Corporate Profits a Boost for US Industry

Corporate America took another step along its long road to recovery on Tuesday as companies from the industrial heartland of Peoria to the technology hubs of Silicon Valley reported stronger-than-expected profits and bullish outlooks.

Read more here:

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/corporate-profits-boost-for-us-industry.html

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Tags: Apple, Yahoo, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, Merck, iPhone, BNY ConvergEx, DJIA, Dow Jones, Caterpillar, Wall Street, Nasdaq Composite, Silicon Valley, United, Continental, Southwest.

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HP Web-Connected Printer: No PC Needed

Hewlett-Packard on Monday introduced an Internet-connected inkjet printer that lets people print coupons, movie tickets, maps, and other items from Web sites without having to turn on a PC.

The HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web has a 4.33-inch touch screen for navigating to sites. The printer includes software for accessing Web content from HP partners, including USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, and Weathernews.

HP also launched HP Apps Studio, a site for downloading future applications for the printer. HP has included application programming interfaces with the printer's software platform for third parties to build software and make it available through the Apps Studio, a strategy made popular with Apple's launch of the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The new printer can connect directly to the Internet through a wired orWi-Fi connection. The device also supports Bluetooth for printing directly from digital cameras and other devices.

HP's pitch with the new product is its ability to go directly to Google, for example, and print out maps or a person's weekly calendar, or to print movie tickets or supermarket coupons from Fandango and Coupons.com, respectively. Users can also view, print, and upload photos to Snapfish, HP's photo-sharing and printing Web site.

"By giving people access to the content they want at the touch of a finger, the ability to customize their printing experience and create their own apps, and enabling easy one-touch wireless setup, we are driving a significant shift in how people will be printing in the future," Vyomesh Joshi, executive VP of the Imaging and Printing Group at HP, said in a statement.

Besides printing, the HP printer also faxes, copies, and scans documents. The device is scheduled to ship this fall and will sell for $399. HP's latest printer reflects the company's strategy to keep its consumer printing business growing at a time when people can access photos, maps, and other content on and off the Web through a smartphone or mini-laptop. While HP is making printing off the Web easy, it remains to be seen whether the convenience is worth the cost of the printer, ink, and paper.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/peripherals/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100736&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Tags: HP Photosmart, HP, Touchsmart Web, USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews, App Store, iPhone, iPod Touch, HP Apps Studio, Snapfish, Bluetooth, Global IT News,

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Apple CEO Jobs Back At Work

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - - Apple's iconic chief executive Steve Jobs has returned to work after a five-month medical leave of absence during which he underwent a liver transplant.

"Steve is back to work," Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, told AFP on Monday. "He is currently at Apple a few days a week and working from home the remaining days. "We are very glad to have him back," Dowling said, declining to provide any further details.

The 54-year-old Jobs, the visionary behind the wildly successful Macintosh computer, iPhone and iPod, announced in January that he was taking a leave of absence to deal with "complex" health issues.

Apple has declined to release any further information about Jobs's health since the January announcement but a Tennessee hospital confirmed last week that he had received a liver transplant.

It said Jobs was "now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis." Apple has been notoriously secretive about Jobs's health since he underwent an operation in 2004 for pancreatic cancer. Apple last week released the first public comment from Jobs since he went on medical leave, a brief statement in which he lauded the sales of Apple's latest model iPhone.

Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in the garage of the Jobs family home in 1976 and the company's fortunes have been uniquely linked to Jobs, who returned to the California company in 1997 after a 12-year absence and turned around the flagging technology giant.

Under Jobs, the company introduced its first Apple computers and then the Macintosh, which became wildly popular in the 1980s. Jobs left Apple in 1985 after an internal power struggle and started NeXT Computer company specializing in sophisticated workstations for businesses. He co-founded Academy-Award-winning Pixar in Emeryville, California, in 1986.

Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 in a 7.4-billion-dollar deal that gave Jobs a seat on its board of directors and made him the entertainment titan's biggest single shareholder.

Apple shares lost 0.33 percent in New York on Monday to close at 141.97 dollars.

Source: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20090630/ttc-us-it-company-telecom-apple-jobs-0de2eff.html

Tags: Jobs back at work, Steve jobs, Apple, iPhone, NeXT, Macintosh, Pixar, Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney Company’s biggest shareholder, iPod, Steve Wozniak, liver transplant, global IT news,

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The First Twitter Arrest

Tucked away in a back corner of my morning paper, I found something that caught my eye.

Jean Anleu may be the first to be Twitarrested by his own government. To be sure, there are paranoid and repressive governments who fear the Twitterverse, and have taken actions. There may be scores of unreported arrests already. We've read reports of Iran arresting thousands, many of them for Internet activity. China and Vietnam are also worried about the effect that Twitter and other social networking sites has on opposition groups—the ability of protesters to use networking sites to gather people quickly for a common cause is a concern to governments that don't trust their own people.

But Guatemala is doing something different. They've gone public with Anleu's arrest to send a message to those who might use Twitter as a forum for protesting the government's actions.

Anleu's alleged crime? He was so fed up with corruption, especially the government banking system, that he used Twitter to send a message for popular action to counter the corruption. The managers of the government's rural development bank, Banrural, are enmeshed in a political scandal. Anleu sent this message out to the Twitterverse: "First concrete action should be take cash out of Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt."

Prosecutors now seek to charge him for spreading false information which carries a five-year prison sentence and $6,500 in fines (much more than the average Guatemalan makes in a year). Sympathetic Twitterers raised money for his bail. About half of his $6,200 bail was donated via PayPal from 19 countries.

Prosecutor Genaro Pacheco says that Anleu's words illegally undermined the public trust in Guatemala's banking system. The police were able to prove that Anleu sent the message by searching his home in Guatemala City. He was taken to a prison that houses kidnappers, extortionists and other dangerous criminals for two days before he was able to make bail. Anleu's lawyer, Jose Toledo, believes the government wants to make an example of him.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone declined to comment on the Anleu case or say whether he knows of any other arrests involving Tweeting. In an irony that only living in a country with a repressive government can produce, Anleu, a geeky computer enthusiast whose passions include playing chess online and reading Czech author Franz Kafka—we see his life has taken on some eerie parallels. Kafka wrote The Trial, whose protagonist struggles to defend himself against the powers of the state.

"I fear I'm being watched and scrutinized in everything I say and do," said Anleu, who walks around with an iPhone to constantly tweet and a BlackBerry loaded with e-books. "The fear makes me want to avoid saying what I think, even about the most mundane topics, and saying where I am, where I'm going—like you would normally do on Twitter."

Guatemala is only a nominal democracy—emerging, still, from a quarter century of genocidal civil war that has seen the deaths of 250,000 of its own citizens, most of the dead comprised the indigenous Mayan populations in remote villages. Guatemala has never been free from violence in its troubled history—a history our own country has provided examples in the laws of unintended consequences. In the 50s, Eisenhower's State Department and the CIA helped to overthrow the legitimate popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, in part because that newly elected government posed a threat to our own multi-national corporations' profits and interests.

Twitter—not so innocuous or vacuous as some critics like to proclaim—it can be a tool for moving toward freedom, and to hold governments accountable.

Anleu's Facebook page is here.

Note: I have some experience in Guatemala. I've written about one part of that in aprevious post here on OS—Chajul and Chalcaté. In my time there, we were never completely safe. On our way up into the remote mountain villages to build homes for widows, we would pass by buses and vehicles, pushed off the dirt highways only enough to allow traffic to pass. They were metaphoric reminders from the government of the dangers of opposition. Slowly rotting and rusting hulks, burned from RPG explosions—stories of untold death and misery—charred and burned bones long since carried away. Our group even had 105mm howitzers fired over our encampment, reportedly as "artillery training exercises," but the message was clear. "You can be here to help widows, orphans, the poor and destitute, but don't make any political statement other than building homes for widows." On one of our trips a uniformed customs agent at the airport in Guatemala City asked us "Why are you taking this dental and medical equipment to the Indians? They're animals—they're not even people."

Source: http://open.salon.com/blog/bbd/2009/06/28/kafka_and_the_twitterverse

Tags: Open Salon, Guatemala, Eisenhower, Mayan, Twitter, Twitarrested, Jean Anleu, twitterverse, Guatemala City, iPhone, Kafka, blackberry, dissident, Global IT News, Politics, Technology and Politics,

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IBM Launches Seer Android At Wimbledon

IBM introduces phone applications that make it easier to follow all the action from the tournament.

IBM is courting tennis fans with a trio of applications that will allow them to follow Wimbledon moment by moment, whether or not they're at London's famed grass courts.

"These smart applications were designed with tennis fans in mind and add a whole new dimension to the event whether you are attending in person or sitting in your garden 5,000 miles away," said Rob McCowen, marketing director at the All England Lawn and Tennis Club, in a statement.

For those who can't make it to Wimbledon during the next two weeks, IBM has two applications that can help keep them abreast of the action. IBM's Wimbledon iPhone application delivers live scores, draws, news, and video highlights from Wimbledon tournament play, which began Monday. The Wimbledon iPhone app is available from Apple's App Store.

Big Blue's Seer Aggregator application, meanwhile, is a downloadable app that works with most Java-enabled handsets. The app pulls together tweets from IBM scouts onsite at Wimbledon, as well as from players and officials.

For Wimbledon attendees, IBM is offering something a little more advanced—albeit in beta stage. The Seer Android application for T-Mobile's Google Android-based G1 phone is designed to help fans navigate their way around the courts and concession stands.

When users point their phone's video camera at objects on the grounds, data built into the Seer Android application identifies the object. The application also relies on the G1's built-in GPS system. Seer Android also gives users live score updates and other information from around the courts. IBM plans to demo Seer Android at Wimbledon.

"I can see the incredible potential here to change the way people will engage with major sporting and other events both now and in the future. The applications address common challenges such as getting lost, encountering queues, or momentarily missing some of the action," said McCowen.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/smartphones/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100659

Tags: IBM, Wimbledon, All England Lawn and Tennis club, iPhone, Apple App store, Rob McCowen, Seer Android, T-Mobile, Java enabled, G1 phone, GPS, Global IT News, Google android,

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Steve Jobs Had Liver Transplant

Steve Jobs has had a liver transplant during his medical leave but is expected to return to work as expected later this month after a medical leave he announced to a shocked Apple community in January, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Journal cited no source in particular for its story, and got no direct comment from Apple itself. It quoted a “a person familiar with the thinking at Apple” that Jobs would have a diminished schedule at first when he returns to work and also reported that “At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery” as part of an agreement Jobs made with the board before he went on leave.

The Journal said the surgery took place two months ago in Tennessee, where there are three facilities which can perform such a procedure, there is no residency requirement and the wait is among the shortest in the country. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the transplant network in the U.S., the five-year survival rate for liver-transplants patients is generally between about 73% and 76%, it said.

The subject of Jobs health has been a front burner item since he announced, on Aug. 1, 2004, that he had undergone surgery for pancreatic surgery. Over the course of last year it was apparent that he was losing weight, but neither he nor the company would directly address this painfully evident fact.

On January 5, Jobs told the “Apple Community” in an open letter that the cause of his weight loss was not a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer but a treatable hormone imbalance. In that letter Jobs said he had already begun a “relatively simple and straightforward” treatment for the condition, that he would remain on as Apple CEO during his recovery, and that he expected to be noticeably improved in a matter of months.

Nine days later Jobs dropped the other shoe.

“… during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought,” he wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees. “In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”

Since then COO Tim Cook has been running day-to-day operations, though the Journal has reported that Jobs was maintaining a “firm grip” on the company and involving himself in projects of his choosing, and that he had also shown up at work from time to time.

Apple shares have improved in Jobs’ absence. AAPL closed at $85.33 on Jan. 15, the first day of trading after he announced his medical leave, and closed at $139.48 on Friday, the day the new iPhone 3 GS went on sale — about a 63% gain. During the same period the NASDAQ has declined by 4%. Without Jobs fully at the the company held a successful if lackluster WWDC and launched the third generation of iPhone.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/jobs-liver-transplant/

Tags: Steve Jobs, WSJ, Apple, Liver transplants, illness, united network for organ sharing, tim cook, nasdaq, wired, iPhone, global economic pulse,

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Crowdsourcing: The Next Game Design Solution?

Want the next Mozart for a pittance? Crowdsoucing may be here to help...

Though you may have never heard of crowdsourcing, since you’re someone with an active interest in gaming, you may have already participated in it. Crowdsourcing describes a task which is delegated to a group of individuals. The group is typically quite large, with each member usually unknown to each other and only linked through their one common goal. If you’ve been folding@home, you’ve been crowdsourced. It clearly works in science projects, but how does this relate to game development?

Startup iPhone developer Inovaz has very recently used crowdsourcing for its upcoming title Aztec Odyssey. The indie developer has teamed up with music marketplace group Minimum Noise, and in doing so gained access to professional and aspiring musicians from around the world.

“You describe what you are looking for and set a budget,” explains Kristian Dupont, owner of Minimum Noise. “Producers who are interested will participate, and when you decide on a composition, you select that as the winner, transfer the money to the producer and receive the audio including the rights to usage.”

Looking at Inovaz’ Minimum Noise page, the developer offered $250 for the background music to just the first level of Aztec Odyssey, and described on the profile page how it was looking for a soundtrack that is “heavily influenced by tribal and indigenous American styles.”

Inovaz received over 25 submissions for the soundtrack and, depressingly, most of them sound good. It’s a sad state of affairs when $250’s worth of background music doesn’t sound too distant from ‘professional’ in-house productions at game studios. Killzone 2’s soundtrack was recorded live at Abbey Road Studios, and yet rarely is the game praised for its sophisticated sound.

But unlike Abbey Road Studios, with crowdsourcing you’re not paying serious amounts of money per hour. “We expect a usual fee for music to be around $100-$500,” says Dupont, “which should be realistic for most productions.”

However, the nature of the service and indeed the youth of the business has provided a few obstacles for Minimum Noise. “First of all, there is the entire licensing model to consider,” says Dupont. “Right now, we insist that producers transfer all rights to the project owner, but we will expand to other options as this is not feasible for all.”

“Furthermore, there is the risk of producers contributing something that they did not make themselves,” he says, before adding that this is still a risk when purchasing any kind of media in the first place. “We hope that the community will watch out for scammers and report to us. Other than that, we are watching everything closely and listening to our users all the time.” As for the future of crowdsourcing, Dupont is - of course - a big believer. But then again, he’s not alone:

“We think that the crowdsourcing model will be wide spread to all areas of game development. Currently, it is very popular in the design world [1,2,3], and the model is definitively proven. When it will take off in other areas is hard to say, but we think it will do so in a near future.”

Source: http://www.developmag.com/news/32179/Crowdsourcing-The-next-game-design-solution

Tags: Crowdsourcing, Game Development, Abbey Road Studios, Aztec Odyssey, Kristian Dupont, minimum noise package, Global IT News, Inovaz, iPhone, Minimum noise, Video games,

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The Medium Is Still The Message

Understanding that the Medium is the Message Matters More Than Ever

Since 1964, when Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "The medium is the message" in his most well-known book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, folks have scratched their heads over and argued about the meaning of those words. It's quite simple really: What McLuhan is telling us is that the characteristics of a medium influence how the message is received and understood.

McLuhan is known for his visionary interpretation of the effects of technological communication on society. Forty years ago, he predicted electronically connected media would eventually produce a huge global village. With Web 2.0 and mobile devises that do everything but make our lunches, McLuhan's prediction is coming to fruition. In my mind, he is more relevant today than ever.

For marketers and other communicators of messages, we need to go back and reread McLuhan with a new understanding. That simple phrase written during a moment of genius tells us that all recipients of a message have a relationship with the medium carrying that message. Furthermore, we need to understand that relationship. Otherwise, our message fails to deliver the impact necessary to create the corresponding action necessary for our marketing or communications to succeed.

With the coming of social media and the rising importance of web sites to commerce, I have been thinking a lot about how our business communications needs to fits those mediums. With Television and radio before it, newspapers and magazines, direct mail and e-mail, we have studied and learned how to shape the content so the medium's influence and that content work well together. When we achieve that purpose, the message is received and understood as was the desire of the advertiser or marketer or publicist or public relations professional or business communicating the message. The message and the medium are in sync in terms of how they influence the recipients.

For example, a super bowl ad is being carried by television and it enters our living rooms because we choose to watch the football game. If the ad fails to be at least as visual, interesting and surprising as the medium, the message will be lost on most viewers. We would ignore a print message by itself; but put that message into the mouth of a well-known spokesperson or in the context of a good story that moves us to watch, and the ad has a much better chance to move us.

That is what made the Pepsi ads so many years ago with Mean Joe Green exchanging his game jersey for the little boy's Pepsi so relevant and successful. We knew Joe, or we thought we did. But the ad surprised us by showing us a softer side of the muddied, tired and seemingly defeated football player. And the little boy's concern for Mean Joe and his reaction touched us. The same can be true for NASCAR. TV is the perfect medium to bring us both the race and the advertising, whether the ad is painted on a driver's car or features the sport during the commercial. It works because it is in sync with the medium bringing us both the race and the advertising.

But what works on a web site or in social media? The medium in both instances seems to be the same: It is a screen attached to our computers or a mobile device. But is it? Is the relationship we have with our desktop or our laptop the same, and doesn't location play a role in that relationship? And wouldn't our relationship with our PDA or our phone be different, as well?

McLuhan would tell us we need to study those media to understand how to shape the message. I don't think we are doing a good enough job of that yet. We spend lots of time talking about the content, but I think we do so without knowing enough about how our readers or viewers relate to the media itself. When we argue that content must have value, everyone can agree. But I think McLuhan would argue that what has value when received on a desktop is quite different from what has value when received on an iPhone.

I think we must immerse ourselves in understanding the relationship created between the new medium and its audiences. It should matter very much to those of us shaping content for those media. I am one marketer that is going to invest far greater time in understanding those relationships, and I promise to share them with you.

Source: http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2009/04/understanding-that-the-medium-is-the-message-matters-more-than-ever.html

Tags: Marshall Mcluhan, Global Best Practices, Marketers, Social Media, Pepsi, iPhone, Global IT News, Mean Joe Greene, NASCAR, PDA, messages,

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T-Mobile Accidentally Posts Secret iPhone 3G S Specs

Apple has flatly refused to tell anyone just what chips lie inside the iPhone 3G S. In fact, while Apple insists that the “s” in 3G S stands for speed, it could equally well stand for secrecy. But T-Mobile in the Netherlands apparently didn’t get the memo, and has gone ahead and posted the hardware specs on the product page for the new models.

The relevant numbers are 256MB RAM for the OS, double that of the 128MB in the original iPhone, and a 600MHz processor, up from the pedestrian 412MHz of the first two models.

The added RAM alone probably makes a huge difference — if you have ever added memory to a Mac you’ll know how much OS X loves it some extra gigs to play around in. And that processor neatly leapfrogs the second-gen iPod Touch’s 532MHz. It also shuts up anyone comparing the iPhone to the Palm Pre, which has the exact same number of megahertz: 600.

Of course, this never really mattered — as soon as the iPhone goes on sale it will be torn apart like a gazelle being set upon my hunger-crazed lions and the innards cast across the floor for all to see. We wonder just how long the T-Mobile site will keep this information up.

Product page [T-Mobile]

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/t-mobile-accidentally-posts-secret-iphone-3g-s-specs/

Tags: TMobile, Iphone, Apple, Leak, RAM, Wired, Global IT News, 3G, Netherlands, OSX, Palm Pre, leapfrogging, Wired Gadget Lab,

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The Future of Facebook Usernames

A small number of super-geeky obsessives are abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

Source: http://dashes.com/anil/2009/06/the-future-of-facebook-usernames.html

Tags: Facebook, usernames, Linkedin, Mashable, Myspace, Bebo, AIM, Techmeme, Global IT News, Mark Zuckerberg, Iphone, FUD, Kanye West, Twitter, Flikr, Openid, Digg,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Japan Explores Using Cell Phones To Stop Pandemics

TOKYO - A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls.

If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through thestudent body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school — using mobile phones.

The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.

The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.

A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.

The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to get checked out by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.

"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, who works on infrastructure strategy at Softbank.

He demonstrates with a calculation: If an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,500 people would get sick.

The experiment was conceived before the current outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn fresh attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside of North America.

It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a program to promote new uses for Japan's Internet and cellular infrastructure. The country boasts some of the most advancedmobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speedcellular networks, and phones come standard with features like GPS, TV and touchless train passes.

The mobile phone market is largely saturated, however, and fees are being driven down by an ongoing price war. For Softbank, a government-backed health-monitoring service could be boon to business.

GPS has its shortcomings, including hazy readings indoors. But Softbank believes it could keep readings accurate to several yards, at least for an experiment in a limited area.

Until now, technologies like GPS have mainly been used to help people figure out where they are and what is nearby. As networked devices like the iPhone become more popular, new applications let people track their children or friends, and could give companies and governments access to their location.

Aoyama Gakuin University, a prestigious school in Tokyo, is givingApple Inc.'s iPhone 3G to students, partially as a way to check attendance via GPS readings from an application running on the phone.

That kind of project raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.

If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, said Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease. "If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," said Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama. Uchida serves on a board that evaluates such proposals for the government.

Softbank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in the fall. But Takahashi says that whichever company is chosen, he hopes the potential benefits of a monitoring system are enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.

"I think it would have a bigger impact than Tamiflu," he said.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090606/ap_on_hi_te/as_tec_japan_mobile_pandemic_stopper_1

Tags: Japan, cell phones, pandemics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Iphone, GPS, Yokohama, Softbank Telecom, Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, Global IT News, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Google prevails, US Treasury wins

A recent article from MIT discusses the repercussions of the recent US telecom spectrum auction, and informs us of “What the FCC's Auction Means”.

It appears that Google Inc. is very satisfied with the results of the auction, as its participation in the process ensured open-access conditions for the winning bids.

“Google came away empty handed, but the company succeeded in pushing open-access conditions for the winning bids. These conditions, which affect the part of the spectrum that Verizon now owns, require that the frequencies be accessible to devices and networks from other companies--a requirement that could result in innovative new mobile phones and services, says David Reed, professor at MIT's Media Lab.”

Google Inc. ensured this result by participating vociferously in the process, and by bidding-up the price along the way. Ultimately, Google Inc. did not “win” a license to any piece of the spectrum, but it wins what is most important, without having to fork-over billions of dollars to the US Treasury.

Speaking of the US Treasury, it walks away as perhaps the biggest winner in the entire process. The FCC, on behalf of the US Treasury, re-assigned what we currently know as Channel’s 60-67 (in the 700 megahertz band) to Telecom industry.

For its part in re-assigning this part of the aether, the US Treasury picks up a cool $19.6 billion dollars. The hand-over of the spectrum takes place in February of 2009, and should serve to spur innovation in the industry as a whole.

Google Inc., for one, has already been rumored to have a “G-phone” in the works. You can say that you heard it here first, when they launch into the Telecom space next year. Considering the competitive weapons that Google Inc. has at its disposal:

- A large Gmail user-base
- Google Earth
- Google search
- Adsense & Adwords
- A huge private IP network
- Cloud-computing expertise

It is perhaps only logical then, that the mobile industry would be next.

I, for one, won’t be surprised when Google Inc. launches an IP-based, Adsense supported, communication device in the near-future. Think Skype meets IPhone meets Adsense meets Blackberry. If Google Inc. isn’t thinking in this direction, they need to inquire after my services pronto.

Either way, consumers should be the greatest benefactors.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20457/?nlid=958

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/