Yahoo, Microsoft team with rival trustbuster against Google Books settlement
An attorney who was at the heart of the US Dept. of Justice's original 1994 antitrust case against Microsoft, arising from its proposed takeover of Quicken manufacturer Intuit, will find himself spearheading a coalition against Google's book scanning policies that includes both Microsoft and Yahoo, spokespersons from both companies confirmed to Betanews this morning.
It was attorney Gary Reback who first called Microsoft to task for using its "embrace and extend" policy in an abusive fashion against competitors, often representing those competitors in legal action, as was the case with Borland International and Sybase in the mid '90s. Currently, he is the author of a book called Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive. His latest confrontation is against Google, whose proposed settlement with book authors and publishers would give Google "non-exclusive" rights to scan their books contents and reproduce them online in the Google Books service. Already, Google has been scanning books that are available in public libraries, and making excerpts of those books available to users -- excerpts, as opposed to the books in their entirety.
New Windows Live Movie Maker debuts, says good-bye to XP for good
The Windows Live team announced this afternoon that Windows Live Movie Maker, the free video editing software component of Windows Live Essentials has come out of beta and is available for download.
Windows Live Movie Maker opened in beta last year, and has been designed to provide a quick and easy method of cutting video clips rather than a full editing suite.
ComScore: Bing the only search to gain US share in July
Usually when a new online product unveils an upgrade, its audience numbers see a bump for the first month, before subsiding and evening out. Last month, Bing's first usage share numbers from analysis firm comScore showed a little bump, but not much of one -- yet Microsoft made as much out of it as it could.
The news this month -- the first to show month-by-month progress since the changeover from Windows Live -- may actually be more encouraging for Microsoft: It gained half a point of usage share among US users for the month of July over June, at the same time when Google and Yahoo combined lost about as much.
Moonlight 2.0 beta tries to show off Silverlight 2.0 compatibility
Though it's been in private testing for some time, the Silverlight 2.0 work-alike system for Linux built by the open source Mono Project is now ready to present itself to the general public. This afternoon (after a few fits and starts), Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released for general testing, with one of the runtime module's ambitious new features being the enablement of different media codecs, including Mono's own rendition of open-source Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac.
Although multiple video codec support is slated for inclusion by Microsoft in Silverlight 3, Mono team lead developer Miguel de Icaza said today that he decided to implement the media pipeline feature from Silverlight 3 into the 2.0 specifically "to play back media files that use the open codecs or to plug your own media codecs." De Icaza only expressed his interest in tackling this bit of functionality just last March.
A browser war veteran turns wannabe
Marc Andreessen is a brilliant guy. His Mosaic browser, which eventually morphed into Netscape, introduced us all to the concept of surfing and ushered in the Internet as we know it. His new way of looking at online services -- which seems ho-hum today but was radically transformational 15 years ago -- freed us forever from the tyranny of arcane, unfortunately named services like Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Gopher. In taking Netscape public, he set the stage for dot.com-era IPOs that created countless tech billionaires-as-rock-stars and defined an era when technology's potential was seemingly limitless. Let's call him brilliant and visionary, then.
However, even geniuses have their bad days...sometimes, they have many. Netscape was eventually wiped off the relevance map when Microsoft finally woke up to the Internet reality and paved over the landscape with Internet Explorer. The Internet bubble burst as the perverse logic that drove much of it -- eyeballs, "stickiness," and the ridiculous notion that bricks-and-mortar were headed for permanent and complete obsolescence -- was finally and thankfully replaced by the old rules of business that dictated you needed to generate revenue, and that revenue needed to exceed your costs.
Bing vs. Google rematch: Who's getting better, quicker?
Two months ago, Microsoft unveiled its revamped Bing search service, touting it as a "decision engine." There were some genuine new advantages which we did discover, but not everything appeared ready for Bing's first outing, and we were told to expect improvements to some features "in the coming weeks." Not months, weeks.
So this is August, and (do forgive me) what hath Bing brung? In our June series of Face-offs, the final score was Google (4), Bing (3) -- not necessarily a runaway, but good enough for the champion to not feel immediately threatened. With Google testing improvements to its search engine, we wondered if we'd find any evidence of tweaking on Bing's side as well. We've decided to put both services through the same paces a second time to see which service is the one that's really gunning for a rematch.
Office vs. Web apps: Breaking the 0-0 tie
The story so far: We're in the initial phase of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview, a period of private and public testing that could last for the better part of a year. So far, the biggest complaint we're seeing emerge is that so little is changing, that it's becoming more difficult for Microsoft to make the value proposition for why businesses and individuals should upgrade from Office 2007 or even 2003. In the absence of viable, existing reasons why the new Office will be better than the old one, a couple of Microsoft employees launched a Web site this week, asking people to come up with their own reasons and vote up each other's best responses.
Right now, the number one suggestion users have for "making Office better" is the restoration of an old feature that existed in Office XP. The #3 suggestion for Word: Give users the option to bring back the Office 2003 menu bar. (You can just hear Carmi Levy cheering that suggestion.) So to recap, from both Microsoft and its users, nothing new yet, but plenty of pleas to bring back old stuff that was just fine.
Qik: Yet another brilliant service crippled on iPhone
Mobile video streaming site Qik, which was introduced last year is leading the charge into the next generation of the Web. Think of it as a real-time YouTube where a user's mobile phone is paired with an online channel that broadcasts live video streamed from his handset camera over 3G. The service's value for citizen journalism is undeniable.
Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android all have the ability to stream live video to Qik, and the iPhone 3G S just got an app for the service for the first time yesterday.
On second thought, Tr.im stays open
Just shy of two days after announcing it couldn't afford to keep URL shortening site Tr.im open, The Nambu Network says public demand for the site is far too great to simply shut down.
Tr.im will stay alive instead.
Google's next search engine: What's the difference?
Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it's describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling "Caffeine," although perhaps intentionally, it isn't yet explaining just what the differences are.
In Betanews' initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google's current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.
Delicious founder: 'Since when is Yahoo cool?'
Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking site Delicious, said in a forum posting yesterday that he regrets selling Delicious to Yahoo.
The discussion centered around Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who announced this week that he's leaving Yahoo to join Cloudera, an enterprise support service for Hadoop users.
Real-time Web search could be Facebook's future
After Facebook announced that it would be acquiring social sharing service Friendfeed, Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable announced that Facebook was in the midst of improving its in-site Search features as well.
Users can enter the term they want to find in the search field, then results can be filtered to include posts by friends, fan groups, or pages viewable to all users, as well as events, applications, and the Web as a whole.
Twittered off: Time to grow up
Last week's monumentally scaled denial-of-service attacks -- more recently attributed to a massive attack on a Georgian professor and part of the ongoing dispute between Russia and Georgia -- once again showed just how soft Twitter's soft underbelly is. And for a service used by 44 million people last month, getting hauled to its knees by a bunch of political/cultural enemies intent on opening up a new front in a simmering regional conflict isn't exactly a sign that all's well on the security front.
If Twitter were a bank, the angry mobs would have already descended on Capitol Hill, pitchforks in hand, calling for someone's head. But since Twitter's just an itty-bitty message service, and since it's free, it gets a pass. It shouldn't.
Facebook buys FriendFeed
Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.
"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.
Tr.im: You can't make money shortening URLs
There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.
URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.
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