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A recent consumer survey by the CGI Group indicates that there is a big opportunity for phone companies to bundle their wireless services with the rest of their consumer services.

“Neither phone company is really taking advantage of the advantage of integrating and bundling wireless service with their wireline offering,” said Phil Doriot, program director for CFI Group. “We think there is a significant opportunity here, and the phone companies are better positioned to take advantage of it than the cable companies.”

AT&T is shuffling its top management team in an effort to tie its wireless and wireline businesses more tightly together.

John Stankey, who previously headed up AT&T’s consumer wireline business will be CEO of AT&T operations. His primarily responsibilities will center around AT&T’s wireless and wireline networks including the infrastructure, network planning, and engineering. AT&T Labs, the company’s research and development arm will also fall under Stankey’s control.

Specifically, the company is divvying up its management organization into four major divisions: consumer, business, infrastructure, and diversified businesses. Previously, the company organized the company by customer segment and further delineated between wireless and wireline services.

“This is the next natural step in our plan to bring together the best of what we deliver–mobility, broadband, voice, video, data, applications and services on our global IP network–combined with a quality customer experience,” the company said in its statement. “We expect these organizational changes will make us more effective and efficient in our sales and operations.”

Each of these executives will report directly to Randall Stephenson, who remains chairman and CEO of AT&T.

But tighter integration of wireless with wireline is on the strategic road map, the company has said. And it’s already begun licensing content to appear not only on its U-Verse TV service but also on its wireless phones and PC screens providing customers with a “three screen” experience.

Here’s a breakdown of who will be in charge of these four new divisions:

Verizon Communications, which owns controlling shares in Verizon Wireless, is trying to do the same thing.

Ray Wilkins will get the new title of CEO of diversified businesses. His role will be relatively unchanged. He will continue to look after AT&T’s online and paper yellow pages as well as the company’s international investments among other things.

Ron Spears, will continue to run AT&T’s business group. But he is getting a new title and a few more responsibilities added to his watch. He will now be CEO of AT&T business solutions. And he will be in charge of all business services from large enterprises to small and medium businesses on a global basis. He will also handle all corporate wireless sales.

But so far the phone companies have not introduced services or applications that truly cross platforms. And neither of the companies has aggressively marketed wireless service as part of its bundle of services, which already includes TV, high speed Internet, and TV.

The management shuffle will bring AT&T’s wireless and wireline activities closer together, a goal that the company said it has been trying to achieve since it finalized the acquisition of BellSouth and got full control of Cingular Wireless. The company rebranded Cingular Wireless AT&T, but it has yet to tie its wireless services closely with its wireline business.

“The management changes further align our employee teams, product offerings and resources around consumer and business customer segments, and integrate the management of our core infrastructure capabilities,” the company said in an e-mail statement. “Our customers want a One AT&T experience and these changes help us do that for both consumers and businesses.”

Ralph de la Vega, who had formerly been the head of AT&T’s wireless division after the company acquired BellSouth and gained full control of Cingular Wireless, will now be the CEO of consumer markets for AT&T. He will be in charge of mobility as well as all consumer wireline services, including the new U-Verse TV offering and all of AT&T’s consumer broadband products.

AT&T also sees the opportunity. And the reorganization should help the company refocus its efforts.

According to the report, Zheng believes that because Windows 7’s User Account Control isn’t as annoying as it was in Windows Vista, Microsoft is leaving its users open to more threats by third parties trying to exploit vulnerabilities. Zheng contends that due to changes in UAC, “malicious code could turn off alerts entirely with the user getting little notice that such a change had been made.”

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In Windows Vista, a UAC prompt popped up each time any major change was made to the system. Some users found that annoying. Realizing that, Microsoft decided that in Windows 7, users would be able to decide how often they want to be notified. The default setting in the beta release of the OS only notifies users when a third-party application is making a change.

In the same blog post, Fathi posed the question of whether or not UAC actually makes your system more secure. Unfortunately, the answer was less than ideal.

Zheng said in a blog post that he and a fellow blogger, Rafael Rivera, have designed a proof-of-concept code to prove his theory. He believes, “at a minimum, that Microsoft’s default setting (should) also warn users if a change is being made to UAC itself.”

“Does (UAC) make the system more secure?” Fathi said. “If every user of Windows were an expert that understands the cause/effect of all operations, the UAC prompt would make perfect sense and nothing malicious would slip through. The reality is that some people don’t read the prompts, and thus gain no benefit from them (and are just annoyed)…There is the potential for a definite security benefit if you take the time to analyze each prompt and decide if it’s something you want to happen. However, we haven’t made things easy on you–the dialogs in Vista aren’t easy to decipher and are often not memorable.”

Worse, the company found in an internal study that users are “approving 89 percent of prompts in Vista and 91 percent in SP1.” In other words, users are “responding out of habit due to the large number of prompts rather than focusing on the critical prompts and making confident decisions.”

The annoying, more secure Windows 7?

(Credit:
Microsoft)

So, there’s your challenge, Microsoft: make Windows 7 more secure, but cut down on UAC annoyances. Is it possible? Sure. But in its current state in Windows 7, it’s not enough of an improvement to ensure more security, since many users won’t change the default setting, leaving them open to exploitation, while others will ignore most of the prompts.

Last Friday, Ina Fried detailed an interesting report from blogger Long Zheng, who “is drawing attention to an apparent shortcoming” in Microsoft’s desire to make
Windows 7 less annoying.

But it’s because of that setting that Windows 7 is less annoying. But should we accept annoyance anyway, if it means more security? I think we should.

“We understand adding an extra click can be annoying, especially for users who are highly knowledgeable about what is happening with their system (or for people just trying to get work done),” Ben Fathi, a Windows 7 engineer, wrote in a blog post. “However, for most users, the potential benefit is that UAC forces malware or poorly written software to show itself and get your approval before it can potentially harm the system.”

It should be noted that Zheng’s contention is based on the Windows 7 beta, which means practically nothing until the final build hits store shelves. Microsoft can change that setting at any time and make this issue go away. More importantly, it can be changed by the administrator, so the issue, while present, shouldn’t be blown out of proportion.

So maybe the issue isn’t necessarily the number of UAC prompts, but the quality of those prompts. Maybe Microsoft needs to focus on making those UAC prompts more intelligent, more informative, and less derivative. After all, if users are better informed, they may be less annoyed, creating a situation where UAC actually cuts down on many of the issues facing Microsoft’s operating system.

Annoyance with more security isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But Microsoft is trying to find a way to achieve less annoyance while maintaining security. That won’t be easy.

No one said securing Windows 7 would be simple. But Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping us safe when we use its OS and UAC is a key component in that. Now it needs it to figure out how to make everyone happy. And maybe, eliminating annoyance isn’t the best way to do that. Perhaps, annoying us just a little less, is the best way to secure Windows 7.

Glyn Moody wonders whether Microsoft has taken the first step in an all-out patent offensive against Linux. After talking with Gutierrez earlier this week, I highly doubt that.

For Microsoft to do that credibly, it would have to go where Linux is strongest and has the highest earning potential: servers. There, Microsoft will encounter IBM and others with bigger patent portfolios than its own. Microsoft has shown little appetite for that fight.

Even so, I think that Microsoft has resigned itself to coexistence with open source, even if it’s not always a peaceful coexistence. On the same day that Microsoft announced the TomTom lawsuit, Microsoft Windows chief Bob Muglia also acknowledged that eventually, “almost all our product(s) will have open source in (them).” Microsoft has taken a reality check, and open source is part of reality.

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Last week, Microsoft promoted Horacio Gutierrez, formerly vice president of intellectual property, to corporate vice president. This week, Gutierrez polished his new business cards and sent them TomTom’s way, with a patent infringement lawsuit.

This TomTom suit, in other words, may well be the opening shot in a broader battle, but for now, it’s the action of a sniper, not a broad fusillade.

But part of that reality will absolutely be infringement of Microsoft’s patents, and Microsoft’s own violation of Linux-related patents (held by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others). That’s the patent minefield in which the software industry operates.

It’s also important to remember, as TechFlash reminds us, that Microsoft has never been a litigious company. While I despise the FUD that Microsoft has promulgated around open source and Linux, specifically, over the past few years, the reality is that Microsoft has sued only three times in its company history over patent claims.

Maybe we, in the open-source world, need to settle down a little. We have an allergic reaction to patent infringement suits–and for good reason–but one company-specific lawsuit does not a war campaign make.

For all the bluster in the open-source press right now, it’s important to keep in mind that TomTom has been battling patent lawsuits for years, some of which may relate to its use of Linux. In 2005, its CEO said at the ICT2008 conference that TomTom spent more that year on patent litigation than on anything else combined. Microsoft’s eight-part lawsuit is par for the TomTom course, it would seem.

This speaks ill of the patent minefield that awaits any technology company, a problem called out recently by Red Hat associate general counsel Rob Tiller. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that Microsoft has declared war on Linux.

As Gutierrez told CNET News, Microsoft’s lawsuit is very specific to how TomTom uses the Linux kernel: “(It’s the) TomTom implementation of the Linux kernel that infringes these claims. There are many flavors of Linux (and) many implementations of the Linux kernel. Cases such as these are very fact-specific.”

This hardly sounds like a sneaky launch of the spiffy new patent product line at Microsoft. It sounds more like what Gutierrez claims it is: “This is just a normal course-of-business dispute between two companies. (Linux) is not the focal point of the action.” Ironically, it could have been obviated had Microsoft bought TomTom back in 2006, as it was then rumored to be interesting in doing.

In some ways, we should be grateful for how Microsoft has carried itself in this TomTom infringement claim. There are no broad pronouncements of Linux violations, as in the past. There are no white papers being circulated, decrying open source as anti-American and cancerous. There is just a reasoned, FUD-free patent infringement claim.

It’s not a system I like, but let’s not get carried away. The GPS community doesn’t seem to be wringing its hands over the fact that most of the claims in Microsoft’s case relate to TomTom’s alleged infringement of Microsoft’s GPS technologies.

It may turn out to be specious, but it’s very welcome to see it made without the sound and fury of past Microsoft public pronouncements about open source.

This is not Microsoft’s opening salvo in a war against open source. That “war” has been ongoing for years, has taken many forms, and seems to want to change open source’s $0.00 price tag to something higher. Something, in other words, with which Microsoft can compete.

As CNET News’ Ina Fried reports, Microsoft on Wednesday launched a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom, maker of GPS systems. TomTom, for its part, summarily rejects the claims and says it will “vigorously defend” itself. Lawsuits are filed all the time, but this one is of particular interest to the open-source community because it includes three claims of patent infringement related to Linux file management technologies.

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Several bloggers and readers are reporting that when they tried to update the firmware on their iPhones Friday, the devices were “bricked,” or rendered unusable.

CNET News reader Peter8105 reported the same thing Friday morning. Blogger Dave Winer posted the error message he got to his Flickr page Friday morning, and complained of the same bricking phenomenon. He does report that he can still make emergency calls, however.

Just from the few reports trickling in, it appears this is only happening to people who tried to update their firmware Friday. There were no such reports when many iPhone owners were able to update their devices Thursday.

Apple has not responded to requests for comment yet, but at first glance the problem appears to be stemming from the severe overload Apple’s iTunes servers experienced Friday as people across the world came out to buy the iPhone 3G.

Update 2:20 p.m. PDT: Many readers are reporting that they have been able to restore or update their iPhones now.

CNET Blog Network contributor Matt Asay reported around 7 a.m. PDT Friday that when he attempted to use iTunes to update his
iPhone, he got an error message and his phone stopped working. He says he can’t access contacts or make calls.

Update 11:20 a.m. PDT: A reader added the text of a note he received from Apple in the comments. Apple blames the problem on “network congestion on the iTunes server,” but says you should be able to update or restore the firmware once the traffic dies down.

We’ll keep updating the story, but let us know in the comments section if you’re having similar problems with the 2.0 firmware update Friday.

I thought about this one a lot, and I believe the cleanest way to add this feature to the iPhone without cluttering up the user interface is to put another meaning on the Home button: hold down for more detail on the current item.

The things I like are, generally, the same things everyone likes. The iPhone is feature-rich, well integrated, well supported by independent software developers, and fun to use.

But come on, Apple! The lines on a sheet of paper are fixed. The lines on a computer display aren’t. Stretch the lines apart so that every event gets the space it needs! Jeez, this isn’t rocket science.

A popular “where’s the feature?” in many articles about the iPhone is the absence of copy/paste functionality. This makes moving data between applications painfully difficult. For example, I’ve sometimes been forced to write down–on paper!– something I wanted to copy from Mail into Notes or vice versa.

My Apple Newton, Palm Treo, and Apple iPhone 3G.

Syncing third-party app data
Currently I use Griffin’s iTalk app to record voice memos. It’s a decent app, but it highlights another “where’s the feature?” issue: where is the standard method for syncing third-party application data to the Mac desktop?

(For the adventurous, this database is located at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup on a Mac, or C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup on a Windows machine. There are a few third-party apps that can extract some of this information, but I don’t know a way to make changes and get them back into the phone.)

On handheld devices, I much prefer the latter strategy because ease of use trumps the ability to abandon changes. Also, since an incoming call can pull the user away from a running application, it’s better for changes to be saved instantly. But one way or the other, there should be a standard for this element of the user interface.

And finally…
What I’d like to see: a MobileMe folder in the user’s home directory that contains one folder for each app that wants to sync data with the desktop.

The Calendar app doesn’t handle multiple-user event scheduling very well. Invitations received by the iPhone’s Mail app aren’t understood by the phone. I can go look at the message on my
Mac and add the event to my calendar there, and eventually the event shows up on my iPhone, but that’s not so good when I’m traveling. And even then, the event can’t be edited on the iPhone–not at all, not even to change the times.

The Calendar app does something else that’s kind of silly. In the daily view, most events get two lines of text: the title and location. Displaying these two lines takes up about one hour of the day. For a shorter event–one scheduled for 30 minutes, say–the two lines get squeezed into one line in an attempt to maintain the orderly appearance of the schedule.

Music and video
The iPod application is missing a valuable feature found in the desktop iTunes application. It can’t play music or videos shared from a Mac on the local network. This feature would be a great way around the iPhone’s limited local music and video storage. (Brian Tiemann had the same thought.)

This would also be the right way to add local file storage to the iPhone. I bought Avatron’s Air Sharing application, but that has its own transfer method that’s a lot less convenient than what I’d like to see.

I can understand why Apple assigned a higher priority to whiz-bang features like multitouch; if you don’t sell a product, it doesn’t really matter how well it works. But now that the iPhone’s long-term success is absolutely assured, it’s time to get back to the mundane stuff like plumbing and save application developers the grief of having to implement their own solutions.

(Credit:
Apple)

Notes has other problems. It’s slow to start up and can’t be configured to open into a new note, which makes it ineffective for quickly jotting down short notes such as phone numbers. It uses the MarkerFelt font, which is ugly and more difficult to read than other fonts on the iPhone. (Personally I wonder if this was a misguided homage to the hand-printed appearance of the Casual font on the Newton. Casual would be a good choice for this app, though, since it’s highly readable.)

Muting and sounds
For example: Where’s the feature to mute the phone? You may point to the little toggle switch on the left side, but no, that just mutes the ringer and certain audio alerts, not the whole phone. On my old Palm Treo, the mute switch darn well muted everything, as if the switch disconnected the speaker wires themselves.

Judging from Apple’s job listings, it’s hiring a lot of people to work on iPhone software, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’ll just have to see how quickly Apple can improve the iPhone, and whether it can maintain a clean, consistent user interface at the same time.

There’s a search field in the Contacts list, but for some inexplicable reason, it scrolls with the list. If you aren’t at the top of the list, you can’t initiate a search. That really needs to be fixed. Also, the search function ought to support searching for names based on first initial, last name (the “flast” method), which generally works better than searching for first and last names.

The things I don’t like are, generally, software features that ought to be present but just aren’t.

This reminds me of one more idea.

The Calendar app does something very nice: the icon on the iPhone’s home screen shows the current day and date. So, where’s the feature? Why don’t all of Apple’s apps do this sort of thing where appropriate? The Clock app icon always shows 10:15. The Weather app always shows sunny and 73 degrees. The Stocks app shows a random squiggle. Sure, updating all these icons would give the iPhone some extra work to do–so Apple should provide a “Live icon updates?” setting and have some rules about how often the updates should happen. I think the slight increase in overhead would usually be worth it.

It would be even more useful if the Phone app could record calls, or parts of calls. I had a great little program on my Palm Treo– mVoice, from MotionApps–that did that, and I loved it. If someone was about to give me their contact information or driving directions, I could push a button and make a quick recording. There’s a version of mVoice for the iPhone, but it doesn’t yet have this feature. MotionApps says “we are working hard on enabling this feature and we are expecting to add phone call recording support in near future,” but I’ve heard Apple (or perhaps AT&T) doesn’t want to see this feature on the iPhone. That’s a mistake, I think.

Application-generated sounds have a separate volume control. If you’re not in the iPod application, which has a volume slider, I think the only way to adjust this control is to use the volume rocker switch while an application is making sounds. Sometimes, that’s after the phone has already started to annoy the people around you.

E-mail and Notes
In the Mail app, where’s the common in-box for all mail accounts? I have two accounts I use regularly, and it takes four clicks to switch from one in-box to the other. Apple’s desktop Mail application has a common in-box that displays all the individual in-boxes together (without actually moving the messages), which is just what the iPhone needs.

Apple’s iPhone 3G

The iPhone will sync third-party app preferences and data, sure, but only to that darned sqlite database. Programs like iTalk that need to move data to the Mac desktop have to create their own transfer programs. Griffin, for example, has iTalk Sync. These programs are a pain in the neck to deal with. Griffin has a section on the iTalk Web page that describes how to transfer recordings. It says “it’s easy” but then provides a five-step, 140-word explanation. That isn’t “easy.”

Other iPhone apps have their own transfer programs, which is a mess. It seems to me that round-trip data movement, including translation so that documents can be viewed and edited on the Mac or PC (where practical), is a more fundamental feature for a smartphone than a multi-touch display.

Another thing I’d like to see: a standard way to access “advanced” details on complex items. For example, the desktop Mail program has a lot of detailed account settings, but the iPhone provides no way to manage these settings even though they certainly exist inside the software. In the Phone app’s Recents list, there’s no way to see how long each phone call took. In most items, there’s no way to find out when the item was created or last edited.

I often find myself wishing I could link contacts to events and notes, a feature that was enabled on the Newton by third-party software. I used my Newton to keep track of my business activities, which commonly involved taking notes during phone calls. It would be helpful if the Phone app provided a button to start taking notes that would be available through Notes as well as through the Phone app’s Recent list.

Since Apple is rumored to be releasing the next major
iPhone firmware update today, I thought I’d run through the list now, and then see how the new firmware changes things. Many of these comments apply to the
iPod touch as well.

The Calendar app also has the worst user-interface design in the whole iPhone, I think. To select the date and time for an alarm, you spin three wheels apparently stolen from the game show The Price Is Right. The minutes wheel is so easy to spin that in going from :00 to :30, I commonly spin right past :30 and back to :00. Apple has developed many ways to select dates and times for other systems and applications; this is by far the worst.

Contacts and phone calls
The Contacts application is very slow if one has a long contact list. I currently have a little over 3,000 cards in my list, and it takes several seconds for the contact list to load in whenever I go to search it–in Contacts, Mail, Phone, or wherever. It hesitates for a few more seconds each time I try to use the quick-scroll list (the letters down the right edge of the screen). That’s too slow.

As you’ve noticed by now, pretty much all of these comments are purely software related. In truth, I have almost nothing to say about the iPhone’s hardware. The iPhone’s industrial design and basic hardware features are entirely adequate for my needs, and certainly enough to support all the features I want to add.

Without the ability to select, replying inline to e-mail is so difficult that I usually just use top-posting, which I generally don’t like.

Bottom line: I can’t find a way to make the unit completely silent without going into multiple Settings panels and applications, and even that isn’t completely effective because some applications (as exemplified by the otherwise valuable Phone Aid) will turn the volume back up when they run.

Where’s the feature to let me generate extended Unicode characters and accents? I assume non-English versions of the iPhone make this easy. Does Apple assume that customers who speak English never have an occasion to write to people in other countries? Or that we don’t care about spelling their personal or place names correctly?

Ever since I got my iPhone 3G in late July, I’ve been keeping track of the things I like–and don’t like–about it.

Where’s the feature to let the home screen’s many pages wrap around from one side to the other? I have seven pages with icons (none full; I use the pages to hold different types of apps) and it bugs me to have to flip pages six times to get from 1 to 7 or vice versa.

As I mentioned, I use the Notes program in spite of the fact that it’s basically impossible to bring data into it. It’s possible to export text from Notes by e-mailing it to yourself, but that’s a one-way trip. Notes aren’t available on the Mac after synchronizing an iPhone; they’re locked in an undocumented sqlite database managed by iTunes.

My entire Contacts database disappeared from my phone one day. I was worried about what would happen when I backed up the phone–would it decide I wanted to delete all the contacts from my Mac as well? I made a quick backup of the iPhone database before syncing, but it all worked out OK. It took a long time to restore the list, though. It hasn’t happened again, and I still don’t know why it happened at all.

It would also be nice if, when entering contact information, the iPhone would do word completion based on contact information. Typing “Intel” is no big deal. Repeatedly typing “Microsoft Research Silicon Valley” gets old fast.

But I realized pretty early on that the inability to simply select text is also painful. If I decide I want to rewrite a sentence in an e-mail I’m composing on my Mac, I just select the old text and start typing the replacement sentence. On the iPhone, I have to position the cursor at the end of the sentence and hit backspace a bunch of times (or hold it down and try to let go at just the right moment) before I can start typing again. Similarly, if I want to just delete a bunch of text, like unnecessary sections of the e-mail I’m replying to, I can’t just select it and hit delete.

(In fact, where’s the iPhone’s “to do” functionality? That’s a very basic PDA feature that shouldn’t have been left up to third-party developers. It was easier to manage to-do lists on the Apple Newton 10 years ago.)

The iPhone Favorites screen is the most useful to me, but it would be a lot more useful if it amounted to a global bookmarks function, giving me access to favorite Web pages, applications, and even specific functions within applications like “create new note,” “send e-mail,” “find nearby restaurants,” “show me a route to my house,” etc.

Currently, double-clicking the Home button can perform one of three functions on an iPhone: going to the home screen (just like single-clicking), going to the iPhone Favorites screen, and going to the iPod app. (On the iPod Touch, it always goes into the iPod application.)

On the iPhone, there’s no way to predict which sound sources will respect the mute switch. Calendar alerts do; alarms don’t. These are good choices–I like knowing that the alarm function will still wake me up even if I mute the phone before going to sleep–but hardly intuitive.

In trying to decide between using the Notes app and this Notes folder for note-taking, I realized that the iPhone doesn’t have a single standard for managing modified documents. Mail works like a Mac: when you edit a document, you’re really modifying a copy of the original, and you have to save your work. Notes works like a Newton: you’re editing the original, so there’s no need to save the document, but there’s also no way to abandon your changes.

Alerts and Calendar app
While I’m on the subject of alerts: in the Calendar application, where’s the function to set an alert for the exact time of an event? Sometimes I just want to beep myself at 10 a.m. to make a phone call, for example. I don’t want to have to set the time for 10:05 a.m. and the alert for “5 minutes before.” I love the fact that Calendar supports up to two alerts for the same event, but I wish I could set them to, say, 15 minutes and 0 minutes respectively. This problem could be solved by providing a “Custom” time choice for both of the alerts.

Each time I discover another one of these missing features, I jot it down in my iPhone WTF list. WTF, of course, stands for “Where’s the feature?”

The Mail program, when configured for Apple’s own MobileMe service, has its own Notes folder, but that’s no improvement. Although it’s called “Notes,” the iPhone treats this folder like any other mail folder. A “note” shouldn’t have addressee information, should it? Similarly, there’s an Apple Mail To Do folder, but it has no actual “to do” functionality.

(Credit:
Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Similarly, a long event has plenty of room to display additional information, such as the notes associated with the event–but instead, the event ends up with two lines of text and a bunch of wasted blank space. Display the notes, and shrink the event if that helps to keep the whole day on the screen. I hate having to scroll the Day display just to show two events.

Alarm volume is controlled by the ringer volume, but even the minimum ringer volume is still audible.

(Sheesh, I’ve been busy lately. I had more spare time when I was employed!)

Download Flash plugin

I’m at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized.

While the Praized database content is hosted, Praized itself is not a destination site. Web managers put some code in their blogs, and the Praized content will then appear locally on the site and adopt the site’s native styles. Furthermore, the ratings that people leave for locations and businesses will be specific to the site where Praized is installed. So if the users on a ballet blog leave reviews for a restaurant near a concert hall mentioned in a post, those reviews and ratings won’t get mixed in with reviews for the same restaurant left by readers of a site for wrestling fans. Good thing.

Praized: Local reviews

Plazes is for recording your location intentionally and episodically. It’s not like Whrrl (story), which is designed to track you passively. The idea is that when you land at a location you want people to know about, or get set up at a location where you want people to find you, you click the big “locate me” button on whatever device you have handy, and then your location goes out to the people you want to see it.

Who sees it? That’s part 2 of the changes in Plazes. Right now, your location is updated on Plazes.com and in your widget, if you’ve embedded one on your site. In a few weeks, Plazes will also update Twitter when you want, as well as sending your data to Fire Eagle, and to Plazes’ own API, which other apps can use to grab your location from.

See also: Brightkite (review).

Plazes has been around for a while. It’s a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes’ co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an
iPhone app is coming (when the new iPhone app store goes public in a few weeks). It will let you update your location just by pressing a “locate me” button on your phone. This method will join the PC,
Mac, and Linux software app that locates you based on the unique fingerprint of the Wi-Fi access point you’re connected to (if you’re not connected to an access point, you have to locate yourself manually, by entering a place name or address).

After talking with Plazes’ Petersen, I caught up with Sylvain Carle, co-founder of a brand-new geo company, Praized. This firm is building a database of locations and a rating system for them. It’s designed so that Wordpress and Movable Type site managers can plug the system into their blog, giving their reader communities a Digg-like rating system for the locations mentioned on the site.

Both Plazes and Praized are based on leveraging their own proprietary databases. Plazes is collecting the data of Wi-Fi access point locations (based on coordinating MAC addresses with user reports of location) as well as matching location coordinates with the places that users hang out at (for example, the Starbucks at SFO). Praized’s database is one of physical location and associated reviews. Both look like useful infrastructure plays for emerging online geo businesses, but it’s unlikely either will (or should) remain an independent company for very long.

Praized's Digg-like ratings and reviews are local to the site they run on.

See also: Yelp (location ratings, but not private).

Plazes: Location reporting

Let’s hope it works. Losing Red Hat as an independent open-source vendor would effectively call an end to open source as a standalone software strategy. Some may cheer at this prospect, but I think the software world would be poorer for having open source serve as a minor component in everyone’s arsenal, rather than having Red Hat showcase that it’s a viable business strategy on its own.

For the first time I’m scared for open source. Not open source as a global movement and way of doing business and software development - that’s safe. Even Microsoft believes in it.

But Wall Street doesn’t seem to care. To help telegraph its own confidence in its future, Red Hat has now initiated a $125 million share buyback to hold up its share price.

commentary

No, I worry for Red Hat. As I wrote the other day, if Red Hat’s stock continues to tumble it becomes ripe for an Oracle acquisition. Red Hat has been doing exceptionally well selling into a down market, growing quarter after quarter.

Customers would also be poorer, as The VAR Guy notes. We need an independent Red Hat. We need the market to recognize that open-source Red Hat promises to deliver more value for lower cost in a recessionary market. Customers appreciate that fact and will buy into it. When will Wall Street recognize what customers already know?

Project Guru allows a user to connect remotely to another computer to troubleshoot and correct problems, with the connection secured using encryption and authentication. The tool offers diagnostic tools for network monitoring and identifying software installed on the remote computer.

Symantec is showing a demo on Tuesday at the Demo 2009 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., of a Web-based tool that allows tech savvy people to provide remote support to friends and family having computer problems.

Project Guru lets people diagnose problems on remote computers over the Web.

(Credit:
Symantec)

Are you sick of trying to diagnose your friends’ computer problems over the phone?

Project Guru is in pilot release with select partners and is planned for pilot release to customers in the second half of the year, Symantec said.

The software uses that same internally developed technology as Symantec’s Software as a Service Online Remote Access offering and is complementary to NortonLive PC help services, which offers round-the-clock phone support.

The Webcaster Settlement Act, which would allow Internet radio stations to negotiate with the music industry for a royalty rate lower than what Congress mandated last year, passed the House by a voice vote on Saturday.

Congress is expected to adjourn on Monday, and the Webcaster Settlement Act enables Internet radio stations to reach an agreement with the music industry while Congress is out of session.

Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said Saturday night that Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) had met with representatives of the group and addressed some of their concerns.

As for the legislation’s chances in the Senate, Westergren said he’s cautiously optimistic.

Tim Westergren, founder of Net music service Pandora, said he was elated about triumphing in the House, which came after traditional radio broadcasters withdrew their opposition.

Update at 7:28 p.m. PDT:
Quotes have been added from the National Association of Broadcasters on why it no longer opposes the bill.

“It would be a killer blow,” Westergren said. “If we don’t get it passed now, it would mean waiting for a whole new Congress and administration and lots of uncertainty.”

Westergren, who has emerged as a de facto spokesman for the bill, said some Web radio stations can’t afford a long delay in the talks. Right now, the law requires them to pay the older royalty rate, which Webcasters say will soon drive them out of business.

The House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill that Web radio stations have painted as life or death for their services.

Proponents of the bill had predicted a close vote.

“The bill having passed unanimously in the House certainly gives it momentum heading into the Senate,” Wharton said.

As a result, the NAB dropped its opposition in the House and will not oppose the bill when it moves to the Senate for a vote, either Sunday or Monday (I’ve written a story about the bill’s chances in the Senate and how the NAB was persuaded to drop it’s opposition).

(Credit:
CNET News)

“I’ve become gun shy because I’ve been burned so many times before,” he said. “We’re waiting to see what happens and consulting with our friends (in Congress).”

Web radio stations live to fight another day.

Tim Westergren

Webcasters are fighting for the right to negotiate with the music industry to reduce the royalty rates they must pay to stream music over the Web. Any deal must be approved by the federal government.

The backgrounds of each individual are maintained by the NNDB community and its editors. You can also go in to create your own charts, though you’re limited to NNDB’s directory of people and companies.

Wondering how companies fit together, and where there's overlap? Check out NNDB's mapper tool.

NNDB, a directory of important people and celebrities (the two are not exclusive) standing for Notable Names Database, has put together a mapping tool that lets you connect the dots to see how people are intertwined.

This reminds me a lot of Cogmap, a service that lets you map out the hierarchy of your workplace. It’s got a little more flash, though, and is similar to They Rule, a site outdated about four years that chronicles the “ruling class” of corporations around the world.

For those who are less corporate-inclined, some of the celebrity “maps” are pretty amusing, including charts of who’s been romantically involved with whom.

Thanks Harrison.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One example, featured in this demo video, shows the overlap of board members for large tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can use the tool to figure out who’s worked where, then drill down to their personal histories–both work and play, with very little effort.

I was going to do one for CBS and CNET, but alas we’re not there. You can, however, compare CBS to NBC, ABC, and even Fox Broadcasting. There’s not a lot of overlap, but you can easily see people’s positions at the company and where else they’ve worked.