Laptop bags that skip the airport scanners
Catching a plane in the US? If you have the right sort of bag you no longer need to take your laptop out when it goes through the security scanner.
Our prediction: big delays as travellers get used to the TSA’s finicky rules about exactly when you can leave your laptop in the bag. There must, for instance, be “no metal snaps, zippers or buckles inside, underneath or on-top of the laptop-only section.” And remember: this only applies to the Butterfly, the Sleeve and the Trifold.
Got that?
Intel connection gives Jajah a leg up
Mountain View based Jajah describes itself rather grandly as “the world’s most innovative communications company.” With a little help from its friends at Intel, it may yet live up to the billing.
Intel Capital emerged as the lead investor in a $20m funding round for Jajah completed in May last year pumping in $15m to help Jajah in its bid to replace Skype as the mass-market VoIP provider of choice.
Jajah still has some way to go, but could get a big boost from the announcement today that it will be the first VoIP telephony application to use Intel’s ‘Remote Wake’ technology baked into a new generation of desktop motherboards that will be available next month.
As the name implies, Intel’s technology enables a PC to ‘wake-up’ from an energy efficient sleep state to accept incoming phone calls and undertake other tasks – a PC typically uses about a sixth of its normal energy consumption in sleep mode enabling both Jajah and Intel to claim it as an tree-hugging eco-friendly development.
In order to support the technology, Jajah has built Remote Wake capability into its core telephony infrastructure – something other VoIP providers are also expected to do over time, but the Intel relationship gave Jajah a jump on the competition.
Outside the VoIP field, Cyberlink, Orb Networks and Pando Networks also announced applications and services today that will also take advantage of the Remote Wake technology.
The Yahoo siege is lifted (for now)
The shoot-out at the OK Corral is over and the hired guns are leaving town.
Paulson & Co, once among Yahoo’s half-dozen biggest institutional shareholders and a backer of Carl Icahn’s attempt to pressure the company into a Microsoft deal this Spring, has sold most of its 3.7 per cent interest. In a filing today, the New York-based investor revealed that its stake had dropped to 15m shares at the end of June, from 50m three months before.
This comes in the wake of T Boone Pickens’ disclosure that he had packed his bags as well, selling his 10m share stake at a loss.
This is the part in the movie where the embattled townsfolk bandage their wounds and think about repairing the damage. At the back of their minds, though, they always know that the gunslingers could return, and the fighting next time will only get uglier.
Cyberwar 2.0 in Georgia
The term “cyber warfare” conjures up images of coordinated military attacks mounted to cripple an enemy country’s vital infrastructure.
As the attacks on Georgian government and news Websites in the last few days show, however, the reality is much messier, and might not deserve the term “warfare” at all. It appears to represent an upwelling of antagonism on a broader front, coordinated across the internet to achieve maximum effect. Active government sponsorship is impossible to discern. All very Web 2.0, in fact.
Georgia was quick to accuse Russia of waging cyber warfare over the weekend after massive denial of service attacks against a number of official state Websites. But Jose Nazario, a senior researcher at Arbor Networks in Massachusetts who studied the pattern of attacks, told me his hunch is that this was the work of a loose alliance of hackers and other bad actors, not some sinister, centrally directed government plot.
Back-and-forth denial of service attacks like this (there have also been some in the last few days against Russian sites) have become part and parcel of many tense international situations, according to Nazario. Similar outbursts have occurred at times when China/US relations have been bad and are a frequent feature of Israeli/Palestinian tensions.
In the most celebrated case of “cyber warfare” to date, Estonian Websites came under massive attack in May 2007. In this article in Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Israeli computer security expert Gadi Evron detailed how these were really cyber riots, beginning with Russian bloggers boasting of small-scale assaults and followed by more widespread attacks by botnets.
In a blog post this week, Evron also says he doubts that what is happening in Georgia is cyber war:
Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically. … the nature of what’s going on isn’t clear, but until we are certain anything state-sponsored is happening on the Internet it is my official opinion this is not warfare, but just some unaffiliated attacks by Russian hackers and/or some rioting by enthusiastic Russian supporters.
If smart governments have always known how to use popular uprisings to their advantage, the Web 2.0 world offers many new possibilities.
iPhone as advertising platform
It seems a safe bet that most of the money made by iPhone application developers will come in the form of advertising. That is the overwhelming lesson from the PC-based internet.
So if Steve Jobs is right in saying that the marketplace for paid-for iPhone applications will eventually reach $1bn, how much bigger might the advertising market be? (Jobs’ prediction, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, is based on the $1m-a-day in sales the the new App Store has notched up in its first month, and why not? These are still very early days.)
I caught up on Monday with Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, the internet radio service that has been the most downloaded non-game application on the iPhone. Pandora will very soon be on 1m iPhones: the application was on half a million devices two weeks after the App Store launched, and since then downloads have remained close to the rate of 40,000 a day. Westergren says this has created a sizeable mobile audience to sell to advertisers far faster than he’d expected. But how best to do it?
Like a lot of internet companies, Pandora will have to reinvent itself for this new platform. At the moment it makes all its money from eyeballs (it sells display advertising, relying on the page hits generated by PC users.) The future, though, will be all about ears.
As Westergren says, radio is a natural for mobile devices. But he also concedes that listeners will probably not tolerate the advertising breaks that pay the bills of traditional broadcast radio stations. His suggestion: short, 10-second “messages” from sponsors.
Will this new mobile audience turn out to be more or less valuable than the old PC audience? The Pandora founder says he has no idea: “The benefit of the computer is, you have a much bigger screen. The benefit of the iPhone is, you know where your listeners are.” The science of mobile advertising needs to develop fast if the early promise of the iPhone is not to be squandered.
A dotcom shooting star finally burns out
It would be a shame to allow the passing of former dotcom star i2 Technologies to go unheralded (it has just agreed to be bought by JDA Software for $346m.)
Remarkably, the maker of supply-chain software was once worth $50bn. These days B2B e-commerce companies induce a mild yawn, but there was a time when they set the pulses racing, and none more so than i2.
The company’s apparently spectacular growth had something to do with it. By 2000 it was reporting soaring revenues of $1.13bn – though it was later forced to cut that by nearly $500m in a restatement. Still, it was quite a ride: revenues eventually peaked at $874m before falling back (they were $260m last year.) Who was to know there was a massive bubble underway in IT spending, not just in tech stocks?
Sanjay Sidhu, i2′s founder, was a man for his times. As we once reported, he created a “cult-like aura” around the company. Sidhu may not have reaped the multiple billions he was once worth on paper, but his stake in i2 is still valued at $70m.
Yahoo’s promise of better advertising behaviour
With its all-important search partnership with Google awaiting regulatory clearance, Yahoo really needs to keep its nose clean on Capitol Hill right now.
That’s probably one reason it has just pre-announced a new opt-out so that users of Yahoo services can request not to be on the receiving end of targeted advertising (it won’t actually go into effect until later this month.)
Behavioural targeting has been getting the third degree in Washington this year. The latest: John Dingell, chairman the House energy and commerce committee, wrote to internet companies last week asking for more information about their practices in this area.
Yahoo’s promise of an opt-out is included in its response to Dingell. It could hardly have done less. It already lets visitors to third-party sites that carry its advertising opt out of targeting, so extending this to Yahoo-owned properties was a must. Also, the industry’s own new draft code of conduct calls for this.
Purists will complain that none of this is enough. Yahoo will still plant cookies and collect data, even if it doesn’t use the information for behavioural targeting purposes. Also, how many users will bother to click through to the company’s privacy policy to search for an opt-out?
But it’s hard to point to real consumer harm here – and for people who actually like to look at ads (don’t count me among them) Yahoo has a point when it claims there are significant benefits from behavioural targeting. The likelihood is that all of this will eventually blow over in Washington with no meaningful changes. And the Yahoo/Google alliance? That could be more problematic.
Desktop Linux, part 2: charge up the defibrillator
Some readers took issue with my reference to Linux on PCs as DOA (though, I should add, very respectfully – these open-source types certainly know how to conduct a civil conversation.)
Yes, it was flip, I admit it. But let’s face it: enterprise customers haven’t bitten, and enterprise is the real focus of the latest IBM push.
As several commenters usefully pointed out, though, there are other markets where the story could be different. Governments, particularly in Europe, have already taken a lead.
Much the most interesting question is how the new market for consumer netbooks develops. If this truly is the new market for low-priced portable computing then it’s a natural for open-source (issues of useability aside.)
One very encouraging sign today: Intel has apparently just placed a massive order for the Atom processors aimed at this new market. According to an analyst at Citigroup, the chip company has ordered 45m chip packages for the second half of this year, ten times as many as most analysts had expected. Even if part of this is to build inventory, it still indicates that Intel expects significant uptake of Atom-based netbooks (like the Asus EEE) in the second half of this year – and that should be fertile soil for Ubuntu and its rivals (it was enough to give Intel’s stock a 4 per cent bump today.)
As for Linux on enterprise PCs, though – the body will probably have to stay on ice a while longer.
Dipping into the DoubleClick cookie jar
The integration of the Google and DoubleClick advertising systems continues apace, with no sign that Google is pausing to rethink DoubleClick audience-tracking techniques that it once held to be undesirable.
You might remember that when it agreed the acquisition last year Google said it would investigate ways to minimise the invasiveness of the cookies that DoubleClick plants on the computers of internet users who see the ads it serves.
When the deal was consummated earlier this year, though, Google admitted it had got nowhere on this (as we reported here) – though it was still hoping to come up with some solution that would meet the needs of advertisers while minimising the privacy risks of collecting all that data on user behaviour.
That brings us to today’s news, which is that DoubleClick’s cookies are now being included in Google’s content network (which serves display ads to partner websites).
There are clear benefits for advertisers in this. They can limit the number of times a single user sees their ads and see how many different people have seen it. They can also track how many people saw an ad and then visited their website.
But what of internet users? Google promises a better experience, because “they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.”
The message: cookies are good for you. Better get used to it.
Desktop Linux still DOA
One of the great tech non-events of the last few years involves Linux on PCs. Every so often, another wave of hype washes in about how companies are finally going to ditch their Windows machines in favour of the open-source operating system and productivity apps like Sun’s StarOffice and (more recently) IBM’s Symphony.
I suppose you can’t blame IBM for trying to capitalise on the bad press of Windows Vista to try to give this story another spin. It has just agreed a deal with the three top Linux companies to distribute its own Notes and Symphony software alongside the operating system. The promise: a “turnkey” software package that, according to IBM, cuts 30 per cent or more from the cost of buying a new enterprise PC.
Companies are finally getting the message about desktop Linux, claims an IBM official, pointing to the evidence from a report by Forrester: this showed that last year the number of enterprise PCs running Linux rose from 0.1 per cent to 0.5 per cent.
No, that’s not a misprint: 0.5 per cent.
When I spoke to Simon Yates at Forrester, he was roundly dismissive of the idea that enterprise customers have got any more interested in running Linux on their PCs:
It’s going nowhere. It’s not made any headway in the last 4-5 years.
The research numbers quoted by IBM, according to Yates, didn’t show anything significant. Forrester tracks the operating systems of the computers that log onto its Website, and that’s a number that can go up and down.
Will the backing of the IBM brand help? It certainly helped Linux on the server, but the PC story is different. As Yates says, companies face enough upheaval upgrading from one version of Windows to the next without contemplating jettisoning Windows altogether. Still, at the margin it can’t hurt. And, from IBM’s point of view, if it at least gives customers more ammunition to argue for lower prices from Microsoft, so much the better.
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