tokyo-lionsclub.com

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said the company is open to partnerships with other media outlets and that extending such a feature to Google Maps–a much more widely used service than the Google Earth software–”would be a logical progression,” though the company has nothing to announce right now.

(Credit:
Google)

New York Times “placemarks” will appear on maps where there’s relevant news, and showing the New York Times layer in the software will show a window with a month’s worth of headlines, Google’s LatLong blog said.

This pop-up window shows New York Times news related to a Google Earth region, in this case China.

Those who want to try the feature must download the latest version of Google Earth,Pearl Jewelry, which runs on Windows,Gucci Watches,
Mac OS X,wholesale jewelry, and Linux.

Google has added a new layer to its Google Earth software that shows New York Times news linked to the region a person is viewing with the geographic software.

Microsoft said on Monday that it has released the first update to its Windows Home Server product. Power Pack 1, as the release is called, adds some minor new features as well as fixes a months-old bug that can lead to data corruption in some cases.

Announced by Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2007, Windows Home Server is designed to act as a central repository and backup point for files and media, such as music, movies, and photos. I’ll have a post up by Tuesday that takes a broader look at the product and how it is doing in the marketplace.

The software, which is available now from Microsoft’s Web site, also allows the home servers to share data with PCs running the 64-bit version of
Windows Vista. Although most Vista machines use the 32-bit version, the 64-bit is used by the same kinds of hard-core enthusiasts who have been the likeliest to give Windows Home Server a try.

Microsoft, and investors, are waiting to see how Yahoo made it through the first quarter, ending March 31. A nonstellar quarter will make Yahoo shareholders more willing to accept what Gates, Ballmer, and company have to offer, and hope that it doesn’t go down.

(Credit:
Yahoo) (Credit:
Yahoo) (Credit:
Yahoo) (Credit:
Yahoo) (Credit:
Yahoo)

Yahoo filed a three-year plan–a set of slides originally presented in December 2007–with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining the ways in which the company is worth more than Microsoft is willing to pay at this point. Yahoo expects growth in revenue and operating cash flow of $1.9 billion over the next three years from display and video advertising and $1.4 billion in added search revenue. Caroline McCarthy has more on this topic in her blog post.

I doubt that this regulatory filing will do much to change Microsoft’s strategy, which has been to hold firm on its February 1 bid of $31 a share, or $44.6 billion. In the current economic climate, Yahoo’s promises of future growth, including doubling its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 in the three-year span, are future promises, not necessarily a reality.

Following are some of the slides from the presentation:

Fred Wilson had an interesting piece up earlier in the day where he offers the delish observation that “all these machinations” are making him ill. But Wilson is coming at this novella from the perspective of a venture capitalist, arguing that the tech industry needs “a new path for liquidity.”

The latest twist–but hey, it’s only mid-morning on the West Coast so who knows where we’ll be by lunch hour?–has AOL and Yahoo discussing a hookup where they would merge their respective Internet operations. At the same time, Microsoft is said to be talking with Murdoch about making a joint bid. The upshot: Microsoft’s MSN and News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media unit, which oversees MySpace, would wind up under the same roof as Yahoo.
Don’t forget Google’s Schmidt, sending a steady stream of “we’ve got your back” e-mails to Yang. On Tuesday, the companies announced a limited test of Google advertisements on some Yahoo search pages.

In the Yahoo drama, the stand-ins for Clemenza, Tessio, Sonny, Michael, and Tom Hagen feature Jerry Yang, Steve Ballmer, Rupert Murdoch, and Eric Schmidt. The common motive in both? How to screw the other guy before he screws you.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Maybe he’s right about that, though I’m more interested in a different question. While Yahoo’s hire-wire drama plays out to its final end, what’s in it for the user? Nobody seems ready to seriously talk about that one. Nobody in a position of management authority at any of the companies figuring in the Yahoo sweepstakes has fully articulated why any of the proposed (or rumored) combinations will enrich our computing lives.

At a memorable point in the first Godfather movie, Clemenza inadvertently demonstrated his talent for Wall Street deal-making when he offered this sage advice to Michael Corleone:

This is wallpaper available for download on Electronic Arts' Web site for 'The Godfather' The Game. But where are Yang, Ballmer, Murdoch, and Schmidt?

Will this improve the user experience on Flickr, MSN, or any of the various e-mail clients operated by the respective companies? The same question applies to any of the me-too services that attract millions of people to the respective Web portals each day. Could be there are solid benefits but I still don’t have a clue how the user is going to make out. And that leaves me suspicious about how this all is going to end up.

“You know you got to stop them at the beginning, like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich. They should never’ve let him get away with that. They were just asking for big trouble.”

In the end, it may turn out that it was Barzini all along.

What should we make of all of these hyperventilating suits running around as if their pants were on fire? In a way, I’m impressed by their energy. It’s been a while since Yahoo’s brass appeared so engaged. And now we know how much Schmidt resents Microsoft for making his life miserable at Sun and Novell.

If you understood all that, you’re doing better than most.

Moderator Chetan Sharma, Telestra's Hugh Bradlow, and Yahoo's Gary Roshak (left to right) listen to a fellow panelist discuss mobile computing.

We’ve been writing about the future of mobile computing for years now, and it’s no surprise that panelists at the Future in Review conference are eyeing the same space. There’s a clear shift going on toward mobile computing, seen both in the PC space, as notebooks overtake designs, and in the evolving handheld/subnotebook space with a surge in interest in smartphones and things like the Eee PC.

The current mobile situation reminds Jonathan Bulkeley, formerly of AOL and currently CEO of ScanBuy, of his days at the once-ubiqituous ISP in the mid-1990s. Companies like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe offered metered access to the Internet in those days and strictly controlled what the user accessed on those networks; just as mobile ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint have done for many years until recently.

The devices themselves also need to change, Bulkeley said. “These devices aren’t meant to navigate a portal page, but they are best suited when you know what you want to get and you go right to it,” he said. Bulkeley’s new company is trying to get the mobile industry to support bar-code scanning, where mobile users can take a snapshot of a bar code in a store and get instant information regarding a product or service.

However, it’s just not enough to capture the traffic, as any ex-AOLer knows.

But the trends are undeniable. Rajeev Chand, managing director and wireless analyst at Rutberg & Co., noted some statistics that ESPN released just after the end of the last NFL season. On the last weekend of the season–when football fans were captivated by the thrilling New England Patriots-New York Giants game–ESPN’s mobile site recorded more hits than its regular site.

CORONADO, Calif.–It’s the mid-1990s for the mobile industry: lots of walled gardens, lots of fragmentation, and lots of promise.

“We learned from the first phase that whoever controls the traffic and monetizes it, wins,” Bulkeley said.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

By 1996 or 1997, however, the entire market had changed to meet demand for flat-rate pricing, again mirrored by the recent actions of the carriers to provide all-you-can-download plans. Once subscriber revenues were fixed at a certain number, the ISPs needed to find advertising and service revenues to keep growing. And that’s what the current mobile industry needs: “The next phase is advertising and commerce growth–who’s going to get the $1 trillion in value (that’s up for grabs)?” Bulkeley wondered.

Yahoo is trying to completely bypass that issue by focusing on mobile widgets, said Gary Roshak, vice president of mobile advertisers and publishers at the company. “The world doesn’t need another phone operating system. We don’t really care if you run on (the various operating systems). We want to fuel these mobile-first experiences.”

Before that comes to pass, however, a few things have to change. Hugh Bradlow, chief technology office for Australian carrier Telstra, bemoaned the current fragmented state of the mobile software industry. “The handset industry is in an absolutely shocking state,” he said, noting that mobile application developers are faced with way too many competing platforms for their products.

“The way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users” isn’t a new concept: The company has tightly controlled what kind of applications are allowed access to the App Store–albeit sometimes without clear policy. But Apple telling Google what to do? Now that’s interesting. The companies have a history together, such as when Google was allowed access to unpublished iPhone APIs for its Mobile app. And of course, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board of directors.

Google on Thursday released a version of its Latitude mobile application for the
iPhone. But Apple, curiously, has decreed that it be a Web-based app and not a native iPhone app, which has raised some eyebrows.

(Credit:
CNET/Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn)

So from where exactly does this concern come? Perhaps Apple has a similar feature coming for the iPhone that it doesn’t want competition for. If not, the solution appears simple: Why not just make Latitude a feature of Google Maps instead of a separate app? Clearly, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

The big exception for the iPhone version is that you have to use the service in the
Safari Web browser. As for why, Google put it this way: “We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a Web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.”

Latitude is a Web app only on the iPhone.

There’s also good news for Google here. It’s a company that loves the Web and wants everyone to be on it. So Apple forcing the company to make a Web-based version of its own application is perhaps not exactly a punishment. Plus, it pushes Google to improve the overall experience of Web apps, the
mobile browser experience, and HTML.

In announcing Latitude for iPhone, a Google blog post noted that the application works much the same way as on other platforms like Android, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. It allows you to show your location on a map so that friends may find you.

Apple’s reason given for why the iPhone version of the Latitude is crippled is, as Google notes, that Apple was afraid people would get confused between a Google Maps app and a Google Latitude app. How? And why isn’t Apple worried about this in other areas? For example, a brief search of the App Store reveals approximately 13 To-Do List applications and 30 streaming music apps. There doesn’t seem to be concern about customer confusion for those two categories of apps. But there shouldn’t be, since most people will just figure it out.

So what is the cell stage? Well, I could explain it. Or, I could let Maxis give you the goods: “Cell stage is your introduction to the fundamentals of Spore. You play a simple organism which is dropped onto your planet by way of meteor. The stage takes place in a top-down 2-D environment and you can play as an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore. You earn DNA and collect parts to improve your creature’s abilities…Avoid larger, carnivorous organisms while feeding on smaller organisms or algae–all while being tossed around in strong ocean currents. Eventually you will grow large enough to sprout legs and crawl out of the water and up onto land.”

The game, as you may already know, is an evolution game: It tasks players with growing their characters from little spore-level creatures step-by-step up the ladder to the tribe level and then on to cities, whole civilizations, and eventually on to the galactic level.

How cool is that?

With Spore, the innovators at Maxis have created what they’re calling a massively single-player game. This is a way of explaining that though the game is for one player only, it allows people to create all kinds of content–creatures, spaceships, odd buildings, and so forth–and then upload that content into the larger Spore universe. And that means that everyone gets to share in the entire community’s content creation, even if you can only play the game by yourself.

That’s because Maxis, an Electronic Arts studio, released a little crumb for us, a video from the cell-stage of Spore.

One of the other cool things coming down the pike in the Spore-osphere is the June 17 release of the creature creator. This will be a piece of free software that will allow people to create creatures for the game, even before they own Spore. And that’s really smart because, having played with this tool before, I know that it is a lot of fun. And people will be able to save their creatures, share them with others, and then use them when the game comes out.

For those of us eagerly awaiting the release of Spore, from The Sims creator Will Wright and his Maxis studio, Tuesday was a day for whetting the appetite.

In the cell stage of Spore, players can try to evolve from simple little spore-like creatures into more significant, larger and stronger beings.

Now, with the cell-level video, Maxis is letting the public see a little bit more detail about the game, which is slated for a September 7 release.

And it’s clear that one of the reasons people like myself are so excited about Spore is because, one, how often do you get to play a brand-new game from Wright? And two, how many games do you get to play that let you work your way all the way up the evolutionary chain from nearly meaningless microscopic ooze to galaxy-conquering demi-god?

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

Not so many. In fact, just this one.

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets–all on the same page.

What’s nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn’t add anything to any of these services there simply won’t be a post. You can also view your entire stream of activity in a large calendar, called a “timeline” that can be perused by year. (Check out mine here.)

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

There’s already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page to a very high degree.

One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it’s definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.

[via Lifehacker]

Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You’re also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.

These two suites show two different approaches to building Web-based app platforms. Ghost is a glue app–really more like an operating system than a suite, since the idea is that you run your favorite apps through it, and use it to manage your file storage and sharing. Glide is an app suite–the
Microsoft Office of Web apps.

Microsoft’s duo didn’t do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas. Two companies here are taking on that charge.

The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.

The Glide desktop is a bit more polished, reflecting the fact that it's already in its third major revision.

The fact that Ghost doesn’t come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes it more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I’ve seen. The design goal of Ghost is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, Ghost will make the transition automatic. If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your Ghost file store, and later to an e-mail, Ghost will do that, too.

Glide
The second company, Glide, will showcase its new service on Thursday. Glide is more of Web application suite than a Web OS. It’s more mature than Ghost, and more comprehensible to the average user today.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to gingerly explore online extensions to its core suite. And although I have been known to complain about the glacial evolution of the architecture of its application suite, in truth it’s probably moving at close to the right pace to keep users onboard.

Like many other Web-based operating systems, it’s a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The “you don’t need your own computer” line doesn’t work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. Ghost is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it’s still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I’ve seen, and more OS-like than most.

Answering the obvious question–How do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud?–the founders respond that people have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.

Unlike Ghost, Glide has an offline version, and a sync engine that keeps your online and offline files in lockstep. Glide works on mobile devices, and the offline apps works on PCs, Macs, and Linux devices.

See also: Xcerion, Startforce, YouOS, EyeOS.

The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that’s the only place it will work at first. There’s no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn’t believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company representative later told me they’re considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). Ghost is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so, let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show.

The new “Glide OS 3.0″ is a fairly complete Web-based desktop, with a word processor, a presentation app, a spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar, media players, and so on. I was critical of the apps in Glide’s early versions, but they do keep getting better. Glide also has a rights management system built into its system, which lets users closely control what happens to their documents if they choose to share them.

Ghost
The first, Ghost, demo’d Wednesday. Its product is a “virtual computer,” as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it’s designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it’s not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.

Also, Ghost is cool since it’s a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.

Microsoft could not do Glide today. It wouldn’t work for its business. And it certainly couldn’t do Ghost (although it’s possible that Microsoft Live Mesh [stories] is an early move in this direction). But these new Web-based operating systems do show us where Microsoft must eventually move because that’s where many of its users will be going.

Glide has a full app suite. Its word processor is shown here.

Of the two projects, the Glide direction is more comprehensible. Users get that it’s a competitor to paid productivity suites. Ghost is far too novel an idea for mass adoption; and I do worry that by the time users are ready for it, its strongest capabilities–data transfer and universal online storage–will be typical features of online apps. But it is, still, the more interesting idea and the bigger bet.

Glide does not offer real-time collaboration, like Google Docs does, though.

The Ghost desktop looks–and works–a lot like Windows.

I hope it looks better than this!

(Credit:
New Balance)

If you’re a big Joy Division fan, I’ve got good news for you–unless of course you’re also a huge iPod fan. Microsoft is set to release a limited edition Joy Division
Zune on June 10, to coincide with an upcoming DVD about the band. The player will feature an etching of the cover art from band’s 1979 debut, Unknown Pleasures. Perhaps Microsoft will even throw in a digital copy of the album, though there is nothing to substantiate this postulating. There are no images available of the new Zune just yet, but my subpar mock-up at right might give you some idea. Or look below for an image of New Balances of a similar nature that came out around this time last year.

(Credit:
CNET Networks/Jasmine France)

(via Wired)

India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut’s main hubs of popularity; in Brazil, it faces many of the same issues that massive social networks like Facebook and MySpace do in the U.S. Despite having been developer in-house in Google’s Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters, the site has never really taken off stateside. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is currently launching an India-centric portal that will compete with Orkut.

Google has since announced that it will relinquish control of OpenSocial, turning the project into a nonprofit organization in collaboration with Yahoo, News Corp.’s MySpace.com, and other partners.

Here’s something interesting: At least for the time being, Orkut users are limited to 25 applications per profile. Google representatives were not immediately available for comment on whether this is permanent restriction.

And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks.

Announcements about social network developer platforms are a dime a dozen, now that Facebook’s example made developer applications practically mandatory, but Orkut has drawn particular attention because it’s owned by Google. The OpenSocial API, on which Orkut’s platform is based, was launched by Google last year.