Apple responds to FCC enquiry about rejection of Google Voice

The Apple iPhone is such a popular device that it has encouraged a huge number of 3rd party developers to write applications for the iPhone, and Apple makes a large number of them available on the iTunes store (Apple claims that around 20% of the 500 apps that it receives per week are not approved - either directly rejected, or they need some modifications). However, it is apparent that one area where Apple is most concerned about is apps that either affect Apple's or AT&T's data plans or the money they make from voice calls. There was a lot of controversy in the month of July when Apple rejected the Google Voice (learn more) application, a software that could enable people to save money in making calls (even if Google Voice is not a VOIP application). The FCC was concerned about this apparent rejection, since it would seem that customers were being denied an alternative, and asked Apple for an explanation.
Apple has finally replied to the FCC, giving multiple reasons for the rejection, including privacy issues, and an apparent change of the basic call making flow inside the app (link to article):

"The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail," Apple said in a statement posted on its Web site. Apple also said Google Voice's importation of the Contacts database represented a privacy concern. "[T]he iPhone user's entire Contacts database is transferred to Google's servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways," Apple said.
Separately, Apple acknowledged that its agreement with AT&T obligates it "not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission.

However, Apple is stating that the application is still under review, and not rejected; an apparent subterfuge to ensure more time, and maybe hope that back-channel contacts ensure that the issue goes away.
At some time in the future however, Apple will find that the platform that it has built in the form of the iPhone and the app store will be broken open, that Apple will find that the rights it has to deny an application will need more openness. This could happen through a mix of consumer reaction and pressure from regulators.

Problems with depending on cloud computing

In recent years, we are being sold on the total promise of cloud computing, or to be on a much simpler level, storing our data on sites on the internet and depend on internet applications for a lot of their work. Some examples of these are using Google Mail, Hotmail, Google Docs, Online Maps, Online photo sharing and storage. Corporations also depend on applications running off the internet such as Salesforce, Google Apps, etc. In fact, the entire concept of Software as a Service (SAAS) depends on companies basing their primary business applications on 3rd party hosted apps. We are now at that stage when companies no longer have a backup for these services; consider your own case - when you save something on Google Docs, do you also have a local copy of that data ? Do you have a backup way of running your business when the internet app goes down for whatever reason ?
Most companies now depend on these hosted services / data storage being always available. After all, if you are a photo storage company and depend on customer photos being stored on Amazon's S3 service, the service better be always available. If the service even goes down for a couple of hours, that is a time when your customers can no longer access their photos, and would not be a pleasant experience. Now consider the recent case of Google services being unavailable for a few hours due to a traffic jam at one of its data centers. This means that services such as Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and so on were unavailable (link to article):

Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. Well, a quick look at this graph from the Web security company Arbor Networks shows a canyon-sized hole in North American Internet traffic during the G-outage. With a wide variety of practical services like Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, Calendar, and even Google search gone, online activities came to a standstill for many people during the Google blackout.
Just how smart is it to depend on a company to store all your data online? Some smaller storage companies have even gone under without giving users a chance to collect their precious bits and bytes. Canadian photographer Ryan Pyle told Spring how he lost more than 7000 edited and retouched images after the storage company Digital Railroad abruptly shut its doors last year.

Leads to 2 problems - with many companies operating on wafer thin margins and in a recession, there is a greater chance of many companies disappearing. If these companies were in the service of either data storage or app hosting, then customers will be hit when these companies go down. In some cases, when the disappearance is sudden, then customers may be hit with data loss.
In the second case, it may be possible that a company does not go down, but operations are hit for some time due to some technical issues, planned downtime, or even hacker attacks. Customers dependent on them will need to suspend activities during such a period.

Hacking the iPhone and ease of hacking the Mac

For a long time, Apple and Mac users have disdained the PC and Windows as very bad in security, and instead tom-tommed the relative lower number of hacks on the Mac. Microsoft has always been on the defensive in terms of security, and the large number of cracks and holes available on the OS and apps have always led them to be worried. There have been people who have been saying that Mac has not shown so many cracks just because it has a 5% market share, and people have not found it worth their while to try and break through the Mac OS security:

Though there has yet to be any documented criminal hijacking of the iPhone outside of a lab, Miller says his research shows the relative ease of hacking smart phones, as well as Macs in general. He spoke with Forbes.com about the iPhone's vulnerabilities, Apple's short-lived patch and the company's undeserved reputation for building secure computers.
There are two issues with the iPhone. First, the specific weakness that we found in its Web browser. But there's a more fundamental problem. The iPhone runs everything as "root." In other words, there are no privileges for different users. They should have built layers of security. Instead, if you can find a single crack, any user has the entire phone at their disposal. Last week they basically patched a hole in the wall. But inside, it's still pudding.
Bad guys aren't yet targeting Macs because they want to maximize their time. That means writing viruses that target 95% of computers rather than 5%. Apple currently has around 3.5% of the market, but its market share is growing by around 35% a year. As Mac's numbers creep up to 30% or 40%, cyber-criminals will start asking whether it's better to spend two weeks writing a bug for Windows or just a couple days to write one for Macs.

Almost nothing in this interview is complementary to Mac, but one tends to agree with what he says. Windows is the dominant OS, and most hackers are anyhow biased against Microsoft, in addition people are ready to believe that Windows is inherently insecure, and hence most hackers target Microsoft. Now that the iPhone is a well advertised target, one can expect many more Black Hat hackers to target the iPhone for benefit, and for Apple to be on the backfoot.

Google buys Postini for $625 million

Continuing in its quest for trying to beat Microsoft in the office category, Google made another big buy, buying a 'communications security' firm, Postini, for $625 million. What does Positini do ? Well, it lets corporations set security rules for all communication happening inside the company, such as e-mail, instant messenger and browsing activities. Such policies are necessary for companies, be it to maintain a track of communications for legal purposes, to filter e-mail for spam and viruses, or to prevent employees from accessing certain type of information.

When corporations adopt Postini's software, they can access, filter and impose restrictions on their employees' e-mail, instant messaging and Web habits. And because Google's moving into corporations -- it's fighting Microsoft for the right to rule over our cubicles -- helping firms keep an eye on their workers is an important goal.
There's a useful purpose to these corporate lockdowns, of course. Google notes that companies are under regulations to preserve all their data; the SEC is going to want to know if you discussed setting up Cayman Island shell corporations over AIM. So companies that are itching to use Google's office apps -- Gmail, Google documents, Google Talk, etc. -- can't switch over until the software can be made to obey such archiving rules. Companies are also targets of espionage, they're subject to leaks, and they suffer losses due to viruses and other network attacks. By keeping workers' computers pinned down and monitored, Postini can mitigate all these risks, it says.

Postini is not meant for the employee, it is meant for the corporations to better enforce policies. This acquisition by Google will help make Google's apps (such as Google Pack, Google Talk, etc) be more usable in an office context, and give them a realistic chance of competing with Microsoft's products, Google's prime goal.

Selling security exploits

The biggest fear of software makers, application system makers and the like (Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and numerous other big entities) is coming true. Ever since software holes and bugs started to come into existence, there was always the pressure between the software company trying to release a patch, and hackers trying to exploit this defect. In the past, software makers would try to apply pressure on the defect finders to keep it quiet till the patch is released. If the patch was found by a big company, they would normally respond to pressure from the likes of Microsoft and not release into the public domain.
However, this was not happening more and more, with the security companies releasing their findings independently of the software makers. Some of them would even sell these to people who would exploit them for nefarious purposes. As an example, review the number of botnets that exist in the internet today, with millions of computers being hacked into and controlled. The situation was literally demanding a market-place for such bugs:

An eBay-like auction site that sells vulnerabilities will improve security by ensuring researchers get a fair price for their work, its founders say. "The existing business model to reward researchers is a failure," said Herman Zampariolo, chief executive of WSLabi, and the man behind the WabiSabiLabi auction site. A tiny minority of vulnerabilities currently get patched, he said, because IT experts aren't paid for their work in uncovering them.
"As long as vulnerabilities are bought and sold privately, the value can't be the right one," Zampariolo said. "Our intention is that the marketplace facility on WSLabi will enable security researchers to get a fair price for their findings and ensure that they will no longer be forced to give them away for free or sell them to cybercriminals," he added.
So far, no bids have been posted, possibly because of delays in identifying the buyers, each of whom must use snail mail or fax to deliver proof of their identity and their bank account--electronic currencies are not accepted on the site. Around 20 buyers have been registered so far, as well as 30 sellers, who have provided another batch of flaws that should be on the site next week.

In this case, the intention may be genuine; however, where is the control mechanism to ensure that these sales are happening to the right people. If we are just dependent on the operators of the exchange, then there is no guarantee. Later, if the number of such buyers increases, it would be very easy for the cyber-criminals to pretend to be a genuine buyer and get access to top-notch holes on a very quick basis.

The time involved in getting the iPhone to actually start working

In all the launch buzz of the iPhone, there has been an incredibly successful publicity campaign that has been run, and market watchers have been waiting to see whether Apple will do anything to trip up on this success story. Well, there is some news, just not enough to trip up the iPhone story, but enough to give a serious headaches to the thousands of people affected.
Normally, the process of wireless activation involves the sales person in the shop handling the activation process, something that would take rougly an hour. However, to make things easier for the large crowds expected, Apple changed the activation process to something that can be done via the user's own computer, through their version of iTunes. However, in the end, this caused problems for a number of buyers, with no clarity regarding contact numbers, and in many cases, with buyers having to spend more than 10 hours waiting for activation to happen.
This can actually be the most frustating thing in the world as of that point, if you imagine spending some time in queue to buy a new phone for around $600-700, and then having to wait while customer service tells you that you need to wait. Obviously, these are teething problems, and Apple should be happy that otherwise people are happy with the phone, otherwise this issue would have escalated into a disaster.

Apple and AT&T unveiled an innovative activation scheme with the iPhone launch. Usually, activating a new cell phone means spending almost an hour or so in a wireless store as the sales representative lights up the phone. But with the long lines expected last Friday, Apple came up with a way to use iTunes to connect to AT&T's activation process so iPhone customers could set up the device at home.
Activation was supposed to be a snap: hook up the iPhone to a Mac or PC with the latest version of iTunes installed, and the software would automatically walk you through the process. After entering a credit card number and selecting a rate plan, the system was supposed to send an e-mail confirming the iPhone had been activated. But waiting for that e-mail turned into a frustrating experience for some iPhone customers.
Other iPhone owners on Apple's Web site reported problems with the SIM (subscriber identity module) cards inside their iPhones. SIM cards hold information unique to a mobile phone account and allow users to easily switch between phones while keeping their numbers and contacts--except on the iPhone, which uses a SIM card that works only with the iPhone. It seemed that the activation system was unable to recognize the SIM cards in some iPhones, which led it to bypass the activation screen and move straight into syncing music, movies and contacts. One user reported that his local AT&T store switched the SIM card that originally came with his iPhone for a new one, fixing the problem. Others said they had done the same thing.

Of course, Apple made a feature that caused a lot of worry to those users who were not activated. Unless the phone was activated, users could not even access other features on the phone; this was something that Apple should have thought through much more clearly, and from the perspective of phone users, not from the perspective of AT&T.

Google wants court supervision of Microsoft to continue

In 2000, a federal judge had found that Microsoft had committed a violation of federal anti-trust law; forcing PC makers to use Microsoft software products on the computers sold by them as opposed to similar software made by other software makers. In a massive scare to the company, the federal judge had ordered the breakup of the company. The part about breaking up of the company was set aside by an appeals court, and the case went back to district court and a new judge did not order the drastic breakup step. Under the new settlement, Microsoft reached an agreement with the Justice department and nine states which ordered Microsoft to modify licensing and to provide competitors with adequate technical information such that their products would run on the OS as a first-class citizen, equal to Microsoft products.
This agreement was valid for 5 years, but Google wants this agreement to be extended, accusing Microsoft of a repeat behavior with regard to changes in the desktop search function introduced in Vista.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Google (GOOG) asked for permission to file a friend-of-the-court brief outlining its concerns. The filing came on the eve of a regularly scheduled hearing to update U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Microsoft's compliance with a federal consent decree. "Microsoft's hardwiring of its own desktop search product into Windows Vista violates the final judgment in this case," Google wrote.
In a filing last week, the Justice Department, 17 states and the District of Columbia detailed changes Microsoft agreed to make to its desktop search function, and said the measures would resolve any issues raised by the complaint. "Microsoft went the extra mile to resolve these issues in a spirit of compromise," Microsoft said in a statement. "The government has clearly stated that it is satisfied with the changes we're making. Google has provided no new information that should suggest otherwise in their filing."

Vista introduced a new search capability in Vista called 'Instant Search' that allowed users to search for items in the hard drive. In April, Google filed a complaint that this prevented other companies from providing their own desktop search function, and in a settlement, Microsoft agreed to make changes to its search function to resolve these issues.
With the change, Microsoft will allow computer manufacturers and end-users to select their own preferred search engine, similar to what is being done for other third-party programs. Google, however, does not believe that Microsoft has really turned a new leaf and wants the settlement period extended so that a check can be kept on whether Microsoft is indeed making the required changes.

iPhone supporting YouTube, but not Flash

Flash Videos, the video format owned by Adobe, got a shock due to 2 major reasons. First, it seems that Apple will not use the Flash player on the iPhone, and then YouTube declared that it will re-encode its videos in the H.264 video format. YouTube's videos were earlier being encoded as Flash Video, a big support for the Flash Video format. That now seems to have gone.
Adobe will need to spend some effort on figuring how to make sure that such things are not repeated; even if this was due to a business conflict between Apple and Adobe, it has made life somewhat more difficult for Flash and Flash Video. The Flash Player now has to battle fears of being slow on the mobile platform, and Adobe needs to trumpet up the success of Flash Video with other broadcasters. Refer this story:

Just as the Apple TV is now YouTube compatible thanks to the H.264 format that YouTube’s video collection is being re-encoded with, so too is the iPhone able to display YouTube’s H.264 videos thanks to a special player iPhone users will see when visiting YouTube’s site.
Currently only 10,000 of YouTube’s clips have been converted thus far, but YouTube is promising to have their entire collection progressively re-encoded over the next few weeks and months, ensuring a steady stream of new videos for iPhone users who are also YouTube fanatics.
With the iPhone only a few days away, revelations of improved battery life and an improved screen have only added to the iHype over the past few days. The YouTube announcement has sent the hype meter off the scale once again.

And of course, with the projected release date of the iPhone only a few days away (29th June), the Apple PR machinery will be going all out to have the device written about widely every day, such that it remains on total recall; and there are incredible first week sales that make this the device to own for those not yet bought on.
Anyhow, back to Flash. Adobe needs to make sure that the Flash Player does not develop a reputation of being memory-hogging or battery draining on mobile devices, that will be a horrible reputation.

Safari on Windows already with 1 million downloads

When Steve Jobs released the beta of its web browser, Safari on Windows at a worldwide developer's conference, he may not have expected this kind of response. This release was also broadcast as the release of the fastest surfing software for Windows.
Even though the browser got hit by security problems and Apple has already released 3 patches to fix major security issues (and Steve Jobs would certainly not have been happy at such adverse publicity about such major problems), it was successful in another front. Within 48 hours of release, Safari got more than 1 million downloads.
Whether this spurt will continue or not is unknown, although Apple would be hoping that it become as popular in the browser application area as iTunes is in the cross-platform music buying and playing software. Safari is currently trailing IE and Firefox in the browser wars, with only 5% (native Mac users) as opposed to IE's 80% and Firefox's 15% market share. If Apple wants to come out with some strength in the browser wars, it will need to push the browser much more.
It will have to come out with more plugin support, not be too different in terms of interface from IE and Firefox, and be very easy to use.

Problems in using Safari on Windows

Apple is on a high nowadays. It is seen as the leader in computing design, has the by-far-largest selling product in the personal media player market, has ownership of the iPhone (probably the most hotly awaited product for some time), and seems to have played a master stroke by moving its Mac onto an Intel machine, this allowing people the option to install windows on their Mac machines and pushing up the sales of Macs. However, there comes a time when a company gets too arrogant, and then realizes that arrogance is not a virtue (especially when the arrogance is revealed to be based on false premises). Microsoft has faced this repeatedly in the past, especially in the area of security (both for operating systems and applications); claiming that their apps are secure, and then facing a number of holes pointed out by hackers and security specialists. Well, the high and mighty Apple faces the same situation today with Safari.
Safari, the default browser on the Mac, is now available on Windows as a Beta, and I read reports where Apple claimed that this browser is secure. Well, no longer. Security experts, no doubt encouraged by Apple's claims, found numerous security holes in this Beta of Safari such as Denial of Service support, remote execution bugs, memory corruption, etc, As time goes by, more such errors will be found. This article claims that the Beta of Safari should not be used for actual web use because of its bugs.

Although all browsers have security issues uncovered on a relatively regular basis, most of which are rapidly patched up with updates and fixes, the latest beta version of Safari has been put to the test by a number of security researchers, as reported by PC Magazine and others, and is so far failing a lot of security tests.
Problems with Safari uncovered so far include DoS and remote execution bugs, memory corruption that could be exploited, command execution vulnerabilities simply by visiting a web site – and that’s just in the last couple of days. Security researchers are bound to find more bugs in the system, or more ghosts in the machine for Apple to eliminate.
So, should you use Safari on Windows? After all, plenty of Windows users will have downloaded Safari since its release on Monday, and will no doubt have had a surf around to see what it’s like. It looks and feels just like Safari on the Mac, it’s certainly fun to use. For now, it’s also the latest novelty must-have experience from Apple that Windows users can enjoy. Apple’s download servers must be running hot!

Safari is indeed hot, after all, it is the browser on the iPhone, which itself lends to a lot of pull for the browser. However, Firefox is a pretty strong competitor on a number of platforms, so it is not sure as to how much Safari can take away from established browsers.

Google Gears: Support for offline web applications

Sounds like an oxymoron, does it not ? Offline web application ? On a Google Developer Day, Google released an offline web application called Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser plug-in that will let users run web apps whether they are offline or online. Google released the source code for this browser plug-in, in an effort to create a standard for adding offline capabilities to web applications. The initial set of adopters is developers who work on the combination of JavaScript and AJAX, to entice them to move to a higher set of capabilities. Google Gears will work on a set of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari) on a variety of platforms (Windows, Mac OS and Linux). Google also plans to submit Gears to a standards body so that it will be built into all standards compliant browsers. In addition, a consumer-ready release of Gears will be available within months, and in the meantime, google expects to get feedback from developers.
Google has a variety of web application, and customers have always complained about not being able to access these when they are offline, hence the quest by Google to bring about an offline version. The first application to use this will be Google Readers, an RSS reader. In a sign that this has not been a sudden development, Google Gears has been endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation, by Adobe Systems and by Opera Software.
The software has 3 components - a web server running in the browser, SQLite which is an open source database, and browser extensions that allow multiple JavaScript jobs to run in parallel. Being able to run multiple JavaScript jobs in parallel prevents locking up of the browser if any of the threads is causing a locking.

Novell publishes details of Microsoft deal

Late last year, Novell had signed a deal with Microsoft that was puzzling to a number of people in terms of details. Now, under the annual 10K filings to the SEC, Novell has revealed details of 3 agreements. These are all the more important as well as controversial now that Microsoft claimed that Linux was in violation of 235 patents that it has, as well as Microsoft's denial to reveal details of these patents. It was claimed that Microsoft offered Novell patent protection for its Linux distribution, while denying this to other in the Linux community, this trying to drive a wedge in the Linux movement. Refer this article:

Novell on Friday published redacted versions of the three agreements it signed with Microsoft in its annual 10K filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, providing the public with its first detailed look into a deal that some see as critical to the future of Linux. The 10K filing had been delayed by an internal stock options review at Novell, which was concluded Wednesday.
Under the terms of the agreements, Microsoft will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing fees and sales and marketing costs over five years, including US$240 million for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates. For its part, Novell has agreed to pay Microsoft a percentage of revenue from open-source products.
Linux advocates are expected to scour the documents for signs of how the agreement may affect Linux and whether anything in it will put Microsoft or Novell in potential violation of the upcoming version 3 of the GNU General Public license (GPL). The GPL is used in licensing many components of the Linux operating system.
Microsoft has claimed that Linux violates more than 235 of its patents, and because the deal offers patent protection to Novell users, it is seen as potentially driving a wedge in the Linux community. "Novell had a choice here, and Novell's choice was to be in the same boat with the rest of the free software community, or not," Perens said.

One issue that comes through the agreements is that Novell does not automatically recognize Microsoft's patents; as well as the fact that Microsoft may not have actually offered patent protection to Novell.
The nature of the deal as published by Novell was that these agreements were done in order to drive a better inter-operation of Windows and Linux and hence drive better penetration of Linux in the enterprise world, but open-source experts are pretty skeptical about the intentions of Microsoft. The deal has been good for Novell from a purely business point of view.

Using cell phones to lose weight

Cell phones have lots of uses nowadays; you use them for making and receiving calls (still number one use), for sending and receiving messages, for using as an alarm, for music and radio, for viewing movies, as a viewer for text books, for internet connectivity and browsing on the move, and so on. Well, add one more use to this list. You use a cell phone for losing weight ! Surprise, read this article:

Wondering how much of a diet-buster that banana cream pie on your plate is? Some Japanese have a novel way to find out: Photograph it with your cell phone and send the image to an expert.
With cell phones ubiquitous in Japan and rising concern over expanding waistlines, health care providers have put two and two together to allow the calorie-conscious to send photos of their meals to nutritionists for analysis and recommendations.
Nutritionists can work with photos from one day's meals to several weeks' worth, he said. Results come back in three days. Participants also can log onto a Web site to get further dietary information and upload photos from digital cameras.
"Patients used to fill out meal logs, but people tend to forget things or underestimate their portions," Kimura said. "Photographing meals and e-mailing them in is easier and gets more accurate results."

This seems like a very interesting use. You make full use of the data plans, you lock customers into an additional service that can provide a cut to the carrier, and has a peer pressure level. You see a friend or colleague doing this, and such a service will appeal to you as well.
Also, with obesity increasing, customers are more likely to use such a service, and if it can help reduce the obesity levels, then it will be a big boon for people.

Sun jumps into the Silverlight vs. Flash battle with JavaFX

There have been an incredible amount of internet discussion in the last few weeks about the potential of Microsoft Silverlight taking on Adobe's Flash for being the basis of building rich interactive applications running on the internet. Sun must have been feeling left out. Hence, review this announcement by Sun:

At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX, which covers Java development from the desktop to the Web to mobile devices. It features a new scripting variant of the Java, called JavaFX Script. JavaFX is a line of products focused on opportunities in the consumer communications market, including desktops, mobile clients, and TVs. The first product release is JavaFX Mobile, a software system for mobile devices.
JavaFX will be open sourced. "We plan to open-source all of JavaFX as we work through the program," said Green. Plans call for eventually offering a line of developer tools to work with JavaFX with a basic, introductory tool to be offered on Tuesday, Green said.
Sun officials acknowledged that JavaFX bears a similarity to enhanced graphics capabilities offered in the new Microsoft Silverlight platform. But Gosling added that Silverlight differs in that it is mostly focused on video-streaming.

Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, the battle for the tools of choice to build the next generation internet applications is wide open. Adobe is the entrenched player with the Flash and Flex combination, Microsoft has thrown a spirited challenge through Silverlight (tightly integrated with .Net), and now this announcement by Sun.
This is a last gasp by Sun. Java was the development with immense promise, but it has never fully lived upto its promise. Microsoft has used all its tricks to promote its development tools. Now, this release can bring back all the non-Microsoft types, especially with the promise of open-source and similarity to AJAX.
However, one major item to note is the emphasis on the cell phone as one of the key players in this market. The cell phone is already ascendant as a mini-computer, and as the power and capabilities of this device grow (foldable typing pad and foldable big screen, anyone?), being able to develop quickly and efficiently on this platform will be a major requirement.

MySpace buying Photobucket ?

MySpace is one of the biggest spaces in the world of social networks. It fact, most people would call it the biggest space. Pretty simple to operate, it allows users to create their own profiles and put whatever they want on these pages; text, pictures, video, anything goes. The younger generation have taken to MySpace like a fish to water. But you really can't store much of photos and videos on MySpace, so users need to store these on another service and link them off their MySpace pages.
Photobucket attempts to fill that void, and allows users to store their photos and video at the site, and more importantly link them from their MySpace page so that users viewing their profile are able to see these images and videos in a very efficient way.
But one wonders as to how Photobucket makes money ? It allows millions of users to store their images and videos, but it does so for free. If they started to charge money for this service, people would switch to something else in a flash. Trying to entice advertisers by showing them lots of young users trying to update images and edit videos may not exactly work. After all, YouTube also had a ton of users, but they were not exactly able to set the advertising world on fire. So it is apt that Photobucket tries the same route that YouTube took, selling themselves to a richer buyer who is looking for this functionality.
Refer this article from Forbes:

Are MySpace and Photobucket tying the knot?
But that's what Gawker Media's Valleywag blog reported Monday morning. A few hours later, the TechCrunch blog said it had confirmed the acquisition at $250 million. Both MySpace and Photobucket representatives declined to comment--which could very well mean that something is going on between the two companies. Or not.
A brief recap: MySpace is one of the world's most dominant social networks--with 107.7 million visitors per month--and allows its users to stick just about anything they want on their pages. Many of them have been using Photobucket, a relatively unknown start-up until recently, to store the images they stick on the site, as well as other sites they visit.
MySpace’s interest in Photobucket should not serve as evidence of a probable exit strategy for other start-ups that thrive largely on the user bases of social networks like MySpace. Photobucket is a rare case. In many other instances, MySpace would prefer to build its own competitor than buy a tool or feature off a popular widget maker. And when MySpace does that, those start-ups are toast.

Convert Flash to Silverlight: Electric Harmony

In the midst of all the discussions about the relative benefits and weaknesses of Flash and Silverlight, comes this conversion tool. A Colorado based company called Electic Rain is bringing out a product called Electric Rain Harmony that converts Flash SWF files to XAML. Read more about this here:

Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms.
Harmony not only eases the pain of repurposing Flash assets into XAML, it also helps designers learn the XAML syntax and mark-up structure by illustrating how graphics and animations are translated from the popular Flash SWF format into the new XAML format. By deconstructing how XAML mark-up builds, displays, and plays animations in context to Flash, Harmony accelerates the understanding and learning surrounding XAML and WPF graphics and animations.

Harmony will be available in the summer of 2007 and sold through the website www.erain.com
This makes the conflict between Adobe and Microsoft more interesting. Flash is the major owner of this market which is being challenged by Microsoft through Silverlight.
People are hesitant to switch technologies unless they have a level of confidence. If they are able to see existing Flash SWF files getting easily converted without a loss of the look and feel as well as the functionality, it will make them feel easier about using Silverlight.

Microsoft allowing Silverlight to mix with .Net

At its Mix07 web developers conference, Microsoft pushed further for making Silverlight as a cross-platform strategy, for allowing devlopers and designers to use technology other than AJAX / Javascript for developing web applications.
Continuing with its campaign to promote Silverlight as a Flash-killer, Microsoft fused a full portable version of .Net with Silverlight. This is supposed to allow developers the ability to mix their Silverlight apps with .net, even on non-Windows systems.
Silverlight is currently in Beta, with the final version likely to be released this summer. This will be an epic challenge. Adobe has the designer market, and will be loath to allow anyone else to take control over it. With the recent release of Creative Suite 3, Adobe would want to make sure that designers stick to the combination of Flash, Flex, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver; while Microsoft will use its power to try and get more traction for its Expression series of products.
Read this article in more detail:

Microsoft kicked off its Mix07 web developers' conference by revealing it has fused a full portable version of its .Net runtime with the next version of its Silverlight 'Flash-killer' technology.
"The web has been mostly about DHTML and AJAX," Ozzie said. "But AJAX has limitations...and there are better languages than JavaScript for the sophisticated applications that developers want to build."
Ozzie also said that web and graphic designers and developers will have free use of Microsoft's Windows Live Platform, a web storage service, to store, run and show off their Silverlight applications and videos.

With all this, designers should be enjoying this battle, since it gives them more options, and these mega companies will also be more sensitive to their concerns.

Using iPods to cheat

Reading into a set of decisions across schools, one realizes the limitless scope of usage of modern technology and how a younger generation is the one which can more easily adapt to these devices, while the authority group is the one which keeps on playing catch-up.
What happened? Well, schools across the country are banning the usage of digital media players in schools due to their potential usage for cheating. It seems very obvious though: These are kids with a very comfortable way with technology, able to be much further ahead than their teachers in their utilization of technology, including misuse. Read this article here:

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious -- students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other. Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device.
Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.
Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.
Some students use iPod-compatible voice recorders to record test answers in advance and them play them back, said 16-year-old Mountain View junior Damir Bazdar.
Others download crib notes onto the music players and hide them in the "lyrics" text files. Even an audio clip of the old "Schoolhouse Rock" take on how a bill makes it through Congress can come in handy during some American government exams.

These media players are very small, and can be hidden very easily. In addition, the functionality available with these players makes it very easy to cheat, you can record answers as a music file, can stores answers in lyrics, and so on and so on.
However, this fight between technology and people in authority is going to be increasing difficult. What happens when you get watches that can act as an interface to a music player, and what happens when you get sunglasses capable of acting as media players.
This problem will not go away. The better solution is to re-structure learning in such a way that people are quizzed on application of what they learnt rather than having to remember things exactly as they are. What will happen when the iPhone becomes available ?

Microsoft tries out a Flash competitor: Silverlight

When the giant starts moving, everybody shakes. Adobe must be a worried company, with Microsoft starting to closely eye their staked out space on the web. Microsoft so far has been a company focused on the desktop with a mighty OS and an immense cash generating Office Suite. It has not exactly been too focused on the web space, falling behind Google in terms of advertising and search capabilities, and ceding the web application space to the likes of Adobe's Dreamweaver and Flash, and the big daddy of them all, Photoshop.
Microsoft is now challenging this in a big way, with the latest challenge coming to the Flash dominancy of Adobe. Flash, that is now massively popular all over the web, and with Flash Video on course to becoming the favourite online video type, has been the jewel crown of Adobe ever since the acquisition of Macromedia.
Now Microsoft is releasing a browser plug-in called Silverlight by the end of the month in Beta, trying to compete in the Flash space. With its new Expression line of products, Microsoft has already been competing against Adobe for the designer market (as opposed to its conventional development tools). These new tools seek to compete against Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the like, and add the developmental touch to the design platform.
The battle is going to be much fiercer, Adobe currently owns this area and is not known for letting go of its market so easily, while Microsoft is a down and out fighter known for employing all tactics to beat its competition. The decider for dominancy in this market is not likely to be known for a couple of years at least, but in the end, it's simple, the platform and tools used by a majority of users will decide the winner.

Microsoft to release Expression web and blend on MSDN

For quite some time, Microsoft has been resisting placing the Expression series of products on MSDN, claiming that these are more of designer products rather than developer products and don't fit into a Development framework. One good reason would be that this ensures that people who want to buy this have to actually buy it, as opposed to people having MSDN just downloading and installing it.
This seems short-sighted since MSDN is one good way of proliferating a product across a wide range of target users. If they want to beat the products of their competitors such as Adobe which are well-entrenched to some degree, then they need to look at the bigger picture. There has been a wide degree of resentment among the developer community about a patently money-making move.
This feedback seems to have forced a re-think at Microsoft, and a course reversal seems to have happened. Expression Web is now available for MSDN Premium members immediately, and Expression Blend will be available for MSDN Premium members shortly after the Expression Studio release later in Q2 2007.
Expression Design and Expression Media are not included in this MSDN availability since they are not directly intended for application development. Read the blog entry here.