What's Next: Microsoft looks to throw back Razorfish
Microsoft's advertising over the past three years has focused on this "human element" thing (although that's also Dow Chemical's campaign at the moment), where technology is supposed to empower people to do what people can do best, rather than simply make technology better or more complex or cooler. Well, with the May 2007 purchase of ad agency aQuantive, Microsoft had the opportunity to practice what it preached, since an ad agency is full of people -- not just ordinary laborers, either, but creative folks whose factories are their brains. Just the kind of folks you'd think Microsoft would be eager to employ, right? Nope. For two years, it's been looking to unload the creative baggage from the $6 billion technology package it bought, and this morning it may be closer to dumping its load. That's coming up in What's Next, but first, let's see if the Mythbusters can blow up AT&T all the way from Canada.
MythBuster 1, AT&T 0 in bad-bill battle
Afloat on the endless news tide
This episode of Recovery is brought to you by second bananas. Ed McMahon knew he was one, but I'll bet Farrah Fawcett would have been surprised how things worked out. (What, too soon?)
There's an application just launching into beta called thisMoment, and I've had a tab open for it all week in hope that I'll catch some quiet time to try it out. Harry McCracken at Technologizer got there first, and he describes it as "part social network, part media sharing site, and part Facebook application."
What's Next: Britain rises up against cyber-terrorism, slowly
On a difficult day for many of us to be talking about high technology and protocols and gadgets, when we'd rather be singing and remembering how lucky we are to be alive and to have friends and people we love, Betanews would like to take a moment -- just one moment -- to ask for blessings for the memory of a lady who used her public platform to make one of the first true public demonstrations that domestic abuse is wrong, and that anyone being abused has the right to fight back, and fight hard. And for giving us the honor of helping her fight her last battle in spirit. Thank you, Farrah. We appreciate you.
The UK's new cyber-terrorism crackdown heads up What's Next this morning, but first, a look at the last 24 hours...
Gen-X childhood icons go boom, take the Internet with them
TV critic Alan Sepinwall asked Thursday afternoon, of no one in particular on Twitter, if this was the biggest double-celebrity-death day since Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr. both exited (May 16, 1990). And for a generation it sure felt like the world, or one's youth anyway, was coming to an end.
Or one's Internet connection, as the relatively muted testimonials to Farrah Fawcett Thursday morning gave way to moment-by-moment coverage of Michael Jackson's end in the afternoon -- from the photos a tourist on a tour bus outside Mr. Jackson's rental home snapped of the ambulance call to the avalanche of tweets from more or less everyone with ears as events unfolded. And the publication of record this time was TMZ.com -- an appropriate end, perhaps, for an artist who lived his life not just in the tabloids but in some fantasy of The Future, a place we suspect doesn't have newspapers.
Semanti Firefox plug-in ties up with Facebook
Semanti, formerly known as Semantifind, is a Firefox 3 plug-in that works with a user's chosen search engine to assign context to queries, preview results in line, save good search results, and provide suggestions derived from community use.
This week, Semanti v. 2.0 was released, with features that now include "Social Search," or search results based upon your Facebook friends' search behavior. For example, when Semanti provides an answer to your query that you find particularly effective, you can save that result so that when your Facebook friends search for the same terms, the results that you approved of appear as the top answers to their query. It's something like "starring" the highest quality answer so your friends don't waste time poking around less pertinent results.
Up Front: At Hohm with Microsoft's power management, and Facebook's privacy push
Hohm, Hohm for your range (and your fridge and your laptops and all)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 • Sometimes it's good to live in Seattle -- like when Microsoft announces its Hohm power-management beta and both your utility companies are part of the team. The announcement was accompanied by all the Web 2.0 trimmings -- the signup page, yes, and also the Twitter account and the blog and the Facebook page and -- say, a person starts to wonder how much power all this is taking to do.
Some Web TV streams will be delayed until Comcast users get first crack
In a deal announced today that could spawn a replication of the multi-tiered pay TV network scheme (first run, second run, rerun) on the Internet, cable service provider Comcast will be partnering with cable network parent company Time Warner (no longer related to Time Warner Cable) to make replays of shows seen on TNT, TBS, and potentially other Turner networks down the road available online first to paying Comcast customers.
The deal will lead to Comcast extending its "On Demand" brand to the Web, using a platform that will not only enable advertising but also provide a ratings service to advertisers. Most likely, this will be an analytics service provided by the Nielsen Company, which Comcast endorsed in January 2008.
Up Front: NSA would have central role in military cyber command
Defense secretary creates cyberspace military command
Morning of Tuesday, June 23, 2009 • As expected, DoD secretary Robert Gates has announced the creation of a new military command dedicated to cybersecurity and focusing on the .mil domain. The Washington Post reports that Gates will recommend that President Obama designate that the post be held by the director of the NSA; that would currently be Lt. Gen. Keith Anderson, who would likely be awarded a fourth star to do the job. Gates wishes the command to be launched by October and under full steam within one year.
Collecta vs. Google in real-time search matchup
If you have a completely new search engine -- in other words, one that's not a renamed version of Windows Live Search -- you need to give it a niche that somehow emphasizes the quality of its results compared to those from Google. Wolfram Alpha's niche of choice is the intelligence of its results, in an effort to wring the educational power out of the verbal sponge that is the Internet. So that slot's taken for now.
Enter Collecta, the product of former AOL search chief Gerry Campbell, and an indicator of what AOL could have accomplished had its previous leadership chosen to invest in ingenuity. Launched last Thursday in public beta, the ideal of Collecta is that it searches content that tends to be updated quickly and frequently, and that it conducts those searches on the fly -- it's truly searching for what you've asked it to search for, rather than look up results from a massive index.
Up Front: Ballmer says Bing may be worth investing 10% of Microsoft's income
The Bing marketing push has been a short-term success for Microsoft in that it got people to trying out its search engine, including several of the features Windows Live Search actually already had for a year or more and just never tried...because it was Windows Live Search. But in a speech last night, the man at the top of Microsoft presented what looked like a "moral," like at the end of a bedtime story, the message we're all supposed to have learned...as if Bing's success is a fait accompli. Sometimes when Steve Ballmer starts talking like Tom Osborne, you have to start worrying...and not always for Microsoft.
Search mavens: They've just like us!
Up Front: Should broadband providers offer customers tiered service?
Eric Massa, a freshman congressman from New York's 29th District, introduced a bill yesterday that would keep ISPs -- including those providing mobile service -- from abruptly changing usage rules on accounts or slapping undocumented "we know it when we see it" overage caps on so-called "unlimited" accounts. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act (HR 2902) would require most large ISPs to submit plans to the FTC and undergo hearings if they wishes to institute metering-based plans.
House of Reps examines usage-based caps
Boku aims to bridge micropay gap with mobile-phone ease
A just-launched payment service would allow users to make purchases for virtual goods via their mobile phone, rather than by credit card or online payment service. Boku follows a model familiar to many mobile-phone users: an approved charge appearing on one's mobile bill.
Forget your late-'90s memories of Beenz and such; the pay-by-mobile model is already quite popular in Asia, and virtual goods -- an $8 billion annual market, according to Boku -- are a good fit.
Everyone's a server! Opera calls upon browsers to 'Unite'
In an announcement early Tuesday morning, Opera revealed the parameters of Unite, a product it says will "enable a whole new class of social software on the Web." The platform is designed to better facilitate multiuser online applications and to give users greater control of their data even while making it available (if they so choose) to others online.
The Unite platform converts any PC that runs it, as Opera puts it, into both a client and a server; a small Web server lies at the heart of the browser-based system itself. For instance -- as Opera demonstrated in an application already written for Unite -- perhaps you'd like to share a file with a friend, but don't want to end up like Jammie Thomas. The file-sharing functionality Opera showed generates a URL for the folder in which you've stored your file on your own machine. Give that URL to your friend and she can simply browse over to it, with no third-party service required.
SEO mavens find scraping switches in Bing
Microsoft last week released guidance for webmasters and search-engine optimization strategists, explaining what Bing's up to in the background. A look at the white paper revealed some smart thinking about where viewers' eyes move on a page of search results, as well as a much more determined "scraping" effort than Google currently uses.
Betanews asked Dan Rosenbaum, a New York-based SEO expert, to walk with us through the white paper and note any features or telling omissions that caught his eye. Overall, he says, "the big changes from Google are in the user interface, and they look pretty interesting and effective. [Microsoft] took the standard heat map of a search engine results page and said, 'How can we make that useful?'"
Bing vs. Google rematch after Microsoft upgrades explicit filtering
A few weeks ago, in our ongoing series of duels between the reigning champion search engine Google and the contender "decision engine" Bing, we gave Bing the edge in a battle of the image filters: With both search engines' explicit image filtering turned on, we were able to explore a very sensitive topic -- breast cancer -- and have Bing yield sensible and respectful, but sometimes graphic, images without presenting offensive content.
Since that time, as we reported last week, Microsoft has implemented a very practical concept for helping individuals and businesses to ensure filtering takes place -- this after complaints were raised about how ridiculously simple it is for any user to turn filtering off in both Bing and Google. As Bing General Manager Mike Nichols announced on Friday, the thumbnails of images which Bing deems to be of a sensitive nature will be sent through a specific URL, explicit.bing.net. That way, users can take extra steps to filter questionable content.
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