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People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code, 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps, Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple's permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day.  

At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad.  If someone could, a grand battle could emerge.  Instead, right now it's looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster.

The Anguish

Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard:

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple's permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

I've always worked at the edge; it's where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I've created would have been possible in an ask permission environment.... I won't work in this ask-permission environment any longer.

As Google's Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, "It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don't know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind."

Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple's Ecosystem Remains the Best

Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society, offers another perspective.

Android needs a better OS before we'd even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn't fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple's legal terms. It's the platform that I fell in love with. It's the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform.

Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave - but probably not enough for consumers to notice.

If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple's hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer - then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big "ifs" in play.

An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn't it?

It is widely accepted that social media has transformed the landscape of marketing radically, and no longer can businesses - no matter their size or stage of development - afford to avoid social media. While the importance of developing one's brand online remains paramount - most obviously through the registration of a domain name - the proliferation of social media platforms can be overwhelming, and startups might feel compelled to register and interact with every service in order to quicken the spread of their name.

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The multitude of social media platforms allow new businesses to establish their online presence, develop a brand and a message, and grow fans and followers - and of course customers - all without extensive investment in elaborate or costly marketing campaigns. The danger, however, lays in the proverbial "spreading oneself too thin" by attempting to make sure one's startup has a presence in every social media network.

While new businesses should certainly take advantage of social networking, here are a few tips to help avoid social media overload:

• Avoid social-media-for-social-media's sake: Social media endeavors should always be in service of clear business goals, not merely an abstract notion of "user engagement." Develop a social media plan that supports your business plan.
• Use the services which which you're most comfortable: Take advantage of social media networks to which you already belong and in which you are already active. It is preferable to develop a robust presence on one or two platforms than to create profiles on every possible site, particularly if these are in danger of becoming unused and out-of-date.
• Engage: Despite the far-reaching power of social media networks, these services are not bullhorns. Use them to engage in dialogue with potential investors and customers, not merely to push information out to them. While social media can be a great place to share information, promote a service, and so on, it is important to be responsive - listen, engage.
• Track, evaluate, and adapt: Many services offer analytics tools in order to ascertain traffic levels and engagement. Be sure to check these regularly to evaluate the ROI of a platform. And as the field of social media is ever changing, be prepared to adapt. For example, just because a service like Foursquare is popular now does not mean that you should be forever wedded to location-based marketing.

Although it is tempting to register for every social media site and to try to adopt every new tool, the drawback may be that in an attempt to network everywhere, your startup fails to network anywhere.

Do you want an iPad with every wretched fiber of your being, but you can’t quite articulate why? Well, College Humor’s Jake and Amir feel your pain.

After all the waiting in line, televised hype and general silliness, it’s kind of a relief when the parodies start coming out in full-force — especially when they capture so perfectly the cultural zeitgeist: IE, I think we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what purpose the iPad will serve in our daily lives.

Why do you want an iPad (if, in fact, you do)? Share your reasoning in the comments.

Tags: apple, humor, ipad, web video

Heavy Gmail label users will appreciate the latest experimental feature, available in Gmail Labs: Nested Labels, which let you organize your inbox into as many categories and subcategories as you like.

To enable it, open Settings — Gmail Labs, and enable the “Nested Labels” option. Now, if you want to create a child label — or a subfolder, if you will — you must name it with slashes (/). For example, you can create a label named “Friends”. A nested label for that label could be named “Friends/Workplace.” It would be nice to manipulate nested labels via drag and drop, but for now this naming scheme is the only way to do it.

Once you create nested labels, you can collapse and open their parent label for better visibility. Google claims you can create “complex hierarchies” of labels, and it’s true, we haven’t been able to reach a limit for how many nested labels you can create; however, you’re limited by the number of characters you can use for the name of your label, which is 40.

Another new experimental feature is Message Sneak Peek, which lets you preview a message by right-clicking on its subject in the inbox, while the message itself stays unread. The feature gets much more useful if you turn on keyboard shortcuts in Gmail Settings; now you can open a sneak peek “card” by pressing “h,” and navigate with “j” and “k.” Dismiss the peek card by hitting Escape.

Tags: gmail, gmail labs, Google, nested labels

RIM has made an acquisition today; the mobile device manufacturer has acquired QNX Software Systems from Harman International. The deal is is expected integrate user experience in RIM’s smartphones and QNX’s in-vehicle audio and infotainment systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

RIM will also be working to expand QNX’s technology in the automotive markets. The Canadian mobile device manufacturer just acquired BlackBerry-app maker Viigo a few weeks ago.

QNX Software Systems, based in Ottawa, Ontario, was founded in 1980 and acquired by Harman in 2004. One of its flagship products is the Neutrino platform OS, which the company says is deployed across multiple business sectors including automotive, industrial, telecommunications, medical, defense, and aerospace.

QNX recently announced that its technology has been licensed for more than 17 million in-vehicle systems worldwide, an increase of 130 percent since 2008.

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What to Expect from Web 3.0

Continue reading iPhone Dev Team's MuscleNerd shows off VNC on iPhone OS 4 beta, hints at jailbreak

iPhone Dev Team's MuscleNerd shows off VNC on iPhone OS 4 beta, hints at jailbreak originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Cloud computing users are shifting their focus from what the cloud offers to what it lacks. What it offers is clear, such as the ability to rapidly scale and provision, but the list of what it is missing seems to be growing by the day.

IBM shot back at Oracle's Exadata platform this week with new server products that combine IBM hardware and software in preconfigured systems for companies doing large-scale data analytics and transaction processing.

Dawinderpal Sahota, Computing, Wednesday 7 April 2010 at 15:50:00

Other PC and handset manufacturers expected to follow suit

Nokia is looking to rival Apple’s iPad with its own tablet computer, which could be in stores later this year.

Samsung, HP and a host of other PC and handset manufacturers are expected to follow suit, creating a similar device of their own, according to a report by news agency Reuters.

Apple has already enjoyed widespread success with the iPad, selling 300,000 units on its first day in stores.

The success of Apple’s iPhone following its release in 2007 surprised Nokia, and it took the Finnish phone manufacturer almost two years to launch a rival smartphone with a large touch screen.

Nokia has already ventured into new markets, entering the PC industry last year when it introduced its first laptop. The phone manufacturer has sold small phones designed primarily for internet browsing since 2005, but with very limited success.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Online Reputation Management

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

I know how to tweak PHP code, but not nearly enough to build complete programs or applications. In fact every time I wanted to build a WordPress plugin in the past I asked some friend to do it for me. Some times it worked fine, other times it didn’t work at all.

The same is true for web applications. I had many ideas for them in the past, but I always had to hire coders to implement them. Even when I managed to find a willing coder there would be time delays, the program would not look exactly how I wanted, upgrading it was a problem and so on.

Recently I came up with another cool idea for a web app, but for the past two weeks I have been looking around for the right coder. In vain.

Guess what? I am pretty tired of not being able to code stuff myself, so I made a resolution for 2010: I’ll learn programming. That is, I want to be able to put together functional web applications by the end of this year.

Now do I think everyone must learn it too? Not at all. If you just want to build websites, you probably don’t need to code to be successful. There are plenty of bloggers and webmasters out there making six figures annually with zero programming knowledge.

That being said, if you plan to work full time on the web for the rest of your life, I believe that knowing how to code can give you a competitive edge over other people. So you mustn’t learn how to code, but perhaps you should.

Thinking about that I figured that it could be cool to launch a new blog about learning how to code. That is, a blog where I would document my journey in learning how to code. I am planning to teach it to myself using books and free resources from the web, so other people could follow the same foot steps.

What do you think? Are you interested in learning to code as well, and would you like to read a blog on the topic?

Everyone's streaming media darling, Netflix, has just reached terms with both Universal and Twentieth Century Fox. Both agreements beef up Netflix's streaming content while limiting Netflix to renting DVD and Blu-ray discs 28 days after the retail street date -- yup,

Netflix inks with Universal and Twentieth Century Fox: first TV streams, more films, and 28 day rental delay originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple has unveiled its new iPhone OS 4 with a ton of new features including a "smart" multitasking, iBooks and an ad networks - that's only the highlights.

Multitasking

To limit battery draining by apps running in the background, like it is happening with Android phones, Apple has limited the number of operating system (OS) services that apps can access in the background to seven: Audio, VoIP, Location, Push Notifications, Local Notifications, Task Completion, Fast App Switching. Fast App Switching allows to freeze the apps and to restore them quickly when you switch back, thus avoid a complete reload. That should be called multi-mono-task, maybe? Local Notifications can be sent directly from apps on the iPhone without requiring an external server like today's Notifications (it's easier for developers). If a status update happens in an app running in the background, you will receive a notification. On the Voice over-IP side (VOIP), you will be able to continue a conversation over VoIP (Skype for example) while checking other applications (Calendar...). The Location Services power consumption is limited by switching from GPS (accurate to 3 meters) to cell towers (accurate to 200m or so). An icon on the main screen tells the user which mode the phone is in, clever! The addition of App Folders with drag and drop is great: now I will be able to organize my apps better (games, news...). Check the multitasking video in the full post.

Permalink: Apple's Announcement of the iPhone OS 4.0 from Ubergizmo | Hot: Sony Vaio Z Review, iPad Review

Transactions of private-company stock on SecondMarket nearly doubled in March, rising to $70 million from $43.8 million in February. It is the highest amount that has ever been traded on SecondMarket. The stats are in its March report, which you can download here.

A full 41% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, compared to 48% in January. We’ve reported that these sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). Despite the demand, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not appear to be in any rush to take the company public.

MedeAnalytics, a healthcare performance analytics company, saw 14% of the transactions, LinkedIn took 10% of the transactions, with Zynga taking 7% of the sales, and Twitter and LifeLock each taking 4% of the total. eSolar, Slide, Kayak, and Serious Materials were also seeing transactions in March. The transactions concentrated mainly in consumer products and services (72%), media and entertainment (14%) and IT services (14%).

In terms of unmet bids, Facebook led the way with one-third of all buyside demand followed by Twitter (6%), LinkedIn (5%) and CraigsList (4%). On the seller side, ex-employees of start-ups continue to make up the bulk of parties who are selling shares, but the percentage of current employees and investors selling shares rose slightly in March.

In a rollout of the OS Thursday at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., company CEO Steve Jobs heralded the release of a developer preview of iPhone OS 4.0 available Apple's developer Web page. Users will be able to get the OS this summer.

With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.

We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole?

After all, looks do matter, especially if you want to reach the broad masses and steal users away from other operating systems.

The new look

Overall, the new Ubuntu will have a sleeker, more stylish look. According to Ubuntu’s branding page, the overall design theme from 2004-2010 was “human”, while the new version uses “light” as its overall theme.

We’re not going to discuss the UI or logo design details here. There are better places to read up on that, but to give you an idea of how big the changes are, here below you can compare the old and new logos and user interfaces. (The image at the top of this post is from Ubuntu’s new boot screen.)

Old vs. new Ubuntu logo

Old vs. new UI theme

As you can see, it’s a pretty big makeover, arguably the biggest visual change ever in Ubuntu’s history. Keep in mind that the design details are still being polished, so by the time the final version is released, it might be slightly different. (If you want to keep up to date with the ongoing Ubuntu design and UI changes in Lucid Lynx, have a look at for example OMG! Ubuntu.)

There’s always an element of subjectivity when judging what looks good and is appealing, and then there is the usability factor to consider, but we think most people will prefer the new style.

Good looks and popularity

As we mentioned in the introduction, what we’re really interested in is how these changes will affect Ubuntu’s popularity. Will the new, sleeker look bring in more users to Ubuntu?

Good looks is far from the only factor that users consider, but you’d be hard pressed to argue it doesn’t have a big impact. If Ubuntu (and Linux in general) wants to attract the broad masses, usability improvements alone won’t matter, things have to look good and deliver a consistent user experience.

The bottom line is that the more attractive Ubuntu becomes, the easier it will be to market to non-Linux users. These are the people Ubuntu has to pull in if it’s to grow the Linux user base as a whole. It has to steal users away from Windows and Mac OS X, and looking at least as good as these will pretty much be a must.

What do you think? Do you approve of Ubuntu’s makeover, and do you think it will help it gain users?

Filed under: OS Updates, Security

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Qubes uses virtualization, sandboxing to deliver a more secure desktop OS originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Open Text (news, site) is starting to reveal its plans in regards to the recently closed deal on Nstein Technologies. Just as we thought, the first bets are on Nstein’s Text Mining Engine (TME) — now known as Open Text Content Analytics — and its integration with the entire Open Text ECM Suite.

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Does a Facebook-specific antivirus application sound like a good idea? Maybe not. One of our analysts saw this particular application claiming to be an antivirus wreak havoc on his Friends list. Of course, there is no such thing.

Once installed on one Friend's account, this application tags 20 Friend into a picture such as the one below:



If a Friend looking through the photos then clicks on the app's (apparently randomly generated) link, they'll see this:



If you have a lot of friends, you might end up with a series of albums like this:



You can find more information about this, including instructions on how to remove the tags on the photos, at

On 29/03/10 At 09:14 AM

Love it or hate it, today was April Fools' Day, and we hope you enjoyed our attempt at spicing things up this morning. We've tagged our April Fools' posts, and will ensure that today's remaining posts are the real deal, so there should be no confusion. Although, if you just can't get enough of the pranks, Google certainly has no shortage of them.

Filed under: Cellular, Business

While everybody was talking about the iPhone OS 4 event yesterday, Apple also quietly announced WebKit2, a major contribution to the open source WebKit project that forms the basis of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. One of the reasons that Google Chrome doesn't crash very often is that Google uses a split process model. Every tab in Chrome runs in a different process and a crashing plugin or bug only takes down this tab and not the whole browser. While Google had to develop this code from the ground up for Chrome, Apple is now making this technology a core part of the WebKit2 framework.

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Here is how Apple's engineers Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig describe WebKit2:

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

What does this mean for users? First of all, Safari and every other application that uses WebKit, including the popular NetNewsWire RSS reader or the Konqueror browser for KDE, for example, will soon be able to rely on the same kind of crash protection that Google Chrome currently offers. Microsoft's IE8 already features a similar crash-protection mechanism and as our own Sarah Perez noted earlier today, the latest beta version of Firefox (Lorentz) now also lets some processes (Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight) run in separate instances.

Getting Ready for Multi-Core Browsing

WebKit2 will also implement a number of APIs that will make applications more responsive. These will allow applications to render web content in the background without blocking other processes that the application wants to execute. As Stephen Shankland points out, this technique will also make it easier for developers (including Apple) to take advantage of multi-core chips.

For a more detailed look at the technical side of WebKit2, also have a look a this document from the WebKit2 team.

Filed under: iPhone

TUAWiPhone 4.0 OS Secrets: MobileMe notes syncing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dawinderpal Sahota, Computing, Tuesday 6 April 2010 at 14:26:00

An indicator of an upswing in the tech market?

The global technology market could be well and truly on the mend if Samsung’s forecasted earnings for Q1 2010 are anything to go by.

The company says it will outperform its record first-quarter earnings this year and plans to spend significantly more on capital than the £4.6bn invested in 2009.

It also expects an operating profit of between £2.4bn and £2.6bn for the three months ended 31 March. That would be at least seven times the £347m profit for the same period last year.

Samsung predicts that the global economic recovery will stimulate demand for TVs, mobile phones and computers. It expects to sell 35 million LCD sets this year, while LG Electronics, the second-ranked LCD manufacturer, plans to ship 25 million in 2010.

Samsung said that demand for chips and LCDs will be strong. According to analysts cited in a report by Bloomberg, global PC demand will rise 15 per cent in 2010 and global shipments of LCD TVs will rise 22 per cent in 2010.

The company has therefore reported a 75 per cent increase in annual profit, marking a five-year high of £5.5bn.

The company recorded a loss of £13m in Q4 2008, but recovered to generate net income of £1.8bn net income for the corresponding period a year later. In the third quarter of 2009, Samsung posted record-breaking quarterly earnings and expects to surpass that figure when it announces its 2010 first-quarter results.

Filed under: Deals, Silver Lake Partners, Private equity

This post was written by DailyFinance contributor Sam Gustin.

Memo to would-be Silicon Valley moguls: do not double-cross a pair of highly litigious billionaires.

After weeks of back-and-forth legal jousting, the tech heavyweights fighting over Skype are set to announce a deal in which the founders of the popular Web-calling service would regain a stake in the company they sold to eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) in 2005 for $2.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. Nice trick.

The pact ends an at-times vicious soap opera replete with accusations of back-stabbing, dishonesty, and outright theft against Mike Volpi, the pair's one-time Golden Boy, who they believe double-crossed them. The legal circus held up eBay's proposed $2 billion sale of Skype to a consortium of private investors led by Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, the investment firm of Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape.

The pact ends an at-times vicious soap opera replete with accusations of back-stabbing, dishonesty, and outright theft against Mike Volpi, the pair's one-time Golden Boy, who they believe double-crossed them. The legal circus held up eBay's proposed $2 billion sale of Skype to a consortium of private investors led by Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, the investment firm of Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype before selling it to eBay three years ago, will assume an ownership stake in the company, alongside the consortium, according to the settlement.

The duo, who had asserted an intellectual property claim on Skype's technology, also will drop suits they filed against Skype, the consortium and a former top executive of theirs, as part of the deal.

For the past several months, the pair has sought to hold up eBay's sale of Skype to the consortium for $2 billion in cash. eBay would keep a 35% equity investment in Skype, and has maintained that it wants the deal, which values the company at $2.75 billion, to close before the end of the year.

When eBay bought the company, it hoped buyers and sellers would use the service to negotiate auctions on the site. But while Skype has become popular, it never integrated into eBay the way then-CEO Meg Whitman had hoped, and in 2007, the company wrote down Skype's value to $1.2 billion.

Zennstrom and Friis had sought an injunction against the sale, as well as statutory damages at an eye-popping rate of "more than $75 million daily." Additionally, in a barrage of lawsuits, they accused Volpi, the former chief executive officer of Internet TV service Joost -- which Zennstrom and Friis also founded -- of breaching his fiduciary duty by stealing confidential information in an effort to seal the eBay deal for the consortium.

The suits accused Volpi of lying, stealing and bad faith by gaffling confidential information for the consortium. Last summer, Volpi became a partner at Index Ventures -- a member of the consortium -- after leaving Joost as the chief executive. He remained as chairman of the startup, but Friis and Zennstrom kicked him to the curb after they found out about his alleged double dealing.

In one e-mail Zennstrom and Friis produced for the court, Volpi plotted the Skype bid with Danny Rimer, a partner at Index. Volpi's e-mail refers to various players involved with Skype, and Volpi's hope to remain chairman of the company.

"Could be cool," Volpi writes, according to the document. "J/N/Dyne will be very unhappy, but ... oh well."

J/N are Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, and Mark Dyne is a Los Angeles banker and former Skype board member.

Yeah, oh well. Although the deal may now go through, Volpi, a 42-year-old former Silicon Valley golden boy once rumored to be a possible successor to Cisco's John Chambers, has suffered serious damage to his reputation.

"Even if we give Volpi the benefit of the doubt and assume he prevails on the legal issues, his actions and behavior are likely to put a considerable dent in his reputation," wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Chris O'Brien. "Volpi seems to have grotesquely underestimated how upset the Joost founders would be. In case you're wondering, the answer appears to be: VERY ANGRY."

Too bad for him, Zennstrom and Friis may be thinking. After all, they felt burned by Volpi and sought to strike back against him. It's a cautionary tale for would-be Valley machers: don't mess with this pair.

Skype soap opera ends as founders set to regain stake ahead of $2B sale originally appeared on BloggingBuyouts on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:50:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Smooth-Stone CEO Barry Evans

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.”

However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans thinks yes, and I think the IP licensing company behind the architecture does too, because it appears to be cooking up something that involves using its architecture inside servers. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc, declined to talk to me for this story, saying the timing was not yet right to talk about the company and servers “for a few reasons that I can’t discuss.”

Evans was formerly an executive at Intel, where he worked in the chip maker’s ARM business unit; he stayed with the division after Intel sold the line of chips to Marvell. Other members of the Smooth-Stone team hail from HPC systems startup Convey vendor Convex Computer and Newisys, a company that helped build the first server optimized for AMD’s Opeteron chips and was purchased by Sanmina in 2004. Evans was coy about what exactly Smooth-Stone is doing, but did say that the system the company is building is not designed for the high-performance computing market and will use ARM-based chips.

However it’s not enough to swap out x86 chips for those based on ARM and expect the new systems to work. For one thing, it takes a lot of low-power processors to equal the performance of a single multicore Nehalem chip. An even bigger challenge is getting all of the cores to work together efficiently, a problem that another low-power systems company, SeaMicro, likely is solving as well with a box that contains 512 Atom chips. When I asked Evans if Smooth-Stone had built a custom chip to handle the networking and coordination of the ARM-based chips, he said, “Our IP goes all the way down to the silicon level.”

As for when the rest of the world will see this product, Evans declined to give a date, nor would he list customers. But engineers at Cisco, Microsoft and Dell have all mentioned Smooth Stone to me and appear to know something about what it’s attempting to do.

I’ve written about how x86 may be on the verge of losing its hegemony as mobile computing turns to ARM-based architectures and graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia move upmarket into high-performance computing and even into some servers. But the commodity servers that populate the world’s data centers (there are still a few specialty servers using Sun’s Sparc chips or IBM’s PowerPC chips out there, but they are not in the mainstream) seemed fairly safe.

After all, there’s a ton of software written for them and the low cost of such machines makes it hard to imagine someone swapping them out for specialty boxes. Evans doesn’t deny the lure of the commodity server, but because of the need to add so many more servers to meet our rising demand for computing, and the incremental power gains associated with them, he’s betting that the end of x86 domination may be in sight. I’m curious whether alternatives to commodity machines can make it inside the data center, and will be talking about it with some smart people at our Structure conference in June.

“Think of the install base of servers and all of the new servers coming online and how most approaches today save 10 or 20 percent on power,” Evans says. “Now imagine saving 99 percent on power and how completely that changes things and takes power out of the equation.”

If that’s what Smooth-Stone does, it could certainly get CIOs thinking.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Hot Topic: Green Data Centers

After the election we will resume highlighting the substantial dangers inherent in the proposals and that the hoped for benefits in legitimate sales will not materialise as filesharers will simply switch to other undetectable methods to get content for free.

In the meantime we stand by our pledges to our customers:

• Unless we are served with a court order we will never surrender a customer's details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
• If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we'll see them in court.

Len has called her dancing "dreadful."

Bruno has called her the super bitch from hell.

Tony Dovolani just wants her gone at any cost.

America won't oblige, however, at least not yet. Kate Gosselin's controversial stint on Dancing with the Stars continues Monday. Will it be her last performance?

Maybe, maybe not. But Mark Ballas, who was inexplicably eliminated first this season with Shannen Doherty, thinks er need to cut the reality mom some slack.

Mark Ballas (left) is showing Kate Gosselin some love.

"She's really out of her element, thrown in the deep end," Ballas says. "I think she's doing a really good job, and I think people need to give her a break. I absolutely sympathize with her. She's never done this before. It's difficult."

This isn't to say he thinks Kate Gosselin is even remotely good, just that we should back off a little. Until she quits her non-stop whining, don't expect it.

As for who he likes to hoist the coveted disco ball come season's end, Mark is high on Jake Pavelka, Nicole Scherzinger, Evan Lysacek and Erin Andrews.

"I like Erin and Maks together," he said of Erin and partner / rumored beau Maksim Chmerkovskiy. "What they did with the blindfold was really creative."

Who are you rooting for on Dancing with the Stars?

The new F.T.C. rules went into effect on April 2, and they required sites to include a prominent notice across the top of each Web page that mentioned free reports declaring that the only authorized source under federal law for such reports is annualcreditreport.com.

Rather than include such disclosures, Experian added the $1 charge, saying that "due to federally imposed restrictions, it is no longer feasible for us to provide you" with a free credit report. And now that the report costs $1, the new F.T.C. rule would presumably no longer apply.

The offer for the $1 report is very clear and in compliance with the F.T.C.'s rule," she said in an e-mail reply to questions. "There is no express or implied offer on our site for a free report."

Filed under: iPad

TUAWiPhone OS 4.0: Coming this Fall to an iPad near you originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: iPhone

• Can't change lock screen or home screen wallpapers. Settings gives him the choice and indicates the choice has been made, but nothing changes.
• Wallpaper can't even be picked on a 3G
• iTunes doesn't recognize folders and will not perform a backup, displaying an error message that the "backup failed because it was refused by the iPhone." It looks like a new iTunes version will be forthcoming. He also mentioned that folders are interesting, but limited to 12 apps per folder. If you have a lot of games, you'll end up with folders named "Games 1", "Games 2", "Games 3", etc...

TUAWiPhone OS 4 Secrets: Some early glitches reported by devs originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.