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The Business Software Association was a sponsor of Wednesday’s technology reception.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon)

MINNEAPOLIS–The streets of the twin cities were relatively quiet Wednesday afternoon: convention attendees were busy wandering from one private event to another. For technology lobbyists, the choice was Chambers, a self-described luxury art hotel here.

A large crowd of Silicon Valley types mingled at a Washington-esque party hosted by trade associations including the Business Software Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and the Consumer Electronics Association. Folks from Facebook, Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices, and other tech companies sipped cocktails amid sleek, minimalist design and large pieces of contemporary art.

The late-afternoon event had a festive feel, though perhaps not as much as similar events last week at the Democratic convention. Though well-attended, Wednesday’s event likely did not attract as large of a crowd as last week’s simply because the Minneapolis location was a half-hour drive from convention headquarters–and was scheduled right before the night’s highly anticipated convention proceedings, featuring vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Unlike at the technology reception in Denver, there were no members of Congress to be seen at Chambers, even though the cuisine was ethics rules-appropriate– all finger foods such as mini-cupcakes, springrolls, and sliders.

If the sudden rush into subnotebooks by major PC vendors is any indication, it’s worth considering whether Palm’s Foleo wasn’t such a lame idea.

Photos of a subnotebook from Hewlett-Packard, reportedly called the HP Compaq 2133, showed up on the Web recently. And another major PC vendor, Acer, is also rumored to be entering the subnotebook fray sometime soon. Neither company will confirm anything, but in the case of the HP Compaq device, an industry insider tells us the product is for real and that the company began seriously looking into the category in November 2007. When the device will come to market, however, is still a question mark.

Palm founder Jeff Hawkins (right) shows The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg the Foleo.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

But there’s likely to be even more news on this front in the next few months. So what’s the genesis of the sudden interest in this category? It’s easy to point to the Eee PC from Asus and its surprising and instant popularity. But the Eee wasn’t the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo.

Hawkins, who invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, insisted the Foleo was “the best idea he’d ever had.” The product was roundly panned by critics and eventually dumped before it even came to market late last summer.

The idea of a small form factor computer that is tinier than a notebook with solid-state memory, running a light operating system, Web access for e-mail is being tweaked and advanced by some of the biggest names in computing.

It’s happening despite the fact that it’s still a vastly unproven category of computing, and previous attempts to define such a middling type of device (see: UMPC, MID) have largely failed. So what’s different?

The attraction to devices like the Eee PC, and the XO from OLPC, is partly form factor, but mostly price. At $399 for the Eee and $400 for the XO (that gets one for you and one for a kid in a developing country), they’re not necessarily functional as fully loaded primary PCs, but at those prices, you’re not going to expect it to be. More importantly though, at that price it severely undercuts notebook PC leaders HP, Acer, Dell, and Lenovo.

Not coincidentally, the impetus for HP’s experimentation in this category was its concern over the very low price tag Asus was able to stick on the Eee PC. Selling the mini-notebook at $399, even if it’s a secondary PC and runs Linux, gives it a serious chance to further chip away at the already-declining average selling prices for notebook PCs. (The 2133 from HP will have an entry level model priced at $499, and will have a Via processor, we’re told.)

But that kind of pricing also could represent a good opportunity for the HPs and Acers of the world. This type of subnotebook is aimed at a very narrow group of users, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group.

The pricing shows “it’s not focused on being people’s primary computer,” he said. “Like the MacBook Air, like the Eee, like the Foleo was going to be. We tend to think of them in the context of other notebooks or portable devices, but they’re really not designed to be a primary portable device. It’s designed to be a niche product that focuses on a very specific usage model.”

But what is that usage model? There’s not even an agreed upon term for this category. Subnotebook? UMPC? Super mobile Internet device? Or as Intel is apparently ready to call it, Netbook? That definition is important to the consumer. The lack of clarity as to the purpose of the Foleo was a major reason it didn’t strike a chord with a lot of consumers.

“The tough part is, this type of product is trying to navigate narrow space between a notebook and a smartphone. It can’t compete with a smartphone in terms of price and portability, but it can outperform a smartphone,” said IDC analyst Richard Shim. “But at the opposite end of the spectrum, these OEMs don’t want to compete with notebooks directly because they don’t want to disrupt the growth engine and significantly (hasten) the decline in ASPs.”

So was the Foleo as silly as Hawkins’ harshest critics said? Maybe the execution and timing was off. Or more likely, he was on to something, but wasn’t quite able to take the idea to the next logical conclusion. In fairness to him, he did recognize at the time that the Foleo’s utility may not have been as obvious to the mass consumer as he’d hoped.

“The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It’s hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot,” he told CNET News.com last year.

Maybe he’ll be vindicated–at least partially–on this one too.

For a year, the company had weathered management shake-ups that included the departures of all three founders. Employees had witnessed some of the Web’s best-known video producers, such as Ze Frank and Lonelygirl15, abandon the site. Revver’s audience was dwarfed by YouTube’s and other video-sharing front-runners.

In a report earlier this month, CNET News.com cited sources who said the beleaguered Revver was asking for between $300,000 and $500,000 and the assumption of the company’s debt, which the sources said was in the $1 million range. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners were among those that invested more than $12 million into Revver.

The employee added that negotiations began to pick up again after the story about Revver’s troubles appeared. That triggered, according to the employee, a flurry of inquiries from other companies. Among those who called was VideoJug, an online video destination and production company.

More recently, rumors circulated the Web that the company was running short of cash, according to the Revver employees.

Representatives from both companies declined to comment, but two Revver employees and an executive at a company that had inquired about bidding on Revver said managers there had informed them the sale was done. The blog NewTeeVee was first to report the acquisition.

Employees of video-sharing site Revver said they breathed a sigh of relief Thursday after management informed them that the company had been acquired by LiveUniverse, a little-known online entertainment network.

Doug Kamin, senior vice president of marketing at VideoJug, said Thursday that he contacted executives about the possibility of making a bid after reading about Revver’s woes.

On Thursday Revver called Kamin to tell him that Revver’s management had decided to go with the “original bidder.”

“Everyone is just really happy that this happened,” the Revver employee said. “We always knew that the company had great technology and a strong following of creators. We knew we had value.”

News.com also reported that talks between LiveUniverse, owned by MySpace.com co-founder Brad Greenspan, had stalled last month over the issue of debt. A Revver employee, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak for the company, confirmed that Thursday.

Revver’s staff, which is half the size it was in 2006, was ecstatic to hear that the company was saved and that they would not be broken up or moved, according to two Revver employees. The status of the company’s CEO, Kevin Wells, was unclear.

“At those prices, we thought Revver would be a good deal,” Kamin said. “I’m betting lots of others thought the same thing.”

“At those prices we thought Revver would be a good deal. I’m betting lots of others thought the same thing.” –Doug Kamin, VideoJug exec

Former Gmail engineer Gabor Cselle, who makes the app, is pushing ReMail as a tool for commuters. One thing that makes ReMail especially well-suited for that is that you can access your entire in-box–even offline. That’s compared to the iPhone’s built-in Mail app, which has to hit the servers to continue a search if what you’re looking for falls outside of what it has recently saved on the device. This can also be a boon when traveling internationally, since you can access and search your account without being connected to, or having to sync up with any servers.

The good:
• Fast, highly-customizable search
• Autocompletion of search terms
• Saved search terms
• Built-in e-mail functions that let you create news messages right inside the app
• Local cache of data for offline reading

Other small annoyances include no landscape view, and a slider you have to toggle every time you want to copy text from a message. I didn’t mind this at first, but it’s a real drag when you realize you want to copy something halfway down a message and have to go all the way back up to the top to turn that mode on.

(Credit:
CNET)

The bad:
• Limited support for e-mail services
• Possible obsolescence by an Apple software update
• No landscape view
• Copy and paste toggle is clunky
• Can take a very long time to do the first in-box download, and you have to leave the app running while it’s happening
• App can crash when doing long downloads or when opening up attachments

For $4.99, this is a very, very solid way to search through e-mail. Though like many other innovative applications that have come along to try to improve on what Apple’s done, it runs the risk of being made obsolete by the very product it’s trying to fix. I wouldn’t put it past Apple to have full-text e-mail search as part of its next major OS update–if not sooner, considering it’s already such a big part of its desktop application counterpart. Though if you’re willing to invest in this app in the meantime, you’ll never have to trudge through e-mails again.

I’m a heavy e-mailer on my
iPhone, and one of the things that really bugs me about the built-in mail client is that it falls just short of being ready for business use. For instance, it lacks the option to flag messages, have different signatures for different accounts, or simply turn on and off an out-of-office auto-responder. But what really irks me on a daily basis is the search tool that got added in OS 3.0. Don’t get me wrong, this was a really important thing to add–but there’s a big problem with it: it’s limited to the subject line and who the sender or recipient was.

That level of search is certainly a good start, but it doesn’t compare to newly-released app ReMail (download), which can index an entire e-mail account and do full-text search within all your messages. You want to find a word or phrase in an e-mail body? It can do that, and it’s fast. Better yet, it doubles as its own e-mail app, so you can open up and read messages; copy parts to stick in new messages; or forward, reply, and delete–all without leaving the interface.

As fantastic as the app is, there are a few annoying bits that will keep it from fully replacing the Mail app, including the fact that it’s currently limited to one account at a time. You can go in and switch it with another account, but then your old index gets deleted. Another pain point is that it doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, just Gmail and IMAP. That’s fine for casual users, but business users won’t be able to get all that full-text search goodness on their work accounts, which for me, would have been one of the big draws. Cselle told me that Exchange and other account types, like POP, would be added later down the line, but for now he just wanted to get it out there.

Of course having the same account in both ReMail and the mail app means that it takes some extra storage on your phone, but what’s surprising is how little it uses. A 140MB Gmail in-box I sucked in for my test account squeezed down to just 25MB. It works like that for one main reason–the app doesn’t download attachments until you open them. Though the nice thing is that after it’s been opened, it stays cached on the device so you can open it again.

ReMail searches inside of mail messages. Here it's picking out the word "nice" from a handful of messages, including different ones from the same thread.

Many of Apple’s ads are nothing more than simple product demonstrations. Beautifully executed, celebrating their own simplicity, with often superbly chosen music. But still simple product demonstrations.

As Apple announced results that beat expectations, Microsoft had its first ever year-over-year dip in sales .

But the difference between Apple and Microsoft advertising–and their brands–can only be told partially through these campaigns. The John Hodgman/Justin Long nipple-tweaking campaign is merely a portion of Apple’s advertising. It doesn’t define the brand. It enhances one aspect of it.

Perhaps
Windows 7 will be launched with a campaign that will lift the spirits and entice the parts that Microsoft advertising has mostly failed to reach for quite some time. Perhaps.

While Apple has kept on steadily associating Microsoft with turgid, virus-infested slop made by the poorly dressed and pitiful.

It depends what you call advertising. Apple’s whole culture is built around the understanding that its very best advertising isn’t TV spots or print ads. It’s the products.

So you might be wondering, as you sip your weekend cocktail and ponder why the NBA playoffs are even longer than the regular season, just how much each company’s advertising might have contributed to these slightly diverse results.

It is difficult to name two Microsoft campaigns that actually built on each other. It is difficult to name two Microsoft campaigns that even reflected the same spirit, the same ethos, the same sense of a defined brand.

The majority of Microsoft’s products don’t enjoy the same quality of exposure. And certainly not the same quality of design. Which means the onus on Microsoft’s advertising should be to create far more drama and positive emotion around the brand. It hasn’t happened.

However, somewhere, somehow, the potential strengths of the Microsoft brand have not been projected by advertising. There seems to have been no consistent strategy, no sense, even, of what emotional values the brand should represent.

For reasons many, varied, and probably political, the company never found a campaign to better it. Advertising came and went. Consistency was non-existent. Contrast that with even the Hodgman/Long ads–they maintain the clean white backdrop enjoyed by so many other Apple ads. Whatever they say, they say Apple immediately.

As Apple announced a billion app downloads, Microsoft gritted its molars with a view to finally shaking a little of the smugness from Apple’s chops.

(Credit: CC Robert Nelson/Flickr)

Microsoft unfortunately abdicated from giving its brand lasting positive emotional values when it walked away from the potentially forward-thinking and moving “Where Do You Want To Go Today?” campaign in 1996.

In that same period, the Apple brand seems to have gained a strength that not everyone might have predicted. But how much is simply down to Apple’s advertising?

It could have been a contender. Is the advertising to blame?

As different products are launched, each ad adds to the style and simplicity of the whole brand. And the values that Apple embraces–simplicity and style being just two–are ones that last through time. They matter to the customer.

Can one imagine Apple launching any product, in any category, without its advertising identifying it, tonally and visually, as being an Apple product?

As Apple celebrated, Microsoft canceled the company picnic.

And now a company that has such a large market share is playing image catch-up. Which is really quite odd.

The onus on Apple’s advertising is largely to say: “Look at this. Isn’t it cute? And cool. Apple? Of course, it’s Apple. Who else did you think it was? Toshiba?”

In the end, Microsoft, a brand that has considerable strength in the marketplace, seems to have become something of a diffused, defused blur in projecting its image. Microsoft built a business machine. But its brand advertising became like your demented auntie at Christmas: there, but not there.

If you asked anyone in the wider beyond to tell you about just one striking piece of Microsoft brand advertising in the last 13 years, you might find them looking as if they’re trying to recall the name of their twelfth one-night stand.

In recent weeks, Microsoft has turned to a strategy of death by a thousand cuts (or, well, at least two) on the Apple brand. Macs are expensive. They’re cool for drooling fools. Oh, and did we mention they’re expensive?

In fact, when Microsoft has been involved with brilliant pieces of work–such as this example for
XBox (and, yes, I know this one was banned)- the viewer would be hard-pressed to feel that XBox is anything to do with Microsoft at all. There isn’t even a Microsoft logo anywhere near it.

Apple products are seen far more often than any of the company’s ads. They can be admired, touched, played, and stroked. And the majority are visually striking.

On the other hand, because Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” campaign is aggressive and timely, it could become the only advertising output by which the brand is defined: We’re cheaper, we’re angry, and we’re just not going to take it any more.

In fact, the most memorable and, in my view, brilliant effort since then, was the second Seinfeld and Gates ad. Again, Microsoft walked away far too quickly.

To test this out, I changed my own status at Indiana University to that of an undergrad, a staff member, and an alumni before switching back to being a graduate student. Facebook’s system didn’t complain once, and I was able to verify that the updated status was indeed reflected on my own profile.

Disclosure: I am a part-time technology policy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, where one of my projects involves social-networking privacy issues.

I spoke with a Facebook spokesperson shortly before press time, who told me that she could not comment on the specific issues I raised.

The new privacy settings allow users to customize which friends can view specific details in their own profile. Users can lock down specific bits of information to their friends, friends of friends, or even particular individuals.

Given an example situation where a student doesn’t wish for the Facebook-using professors at their university to be able to view their profile, it would be trivially easy for a professor to log in, and change his or her own status to that of an undergrad.

This sounds like a great idea, and should be a significant benefit to those students who find that their Facebook-advertised parties were busted by police who found out about the events through the social-networking site.

At least under the old controls, Facebook users (in theory) knew that their profiles could, by default, be viewed by any other Facebook user at the same university. This new system provides little in the way of real additional protection, yet may give users a false sense of security, leading the millions of users to post even more stupid and embarrassing things to the site than they currently do.

Changing status in Facebook

Facebook's new privacy controls

Facebook launched a bunch of new privacy controls today, and has received a significant amount of positive press as a result. The praise is perhaps not so deserving–as the new privacy controls can be easily evaded.

There is, however, a significant design flaw present in this new feature. Facebook users can select which types of strangers can view their profile. That is, a student at Stanford University can decide to allow other undergrads to view their profile, while specifically forbidding staff and professors who have not been made a friend from viewing it.

This is a fairly significant security flaw in Facebook’s fancy new privacy controls, and frankly, there isn’t too much the company can do to fix it. In the real world, it’s perfectly possible for an administrative staff member to go back to school (and thus become an undergrad), or for a grad student to become a professor. The status controls need to be modifiable.

The primary problem is that Facebook has no way of determining what someone’s university status is. The company is only able to verify that the user has a valid .edu e-mail address, which could mean that the person is a student, staff member, professor, or alumni. As a result, Facebook asks users to self-report this information.

Poulsen reported on January 17 about a MySpace Bug that leaks “private” teen photos to voyeurs. He wrote, “A backdoor in MySpace’s architecture allows anyone who’s interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles–including those under 16–despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user’s friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months.”

On January 18, Poulsen updated the story to say that the next day, MySpace quietly fixed that back-door bug, without publicly acknowledging the problem, even though users’ profiles had been vulnerable for months.

What’s more worrisome than a public MySpace page? A page that the user only thinks is private. I was just alerted to several stories by Kevin Poulsen of Wired News that publicize recent security breaches on MySpace.

These message boards include self-described groups of “pedos” who hacked into underage-girls’ private MySpace profiles. According to Poulsen, one poster reported successfully pilfering photos from a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl, “It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts.”

Then on January 24, Poulsen reported that “A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site.”

Reporting kudos to Poulsen for staying on top of these emerging privacy concerns. I haven’t seen this story widely reported elsewhere, which is significant since public scrutiny and user concerns are the main points of leverage we have with companies like MySpace and its owner News Corp. to pressure them to devote sufficient resources to developing safe and secure products. Taken together with Facebook’s Beacon fiasco, breaches like these are sure to reinforce the impression that they still have a long way to go.

There are also 70 “sponsored” Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.

Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning’s way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style “compliments” now in the mix.

Long version: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It’s Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven’t heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it’s positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.

What’s the difference between a device that bundles music and the relationship between iTunes and iPod? Weren’t they tied together?

UPDATED 2:55 p.m.
(To include legal challenges to alleged anticompetitive relationship between
iPod and iTunes.)

The talks are preliminary and no agreements have been reached, the source said. That hasn’t stopped some of Apple’s competitors and antitrust lawyers from sounding alarms.

The answer is yes and they have been challenged in U.S. and European courts. A year ago, two separate lawsuits, which have now been consolidated, accused Apple of unfair competition, maintenance of a monopoly power and “unlawful tying.” That case and a similar one, Black vs. Apple, are pending, according to documents Apple filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Critics say that Apple, which sells 70 percent of all digital music devices, could use its overwhelming market share to wall out competitors. No other music services–download or subscription–could sell songs to such a device. Music listeners wouldn’t need to get their music anywhere else. Competition among digital music retailers would suffer, said Pakman.

“When Apple came out with the iPod, only Apple could deliver music to it,” Blecher said. “They accused Apple of exclusion. When they did the
iPhone, it was impossible to shift to other carriers. They said that was exclusionary…any time you have high market share and restrict competition in any way, you’re going to raise antitrust concerns.”

But just because smaller players in the market may have similar deals may not be enough to prevent Apple’s deal from being challenged, said Blecher.

Pakman says Apple is following Microsoft’s lead. In 1998 the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing Microsoft of monopolistic practices by bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. The case was settled in 2001. In that case Microsoft had monopolistic position in operating systems with Windows, the government charged. The company achieved dominance in browsers by forcing Windows buyers to use Microsoft Explorer.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.

“It smells like classic Sherman Antitrust Act to me,” Pakman said. “I only know what I’ve read but the plan sounds very similar to the tying practices Microsoft used with Windows/Explorer. And Microsoft is still paying the penalties for that one.”

Such a plan “would produce a long and drawn out fight in both the U.S. and European courts,” Pakman said.

In France, a consumer group has alleged that Apple has violated that country’s consumer laws by failing to mention that the iPod is “allegedly not compatible with music from online music services other than the iTunes store” records show.

Maxwell Blecher, an antitrust expert with the Los Angeles firm of Blecher & Collins, agreed that Apple could face legal challenges for bundling if other music vendors are indeed prevented from distributing songs to such a gadget. “Apple is going to argue that they compete with lots of other similar devices,” Blecher said. “You have to look at whether there are exclusionary aspects or conduct. In that debate lays the outcome of any lawsuit.”

Universal Music Group has already signed a deal with Nokia to enable buyers of some of its devices to gain access to all of Universal Music’s library. The music industry source said that UMG is in talks with several other handheld manufacturers as well. But no handheld maker has struck a deal with all four of the top music companies. Apple could be the first.

The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Apple is in talks with the four largest record labels about offering a device with access to the entire iTunes music library. A source close to the negotiations confirmed the report in an interview with CNET News.com and said the offering would be free initially but device owners would later be charged subscription fees.

The parallel is that Apple is forcing people who buy this device with preloaded music to buy its music, Pakman argues.

Apple is in for a fierce legal fight should it ever release a device that offers all-you-can-eat music, according to David Pakman, CEO of rival digital music service eMusic.

Last year, Microsoft’s developer group released Popfly which is a mash-up builder. It’s a visual application creation tool, but it’s also meant to introduce basic concepts of programming.

By creating models of applications, developers can speed up their development time and make it easier to deploy and operate those applications once they are live.

Her post describes D as a “declarative language aimed at non-developers.”

Modeling and end-user programming are big themes in Microsoft’s development tools work.

End-user programming, a long-held idea, is getting more realistic in the days of mashups where people combine data from different Web feeds onto a single Web page.

Microsoft is working on a new development language, called ‘D,’ which will make it easier to model applications, Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports.