fact, to MyBlogLog, which just got acquired by Yahoo and also includes support for MySpace.

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Yahoo Buys Community Site MyBlogLog

I use MyBlogLog on all my blogs and have found it too be excellent. I think the move by Yahoo to purchase it is a good one. We should see the team at Yahoo take it too the next level……Whatever that may be!

From the article
Yahoo has bought MyBlogLog, a Web site that builds online communities around the blogs people like to read. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition, announced Jan. 8, fits Yahoo's strategy to keep its global audience of half a billion people on its Web properties longer by engaging them in social activities. MyBlogLog provides people with the online tools to create a profile and associate it with their blogs, enabling registered users of the site to form communities around those blogs.

"If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real," Chad Dickerson, senior director of Yahoo Developer Network, said in a company blog announcing the deal.

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iPod Good for Video Games

I’m not so sure about the iPod being a great mobile game device. I think there would need to be some changes made for it to really take hold as a serious player in the mobile gaming department. A bigger screen, better battery would be a start. Personally I think the iPod should stick to it’s core function of being a music player and video player.

From the article
Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod has conquered the portable music market, is making inroads in video, and may turn out to be a video game player as well, game maker Electronic Arts Inc. is betting.

Many potential gamers already carry iPods, easily the most popular portable music players sold. Now they can listen to music while also playing EA iPod titles that include "Tetris," "Mahjong" or "Sudoku."

"Consumers have an appetite for a diversionary-type game experience—a snack where they can play for five minutes," Mitch Lasky, who leads EA's mobile gaming initiatives, told Reuters in a recent interview.

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Is The Recording Industry Realizing That DRM Is Bad?

Here’s hoping. DRM is pretty much the main driver behind the explosion in people illegally downloading music. DRM is far to strict and needs to be relaxed or removed altogether.

From the article
We've never quite understood why the entertainment industry was so fascinated with copy protection schemes. It doesn't actually stop content from being copied, but basically makes life difficult for legitimate purchasers. Any content will eventually (usually quickly) be copied and make it online, at which point the copy protection is no longer useful at all. Anyone who wants a copy will simply go online to get it, while those who have legitimate reasons to make a copy of their own will be frustrated by the copy protection -- and eventually be forced to just obtain an unauthorized copy online. It's hard to see what good that does, other than add an additional expense and annoyance to CDs.

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8 things you may not have known about iTunes

I thought I new quite about about iTunes. While I was aware of some of the stuff in this list there were a couple I wasn’t. Very useful list for both the inexperience and experience iTunes user.

From the article
1. Did you know: You can change both the bit rate and format of CD's that you import? Go to Edit> Preferences> Advanced> Importing. And you can play with the quality at which your CD's are imported.

2. Did you know: You can drag songs directly from the iTunes Store into your library and make a playlist of 30 second tracks? This may be stupid to some people, but if you're determining whether you're actually going to purchase an album from the store, this could be of good use.

3. Did you know: Everything in the source list of iTunes can be lifted from the main iTunes window and made into its own window. Just double click anything in the source (a playlist, the store, etc.) and you can have your own unified window with what you're working on at hand-without the source list.

4. Did you know: There is an unwritten rule at Apple that allows you to re-download all of your older purchased music if you've lost it. You won't find it on any document, but call Apple and tell them you lost all your music in a mac to mac transfer, they'll allow you to re-download every song you've ever purchased free of charge.

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ABC/Disney Shuts Down Blog Exercising Fair Use

More heavy handed tactics from big companies. Why do companies respond in this way which seems a little over the top?. It is no wonder that consumers don’t hold large companies in high regard.

From the article
A blogger named Spocko had his blog shut down by ABC/Disney lawyers because he had posted clips from an ABC Radio-affiliated program and commented on their content, as well as informed show advertisers of what exactly they were paying for. Spocko merely pointed out the content that station KSFO was broadcasting, and as a result Visa pulled their advertising from the station. More companies were reportedly considering pulling their ads.

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Google Adsense Suffering Drop in Numbers

I'm not sure that the quality of traffic advertisers using adwords is worth the expense. That said it is an easy way to get wide exposure. I'm sure Adsense will survive.

From the article
Google is seeing a small drop in the number of mid-sized businesses that utilize their ad programs. Now that businesses have used Google ads long enough to be able to assess the effectiveness of their ad campaigns within the Google system, many businesses are noticing an oftentimes weak correlation between the amount of money they spend advertising with Google and the number of customers they gain.

Google’s keyword advertising system could be partly to blame for the decreasing use of their ad programs. As a keyword becomes more popular, the price a business pays to use it increases dramatically, inflating not only the rates to advertise with Google, but Google’s stock value as well. When a business is dedicating so much of their budget to keyword searches and don’t get a good return, they are bound to evaluate the costs and benefits of using Google.

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Botnets will eat the Internets

I wish there was a simple solution to stamping this problem out. Spammers, hackers and other malicious people are ruining the internet for us all.

From the article
In the NYT, John Markoff covers the botnet phenomenon -- networks of compromised home PCs that are remote-controlled and used to send spam, blackmail net-casinos with denial of service shakedows, and harvest credit-card data and other valuable intel. I keep hearing that botnet numbers are swelling (which makes sense -- if Internet Explorer was insecure for 284 days last year, that's a lotta pwned PCs). If that's so, I would expect that the value of botnet time would be crashing -- I wonder when it'll become too cheap to even sell... Who needs volunteer PCs for Folding@Home when some Bulgarian hacker will sell you a month on a ten-million PC botnet for ten bucks?

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Daylife Establishes a New Way to View News

I’ve had a quick look at this site and it looks nice. Obviously it is not a patch on Newsvine but then it is not meant to be. I like the layout although it could do with some more features.

From the article
Daylife, a startup that Jeff Jarvis is working on, rolled out its public beta today. I have been an alpha tester for the past few months.

The site aggregates content from news sites and a selection of blogs. Like Topix, Daylife categorizes the news based on the content into distinct topical pages - like this one on YouTube. In addition, the site pulls key quotes from stories and breaks them out in a sidebar. You can take a tour here. One of my favorite features are the Daylife covers. It offers a clear view of the top stories in a way that harkens back to the day when print ruled.

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Expect iTV, Leopard News at Macworld

This years Macworld is eagerly anticipated. With so much cool stuff going on at Apple these days there is bound to be some gems at this years event.

From the article
Industry watchers say the annual event may bring word of an improved, full-screen iPod and an Apple cell phone compatible with iTunes.

Each year, in the weeks leading to Apple Computer's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, the rumors and speculation begin circulating about what CEO Steve Jobs and his team will unveil during the major keynote address.

This year is no exception.

Many industry watchers predict that Jobs will dedicate a large portion of his Jan. 9 keynote address to describing in greater detail the so-called iTV device, which he previewed in September. Also, Jobs is expected to give the audience an update on the status of the soon-to-be released Mac OS 10.5, called Leopard.

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Should Digg be in Google Search Results?

Valid point. I agree that Digg shouldn’t be included in Google search results for pretty much the reasons stated above.

From the article
Allen Sterns comes to the conclusion that Digg should not show up in Google search because Digg doesn’t create content, rather that it merely links to content that is already out there. Furthermore, he argues that Digg actually creates a hindrance for the readers trying to access the content because the person has to click twice and even understand that they must do that, before they can access the content.

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MySpace Users Slightly More Gay Than Facebook Users

This is kind of interesting but useless information. I guess the marketing think tank will come up with some campaign now to target the GLB users of these sites.

From the article
The makers of the L-Word social network will be pleased to hear the results of a poll released on Tuesday by Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications (not publicly available). The poll shows that gay, lesbian and bisexual people use social networks more often than straight people - 27% of the GLB group visited YouTube for “one hour or less” per week, compared to 22% of heterosexuals. The stats for Craiglist show a bigger gap - 20% of the GLB group compared to 13% of heterosexuals.

On MySpace, 33% of GLB users visit once per week, compared to 28% of heterosexuals.

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Web Trend Map 2007

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Memories of a Media Card

So memory cards are no different to the hard drive of the computer you are getting rid off. I think the only sure way of making sure your memory cards or hard drive is totally free of any data is to actually destroy them.

From the article
Anyone who has upgraded their digital camera probably has a few older, incompatible media cards lying around — so why not post them on Ebay? Well, if you do, be sure to properly wipe them because the digital voyeurs are watching. Seth Fogie at InformIT.com purchased a bunch of used cards from Ebay and found recoverable data on most of them. Using the freely available PhotoRec application, he was able to extract pictures, movies, and more from apparently formatted cards. The picture is clear — wipe anything that can store digital data before getting rid of it.

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Is serious gaming in Apple's future?

These sort of stories are great for the rumor mill. 2006 seemed to be dominated with the iPhone rumors, will 2007 be dominated with iGaming rumors?

From the article
I am sitting out another Colorado snow storm. Last week it was a blizard and this week it's "just" a snow storm. We've got over a foot on the ground already and it still ain't done.

Apple is looking for a games developer and all kinds of speculation has come to the surface. I doubt they will be trying to make some kind of console system to take on the latest generation of consoles. At least not at first. Not to say they couldn't but I don't think they want to do that right now.

This is also a significant change in direction for Apple. Steve Jobs had them make it hard to develop games on the Mac because he wanted it to be taken seriously, yet the most played game out there has got to be Solitaire on Windows. With OpenGL and the various Core technologies, particularily Core Amimation, there's a strong technological foundation. The game developers may need some initial impetus to show the way. Lately Apple has been having to create software on its own to fill in the niches to show others how it's done on the Mac.

The iPod comes with a few simple games: Breakout, Parachute and Solitaire. Now more and more colorful games are available for the iPod through the iTunes Store and there seems to have been some issues with getting more games for the iPod. So this developer position could just as well be for the iPod as well.

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What To Watch For In 2007

Some interesting, exiciting prospects here. IF we could gaze into the crystal ball and see 12 months ahead we would know how accurate or far off the mark these picks are.

From the article
2007 will be the year when a host of hot technologies which have been percolating around the mainstream rise high on the radar screens of CIOs and IT managers.

For example, radio-frequency identification (RFID), frequently viewed as a standalone tagging technology, will begin to ramp up the data loads IT centers must handle, as the tags become more pervasive. Web services, long touted as the next big thing, is poised to begin presenting workaday challenges, as managers are tasked with integrated Web-based apps into the enterprise. Mobile security is a no-brainer as a hot technology for the coming year, as far flung workforces face newer and more troubling threats.

Most challenging may be two technologies which will begin their ascent in 2007, but may take a bit longer to assume a dominant role in the enterprise. Those would be virtualization and advanced graphics. The latter will get a big boost from the advent of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

In this article, we'll discuss all five technologies and try to touch on how they'll impact your ability deploy applications and manage your infrastructures.

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