Bosses ’should embrace Facebook’

Ed note : i love how ” pop ” media jumps on a bandwagon soon as some overpaid ” think tank ” researcher gets up on stage and avers what we internet users have known for about 10 years .. LOL … these dunderheads are the keepers of the economy and that is precisely why its tanking …

any fools donkey can tell you that any programmer can help you circumvent the IT rules of the house … not allowing people to communicate may help keep the office quite but it will ruin business because anybody with a real idea has to communcate it, the ones that are following your company rules and reciting after you are sucking on your oxygen at a time when 500 million Indians, 600 million Chinese, millions of South Americans, millions of Russians are doing everything they can and more to improve life at home by working on the cheap for anyone who cares to pay -

Businesses in the EU and the US ( the so called West ) that choke access to these idea rich, capital starved idea pools are only hastening their inevitable downfall, schools in the West are hard pressed to find good engineers, doctors, scientists, programmers and mathematicians  ( Mr Bill Gates himself is on record saying he has never met so many young, bright, educated professionals as he has in India .. )  because the average student is gearing up to slot himself into some unionised median wage job where he is only a consumer, a monkey to turn that wrench; neither has the West invested in creating future – proof engineering jobs, nor has it invested in renewable energy, nor has it spent enough to educate its populace on the advantages of Information technologies, nor has it re structured its schooling to allow the best ideas to stay in the country – the best ideas are getting shipped to China and India for research and develop enabling these economies to learn, adapt and catch up, its an exponential growth – since the mid 80s when IT started to take off more dollar millionaires employees have been created in India than the US or the EU ( as of 2000, India had 80 million Dollar millioanires, thats the entire population of Germany ) – why ? arent Americans smart enough ?

The West does not know how to save its income, they blow it all up on stupid entertainment ( Im not sure how else to categorise 200 million USD spent on making tripe like ” Titanic “at a time when millions of children starve to death in Sub Saharan Africa – the EU and the US have built their capital markets, lifestyle and consumer spending by preying on poor economies – now these same Western societies – economies are hoping that their former prey will open their purse strings to help them maintain the former opulence.

The head of Infosys India has no 300 million yatch; I personally would prefer that the Western economies that profited from years of growing consumer spending fulled by low interest rates just die out, lets replace them with a global economy where your idea comes from smart people ( not white or yellow or blue or offshore ) , where you capital comes not from speculative players but from savings and solid business plans, where you develop and keep markets abroad and at home via innovation ( thus engendering a culture of free thinking and innovation ) and one where the future is what you make it rather than what you are forced to inherit after each economic bubble – we can do it.

And to make it happen all we really need to do is install an IM and tap into the Billion people on the Internet, atleast 5 % of who are really smart. It wasnt the Industrial Revolution that opened up the world for the common man, it was the Movable Type; it wasnt capitalism or socialism or government intervention that drove the French Revolution, it was ideas.

Ideas are to be gifted. If you dont whats the idea worth anyway ?

I hope I have made my stance on IMs clear – set the herd free … they arent your slaves, if your staff is under producing due to IMs then you have the wrong people in the wrong jobs; any noob can show you how to ignore messages that decrese productivity, you dont need to be Albert Einsten to hang out a ” Do not disturb ” sign.

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Bosses ?should embrace Facebook?

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The Entire Video of John Doerr Giving 10 Tips for Start-ups to Avoid the Econalypse

• Searching for identity: The G1 obviously integrates the best of Google very well — and it should. Search is part of just about everything the device offers. It’s on the home screen, it’s in the music player, it’s in the maps. It’s quite impressive. Honestly, though, none of the mapping or other Google features bowled me over any more than the integrated Google offerings of the iPhone. (If the G1 offered voice directions, I might have said otherwise.)

• Apps: Compulsive purchasers will have to wait a bit. The Android market offerings are a tad anemic by comparison. But, obviously, developers have had more time to create for the iPhone than for the G1. And, for now, everything there appears to be free. Also, man, some of those babies download fast. I wasn’t even riding on Wi-Fi at the time. (Downloading a video player took a little longer.) There is an app that folks are buzzing about that lets you take a pic of a bar code and have Google dig up details on the item. I can see a use for that, but it’s not enough to completely geek me out.

• Getting your game on: The best thing I found in the store in the game realm was very retro — Pac-Man. While I’m all about nostalgia, Pac-Man was made for a joystick, not a touch screen or accelerometer. Tilting away from angry ghosts really isn’t that much fun. That said, maybe its Spore Origins is still to come. When the iPhone launched in 2007, folks had to wait about a year for any apps to download to their unaltered phones. So, kudos for having any to choose from at the G1’s launch.

• Multimedia: C’mon, the iPhone is an iPod with other cool features that can make phone calls. The G1 is a search tool that plays music and makes phone calls.Transfer of multimedia feels a bit easier to this iTunes-trained user. The iPhone is plug and play; the G1 is drag and drop — that is to say, you have to plug it into either a PC or a Mac, where it shows up as an external drive and you can drag over the music files or folders. I prefer less thinking and activity for my transfers.

• IM/MMS: I’ll say it. I’m totally, completely and blindingly jealous about this. First, instant messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger and AIM can run in the background, as on the BlackBerry, without having to reconnect every time you leave the app to do something else like check e-mail or answer a call. And G1 lets users send multimedia messages via MMS. Any basic cellphone these days can do that, but not the iPhone. (This difference did elicit a mostly silent growl from me.)

• Ringtones: The ease of setting ringtones on the G1 is almost enough to make an iPhone owner throw up her hands and think about converting. Pick a song, any song on your phone, and make it your ringtone. Yeah, it should be that easy — and it is on the G1. (Again, grrrrr! I had to buy a separate program to do this easily — or convert the files in my iTunes library and sprinkle pixie dust over them. Too many steps for the maker of the iPod.)

• Keyboard: OK, this one’s for the FWF — friends with fingernails. There’s a Sidekick-style keyboard that pops out, making typing a tad easier out of the box. But there’s a price for this convenience. The only way you can enter info is by using that keyboard — and it has to be in the landscape mode. And, frankly, my thumb is still crazy sore from playing around with the device. Why? The right thumb has to reach over a fixed set of navigational buttons that are well placed in portrait mode but get in the way in landscape.

• Of portraits and landscapes: Here was something that drove me a little nuts. I want to look at the screen the way I want to look at the screen — not the way the device insists I do. The G1 won’t let you flip back and forth unless you open and close the keyboard. Again, you can enter text only in landscape and only by opening the keyboard. I kept touching the screen, hoping to just be able to tap in anything. Tap, tap, tap — alas, nothing.

Ultimately, it’s a tale of two smartly developed smartphones: One created by the search-and-information behemoth (Google), the other by the master of multimedia (Apple).

Pick your preference.

So far, I feel smart enough with what I have (don’t worry, my precious). But I did get my geek fix from the G1.

– Michelle Maltais

Maltais is editorial broadcast manager for the Los Angeles Times.

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How iView the G1: An iPhone owner?s take on the Google phone

Android is now available as open source

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Android is now available as open source

Intel on Monday showed off a prototype handheld based on Moorestown, its upcoming Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform designed to enable a new generation of ultra-thin, touchscreen devices with extensive battery life.

Presenting at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, Intel vice president Anand Chandrasekher said Moorestown will consist of a system-on-a-chip (SOC), codenamed “Lincroft,” which integrates a 45nm processor, graphics, memory controller and video encode/decode onto a single part.

The chip will connect to a southbridge I/O hub codenamed “Langwell”, which supports a range of I/O ports to connect with wireless, storage, and display components in addition to incorporating several board level functions.

When it arrives sometime in the 2009-2010 time, the Moorestown platform will introduce a more than tenfold reduction in idle power consumption when compared to Intel’s first-generation MIDs based on the Intel Atom processor, Chandrasekher said.

Intel is targeting Moorestown at the smartphone space, claiming the technology will serve as a catalyst for new developments that will extend the full Internet experience into into a new generation of handsets with advanced wireless communications.

The platform will support a range of wireless technologies including 3G, WiMAX, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile TV. Chandrasekher said Intel is collaborating with both Ericsson and Option on new 3G HSPA data modules that will come in 25×30×2.x mm small size and provide an “always connected” Internet-based experience.

In the videos below, the Intel exec can bee seen demonstrating the first working Moorestown-based handheld, which Engadget claims is “little more than a validation board running fresh from the factory, three-dayold Moorestown silicon in an Intel lab.” A similar device had been flaunted by the chipmaker in recent years, though those versions are said to have been non-functional mockups.

At one point, it was reported that Apple would embrace Intel’s MID platform as the foundation for its own next-generation mobile Internet device, sometimes referred to as a next-generation Newton handheld or Internet tablet.

Intel’s vision of a next-generation mobile Internet device looks something like this.

However, the company’s recent acquisition of chip designer PA Semi to build proprietary ARM chips for iPhones and iPods may signal a change of direction on the part of the electronics maker.

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Intel shows off working Moorestown MID device

Photo: Getty Images; Illustration: Angelos Dosoulas

As the wireless world awaits the Oct. 22 debut of the first phone based on the Google-backed Android software, engineers at Motorola (MOT) are hard at work on their own Android handset. Motorola’s version will boast an iPhone-like touch screen, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, and a host of social-network-friendly features, BusinessWeek.com has learned.

Motorola has been showing spec sheets and images of the phone to carriers around the world in the past two months and is likely to introduce the handset in the U.S. sometime in the second quarter of 2009, according to people familiar with Motorola’s plans. Building a phone based on the highly anticipated Android operating system is part of Motorola’s effort to revive a loss-making handset division that has forfeited market share amid a drought of bestselling phones. Motorola stock, which on Oct. 17 rose a penny to 5.62, is hovering near a 16-year low.

The phone will appear among a new class of social smartphones designed to make it easy for users to connect quickly and easily to mobile social networks such as Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace (BusinessWeek, 10/10/08). Such phones let users message in-network friends directly from phone contact lists, for example. A Facebook representative declined to comment on the company’s work with Motorola. MySpace.com didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Motorola declined to elaborate on its plans, but said in a statement: “We’re excited about the innovation possibilities on Android and look forward to delivering great products in partnership with Google (GOOG)” and the community of developers known as the Open Handset Alliance that are working on the Android operating system.

Mobile Networking Wave

In the next year, social networking phones are expected to be a hit with the 16- to 34-year-old crowd, analysts say. According to consultancy Informa (INF), the number of mobile social-networking users will rise from 2.3% of global cell-phone users at the end of 2007 to as many as 23% of all mobile users by the end of 2012.

The Android handset will feature a touch screen about the size of those on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, people familiar with the phone say. While it takes some of the design cues from Krave ZN4, the first touch-screen phone from Motorola launched with Verizon Wireless on Oct. 14, it’s not certain whether the Android phone screen will feature Krave’s distinctive and interactive clear flip screen.

Like the world’s first Android phone, from HTC, Motorola’s Android-based device will offer a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. People who’ve seen the pictures and spec sheets for the device say it looks like a higher-end version of the HTC phone, called the T-Mobile G1. But it’s expected to sell for less, at prices similar to the Krave, which is available for $150 with a two-year contract. After carrier subsidies, the G1 will retail for $180 with a two-year contract.

Slow Off the Mark

Motorola’s new phone likely won’t be ready to launch in the U.S.

until the second quarter of next year, say people who are familiar with it. And it may not be available in Europe until the third quarter of 2009. Many analysts have been expecting Motorola to roll out an Android phone in December or January.

Any delay gives competing Android phones a chance to gain traction. London-based INQ will unveil its social-networking phone, INQ1, in Britain and Australia in about a month (BusinessWeek, 10/09/08). The slider phone, which integrates Facebook features into its address book and camera, is expected to enter the U.S. market next year. And Nokia (NOK), the world’s largest cell-phone maker, has already begun adding connectivity to its media-sharing site Ovi in some of its higher-end phones. “The sooner [Motorola] comes out with a social phone the better,” says John Jackson, an analyst with the Yankee Group. “The more you wait, the more distance gets put between you and the rest of the world.”

In the handset business, a best-selling product can reverse a company’s fortunes quickly, as Motorola has seen first with its popular StarTAC, and then with the Razr line of devices. “Motorola still has global carrier and distribution relationships” to rival those of most competing players, says Jackson. Motorola also has a relationship with industry innovator Apple, and may be able to offer iTunes downloads for upcoming phones, says Moe Tanabian, principal at researcher IBB Consulting. Music downloads may appeal to the same category of consumers that is expected to buy social phones.

Good People

The Android project is getting a lot of attention and support directly from Motorola’s new co-chief executive officer, Sanjay Jha. The Android phone—likely one of a series of Android handsets Motorola is cooking up—is the brainchild of people who joined Motorola via its 2006 acquisition of Good Technology. Good specialized in enterprise wireless messaging, data access, and security software used in such products as Motorola’s Q line of smartphones. The project is headed by Rick Osterloh, vice-president and general manager for Android products and formerly Good’s vice-president of marketing and product management.

Motorola is looking to add staff to its Android project in California, where the Good team is based. Applicants are invited to work on a “social smart phone.” One posting for a software engineer on job board Monster.com reads: “We are a new start-up division within Motorola with strong executive level sponsorship, a 50M+ budget for our Android platform. Our new CEO, Sanjay Jha, has been in the forefront of the formation of the Android Open Handset Alliance!”

Kharif is a senior writer for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.

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Motorola Readies Its Own Android Social Smartphone

In the midst of the financial meltdown and a contentious upcoming election, you might think the U.S. government and taxpayers are just funding wars, bank bailouts, and bridges to nowhere or somewhere. But this is the same government that funded the Internet way back when and is also funding the next generation of technologies that will make the current Internet seem like a Model-T.

Over the last several years, the U.S. government–via DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grants–has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in PAL, an acronym for “Personalized Assistant that Learns.” Smarter software and networks and augmenting human intelligence are useful in times of war and peace.

As part of the PAL project, more than $200 million of DARPA money has been poured into CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) over the last five years. CALO has been run out of SRI International with the assistance of 25 research organizations and 400 researchers.

Several companies, including Radar Networks, Farecast (acquired by Microsoft) and Adapx, have been spun out of SRI based on some facet of CALO technology. The latest, Siri, was founded in December last year and has raised $8.5 million in series A funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.At this point, Siri’s management is being secretive about what the company is developing. The elevator pitch goes something like, “Users’ online lives are becoming more complicated and getting out of control for mainstream users. What if there was an easy way for normal users (non-power users) to ask the Internet to help them.”

According to the Siri PR pitch, the product is “a new interaction paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies intelligence at the interface.” The company expects to release a beta version of its initial product in the first half of 2009, according to Dag Kittlaus, a former Telenor Mobile and Motorola executive who is a co-founder and CEO of the company.

“We have to be careful at this stage,” Kittlaus told me. “We don’t like to play these games, but we need to keep a tight lid on what we are specifically doing. We have some original ideas of what the product is going to do, but we don’t want to spark ideas among potential competitors.” Those competitors would likely be masters of the Internet with large Internet footprints and research prowess like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Kittlaus did allow that Siri has more than a dozen partners, presumably large, well-established distribution players that can help build a consumer market for Siri’s product. Unlike most Web start-ups, Siri has a business model, Kittlaus claimed. “We have good business models, both existing and emerging. We think CPA (cost per action) is the future, and this specific application is good for CPA and we are partnering on that.”

He also touted the pedigree of the company’s current cadre of 19 employees. “They are mostly engineers from Yahoo, Google, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC,” he said. The chief architect of the CALO project, Adam Cheyer is a co-founder and vice president of engineering at Siri, and Tom Gruber, a well-known artificial intelligence and semantic Web expert, is a co-founder and CTO.

Cheyer described CALO as superset of what Siri is developing. “The CALO project is building an automated assistant to help manage and improve your life. The technology spans all aspects of interaction–natural language processing, speech recognition, and planning and reasoning capabilities–and interfaces with all kinds of systems, such as email and contacts,” he said.

(Credit: SRI International)

“Learning in the wild is core focus,” he continued. “We want it to improve over time and learn from users with no coaching and without changing any code. We are taking the key elements from the project to commercialize it in a form that will delight users. We are not building systems that do things but that learn how to do things.”

CALO sounds like a representation of the famous Apple Knowledge Navigator video from 1987.

“Siri is a subset of that concept,” Cheyer said. “We have to keep in mind existing user behavior. It will feel like something close to what people use a lot. We will add speech recognition and other features as we go. We don’t want to take such a leap that people cannot identify with it. We’ll do things similar to but more advanced than what we do now. The longer term vision is the Knowledge Navigator, although it is an early chapter now and it might look different than that.”

According to Gruber, intelligence at the interface allows the computers to make recommendations, like a personal assistant:

The interfaces we use to interact with the world’s information are getting smarter. Web portals gave us someone else’s idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want, one query at a time. We are about to see the next wave — intelligence at the interface — in which the system knows about us, our information, and our physical environment. With knowledge about our context, an intelligent system can make recommendations and act on our behalf.

(Credit: Tom Gruber)

Siri may be working on more intelligent Web interfaces that can make inferences based a wide variety of user activities (the “lifestream”), learning over time on its own, and then taking actions on behalf of users. For example, if you are booking travel or looking for a restaurant, Siri would know your preferences and about travel sites or restaurants, integrating data and context from multiple sources to deliver personal assistance. This could be especially useful in mobile scenarios where you don’t want to wade through pages of search results or deal with complex interactions.

Tom Gruber: “If we want our technology to have world-changing impact, bring it to the interface: get useful knowledge from all those intelligent people on the Internet give the benefit of this knowledge to everyone. “

(Credit: Tom Gruber)

We’ll have to wait for next year, if the company stays on schedule, to see whether Siri can really define a new paradigm for experiencing the Web.

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Start-up developing new Web interaction paradigm

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Google System

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Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results

Google Puts Tunes From YouTube a Click Away

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Google Puts Tunes From YouTube a Click Away

Wordpress 2.7 is the Real Deal

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Wordpress 2.7 is the Real Deal

CBS Labs has rolled out a labs version of a new product called Social Viewing Room, you pick a live show and chat about it with others.

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CBS : Social Viewing Room

(Credit: CNET News)

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign launched an iPhone application on Thursday that turns the vaunted device into a political recruiting tool.

The most notable feature “organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly,” according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

The application anonymously reports back the number of calls made this way: “Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.”

The software is the latest effort by politicians to capitalize on technology, joining other examples such as ads distributed through YouTube, Web-based fund-raising, Facebook pages and fan groups, and e-mail recruitment drives.

The Obama for America iPhone application is available for download through Apple’s iTunes store, said Raven Zachary, an iPhone consultant who’s directing the launch effort.

A “get involved” feature uses the phone’s GPS-based location sensing to find the nearest Obama campaign headquarters, and “local events” likewise pulls up a list of activities sorted by proximity.

A “media” section provides links to video and photos, but beware: YouTube showed errors following some of the links. Perhaps the newer videos hadn’t been prepared for iPhone display yet.

The application also shows Obama statements to the news media and a guide to Obama’s positions on various issues.

Update 8:50 a.m. PDT: The application shows how many calls have been made nationwide and how many you made. Those statistics are the kind that can motivate people–they can feel like they’re part of something bigger. That may sound a bit silly as a motivational tool, but consider that Smule’s Sonic Lighter application for the iPhone is popular, despite the fact that it costs 99 cents more than its free competition, likely because people can see where else on the globe people are using it and because the longer you run the application, the bigger your own spot on the map becomes. It’s a kind of competition.

Update 9:28 a.m. PDT: The campaign added an Obama iPhone app Web site, too.

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Obama releases iPhone recruiting, campaign tool

LeWeb’08 Program

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LeWeb?08 Program

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Customers Get Quick and Easy Access to Over 6 Million DRM-Free Songs from Amazon MP3 On New T-Mobile G1 Powered by Android Software