Google is notoriously slow and calculating about changing it the user interface of its services. In fact, Google hasn't made any major changes to since launch. While you might not notice these changes immediately--unless you are a hardcore Google Maps user--they are designed to enhance the readability of the maps. As seen above, the thick street outlines that can make maps harder to read have been eliminated. Google describes the update here:::Google Maps' appearance takes new direction::
(L)ocal and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colors have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map. Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.
Google Maps' appearance takes new direction
Carl Icahn resigns from Yahoo board of directors
Carl Icahn resigns from Yahoo board of directors
Carl Icahn, who launched a shareholder insurrection at Yahoo last year over its handling of a takeover offer from Microsoft, is leaving Yahoo's board of directors.
MarketWatch reported Friday that Icahn has informed the company he's moving on to other interests. It's been a over a year since he forced his way onto the board after expressing his displeasure at Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's offer to acquire the company, which at one point was valued at $33 a share. Yahoo's stock closed at $17.22 on Friday.
Yahoo confirmed Icahn's departure, and said in a statement: "Carl has been an important member of our Board and has helped us through some significant transitions. We are all grateful for his active role shaping the future of Yahoo."
Icahn has recently turned his famously wandering eye to struggling financier CIT Group, offering it a $6 billion loan. In a letter to Yahoo, he said "I don't believe that it is necessary at this time to have an activist on the Board of Yahoo and currently, my attention is focused on other matters." He expressed his support for CEO Carol Bartz and the pending search deal with Microsoft, two strategic decisions that he said he was "proud to have played a role" in bringing to fruition.
"Carol is doing a great job and I believe the Microsoft transaction will provide great long term benefits, the potential of which many still do not understand," Icahn wrote in the letter. His departure leaves Yahoo with 11 board members, which will decrease again to 10 when current director Maggie Wilderotter leaves at the end of the year.
NASA iPhone app full of surprises for space geeks
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for iPhone. OK, that's probably a little overly dramatic, but the new NASA iPhone app, which was released Friday, is pretty cool. With NASA's iPhone app, space geeks can access all kinds of information about their favorite missions. Designed to provide information, updates, and images on all current and scheduled NASA missions, the app--which can be found in Apple's App Store under the name "NASA app for iPhone--nicely allows you to search for any specific mission, say, Constellation, and then find information and images just for that project. "Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA's many Twitter feeds," and more, the space agency said in a press release about the app. It also allows users to track where the International Space Station is at any moment, as well as other spacecraft orbiting the planet, in three different views: maps with labels and borders, available visible imagery of satellites, and satellite positions overlaid on maps with country labels and borders. Already, NASA nuts--you know who you are--have had access to much of this information online. But now, having it all available in a free iPhone app is going to keep these people happily staring down at the screen of their devices no matter where they are. And for NASA, anything it can do to get more people excited about its various missions and projects is a good thing as itstruggles for public resources and attention in an era where the economy is in trouble and people are increasingly distracted by other things.NASA iPhone app full of surprises for space geeks
Google competes for the future; Microsoft, the past
:Google competes for the future; Microsoft, the past:
Google was born on the Web and is increasingly giving Microsoft fits by forcing the decades-old software giant to compete on Google's terms. Like open source. Like cloud computing.
Microsoft may shore up its fortunes in the short term with a successful Windows 7 launch. But in the long term, its very success with outdated "desktop" products threaten to cede the market to Google.
We'll have all of it, please
It's not really fair to Microsoft. Microsoft is a victim of its own success, needing to cater to its existing clientele with each new release, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion. Hence, Microsoft continues to make a lot of money, but its last two quarters have seen traditional strengths like Windows become a drag on earnings as enterprises spend more money with Google, Red Hat, and others.
Google's lack of legacy frees it to innovate rapidly and broadly, as Genentench CIO Todd Pierce, a Google Apps customer, suggests:
The rate of innovation at Google is - well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google's product cycle is five days. It's incremental. In five days you're not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won't have Microsoft Office.
Microsoft, for its part, is so concerned with "backward compatibility"--"Is this product/feature compatible with our ability to continue to monetize our 1980s-style desktop monopoly?"--that it continues to struggle to embrace the Web. CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg points out that Windows 7 should have been Microsoft's launchpad to cloud computing, but isn't.There are a lot of "should have beens" for Microsoft when it comes to the Web.Meanwhile, no one is slowing down for Microsoft. Let's stick with cloud computing for a minute. VMware dominates virtualization and has a strong claim on cloud computing, though open-source rivalry from Eucalyptusand VMops threatens to challenge both VMware and Microsoft as they seek to dominate cloud computing.And then there's Google, which provides an increasingly wide array of cloud-based services to enterprises looking to untether themselves from the desktop. In an interview with CNET News, G
oogle CEO Eric Schmidt argues that "The browser can be both enterprise- and consumer-capable. The architecture is driven from the browser. That is the story of enterprise IT today."
In other words, the desktop is simply the means by which a user loads a browser. It's a gateway. The value is not in the desktop anymore. It's in the browser, which is the new desktop, in terms of real functionality delivered.
Microsoft's big opportunity to stymie the threat from Google and others is SharePoint. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has described it as Microsoft's new operating system, but it's in a recent interview with Forrester that he makes this meaningful:
In my own mind I compare (SharePoint) to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, (SharePoint is) a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information....
I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development (by IT architects and developers).
SharePoint is Microsoft's best attempt to connect desktop applications like Office with centralized, cloud/cloud-like collaboration and storage. Yes, Microsoft has other initiatives like online Office, but none marries so well its legacy profit centers with future innovation. And, given that SharePoint is already a $1 billion and frenetically growing business, it has momentum that other initiatives don't.
SharePoint, then, may be Microsoft's best hope for marrying its legacy to the future of Web-based computing.
Microsoft needs something like this. It is losing in mobile, and not simply to Apple. Google's Android momentum is almost astounding, with AdMob data pegging Android smartphone penetration in the U.K. at 10 percent, as but one example.
If we assume that mobile will increasingly be the client platform of choice, then we see Google squeezing Microsoft from the top (cloud) and the bottom (client).
In both areas, open source is Google's weapon of choice, and it's one that Microsoft is going to have to figure out quickly if it wants to be a player on the Web. The Web is too big for Microsoft to control it, and the Web is overwhelmingly open source, as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor states:
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the Web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
All of the servers, pretty much, they run Linux as the operating system; they run Apache as the basic Web server on top of which everything else is built. The main languages out of which Web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the Web is open source ... the Web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
Kapor further suggests that Microsoft's war with open source is over, or should be over: open source has won. It's essential infrastructure now, and hence something that Microsoft needs to embrace, not fight. This isn't about open-source religion. It's about pragmatism. Pragmatism that Microsoft, like anyone else, can embrace.
Google is using the future (open source, cloud) to compete for the future, and its tactics threaten to hit Microsoft in its profit centers like Windows.
Microsoft, however, appears to be mired in its past. Windows 7 looks to be a serious upgrade over its Vista predecessor, but in 10 years time, will we care? Or will we have moved on, forgetting about those quaint days when we used to care about the operating system and applications like Office?
Nokia pushes back N900 Net tablet
::Nokia pushes back N900 Net tablet::
Nokia has delayed the release of its N900 Internet tablet.
The N900 was previously set to arrive in October--and Nokia'spreorder site still states that. However, it is now set for release "during November," Peter Schneider, head of Maemo marketing at Nokia, said Thursday in a post. Schneider did not state the reason for the delay, but Reuters reported that the company is waiting for more feedback from developers.
N900, which costs $649, is part cell phone and part computer. It's considered a potential game-changer for Nokia, which is pushing it as "fusing the power of the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone."
The device uses Nokia's Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system to offer multitasking, Web browsing via Mozilla, a touch screen, and slide-out keyboard. It includes an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 1GB of application memory, and 32GB of storage (expandable to 48GB with a MicroSD card). It measures 4.4 inches by 2.4 inches and features a 3.5-inch widescreen display.The device also sports a 5-megapixel camera.
Why I choose 3G over Wi-Fi
::Why I choose 3G over Wi-Fi::
Say what you will about the wireless phone companies, but in a crunch their managed 3G cellular networks get the job done when Wi-Fi connections fail.
I was in Chicago at a telecom trade show this week and had to cover a Federal Communications Commission'smeeting via Webcast. Ironically, the meeting was focused on the FCC's proposal to draft new regulations to keep the Internet "open" and "free."
The video for the Webcast, which I was watching over an unprotected Wi-Fi connection, started out fine. But after only a few minutes, the picture began to break up, the buffering wheel on the media player churned wildly, and the audio stopped and started so often that I only could make sense of two or three words at a time. Sometimes the audio would start up where it had left off, but then quickly jump ahead to the live stream, cutting out entire sentences and paragraphs.
When I couldn't take it any longer, I shut down my computer, rebooted, and plugged in my Sprint 3G air card.
Almost immediately after launching the video, Chairman Julius Genachowski's face popped up on the screen clearly. But the best part was that I could hear everything he was saying. I didn't experience one hiccup, not one pause. There was no little circle turning round and round as the video buffered. It was working perfectly.
The problems I experienced were likely due to congestion on the unsecured Wi-Fi network. Even though I didn't see a lot of people connecting to the network, there was still likely a lot of traffic. Meanwhile, Sprint's 3G wireless network is more tightly managed, because the licensed spectrum is a limited resource that must be used efficiently. So even if there had been congestion, I might not have even noticed.
Sprint, which owns spectrum licenses, has more control of the traffic that is on its network than the trade show folks who put up the Wi-Fi network, which uses unlicensed spectrum. In theory, the Wi-Fi network should be at least three times faster than the cellular network. But when there is a lot of traffic on the Wi-Fi network, Web pages load slower and video gets warped and choppy.
How Net neutrality fits in
One of the issues that has been hotly debated among Net neutrality supporters and detractors is how to prevent network operators from favoring some traffic at the expense of services, while also allowing the operators to manage their networks to ensure their customers have good experiences.
As I sat watching the choppy FCC Webcast, trying to piece together what was being said, I experienced firsthand how an unmanaged, congested Wi-Fi connection, simply doesn't work, especially when it comes to video.
And if we are to believe companies, such as Cisco Systems, which makes most of the routers powering the Internet, the Net is about to become a whole lot more congested. In June, the company said that Internet traffic worldwide would grow to five times its current size between 2008 and 2013. And much of this growth will come from video. Not only is video traffic very time sensitive, but it also eats up a lot of bandwidth. The result is a double whammy for network operators.
With a recent survey of more than 20 service providers around the world, Cisco predicts that by 2013, 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic will be video. Today throughout the world, the average broadband connection, generates about 11.4GB of Internet traffic per month. Of this 11.4GB of data crossing Net monthly, 4.3GB of it is video or some other type of visual application, such as social networking or collaboration services.
What this means for network operators is that a tsunami of data traffic is coming. And even though network operators continue to add capacity to prevent congestion, they also need to better manage their networks.
Network design becoming more critical
At the Supercomm 2009 trade show this week, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donavan said that there must be changes in how networks are designed and managed to keep up with demand.
"The capacity we carried in 2008 will be a rounding error five years," he said. "We need to fundamentally rethink how we're carrying traffic in our networks. We have to rethink how we interoperate, how networks are constructed, how routing is done. How we move content in off-hours."
He warned that there will be consequences if operators don't act soon. "We'll end up in a dire situation a few years out if we don't collectively step up as an industry and throw Moore's Law out the window," he said.
So with more traffic on the network, operators say now is not the time to change regulation that could inhibit the way they manage their networks.
"If you have to treat all bits the same, it's hard to manage and protect the network," Tom Tauke, Verizon's chief lobbyist said. "When you're trying to make the network flow, you can't have lawyers looking over engineers' shoulders telling them what they can and can't do."
It seems that the FCC has gotten the message. In the nondiscrimination principle that was presented at its meeting this week, the document spells out that network operators cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications, but it allows for traffic discrimination when allowing for reasonable network management.
Of course, the FCC is only in the beginning stages of drafting the new Net regulations. And no one knows what the final wording will be. But I hope that when the official regulations are adopted, that network management is preserved unscathed. Because if it's not, we're all in trouble.
Apple punts on lower-cost Mac Book
By not coughing up a low-cost MacBook, as some had expected, Apple has ceded a potentially huge market to PC makers. But is this just all part of Apple's marketing genius? $999 is as low as Apple will go. The announcement Tuesday of the $999 white polycarbonate MacBook was pretty ho-hum as product refreshes go (same price, same color as before) but the implication was important: Apple is surrendering a large, emerging laptop market to Microsoft and its coterie of PC makers. Not that it's necessarily a bad strategy. Market researcher Gartner said recently that Apple's shipments in the U.S. grew year-over-year by 6.8 percent to total 1.57 million during the third quarter, putting it right behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Acer. Comparatively, overall PC shipments in the U.S. grew by 3.5 percent from a year earlier. But among those unimpressive overall PC numbers (HP's third-quarter shipments grew only 2.7 percent), was an impressive statistic for Acer: buoyed by Netbooks, Acer's shipments grew by 61.4 percent year-over-year, and it blew past Dell to become the No. 2 PC maker worldwide based on this growth. Granted, Netbooks are a relatively low-profit segment (i.e., profit on a $400 Netbook is going to be a lot less than that on a $999 laptop). Nevertheless, they're a hot market. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has stated numerous times thatIntel was able to create a market that grew faster than either the iPhone or Nintendo Wii. Case in point:Windows 7-based Acer Netbooks are now big on the Home Shopping Network--which claims to have sold more than 5,000 in one segment on Saturday. And that's not the only market Apple is punting on. A new category of inexpensive, thin laptops has emerged with the roll-out of Windows 7 on Thursday. Like Netbooks, these laptops are light (typically 4 pounds) and don't include an optical drive. But they are relatively powerful and full featured. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire Timeline, for example, with a 320GB hard disk drive and dual-core Intel processor is fairly well-endowed at only $500. Apple is not receiving a lot kudos in the mainstream business press by sticking to its $999 guns. The Wall Street Journal said that users can get roughly equivalent laptops for a lot less at Dell and HP. And other publicationshave said that Apple is not just ignoring new market realities but, in fact, ignoring the Mac lineup as a whole in favor of the iPhone. So, do consumers lose by not getting the chance to buy a competitive low-cost Apple MacBook? The short answer to that rhetorical questions is yes--because Apple offers no alternative to, for example, a thin, light $650 HP Pavilion dm3 laptop. But an apples-to-apples (pun not intended) comparison shows that while Apple skimps on a couple of white MacBook features, it's not an egregiously bad deal for $999. Let's do a quick side-by-side of the cheapest MacBook with a mainstream HP laptop. • For $999, you get white polycarbonate wrapped around a 13.3-inch 1280-by-800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 250GB (5400RPM) hard disk drive, an optical drive, and the standard wireless features. All in a 4.7-pound package. • For $997, HP will sell you (online) an HP Pavilion dv3t series with a 13.3-inch 1280-by-800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, a 500GB (5400RPM) hard disk drive, an optical drive, and the standard wireless features. Also, in 4.7-pound package. Apple beats the HP by a hair in the processor category and loses in the memory and storage departments. If polycarbonate is, in fact, better than the plastics HP uses, then that aspect of the design would be a win for Apple. The real win, though, is for Apple the company. It avoids the cut-throat sub-$900 laptop market and still sells--quite profitably--a lot of laptops. But will Apple be able to snub this growing market of inexpensive Windows 7 laptops indefinitely? We should know in about six months when Gartner reports first-quarter 2010 numbers.::Apple punts on lower-cost Mac Book::
