Monday, March 05, 2007 2:35 PM EST
The United States Patent and Trademark Office will test a project this spring that will post patent applications online, invite comments and rank those comments for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. The Globe and Mail's Matt Ingram says the program is an important first step toward unclogging the patent office pipeline, despite the Web crowd's reputation for being illiterate numbskulls. The very literate crowd at Slashdot, meanwhile, wonders about the dangers of letting corporate users rank their competitors' applications.
Monday, March 05, 2007 2:43 PM EST
USA Today unveiled a major redesign this week, allowing users to comment on every story and personalize their reading experience. Super ad mensch Steve Rubel says the paper didn't go far enough, and should allow readers to open blogs on the site, too. But publishing guru Scott Karp argues the opposite, pointing out that most USA Today readers don't like the change, and probably don't care about "social" tools anyway.
Monday, March 05, 2007 2:55 PM EST
The Recording Industry Association of America announced on Friday that it had adopted royalty rates for music published over the Web. Those rates will likely impact small webcasters who won't be able to afford the fees. Doc Searls annotates the negative repercussions.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 3:09 PM EST
Speed freak take notice: Fujitsu recently broke some records with its new MHW2 BJ HDD, the first 2.5-inch laptop drive to hit 7,200 rpm and offer 160GB of storage. Read: It's fast plus ups the storage capacity on laptops. Fujitsu claims the drive is super quiet when idling and only uses 2.3 watts of power at its max, about average for most notebook HDDs. Expect to see the drives in custom-built laptops by May.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 3:14 PM EST
Microsoft's general counsel criticized Google in his prepared remarks to the Association of American Publishers, arguing that the search giant doesn't respect copyrighted works, either with its book scanning projects or with YouTube. Microsoft, of course, offers competing book scanning projects and is involved with the Open Content Alliance, which only copies books with the publishers' permission, so their resistance to Google's projects is to be expected. Danny Sullivan dissects Microsoft's claims at Search Engine Land.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 3:26 PM EST
Only seven weeks after it launched, the "social network for families" site Geni has raised $100 million in financing from Charles River Ventures.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007 2:49 PM EST
Google is developing a program to help eggheads exchange huge amounts of data. The search giant's open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Good thing, too: Recent research from IDC suggests that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital information last year. That's 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007 3:03 PM EST
Samsung Electronics has begun shipping its hybrid hard drive to the commercial marketplace. Samsung's MH80 series hybrid hard drive is offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities. The MH80 is optimized to work with Windows Vista capable notebook PCs, is 2.5-inches thick, and comes with 128 or 256 megabytes of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a cache comprised of Samsung's OneNAND flash memory, and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007 3:07 PM EST
Bouncing back from a few security problems, Google has released version 5 of its popular Google Desktop software.
Monday, March 12, 2007 8:35 AM EST
Web 2.0 app of the moment: Twitter, the insta-presence and personal updating tool that lets you tell your friends what you're doing and read the mini-chunked diary entries of others. Breathless technophile Robert Scoble thinks Twitter is the bee's knees, while those with more critical minds think the app just adds more noise, less signal. Regardless, if you're not at SXSW this year, Twitter can be your best outlet for information.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:01 PM EST
Viacom dropped a bomb on Google and YouTube yesterday, filing a lawsuit in New York federal district court accusing the search giant and vid share site of massive copyright infringement. Entrepeneur and vocal YouTube critic Mark Cuban was unsurprisingly pleased with the suit, while most of the blogosphere reacted with derision. Tech lawyer Lawrence Lessig notes that the real questions will be whether YouTube has the "ability to control" uploads before they are identified as infringing.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:07 PM EST
Microsoft announced today that it would acquire TellMe Networks, a hosted speech applications company that uses voice recognition to improve data access. Microsoft isn't disclosing the acquisition price, but sources tell Om Malik that it's around $800 million. Will TellMe save Microsoft's mobile search initiatives?
Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:10 PM EST
Cisco, fresh from buying social networking company Five Across Inc., has now agreed to purchase online presentation company WebEx for $3.2 billion. Roughly equivalent to the price of two YouTubes, the purchase price garners Cisco a company that made has a net income of about $47 million on sales of $380 million. Om Malik says the acquisition is part of an ongoing chess game versus Microsoft, which increasingly competes against Cisco in the VOIP business (especially after Microsoft's acquisition of TellMe Networks).
Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:16 PM EST
Yahoo is getting serious about its new apps innovation team, codenamed Brickhouse, and has just hired entrepreneur Salim Ismail to galvanize their efforts. Ismail, who has founded no less than seven companies, will help Yahoo to compete with smaller companies which increasingly beat Yahoo to the innovation punch.
Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:21 PM EST
Could Twitter, the public instant messaging service that's all the rage in Web 2.0 circles these days, be close to death. Blogger Mat Balez argues that despite its rapid adoption, Twitter will flame out before year's end for lack of any substantive uses. Meanwhile, Steve Bryant at Google Watch says Twitter is like Google's Dodgeball SMS service, but boring.
