If the file format does not become a standard, some governments could shy away from using Open XML — and therefore, potentially, Microsoft Office.

By J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek March 31, 2008 05:25 PM

After years of wrangling, Microsoft’s Office Open XML file formats are set to gain or lose approval as international standards. The ballots are in and being counted, but the world won’t know the verdict of the International Standards Organization until Wednesday.

The voting ended over the weekend, and it’s not clear exactly what is delaying the results. A total of 87 national standards bodies are voting. In at least one case, Steve Pepper, chairman of Norway’s committee on the approval of Open XML is reported to have filed a formal protest with his country’s yes vote, citing “serious irregularities” with the vote.

The voting process has been marked by jostling and sometimes open hostility on both sides of Open XML’s standardization, with Microsoft competitors like IBM repeatedly coming down hard on Microsoft and with reports of Microsoft’s heavy-handed lobbying for its format, including promising “marketing contributions” in exchange for votes in Sweden — a move that Microsoft later said wasn’t company approved.

If the file format does not become a standard, some governments could shy away from using Open XML — and therefore, potentially, Microsoft Office — in favor of something like Open Document Format, (ODF) which has already become a standard. However, Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s general manager for interoperability said in an interview, “most governments will come down on the side of choice.” The state of Massachusetts along with the countries of Switzerland and Denmark are among those that have said they’ll use either format.

Either way, Microsoft is pushing forward to get its formats used in more places. With Microsoft’s large market share in productivity software, Open XML isn’t likely to decrease in importance anytime soon.

Last week, for example, Microsoft announced that it would contribute to an Apache project that would let Open XML be used in Java apps. The formats have already been employed or supported in Apple’s iWork productivity suite, a productivity suite for Symbian mobile devices and a range of IBM products despite IBM’s efforts with its own ODF.

As Open XML moves forward, a few vital missing pieces need to be put into place. For example, there are no standard interoperability test suites available for Open XML. “It’s a real need,” said Robertson, who pointed out that Microsoft recently launched a Document Interoperability Initiative aimed at creating test suites and templates for forms that would be optimized for interoperability between Open XML and ODF.

Currently, Microsoft’s Open XML is a standard of ECMA International, where Microsoft is chair of the technical committee leading the standard’s development. However, Microsoft anticipates significant changes in the future course of the standard’s development if passed. Control of the standard will shift to ISO, where groups representing larger constituencies than in ECMA will be represented.

Microsoft has not yet said whether it will continue to use the standard version of Open XML for future releases of Office, and Robertson wouldn’t confirm its use in the upcoming Office 14. “I don’t know that there’s a company on earth that would say, into the future, we’re going to do X, Y or Z,” he said.

Article source- http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207000830&subSection=All+Stories

Posted by Charles Humble on Mar 31, 2008 11:59 PM

Within 24 hours of Apple unveiling the iPhone SDK, Sun Microsystems announced their intention to port the Java ME JVM to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices. In a video announcement Eric Klein states that he sees no reason why the JVM would not work on the iPhone:

“We’ve spent the last 24 hours feverishly pouring through all the information that Apple made available about this SDK and we’re really excited that Apple has decided to open the iPhone and iTouch (iPod Touch) to third party development. One of our original visions for Java was to allow the developer community to create amazing content and applications for as many devices across the world as possible and the iPhone is an important platform in that regard.”

When Sun made its announcement a number of astute bloggers and forum posters pointed out two major issues that seem to preclude Sun’s Java port. The first is a clause in the license agreement:

“An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

The second appears at first glance to be a technical limitation in the SDK. According to Apple’s official iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (available from the Apple iPhone Dev Center, login required) only one iPhone application may run at a time, and third-party iPhone applications will not be able to run in the background:

“This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.”

This is presumably not strictly a technical limitation - the iPhone runs the same kernal as Mac OS X which supports multiple concurrent processes. The iPhone itself can clearly multitask (otherwise it couldn’t, for example, ring when you were using Safari with it) so this restriction is most probably imposed to limit the amount of RAM consumed by third party background processes. It seems reasonable to speculate that Apple could therefore allow chosen third party developers the ability to run their applications in the background. However it seems quite unlikely that Apple would provide Sun such access. For one thing being able to install and Run Java ME applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch would make it harder for Apple to restrict distribution to their store as they intend, and for another Apple’s relationship with Java seems to have become increasingly negative over the last few years. Contrast Steve Job’s comments at a keynote at JavaOne 2000 in which he said:

“We want to bring Java back to the desktop in a really big way. I’m here today to personally tell you we are working hard to make Mac the best Java delivery vehicle on the planet. The biggest thing we are doing is we are going to bundle Java 2 SE into every single copy of Mac OS X [the upcoming Macintosh operating system] that we ship later on this year.”

with remarks he made last year to the New York Times:

“Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

Eric Klein issued a further statement last week stating that Sun would like to talk to Apple if there are conditions blocking Sun’s intentions:

“Our announcement was based on our excitement to build a JVM for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, as well as our assessment of Apple’s publicly available information on the SDK and related business terms. If there are clauses in the iPhone beta SDK license agreement that potentially limit third party application distribution, then these are items that we want to have a positive discussion with Apple about. Sun and Apple have an ongoing relationship around Java SE on Mac OS X and we look forward to further discussions with Apple about a JVM for iPhone and iPod Touch. Sun definitely plans to deliver a JVM for iPhone and iPod Touch if at all possible!”

It will be interesting to see if Sun provide any more details during JavaOne.

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Despite a new owner and the potential for more competition in the future, MySQL and Oracle will continue to work together.

By Charles Babcock InformationWeek  March 31, 2008 10:00 AM

When MySQL AB was bought by Sun Microsystems, some knowledgeable observers said the first thing Sun would do is make MySQL free of its dependence on Oracle.

MySQL incorporated the InnoDB transaction storage system as part of its database system, then Oracle acquired its Finnish parent company, Innobase Oy, in October 2005. “Look for Sun to do more and more to make MySQL free of any third parties,” said Raven Zachary, open source analyst with the 451 Group, in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

But Zack Urlocker, the executive VP of products, who supervises both engineering and marketing at MySQL, says such independence is still viewed as unnecessary inside Sun. Urlocker appeared on a panel on the state of the open source database market. Seated nearby was Ken Jacobs, VP of product strategy at Oracle.

MySQL’s strength has been in its ability to serve Web pages, and many Web applications are built with MySQL as the database of choice in the background. Oracle aspires to be the database of future applications as well, including Web applications, and it’s conceivable the two eventually will come into more direct competition.

But Urlocker says that doesn’t mean MySQL can’t keep using InnoDB. “We’ve always had a very good relationship with Oracle,” he said after the panel concluded.

“It’s absolutely a fact. We’ve always had a very good relationship,” affirmed Jacobs, one of the original employees of Oracle, who helped establish Oracle with the federal government from its new Washington office in 1981.

MySQL isn’t ready to announce anything yet, but the way Urlocker and Jacobs exchanged meaningful glances, it was as if to say they’re ready to sign a multiyear continuation of their agreement.

Meanwhile, another third-party piece of software on which MySQL used to depend, the SolidDB for MySQL that was under the sponsorship of IBM, has been pushed off to SourceForge. Dhiren Patel, IBM’s community relations manager for the overall SolidDB project, announced that IBM had acquired SolidDB in December for its in-memory database, technology that will help it compete with Oracle TimesTen.

“This in-memory technology, and not Solid’s open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM’s acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effectively immediately, we will not be continuing further development on SolidDB for MySQL,” he wrote March 3, six days after Sun completed the MySQL deal.

The open source community around SolidDB for MySQL will be free to continue work on the project, and the developer forums and bug tracking have been migrated to SourceForge as well, Patel noted.

Urlocker said both Jacobs and Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president, have assured him of continued, unfettered access to InnoDB. MySQL, initially developed as a read-only database, gets its key transaction handling characteristics from InnoDB and SolidDB for MySQL.

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Website visitors will have another way to view the videos.

By Michelle Quinn,

YouTube, not happy to be just an Internet site, is expanding to the medium it has helped undermine — the boob tube.

On Wednesday, TiVo Inc., the digital video recorder maker, announced that its customers would be able to watch YouTube videos on their TVs using one model of TiVo’s set-top box sometime this year.

Over the last year, it has been possible to watch YouTube videos on the television through other devices, such as Apple Inc.’s Apple TV.

But TiVo, which has more than 4 million subscribers, could make YouTube a television star.

YouTube has been a thorn in the side of traditional media ever since the video sharing website was created in 2005. Now owned by Google Inc., YouTube has faced criticism and legal trouble that it benefited from visitors copying TV shows and putting them on the site.

YouTube has also hastened the fracturing of how people, especially teenagers, get their entertainment, with many turning on their computers instead of TVs.

Monthly, 66 million viewers watch about 2.6 billion videos on YouTube, accounting for about 57% of the 116.7 million monthly online video audience, according to Nielsen Online.

A Harris Poll in December found that 65% of U.S. adults who were online had watched a video on YouTube, compared with 42% the previous year. Among people 18 to 24, 85% watched something on YouTube, compared with 73% the year before.

“Among all age groups, there’s interest in more video online, both professionally created and user generated,” said Jim Schaffer, vice president of client development for media and entertainment research for Harris Interactive.

“But clearly the younger age groups are clamoring for it more,” he said.

Many people already go to YouTube for the same reason they use TiVo — to be able to watch TV when they want it. But with TiVo, YouTube might finally make it on the main home screen.

“It’s possible it could bring people back,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“But if it’s really complicated it probably won’t change how people watch their YouTube.”

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Users can access an English-language beta version of Microsoft Office Live Workspace from the company’s Web site at no charge.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) said Tuesday it has made available for worldwide public testing a hosted version of its widely used Microsoft Office productivity software.

As part of the trial, users can access an English-language beta version of Microsoft Office Live Workspace, as the offering is called, from the company’s Web site at no charge. Microsoft for the past several months has conducted a private beta program for Office Live that’s drawn more than 100,000 participants, according to the company.

Office Live Workspace lets users store and access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office applications on the Web through any computer with an Internet connection — even if the PC isn’t running Office on its hard drive.

That means a mobile worker could, say, create a Word document at his or her office, upload it to the service, and then access it later from virtually any PC.

Without Office Live, that same worker would have to carry the file around on a flash device or e-mail it to himself. Still, the document could only be downloaded and opened on a computer running a Word-compatible application.

Office Live could also eliminate the insecure practice — often used by executives on the go — of downloading files to a public computer. Office Live users can store more than 1,000 documents on the service and also grant access authorization to their files to business colleagues and other third parties.

Office Live Workspace is part of the software-plus-services strategy that Microsoft unveiled last year. The campaign is meant to bolster the company’s presence in the booming Web services market while protecting its multibillion-dollar packaged software franchise.

The effort has seen Microsoft roll out a number of Web services under its Windows Live brand, including an online storage site called SkyDrive and a social networking site called Spaces.

Microsoft’s assault on the Web is in no small part a response to advances by archrival Google. In recent months, the search engine company has introduced a host of new online services. Of those, the biggest threat to Microsoft is Google Apps. The offering features free or low-cost versions of Office-style productivity applications that are hosted on the Web.

The advantage of Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s approach is that, unlike Office Live, users don’t need to purchase any pricey boxed software for the service to work. The downside is that users for the most part can’t get to the applications without an Internet connection.

Microsoft said it plans to roll out Office Live beta programs in languages other than English in the coming weeks.

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By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

Opera Software (News - Alert), a vendor of Web browsing products, has announced that Ten by Orange has launched its unlimited mobile Internet service, Easy Web, powered by Opera Mini.

Using Opera’s compression technology to process and compress Web pages by up to 90 percent before sending them to mobile phones, the Easy Web service is billed as letting Ten by Orange customers access the full Web, surf sites, mobile blog and social network on the go. Easy Web, powered by Opera Mini, will be made available on the HTC (News - Alert) Touch, Samsung SGH-F330 and fifteen other handsets in France.

A subsidiary of the Orange Group, Ten by Orange develops offers and services designed to bring mobile Internet products to the French marketplace.

“By partnering with Opera, we are able to provide our customers with a true Web browser which is fast, robust and keeps our delivery costs under control,” said Thierry Coilhac, COO of Ten by Orange.

Opera Mini officials claim over 39 million cumulative users. The tailor-made Opera Mini product for Ten by Orange uses a customized home page with full brand integration of the User Interface, home page control including search, modification of menu items, pre-installation, bookmarks and more.

Bringing the desktop experience to mobile, Opera Mini’s Small Screen Rendering reformats the Web page to fit inside the screen width, eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling. Alternatively, a new “Desktop mode” gives users a wider view of the page.

Orange is the key brand of France Telecom (News - Alert). FT serves more than 170 million customers in five continents as of December 31, 2007, of which two thirds are Orange customers. The Group had consolidated sales of 52.9 billion euros in 2007. As of December 31, 2007, the Group had 109.6 million mobile customers and 11.6 million broadband internet (ADSL) customers.

Last week Oslo, Norway-based Opera made Google (News - Alert) the default search engine in Opera’s mobile Web browsers. Opera Mobile or Opera Mini users can access Google’s mobile search directly from the browser start page.

Because Opera Mini targets feature phones that have traditionally possessed limited browsing capabilities, company officials say, users choose to download and install Opera Mini to their phones. These consumers tend to use the mobile Web more frequently and actively than consumers with more static, less dynamic mobile Web browsers.

Every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages, with much of that traffic generated through the search function in the browser.

Google has been the default search option on Opera’s desktop browser for seven years. This new mobile collaboration covers all global territories except Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and includes all of Opera’s standard mobile Web browsers.

Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera, said 2008 is “poised to be the year the mobile Web goes mainstream.” He noted that Opera Mobile has shipped on more than 100 million mobile phones so far, and that in 2007, more than 55 new phone models were launched with Opera Mobile pre-installed as the default Web browser.

Opera Mini is available completely free from http://www.operamini.com/. Opera Mobile is also available from http://www.opera.com/ in a free trial on select platforms. Google will appear as the default search engine for new and current users of Opera Mini as of March 1, 2008.

Earlier in February Opera Software announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5, its Web browser for phones.

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Microsoft has launched a bid to capture a segment of the growing market for rich web content on mobile phones.

The software firm has signed a deal with handset manufacturer Nokia to bring its Silverlight platform to millions of mobile phones.

Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, which is already used by popular websites such as YouTube.

The software will first be available on Nokia’s high end smart phones running a Symbian operating system.

Flash phone

Nokia’s S60 platform, which uses Symbian, will be the first to take advantage of Silverlight.

S60 is used in handsets built by LG and Samsung as well as Nokia and is the most popular smart phone software platform with more than 53% market share.

It is used in Nokia’s latest N96 phone, the successor to its popular N95.

Other handsets and internet tablets running different software will follow at a later date, according to the firm.

Silverlight allows designers and developers to produce rich web applications that are independent of browser, operating system and handset.

Microsoft has stressed its value for developing Web 2.0 applications that would work on a computer, but also on any other device including mobile phones.

The software enters a marketplace already dominated by Adobe’s Flash, and its recently launched Air product.

Flash is already on millions of mobile phones.

Adobe has agreements with 18 of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide including Nokia.

And, according to Adobe, 450 million devices have been shipped with the cut-down version of Flash, known as Flash Lite.

Microsoft will hope to compete with this presence.

The firm is currently working on a version of Sliverlight for its own Windows Mobile software.

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By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; Page D08

In a half-step into the growing realm of Web-based computing, Microsoft is announcing a service that allows users to extend their use of the company’s dominant Office software into the online world.

With some fanfare — a stunt scheduled for today in New York featuring actor Jeremy Piven and scripts of HBO’s “Entourage” — the software giant said it was opening to the public a test version of its “Office Live Workspace,” a service that allows users to save Office documents such as memos and spreadsheets online so that they may be accessed by other users connected to the Web.

“We are responding to the most urgent needs of the 500 million Office users. They want to access their documents anywhere,” said Guy Gilbert, a senior product manager for Microsoft.

The venerable software giant’s embrace of the Web, however, is relatively tentative.

Microsoft’s fortune has long rested with the sales of software that users have installed on their own computers, not computing over the Internet. Increasingly, however, as more computing is done online, the company’s dominance has been challenged, and it has sought to move to the Web.

While similar products offered by Google, Zoho and others allow users to do word processing and use spreadsheets online for free, the new Microsoft approach simply allows users who already have purchased their Office software to make easier use of it online.

Microsoft Office Live enables users to save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online. With the software, a user or collaborators can access the documents and make changes.

Asked about what users might expect of Microsoft’s Office Web efforts in the future, Gilbert said, “nothing is really off the table.”

In a separate announcement yesterday, Microsoft said it would offer its online business services to companies of all sizes. Formerly, those services were limited to firms with at least 5,000 users.

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By Damon Poeter, ChannelWeb

Intel (NSDQ:INTC) has announced a new brand, Atom, for a family of low-power processors set to ship in the coming months. Atom, comprising the processors codenamed Silverthorne and Diamondville, represents the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker’s biggest push yet in the familiar mobile Internet device (MID) and ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC) space, but also the beginning of the hype for two new, cheap, Internet-centric categories Intel hopes capture the imagination — the “netbook” and the “nettop.”

“The Atom processor family covers MIDs, UMPCs, nettops and netbooks. That means that even very inexpensive desktop machines by the end of this year may feature Atom processors,” an Intel spokesman said Monday.

The development of the Atom family proceeded counter to the traditional path that processor technology follows at Intel, where new architectures are first designed for the most expensive, powerful chips then trickle down to low-cost, less powerful devices, Intel spokesman Bill Calder said.

“Typically, it flows from the top of food chain. But in this case, here’s an architecture that has been designed from the ground up for these specific devices,” Calder said.

The “specific devices” include “a new class of simple and affordable Internet-centric computers” that Intel defines as “low-cost, Internet-centric mobile computing devices dubbed ‘netbooks’ and basic Internet-centric desktop PCs dubbed ‘nettops.’”

The chip giant believes that netbooks in particular will have a huge impact on both mature and developing markets, Calder said, adding that system builder and reseller channels should benefit.

“We think netbooks are a tens-of-millions of units opportunity by 2011,” he said, noting that Intel CEO Paul Otellini planned to say as much at Wednesday’s Financial Analyst Day.

The Atom brand also ties in with a new MID platform initiative announced by Intel Sunday. Intel Centrino Atom is essentially the platform codenamed Menlow, which includes the newly branded Atom processors and the chipset codenamed Poulsbo. To qualify for the Centrino Atom brand, builders of MIDs must include a low-power integrated graphics chip and wireless connectivity in “a thinner and lighter” form factor” — or “one that fits in your pocket,” Calder said.

Intel Atom processors, manufactured on the chipmaker’s latest 45nm process, maintain the Core 2 Duo instruction set to include support for multi-threading, according to Intel. The chips are “Intel’s smallest and lowest power processor yet,” with thermals in the 0.6-2.5 watt range. Clock speeds will reach 1.8GHz at the top end, Intel said in a statement.

Pricing is not yet available, Calder said. He tipped Q2 for the first shipments of MIDs built on Atom, with the first of the new netbook- and nettop-class products hitting shelves in Q3.

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Author: Jack

Offshore software development is a kind of outsourcing in which the jobs of software development are transferred to offshore countries. Mainly companies in USA transfer software development job to India or other south Asian countries. In India there are many offshore development companies.

Outsourcing a term having different connotations but on the other hand having significant potential to improve an organization-s bottom lines. It makes the business enterprize more competetive in today-s market-place by makimg it more responsive to changes in technology, improve quality of offerings, import new and desired skill-sets into the organization and generally However, if done with little preparation and without a clear business case, can often be a sure recipe for disaster.

Offshore software development is a kind of outsourcing in which the jobs of software development are transferred to offshore countries. Mainly companies in USA transfer software development job to India or other south Asian countries. In India there are many offshore development companies. In India offshore software development have some advantages and also some disadvantages.

Advantages of offshore software development in India

India is a densely populated country so the labor cost in India is too cheap. Along with the cheap labor Indian software professionals are so skilled and high mental level persons. This is the main reason that the US and Europe companies transfer their jobs in India. By offshoring their jobs the companies will save a lot of money. According to a market research normally US and Europe companies save around 70% of their software development cost through offshore software development. In US the average salary of software developer is $9000 per year.

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Adrian Bridgwater ZDNet.co.uk

Microsoft is giving its core developer tools away for free to university and higher-education students in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, China, Canada and the US.

In a speech to be delivered later today at Stanford University, chairman Bill Gates will give details on the DreamSpark programme’s free downloads, which include full professional versions of Visual Studio 2008, the Expression Studio design tools, XNA Game Studio 2.0 for developing Xbox 360 software, SQL Server Developer Edition and Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.

“The Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance has set up over 600 licensed labs with free software in computing-specific faculties around the UK over the last five years. DreamSpark will now extend this and make our tools available to students of any academic subject, from history to music to ancient languages,” said Dr Andrew Sithers, academic manager at Microsoft.

“Our scaled-down Express versions are still available free of charge to hobbyists and students, and I hope these may still serve as a valuable entry point for those interested in getting their hands on a more powerful set of products through DreamSpark,” added Sithers.

Microsoft said it recognises that a new set of training and reference materials will be needed for the younger breed of newcomers to software development. There is currently a “gulf” between the ease of downloading the products and students actually being able to use them properly, the company claimed. To address this need, the company is planning to develop a new set of tuition materials as soon as possible.

To bring the DreamSpark programme online in the UK, Microsoft is working with service providers, academic institutions, the government and student associations, such as the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and not-for-profit IT services group Eduserv, to ensure the necessary student identity-verification technology infrastructure exists. Microsoft says that the programme will be expanded as fast as this community-based effort with government and organisations can be connected.

According to a Microsoft-commissioned IDC study of the economic impact of IT across 82 countries, technological innovation is a “critical economic growth engine” and is predicted to generate 7.1 million jobs worldwide over the next four years.

“The UK’s productivity and future competitiveness depend on making the most of technology. Microsoft is an active supporter of e-skills UK’s campaign to make the UK world-class in technology skills and helping the workforce of the future to develop valuable IT skills,” said Karen Price, chief executive of e-skills UK.

During 2008, Microsoft intends to extend the DreamSpark programme to school-level students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and elsewhere.

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Apple has called a special event at its Cupertino headquarters next Thursday, 6th March, to discuss the current state of the iPhone and its future.

It’s widely believed that Apple will use this time to launch — or at least provide a decent information update — on the Software Development Kit (SDK). Steve Jobs had originally said that this software, which will allow third-party applications to natively (and officially) run on the iPhone, would be available this month. However, that date slipped.

Many believe that the iPhone should have been an open system from the start. It’s one of the main reasons (along with trying to break away from the exclusive network carriers) why so many iPhones have been hacked.

Whether that practice will stop when the SDK is released will probably depend upon how restrictive it is. If it’s only made available to selective developers, or it closes away too much of the internal workings of the iPhone, then the hacking may well continue.

Next week’s event may also be used to introduce more business-oriented applications for the iPhone, which could make it more attractive to business users, particularly with new tariffs introduced in the US, and similar ones expected in the UK this year.

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With Google’s financial backing, Steve Chen is optimistic about offering real-time streaming on the Web.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says the site plans to launch a live video service this year.

In a brief interview videotaped at a New York party thrown by YouTube, Chen told Sarah Meyers of Pop17.com that YouTube had always wanted to offer live video but lacked the resources. That, however, has changed, since Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

The video and transcript of the interview were posted by TechCrunch. In the interview, Meyers asks, “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”

Chen responds: “2008. We’ll do it this year.” He goes on to say, “Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do. We’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually launch something this year.”

Live video, which is the ability to use a Web cam to record events and then stream the results in real time to the Web is not new to the Internet. Yahoo launched such a service as an “experimental release” this month.

Along with showing Web cam-generated video streams from people’s computers, Yahoo Live also offers developers an application programming interface for mashing up live video streams on a Web site or client application. The API uses REST, or Representational State Transfer, an XML-based protocol for invoking Web services over HTTP.

A unique feature in the service is the ability to see people watching the same video, assuming their Web cams are linked to the service. In addition, there’s live chat while the video is playing.

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By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, February 5, 2008; Page D01

Microsoft has begun lobbying Congress even before its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo has been accepted, while Google, the real object of Microsoft’s concern, has started to raise objections on Capitol Hill.

Top Microsoft executives, including General Counsel Brad Smith and Jack Krumholz, head of the company’s Washington office, contacted the offices of key lawmakers on Friday, one day after the unsolicited bid for Yahoo was announced.

The company’s approaches, made by e-mail and phone, were largely informational, according to congressional aides. The executives explained what the bid was and what advantages they saw in its completion. They also said they wanted to come in later to talk about the transaction at greater length, especially in advance of any hearings on the subject.

In lobbying parlance, this is known as “checking the boxes” — meticulously informing powerful congressmen and senators about a transaction they might want to weigh in on down the road. Lobbyists live by the rule that when it comes to senior government officials, surprises should be avoided at all costs.

Google’s lobbying, on the other hand, was unusual because the company is not involved in the proposed acquisition. Still, lobbyists for the Internet search engine, which has raised its misgivings in public pronouncements, spotlighted those objections for lawmakers and their aides over the past few days, congressional staffers said.

Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is an effort by the software giant to compete for search and online ad dollars with Google, which dominates both forms of advertising.

Washington decision makers are gearing up for what could be a major policy and legal battle over Microsoft’s surprise offer. Technology industry executives and consumer advocates are pressing officials to think hard about the merger, which may have major antitrust and privacy implications.

In response, congressional committees are preparing hearings, and administration officials are making plans to investigate the transaction. The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing for Friday on “The State of Competition on the Internet.” In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee expects to hold a hearing if the deal goes through.

Should the companies agree to the transaction, the Justice Department has made clear it would review the merger for potential anticompetitive implications. “We’d be interested in looking at it,” said department spokeswoman Gina Talamona.

Yahoo has not yet made its presence felt in official Washington circles, according to congressional aides. A spokeswoman for Yahoo would say only, “Yahoo’s board is carefully and thoroughly evaluating the Microsoft proposal in the context of all of the company’s strategic alternatives.”

Spokesmen for Microsoft and Google declined to comment.

Consumer groups, however, were getting ready to speak out against Microsoft’s bid. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said his group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups plan to complain to the Federal Trade Commission that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo poses a risk to individuals’ privacy rights. He said the groups will also urge Congress and the Justice Department to block the buyout.

“The danger is that by combining their platforms, the companies will be able to have a vast storehouse of information, of detailed dossiers on users that they can access without an individual’s consent or awareness,” Chester said.

The groups made a similar objection to the merger of Google and the online advertising company DoubleClick, but the FTC approved the merger in December.

Microsoft, aware of the consumer groups’ wariness on the privacy issue, began a campaign to win them over. After the bid was announced, a Microsoft executive sent an e-mail Friday to several consumer advocacy organizations.

It read in part: “Some of you have raised privacy concerns and may have questions about how consumer data might be treated. We’d be happy to discuss any issues you may have related to this deal. Microsoft has been at the forefront of privacy over the last few years, including support for a federal privacy bill. . . . Our strong views that privacy is important and needs to be protected have not changed. We will work to ensure that consumer privacy continues to be protected moving forward.”

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I’m going to ask you to use your imagination for a moment.

Think of a topic that interests you. Maybe it’s your favorite sport or hobby, for example. Now imagine that you’re searching the Internet for information on that topic.

The first article you come across is related to the topic you’re researching, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of value. It’s too general and full of pointless “fluff.” It makes obvious points that a third-grader could grasp. And it fails to offer any related information or resources.

The second article you come across is much more in-depth. It explains several aspects of your topic with refreshing insight. It is helpful and useful, and it links out to many related articles and resources on the subject.

If you could only bookmark one of these pages for future reference, which one would it be? It would be the second page, right?

You, like most people, would probably prefer the second page to the first. It’s an easy choice, and that’s because the author of the second article understood (and delivered) the most important concept of website content development — the value factor.

5 Benefits of High-Value Web Content

This kind of content has value for the reader, obviously. But it also benefits the author / publisher. Here are the top five benefits of creating high-value website content for your small business website:

1. It keeps people on your website longer.

2. It makes people more inclined to trust you.

3. It encourages readers to recommend the site to others.

4. It encourages other webmasters to link to your content.

5. It helps you improve your search engine ranking and visibility.

All of this sounds great, you say. But how do I create that kind of small business website content? Here are the top five guidelines for creating high-value website content.

 5 Steps to High-Value Web Content

1. Choose the right author.

2. Choose the right topic.

3. Address all sides of the topic.

4. Add supporting graphics, pictures, etc.

5. Link to related resources, both on your site and elsewhere.

Let’s look at each of these steps in greater detail.

1. Choose the Right Author

I once worked for a company who let their web programmers write the instructions for their online ordering process. Big mistake. If their audience were programmers as well, this might be okay. But most of their customers had limited technical skills. So when these people encountered online instructions such as “Validate parameters before advancing” … the customers would often become dead in the water.

This is a prime example of choosing the wrong author for web writing. Sure, the programmers’ input is important. After all, they built the thing. But they should not be the voice of customer guidance. A skilled web writer (someone with usability experience) would have “translated” these instructions to say something like “Please fill in all required information before moving to the next screen.”

Here’s the key to this. The best author for your small business website content is not always the person who knows the most about the product or service from a technical standpoint. Often, it’s best to have an in-house writer who plays the go-between role of “consumer advocate,” getting the information from one group and translating it for another group.

 2. Choose the Right Topic

If your small business only offers one product or service, then that will likely be the topic of your web content. In this case, I would focus on choosing the right angle as well. Don’t tell people what you want them to know — this is an outdated way of thinking about public information, especially when it comes to small business website content. Instead, find out what people want to know about the types of products you offer, and use your web content to address those questions or concerns.

If you are writing web content for a company that has many products or services, you will have to spend more time choosing topics first and choosing your angle second. In this case, it becomes more about topic organization than anything. Large websites with many topics are ideally suited for a category and sub-category system: These are our products >> And this is product ‘A’ >> And this is a web page that explains product ‘A’ in detail.

3. Address All Sides of the Topic

Whether you’re writing about one of your products, or you’re creating a tutorial of some kind, you need to cover all the angles. There’s nothing worse than website content that leaves the job only half-done, telling you why a certain thing is important but not pursuing that lead.

When you are close to a certain topic — as is the case with people who create a product or service — it’s easy to assume everyone else understands it as well as you do. But the opposite is usually true, so you need to explain all sides of a topic when you write content for your small business website.

Want to keep your pages relatively short for easy reading? You can do that while still offering complete information. That’s what hyperlinks are for!

4. Link to Related Resources

Here’s the key to developing great content for your small business website. Try to create authority documents that others in your field would link to and recommend to others. One of the key criteria for a resource document is that it links to plenty of supporting information, both on the same website and elsewhere on the web.

In addition to being good for your readers, this kind of useful content will make other webmasters more inclined to link to your website. This adds to your link “popularity” and can further improve the search engine ranking of your small business website.

When writing a particular web page, try to think of it as “the ultimate guide to [blank].” This is the first step to creating the kind of authority documents that eventually dominate the search engines and drive endless web traffic for the authors. But it’s rarely possible to create an “ultimate guide” to anything in just one page, so be liberal about linking to other sources on your own website and elsewhere (as long as they are not direct competitors).

5. Add Supporting Graphics, Pictures, Etc.

Reading online can be hard on the eyeballs. You can make the reader’s job easier in two ways. First, you can format your content appropriately for web reading (short paragraphs, narrow text columns, lots of bullet points, headers, sub-headers, etc.). Secondly, you can add supporting images and helpful graphics.

Well-placed graphics can improve website content in a number of ways. Images are more enticing than text upon first glance, so they can help attract and retain readers. They also help you clarify your message with visual reinforcement.

Conclusion

I have a motto I use regarding website content. “If it’s not worth putting online, don’t put it online.” This is my reminder to myself that I need to use the techniques outlined above to create superior website content. Because that’s the kind of content that leads to online success. Apply these lessons to your small business website and watch your own success increase!

About The Author
Brandon Cornett operates a web marketing firm in Austin, Texas and is a web writer at large for dozens of websites and blogs. Learn more by visiting http://www.austinseoguy.com.

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Magnetic fields produced by Apple iPods and other such portable music devices don’t interfere with cardiac pacemakers, an FDA study says. Network World Staff

Friday, February 01, 2008 3:50 PM PST

A Food and Drug Administration-led study refutes claims that the magnetic fields produced by Apple iPods and other such portable music devices interfere with cardiac pacemakers.

A report from the research team, which tested four iPod models, appears in BioMedical Engineering OnLine.

A report from a Michigan high school student — who teamed with a couple of heart doctors — is among earlier research that generated some buzz about whether iPods could muck up pacemakers and raised the idea of putting warning labels on portable music devices.

From a BioMed Central press release: “Using a 3-coil sensor, the team measured the magnetic field produced by the iPod at a distance of around 5 to 10 millimeters. They obtained readings for the magnetic field at various specific and small regions 10 mm from an iPod. The peak magnetic field strength was 0.2 millionths of a Tesla, a value hundreds of times lower than the levels capable of interfering with a pacemaker.”

Howard Bassen, a researcher with the FDA, said in a statement: “Based on the observations of our in-vitro study we conclude that no interference effects can occur in pacemakers exposed to the iPods we tested.”

One company breathing a sigh of relief: Tonicum. Last year it released a portable music device for DJs named, yes, Pacemaker.

Meanwhile, iPods continue to enjoy great success, most recently highlighted by the spate of new iPod-related offerings at the recent big Consumer Electronics Show show in Las Vegas. For more information about enterprise networking, go to NetworkWorld. Story copyright 2007 Network World Inc. All rights reserved.

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