2018 Wholesale Gold-Plated Jewelry blogs

A rather nice day at the Bing and Office office, no?

So, yes, one imagines that Microsoft thought it might have a little amusement with its jingle competition. $500 does not signify seriousness.

I heard a little techno beat, the voice of a distant cousin of the Pet Shop Boys and the oft-repeated phrase “Bing goes the Internet.”

These seem like strange words to be directed at a jingle. Any jingle. Even the word “jingle” is from some time gone by and awry.

However, Mann seems to have been a little perturbed by the criticism, specifically that of MG Siegler at TechCrunch. So to prove his agility and, frankly not insignificant wit, he penned a heartfelt and quite harmonious homily, and uploaded it before the blogosphere’s bile had soaked into the organic cotton of his T-shirt.

I then discovered that his oeuvre had been pilloried. Words like “awful” winged their way toward Bing–even the phrase “worst ever.”

Brands rarely use jingles these days. They just pay U2 or Coldplay a lot of money for an original track. Truly the “$5 footlong” era is somewhat to the Peyton Place side of Tony the Tiger.

I awoke on the floor of my house today with a thumping, bumping sound bashing lumps into my ears.

So you see, for a mere $500, Microsoft has been rewarded with significant publicity and joyous new music, all amounting, no doubt, to a little bada-Bing cha-ching.

He also shouted that the first thing I should do after I had scrubbed my armpits with sandpaper and removed myself from the shower was to watch the video on YouTube.

This seems to be a far more noble pursuit than, say, dropping a bomb every day. So I was relatively touched to see Jonathan Mann dancing in a very precise and slightly parodic manner to his composition.

Yes, someone had called me to play a winning Bing jingle over my cell phone.
This was a friend, indeed. A friend with no conscience.

When it ended, my friend shouted into the phone, at least I think he shouted, that this ditty had won its creator $500 in a competition sponsored by Microsoft.

Because I do pretty much what everyone tells me, I went to YouTube and espied a chap called Jonathan Mann, a Mann who has decided to write a song every day.

Marten Mickos, surrounded by inflatable MySQL dolphin mascots.

Marten Mickos, the one-time chief executive of MySQL who left about a year after Sun Microsystems acquired the open-source database company, has joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence.

Mickos joined MySQL in 2001, stayed through Sun’s 2008 acquisition, and left earlier this year. Mickos also is on the board of cloud computing start-up RightScale and Thunderbird e-mail software backer Mozilla Messaging.

(Credit:
Benchmark Capital)

The admiration is mutual. “Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open-source company in the world,” Benchmark said on its Web site.

“Why I like @benchmark: They consistently ask ‘What’s best for the entrepreneur?’ and they think big,” Mickos said Tuesday on Twitter.

However, there has been nothing too earth-shattering thus far.

The two companies said the deal is expected to close during Adobe’s fourth quarter and is subject to government approvals. Omniture will become a new unit within Adobe, with Omniture CEO Josh James continuing to lead the business as an Adobe senior vice president. Adobe said the deal should add to earnings in fiscal 2010.

“Today that’s a real pain point for customers,” Weiskopf said. “We have the opportunity to integrate what is today a pretty disparate and not tightly integrated set of workflows.”

Update 2:15 p.m. PT: Adobe’s executives are now on a conference call talking about the deal, as well as the company’s most recent quarterly results.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called the move a “game changer” for the company.

Update 1:45 p.m. PT: In an interview, Adobe senior vice president Paul Weiskopf said the deal will allow Adobe to merge the “art” of developing and delivering content with the “science” of measuring the impact of that content.

That represents a 45 percent premium to Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 days, Adobe noted in its press release. Omniture, which was started in 1996, has about 1,200 employees and took in just under $300 million in the 12 months ending Dec. 31.

The deal is the company’s largest since its $3-billion-plus acquisition of Macromedia, announced in April 2005.

Adobe said on Tuesday that it has reached a deal to acquire Web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion, or $21.50 per share.

“Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online,” Narayen said in the press release announcing the deal.

Weiskopf declined to discuss how long the deal had been in the works or whether there will be any job cuts once the deal goes through, although the company has a conference call slated to start at 2 p.m. PT and will also file additional details with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of its tender offer to acquire Omniture’s shares.

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The two services aren’t exactly comparable: Goom is a profit-driven business intended to reach as many people as possible, while MTT Radio is an experimental way for indie musicians to get exposure on the site. Still, the contrast made me think about how online radio is going to evolve. In a world of MP3 players and on-demand streaming services like Spotify, where users are accustomed to controlling every song that plays, and services like Pandora, which create customized radio stations for every taste, I don’t know if a DJ-driven online radio station has much appeal. One-to-many, broadcast, top-down: no matter who’s driving it, this kind of radio already seems outdated. A service like MTT (or, for that matter, MySpace), where anybody can post their music for the world to hear, seems like a more modern approach.

(Credit: MTT Radio)

In the last couple of days, I’ve been introduced to a couple new online sites, both calling themselves “radio,” that encapsulate very different approaches toward distributing music over the Web.

In our conversation yesterday, Goom CEO Rob Williams emphasized that the company is seeking out the right kind of DJs–folks who truly care about music, and are as bored and fed up with the research-driven pap on mainstream radio as most other hardcore music fans are. Still–a DJ is a DJ, and most of the folks on the station so far come out of the traditional music industry. As a result, the stations on Goom radio today are cool–there’s an Eels song playing on the indie-rock Tastemaker station as I write this–but not particularly cutting-edge or risky. This is the music that the pros think you should hear.

Contrast this with another service that launched last week, MTT Radio. MTT stands for Music Think Tank, and it’s a relatively new blog and service for indie musicians, staffed and owned by people with ample experience catering to that market. Written content on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons license, and would-be contributors are encouraged to post for the MTT Open site, which is open to all writers. Think of it like a Huffington Post for indie musicians. MTT Radio works the same way as the Open blog site: anybody can contribute a song, and they’re listed in reverse-chronological order and indexed by genre.

Goom Radio, which entered public alpha testing yesterday, claims to be trying to change the landscape of online radio. One big difference between Goom and other radio services is a radio widget that users will be able to embed in social-networking sites and other Web pages. Goom also makes a big deal about its audio technology, which starts with uncompressed WAV files instead of digitally compressed MP3 or Windows Media files, and then runs them through various boosters and filters equalizers tailored to each genre–sort of how traditional radio stations do it today. Eventually, users will be able to create their own radio stations (and I’ll blog about it again when this feature’s available), but today it’s limited to a handful of professionally curated stations in particular genres.

Dell’s consumer business turned a small profit of $89 million in the second quarter. That tally was Dell’s best consumer profit since the third quarter a year ago. Revenue came in at $2.9 billion, down 9 percent from a year ago, but up 2 percent sequentially.

As for the outlook, Dell generally said it expected “seasonal demand improvements from the consumer and U.S. federal government businesses,” but noted the fiscal third quarter is typically slow for enterprise customers. In a statement, Dell noted:

Dell believes a refresh cycle in commercial accounts is more likely to occur in 2010, with IT spending improving first in the U.S. The company continues to see pressure in the form of component costs and areas of aggressive pricing in the near term, and continues to take actions to offset these items.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

On a conference call with analysts, Dell CFO Brian Gladden confirmed that the company is working with China Mobile “on a small-screen device.” However, Gladden noted that Dell will primarily be focused on the enterprise.

(Credit:
Dell )

Dell’s public business (government and education) delivered second-quarter revenue of $3.8 billion, up 20 percent from the first quarter, but down 16 percent from a year ago.

The company on Thursday reported earnings of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, on revenue of $12.76 billion, down 22 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $12.6 billion.

Dell said second-quarter enterprise revenue was $3.3 billion, down 32 percent from a year ago. Dell said it is facing aggressive pricing.

Like Hewlett-Packard, Dell reported that sales stabilized sequentially from the first quarter, but the year-over-year comparisons were tough.

CEO Michael Dell added that enterprise demand was improving in July and that trend continued into August. Dell reiterated that the company would remain focused on the next-generation data center. In addition, Dell noted that “we see a pretty powerful new product cycle” fueled by Intel’s Nehalem chip, Microsoft’s Windows 7, and technologies like virtualization.

(Credit:
Dell)

And by the numbers:

Dell’s second-quarter earnings were down 23 percent from a year ago, but topped Wall Street estimates. The company continues to bet on an enterprise refresh cycle in 2010 and sees ongoing signs of stabilization.

(Credit:
Dell )

When you look at the product summary from Dell the picture is mixed. It appears that Dell has hit bottom, but sales are down a lot from a year ago.

Here’s Dell’s read on the environment compared to what it outlined at its analyst meeting last month:

The SMB business delivered quarterly operating income of $246 million on revenue of $2.8 billion, down 29 percent from a year ago. Dell said demand was strongest in Asia.

(Credit:
Dell )

(Credit:
Dell )

An analyst challenged Dell on his contention that CIOs would refresh their PCs. Dell said the age of the PC installed base was old enough to be “onerous” in terms of costs because most rely on an eight-year operating system, Windows XP.

Sure, the idea of iTunes including integration directly with some of social networking’s most promising brands is a nice thought, as blogs like Boy Genius Report have excitedly reported.

But the entire proposition seems out of character for Apple, and is leading us to think we won’t see these features in iTunes 9 when it is released. Here’s why:

• First, Facebook already launched Facebook Connect for iPhoto earlier this year. Getting that partnership in place was a big deal for Facebook. But the implementation is very subtle. The fuzzy screenshots show a slightly confusing implementation, at least when it comes to the visual organization, with the tiny (and misaligned) Facebook icon on the bottom of the iTunes window. And more importantly, people in a position to be familiar with the situation suggest to CNET that Facebook-iTunes hooking up is unlikely, at least for now.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

The three images, which show Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter integrated directly into iTunes, came from a Chinese discussion forum, conveniently after several days of rumors bouncing around about everything from Blu-ray to Twitter making an appearance in iTunes 9 later this year. The images mainly show what it would look like if Last.fm’s online music streaming and recommendation service were built into Apple’s music software. It appears under a tab on the left menu bar called “Social.” And then at the bottom of the iTunes window, there are two small icons, one the familiar blue ‘f’ of Facebook, and the powdery blue lowercase ‘t’ of Twitter.

Juicy screenshots purporting to show new features in the next version of iTunes popped up online Tuesday morning and are generating a lot of excitement. But here’s the thing: they’re probably fake.

• Second, Apple doesn’t just partner with anybody. When it does link up with other companies, they’re established brands: think Motorola, Nike, U2, AT&T, Google, and Microsoft. Twitter does not appear at the moment to fit that bill. While it might be the word on the lips of celebrities and journalists, Twitter is a tiny San Francisco outfit that hasn’t shown it knows how to turn a profit, and one whose service isn’t very reliable. Not exactly a rock-solid partner for a company like Apple that prides itself on offering products that “just work.” Plus, Twitter seems a little trendy for Apple, a company that rarely races ahead with the latest technological obsession–see its stance on Blu-ray for the past few years as an example.

This is how the Facebook icon currently looks in iPhoto.

CNET News’ Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.

Last.fm (also owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive) is far from being an established brand. It’s simply one of many streaming music services available on the Web. And the inclusion in iTunes seems contrary to Apple’s purposes. The point of iTunes is to sell you music, not let you listen to songs for free whenever you want. And the other useful features Last.fm offers aren’t new to iTunes: there are already plug-ins, like the one from iLike, that connect to your iTunes account, analyze your library, find music you’ll like, direct you to concerts you may want to attend, and provide artist info–all things Last.fm does, too.

• And finally, cosmetically, the images just don’t look all that convincing. Comparing the implementation in iPhoto and the two little logos of Facebook and Twitter below, the Facebook logo in the screenshots just doesn’t look right. The blog Pocket-lint UK talked to some image experts, who point out that many of the pictured logos show a lot of imperfections: including the “9″ in relation to the “iTunes,” and other clues that point to a Photoshop job.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to find clues. One is another Twitter account that was set up as a clearinghouse for information (@EvansVanished). Another is a Facebook account called The Search for Evan Ratliff, where fans are posting clues and working collaboratively to solve the puzzle.

But as of Friday morning, his Twitter account (@theatavist) had been suspended for “strange activity.”

Of course, given that Ratliff is surely employing everything he can think of to stay below radar (theoretically not using credit cards or doing anything that might too easily give away his whereabouts) the Twitter account suspension might somehow be intentional. Then again, one would have to wonder what he would have had to do to get Twitter on board.

(Credit:
Twitter)

When Wired recently launched its Vanish contest, a challenge to readers to locate reporter Evan Ratliff, who has gone on the “lam,” it suggested that a major source of clues would be Ratliff’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

For now, those trying to find him and win the cash–and no doubt, bragging rights, as Ratliff said that to collect the prize, the winner has to agree to be interviewed on his or her methods–will have to do so without the assistance of his Twitter account. Then again, Twitter has been going through a rough time recently, with several periods of downtime.

Wired readers who want to try to win the $5,000 prize for finding reporter Evan Ratliff may not be able to use clues posted to his Twitter account, as the account has been suspended for ’strange activity.’

This game, then, has many of the makings of a traditional alternate-reality game: online and offline components, widespread community involvement, clues spread across a wide swath of the Internet and a prize that may, in the end, have to be shared by a number of people who worked together.

And as is often the case with ARGs, this game, too, is in the service of promoting something else, in this case, Ratliff’s larger article.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information as to why the account was suspended.

Still, I really want to know what “strange activity” caused the service to take down the account. I’ll update this article if I find out.

Update (2:27 p.m.): The account is now back up. According to a Twitter spokesperson, it was “infected” for some reason.

The challenge is an interesting way to draw attention to a recent article of Ratliff’s about the difficulties of disappearing from society. And in the original contest challenge, it was suggested that contest participants might draw some conclusions as to the methods the reporter would use–or wouldn’t, as the case may be–from that story.

Whoever finds Ratliff (and is the first to send his editor a photo of him) will win $5,000. And while there are a number of different ways to source up clues as to his whereabouts, one of them was supposed to be his Twitter account.

“With Palm WebOS, we’re creating a new, more intuitive smartphone experience defined by unmatched simplicity and usefulness,” Jon Rubinstein, Palm chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Palm Pixi brings this unique experience to a broader range of people who want enhanced messaging and social networking in a design that lets them express their personal style.”

Apparently geared toward younger consumers than those targeted by the Pre, the playfully named smartphone will be longer but slimmer than the Pre and will sport a smaller multitouch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, and a 2-megapixel camera, Palm said. However, like its smartphone sibling, the 3.5-ounce Pixi will still have 8GB of memory and GPS capabilities.

(Credit:
Palm)

The move coincides with an announcement that Palm would drop the price of its Pre smartphone to $150 with a two-year service agreement and two rebates. Palm did not reveal the Pixi’s price but did say it would be less than that of the Pre and that it was expected to be available to consumers in time for the holiday shopping season through Sprint. Palm also plans to offer artist-designed, limited edition replaceable back covers, which it plans to showcase at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York, which starts Thursday.

In addition to a new Facebook application, the Pixi will also be able to integrate LinkedIn contacts and Yahoo contacts, calendar, and IM in a single view via Palm’s Synergy feature.

On Tuesday, Sprint kicked off a short-lived promotion that offered customers of competing carriers a $100 service credit to anyone who bought a Palm Pre and ported his or her old number to Sprint. However, the offer was pulled after a few hours with Palm saying that it was posted in error.

The following product mentioned is available.

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Palm Pixi photos

Hoping to capitalize on the momentum created by the release of its Pre smartphone, Palm on Wednesday will unveil a smaller, cheaper smartphone called Pixi.

The announcement of the Pixi comes less than four months after Palm began selling the Pre, which the company said registered record sales when it became available in June. The company did not discuss specific numbers that first week, but some analysts estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 units were sold during the first weekend.

Palm's new smartphone, the Pixi.

Some publishers, like TechCrunch, have taken to contracting with services to begin to wrest some control — and branding — from the growth of the short URL sites. TechCrunch uses the Awe.sm service for its tcrn.ch short URLs. Some CBS TV sites (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS) also use a third party — Bit.ly, in fact — to create co-branded short links. CNET tech sites do not have a partnership contract for short URLs.

It’s not very likely that the community-owned link shortener Woodward is trying to build will be taken up by Twitter, Tweetdeck, or other powerful gateways to the Twitter network, and this will limit its growth, to put it mildly. However, a community-driven URL shortening service could make some inroads and certainly get some traction among users who want to buck the trend of feeding data into what they may see as a steel trap owned by a for-profit corporation.

(Bit.ly data is currently wide open, at least on an individual URL basis. Simply append “+” to a Bit.ly link to get traffic stats on it. Woodward wants to see a “fire hose” of short URL data, however.)

A Twitter keiretsu?
Woodward does have reason to be envious and even suspicious of the Bit.ly-Twitter relationship, although it’s difficult to draw the connection all the way to malfeasance on the part of the two companies. And it’s hard to believe that his strident posturing will win him much support outside of a small group of the most zealous open-source boosters.

Eric Woodward, creator of the short URL service Tr.im, painted his product into a corner when he announced first, that he was going to take it offline, and then a few days later that he wasn’t. Nobody wants to trust their Web links to a capricious business that could go offline again, and take working links and traffic with it.

Currently, according Tweetmeme, Bit.ly has nearly 80 percent of the short URL market. Tr.im’s Woodward hopes that a community-owned and -run short URL service based on Tr.im — which he will fund personally, if needed — can grow to a 5 percent or 10 percent market share. With that position, he believes the “Bit.ly cartel would be worthless,” since the competing Tr.im service would then have enough data to provide the analysis that Bit.ly or Twitter would, presumably, otherwise be able to sell for any price they wished.

A tight network of businesses doesn’t necessarily build bad or evil products. When Twitter was looking to replace TinyURL as the default link shortener on the Twitter.com site (because TinyURL was not reliable enough, a source says), company execs had very stringent reliability, security, and real-time requirements for the project. Bit.ly iterated its product to live up to most of Twitter’s specs. Indeed, its real-time link analysis is something Tr.im doesn’t offer, and while Tr.im’s Woodward told me that most users have no interest in real-time stats, clearly if real-time data was a feature that Twitter wanted its default URL shortener to have, one can see how a company that didn’t have it and wasn’t interested in building it would have a hard time getting the plum deal. (And in my opinion, once you use Bit.ly’s real-time tracking service, you’ll be hooked; Twitter was right about that.)

Twitter did not return a request for comment on this topic.

Several powerful companies in the Twitter ecosystem are inter-related. Bit.ly’s CEO is John Borthwick, and Borthwick is also CEO of Betaworks. Betaworks helps build companies in the social-messaging space. It incubated Summize, the Twitter search engine Twitter acquired last year, and through that deal Betaworks remains connected to Twitter. Betaworks has also worked with Tweetdeck — which also uses Bit.ly as the default link shortener. The company has several other Twitter (and Facebook) projects running right now. Suffice it to say that if you’re in Betaworks’ network, you’ve got great access to Twitter. If you’re competing with a Betaworks portfolio company to get Twitter’s attention, you’ve got a tough road ahead.

On August 17, Woodward put a fresh coat on the prior week’s drama with a new gambit: He said he was giving the service to the community. In the bitter post announcing this plan, he continued to claim that due to the fact that Twitter made Bit.ly the default URL shortener for the service, a product like Tr.im has no real chance for success. Related, he says, is the recent announcement of the 301works archive for short URLs, which he sees as a craven publicity stunt to boost Bit.ly, since the same people behind it are also running 301works.

Users who really want to avoid having their links stuck in an URL shortening service can simply create their own short links, as, frankly, we’ve done at CNET in an experimental project. This is likely the true alternative to the otherwise excellent Bit.ly hosted URL shortening and analytics service. We should expect shorteners to be built into content management and blogging platforms, where they can be integrated into the analytics systems already running on those platforms. Links belong, after all, to the sites that create them. As OpenDNS’ Ulevitch says, short URLs, “add an unnecessary layer of cruft to already-brittle links.”

Betaworks is one of the drivers of the 301works short URL data project, and it’s the relationship between Bit.ly and 301works that led Woodward to shun the project, at least for now. “There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but it doesn’t solve the link rot problem,” Woodward said. He added, “Why would I give them the publicity?”

“We’ll just give it away,” Woodward says.

Woodward says that the Internet needs an open link-shortening service, because the traffic data short URLs generates is too valuable to entrust to a single company. “You can’t get the aggregate data on what’s being shared in real time by everyone,” he told me. “Twitter wants to become a real-time search engine, so the data Bit.ly is capturing is very valuable.”

But if Bit.ly remains free to use (even if only to a point) and the product continues to stay ahead of Tr.im in features and reliability, chances are people will continue to use it, even if it’s not as open.

The DNS option and other speculations
The real challenge for everyone in the short URL business is that it shouldn’t exist to begin with. “The worst is that you put links to your site in the hands of a third party,” OpenDNS CEO Dave Ulevitch wrote to me. “This entire problem was created by Twitter and could be solved by them. The analytics that come with Bit.ly are cool, but people can start doing them self-hosted.”

WordPress blogs falling prey to worm

Windows 7, Vista zero-day flaw reported

Microsoft offers some Silverlight 4 details

Orange, T-Mobile to unite in U.K. merger

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