YouTube, Susan Boyle, and a slap at snark
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered last night at Carnegie Hall to play an original Tan Dun piece composed specifically for the global competition that brought the group together. It's lovely. But I'm willing to bet that instead you were listening to a heretofore obscure singer absolutely flatten a roomful of doubters with a show tune.
Like a lot of us, I've been watching the Susan Boyle video repeatedly this week, trying to get at what it means for the Internet to have taken to heart, as the Britain's Got Talent audience took to heart, a middle-aged Scotswoman with ungroomed eyebrows and a frumpy Best Dress and a voice that seems to have broken something that needed breaking in hearts around the world.
Trillian sends Astra into beta
Download Trillian Astra beta from Fileforum now.
What next, Duke Nukem Forever? All right, that may be a cheap shot -- we've only been waiting three years for the release of Trillian Astra, the update of the IM software that once owned the multi-service chat realm. The software moved from alpha to beta late last week.
How much would you pay for news? A new coalition seeks an answer
For a great many Internet users -- perhaps a majority -- who believe they're already paying monthly fees for content, the thought of paying a subscription fee for online news may be akin to yet another "tax." Certainly the purveyors of the news-is-by-nature-free argument may elect to characterize such a fee as a "tax." But challenging and defeating the new conventional lack-of-wisdom is just one of the challenges facing a group of businessmen at the nucleus of a new online news coalition.
Perhaps if there were just one fee that pertains to a whole portfolio of news providers, enough readers would see enough value in their product as a collective, to subsidize it through a single subscription fee. That's the bet being placed today by Journalism Online, LLC, the latest venture from business innovator and Court TV founder Steven Brill, venture capitalist and former TCI CEO Leo Hindery, and former Dow Jones executive vice president and The Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz.
Microsoft still thinks 'Pink' in its Zune ad hunt
With a handful of Zune HD leaks now out in public, and a semi-solid release schedule for Windows Mobile 6.5, we're now beginning to hear some development in the "Pink" category.
"Pink" is Microsoft's code name for a mobile product with very little in the way of concrete information behind it. What is known is that it will likely be coming from Danger, makers of the OS found in the T-Mobile Sidekick which Microsoft acquired in February of last year. Before CES this year, CNBC's Jim Goldman said "Pink" was going to be a device that would "provide true competition to the iPhone."
One extra week for Microsoft to defend tying IE to Windows
After a Financial Times report this morning cited April 28 as the deadline for Microsoft to comply with a request by the European Commission to respond to its latest Statement of Objections, reporters close to the story wondered why that seemed like one week too many. As it turned out, the FT had something of a scoop and didn't even know it, as Microsoft confirmed the news to Reuters later in the day. April 21 had been the company's anticipated deadline.
Last January, the EC issued a formal objection to Microsoft regarding its practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, which it claims doesn't give browser competitors a level playing field. Statements of Objections are the first steps taken in launching formal court proceedings against a prospective defendant; yesterday, the EC issued a similar notice against the government of the United Kingdom, for interpreting or "transposing" an EU law in a way which could enable interception of private Internet communications data.
AT&T launches mobile user tracking
Exactly three years ago, Sprint unveiled its plans for a child-tracking phone service. The $9.99 monthly plan hooked a kid's phone up with a piece of software that pinpointed the handset's location on a map.
Today, AT&T has debuted FamilyMap, its version of essentially the same service, which will also cost $9.99 for two trackable phones, and $14.99 for up to five. Compatible handsets do not require full GPS connectivity, but can be made visible through A-GPS or cell tower pings.
Tests of Time Warner broadband cap rescheduled, debates continue
Time Warner Cable's proposed trials of consumption-based billing were originally slated to begin in several markets this summer, where customers would be a part of a tiered pricing scheme. Pricing would have started at 1 GB per month for $15, and go up to 100 GB per month for $75, and include a per-gigabyte overage fee.
The public's reaction was less than favorable, and the trials in Texas have been rescheduled.
Mainstream support for Windows XP ended Tuesday
Without a reprieve from the governor this time, Microsoft's free product support for paid users of all versions of Windows XP officially ended as of April 14. What this means is that the company will no longer give complementary product support to XP users.
This doesn't mean the end of the free security updates, however, and there could very well be a big batch of those as soon as next Tuesday. Customers can still purchase product support for XP from Microsoft per-incident for at least the next five years.
Code freeze for Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, release as soon as next Wednesday
The Mozilla organization's developer's wiki has sent out the call for a code freeze for what will very likely be the final beta of Firefox 3.5 -- now fully renumbered -- prior to the first Release Candidate. The Quality Assurance process for the frozen code will begin Friday, which means it will be another busy weekend for developers and testers.
Fan fake or leak? Another Zune HD image surfaces
Another promotional shot of the Zune HD has leaked out, this time to Windows Mobile Power User, fleshing out the appearance of Microsoft's newest PMP a bit more, and revealing a few more details.
According to the report, the Zune HD is equipped with a capacitive OLED screen that supports multi-touch and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio. Further, the device and updated Zune Marketplace will offer HD media and support for "3D Xbox games." The report claims that the visible port on the side of the device is an HDMI out, but that looks to be mostly wishful thinking, since the device's slim profile leads one to believe it is actually Micro USB.
See your voice mail: Microsoft's next Exchange Server will make speech visible
Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Public Beta from Fileforum now.
Perhaps you've heard about this service that carries your voice across wires. It could become all the rage very soon, as new e-mail server functionality will give users the ability to see the text of messages callers have just spoken, and then to speak the contents of menus that users have just now written.
Dozens of corporations float to the Amazon cloud on RightScale
Big businesses are now moving to the clouds "en masse," through a deal between Capgemini and RightScale. The 50-or-so corporations are all clients of IT consulting firm Capgemini's emerging Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, said RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in a briefing with Betanews.
After starting to migrate the customers' existing Web sites to "cloud-style, elastic-type applications and grids" in Amazon's EC2, Capgemini turned to RightScale's pre-configured templates for assistance.
It's Office 2010: First technical previews due in Q3
Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews of the applications suite we can now call Office 2010, will be distributed to special participants -- probably in limited number at first, just like before -- in the third quarter of this year.
Julia White, a product manager for the Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews that this limited number of initial testers will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it will go beyond the usual MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. In tandem with this development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially since they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.
ODF, PDF become part of Microsoft Office on April 28
In a post this afternoon in an unusual location -- the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog -- the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and "compatibility mode" documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe's PDF format, in the company's first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.
This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications -- that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS -- Microsoft's own try at an interoperable display format -- has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.
The pendulum swings toward Microsoft in the Alcatel-Lucent IP battle
The intellectual property war which at one point had Microsoft owing Alcatel-Lucent a penalty of over $1.5 billion, may end up with the latter actually owing the former. First that penalty was reduced in light of new Supreme Court guidelines, and then last September an appeals court overturned the jury verdict, ruling in favor of Microsoft.
Yesterday, Microsoft was handed another victory, as first reported by my friend and colleague Liz Montalbano at PC World, with the US Patent and Trademark Office overturning the validity of two Alcatel-Lucent patents, concerning methods for how a user selects calendar entries from an onscreen menu. Microsoft had owed the France-based holder of the Bell Labs patent portfolio some $357.7 million, which has since accrued interest.
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