The fusillade of iPhone coverage continues. Today, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of the New York Times weigh in on Apple’s shiny new handset. Here’s a look at some early reviews. You can read our own Paul Taylor’s analysis on how the iPhone stacks up against other smart phones here.

Mossberg writes:

Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

Pogue wavers a bit, but ultimately pronounces the iPhone fit for consumption:

As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.

With the iPhone launch just a few days away, the amount of ink spilled over the gadget is rapidly approaching the limits of endurance for all but the most ardent Mac fanboys. It’s getting so bad that the hype itself has become newsworthy. As Roger Kay at Endpoint Technologies put it in a note last night, it’s "an event spiraling toward the edge of control." Of course, when it comes to spilled ink, we’re as guilty as anyone else.

(more…)

Plaxo, the online contacts manager that had an irritating habit of getting in touch with users and non-users far too often, has come out with a new version that you shouldn’t mind hearing about from them.

Plaxo members’ practice of email blitzes requesting contacts to update their information became akin to spam for many people and garnered the Mountain View company bad publicity.

“We had some over-zealous users who probably sent too many of those emails and I think it annoyed a lot of people,” Todd Masonis, Plaxo co-founder, told me.

“So about a year ago, we announced a change of direction, reduced the viral marketing to a trickle and we have been quietly building a whole new product, it’s really a new beginning for the company.”

That product, Plaxo 3.0, came out of private beta today and contains some neat Web 2.0 and social networking add-ins, improved syncing of contacts and a new calendar application.

The new Plaxo did a great job of syncing and consolidating my contacts from my Yahoo address book, Outlook and LinkedIn, the latter sync being part of the $50 a year premium service.

The integrated calendar has attractive features including the ability to create countdowns to significant events and to decorate it with a background and side panel from your personal Flickr photo feed. However, I found it buggy in syncing with Google Calendar, with a number of events failing to be imported.

Contact information also now benefits from maps and click-to-call phone numbers courtesy of mash-ups with Yahoo and Jajah.

The feature I found most impressive was the Pulse tab ( click on screenshot below), which can scrape contact information of friends to automatically alert you to the latest posts on the blogs they listed, as well as showing their new Flickr uploads, changes to their Amazon wish lists or their jobs.

This looks like the newsfeed on friend’s activities on Facebook, but seems a far more useful tool and is based on open APIs with the promise of further plug-ins to come.

"I think we’ve found our pathway over to social networking," said Todd Masonis.

I think revamped Plaxo will get a much friendlier reception from this new crowd.

UPDATE Robert Scoble and others are also having problems with Plaxo’s sync feature.

As many as 500,000 people are expected to attend San Francisco’s Gay Pride Celebration and Parade this weekend, while the fanatical followers of Nascar have also arrived in the Bay Area, filling fields with RVs for the latest event on the racing calendar at Sonoma’s Infineon Raceway.

This mixture of gays and rednecks has probably only been matched by the movie Talladega Nights, where Sacha Baron Cohen stars as a gay French Formula 1 driver challenging Will Ferrell’s hard-driving good ol’ boy Ricky Bobby.

Sony Electronics’ announcement of a personal endorsement deal with Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt Jr this week was like a scene straight out of the movie.

Staged at the top Napa winery, Nickel and Nickel, Earnhardt appeared on stage with Stuart Redsun, Sony’s head of corporate marketing, and delivered some classic Ricky Bobby-style quotes.

“We’re looking to partner with people that match my brand – I’m still trying to figure out what that means but I’m starting to giddit,” he said.

“My father had the Mr Intimidator style, when I came in I didn’t have that niche, I’ve just tried to be as down to earth as possible, the guy you run into at the gas station.”

He also confessed to being a huge Barry Manilow fan: “He’s awesome, American Bandstand, it’s not just me [that likes him] is it?”

And yet Earnhardt appears to like to crash and put back together computers and consumer electronics as much as cars.

“I can wire with the best of ‘em, if you want to talk the limits of technology, there’s so many things you can do with computers, some work out, some end up in sparks and fires,” he said.

As a test driver of Sony products, he may get through a lot of Vaios, but he is also likely to sell many more televisions to a demographic that , according to Sony, never stops watching television, and car racing in particular, in high definition and on big screens.

Sony already boasts the highest average selling prices and market share in the US HD market and hopes to lap its rivals with personality-driven endorsements of its products from cross-over sports stars such as Earnhardt and Peyton Manning of the NFL.

Guessing the value of MySpace has become a faourite party game in the Web 2.0 world - and it is one that Rupert Murdoch has now played in public three times.

In 2005 he paid $580m to get his hands on the site.

At the end of 2006, the year that MySpace Mania peaked, the News Corp boss speculated at a shareholder meeting that its value had jumped to $6bn.

Now, he seems to think it has has more than doubled again. To judge by reports in the New York Times and Murdoch’s own London paper, he is now putting a value on it of $12-16bn - what it would be worth if he were to swap it for 25-30 per cent of Yahoo, an idea apparently touted by News Corp.

Well, you could forgive Murdoch if he were inadvertently to overstate the price a little. According to a Citigroup analysis today, a more reasonable valuation might be closer to $6.5bn (based on a multiple of 30 times MySpace’s likely earnings before interest and taxes next year.) Based on that figure, a swap would leave News Corp with more like 15 per cent of Yahoo.

The most interesting aspect of all of this, though, may have nothing to do with speculation about price. Rather, it is that Murdoch has apparently shown his hand: after less than two years, it seems he is willing to trade away his ownership of MySpace. An opportunistic grab to cash in at the top? A strategic sleight of hand to ally himself with a portal that, while struggling to find its way, still has one of the best audiences on the Web? Either way, this may say as much about Murdoch’s views about the prospects for MySpace as it does about Yahoo.

FT technology correspondent Maija Palmer, also in Paris for the Google event, adds:

Googling the iPhone

No tech event is complete these days without a mention of the iPhone. Eric Schmidt pulled his Apple phone out of his pocket with some smug satisfaction at Google’s Paris press day.

"You are asking to se my iPhone, aren’t you?" he said, in response to a question about Google’s partnership with Apple to put Google maps on the device.

There was a frenzied paparazzi flash of cameras, making this possibly the highlight of a day that was often a little light on financial details.

Mr Schmidt called the device "stunning" and said it was "a powerful new device" excellently suited to other Google services.

"You should expect other announcements between the two companies over time," he said.

Sounds like Mr Schmidt wants to ensure he remains top of the list for any future  upgrades.

YouTube gives Germany the cold shoulder

There was a small outcry when YouTube unveiled the list of countries for local language launch - where was Germany? The list of nine "first phase" countries contained the rest of the usual suspects - the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands, even Poland. But no Germany.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen insisted it was a lack of resources and nothing personal, but German reporters at Google’s press day in Paris were clearly miffed.

The truth may be that a German launch lacks the same urgency as a launch, say in France, where YouTube is facing much greater competition from local rival Dailymotion. The two sites are neck-and-neck with just over 20 per cent of online video users each, according to recent figures from comScore, the research group.

In Germany, on the other hand, competition seems less intense. Local rival MyVideo may have almost as many unique visitors as YouTube, but the comScore figures suggest that the US company serves up the lion’s share of the streams.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the FT media editor, sends this bulletin from Google’s press day in Paris:

Google’s efforts to "go local" with YouTube ran into some little local difficulties in Paris today. The unassuming venue in the Rue de Richelieu looked all very Googly, with eager staff wandering round in white lab coats and Liberté Egalité Fraternité T-shirts, but the infrastructure was not quite what they are used to in Mountain View.

First, the crowd of reporters and bloggers overloaded the venue’s wi-fi network, leaving many unable to get an internet connection. Then a vase was overturned upstairs, sending water pouring through the ceiling above the stage, cutting the power in the middle of a presentation by Marissa Meyer, VP of search and user experience.

The elderly air conditioning unit also packed up - an unfortunate irony as Google boasted of the "evaporative cooling" systems it is installing to save energy in its data centres.

It was left to a guest, environmental photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, to suggest that the environmental cause might be better served next year by Google’s US team staying home and doing the event by video conference.

Of course, that might prevent the European press from learning all sorts of fascinating Google trivia. some highlights:

- Google staff in Europe have consumed 20,000 bottles of water this year and 3,500kg of oranges - well over a kilo each.

- Belgium is a great place to put a data centre. Like Oregon, it is not too hot and not too cold - an important consideration if you want to cut power consumption with evaporation-based air conditioning.

- Google Maps is working on a street map of Kiev (Eric Schmidt is either a master of the detail or simply wanted to keep a Ukrainian journalist quiet).

- The Venezuelan TV channel closed down by Hugo Chavez has popped back up on YouTube.

- If we all upgraded to energy-efficient PCs we could save 25,000 square miles of trees - one and a half times the acreage of Switzerland.

- Just one per cent of the books in the library of Alexandria have been translated, and just one per cent of the pages on the web are in Arabic.

Who should get to keep the lion’s share of any money earned from the widgets that are suddenly springing up all over the Web?

"That is the multi-billion dollar question," agrees Max Levchin, whose Slide.com has just been accorded the status of Number 1 widget site by comScore.

There may not be that much money at stake just yet, but the advertising dollars will surely follow as distributed media consumption becomes a wider habit.

Advertisers have every reason to turn to widgets as a new way to reach a dispersed audience across the Web. As Levchin says, "they have massive reach and a high level of engagement." From nothing 16 months ago, Slide now reaches an audience of 117m through its widgets, according to comScore (this is based on the number of internet users who at least once a month view a Webpage with a Slide widget embedded in it.) Many widgets are Flash-based "rich media" applications that cry out for attention. Eventually, says Levchin, they are a natural vehicle for ecommerce: there is no reason a check-out function couldn’t be embedded in a widget (view a clip of a new movie, then click on a button that says "Charge this to my iTunes account.")

So how will the cash be split between these rich media interlopers and the sites that play host? MySpace’s none-too-subtle move to block Photobucket a couple of months ago was a clear indication that the stakes here are high. Perhaps that was one reason for Facebook’s recent decision to open itself up fully to the widget-makers: it could steal an early lead in the race to attract Web developers as social networking sites evolve into broader online platforms.

Levchin predicts that two or three precedent-setting deals will eventually lay the groundrules for this new economy. His suggestion: pretty much an even split of the proceeds between widget-maker and host. As MySpace’s graphic demonstration showed, though, the sites that own the eyeballs may think they deserve a bigger cut than that.

Attending Lunch 2.0 in Palo Alto yesterday, I was surprised at how this four-guys-blag-a-free-lunch idea had grown into a sizeable social network and even more amazed at the amount of coverage the event was attracting.

In traditional media terms, this was not much of an entry on the coverage diary:

12pm Lunch 2.0 at the offices of Ning in Palo Alto. Anyone and everyone converges on Ning for free sandwiches and salad. Ning CEO gives short powerpoint presentation on how Ning is doing. Everyone stands around and chats till 1.30pm.

It doesn’t sound like a great story or great television, but I was there to write a piece on Lunch 2.0, Justin of  Justin.TV turned up so the whole event was broadcast live over the internet and bub.blicio.us was also filming it for the net.

In addition, there were bloggers and photographers posting about the event on their sites and on Flickr and doubtless many of the attendees were Twittering and commenting afterwards as well.

With other services such as Veodia, which allows bloggers to broadcast live in professional quality, and PodTech, the net has wall-to-wall video coverage of anything happening in the Valley.

Bub.blico.us told me they get calls all the time from companies asking them to cover their parties. They naturally accommodate them trying to pick up on any buzz.

But while this is great for party-throwers, party goers and video sites desperate for material, what is the attraction for traditional viewers? Are they the last consideration in this democratisation of the media, or not a consideration at all?

Billions of dollars have been spent of late on acquiring online advertising companies, notably DoubleClick and Aquantive, but a small $5m investment may prove to be equally significant.

London-based Openads announced today it had received that amount in first-round funding for its free, open-source ad server software.

This helps publishers generate revenues from their websites, giving them control of banner ads and campaigns and the ability to track usage statistics.

Openads says it powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined, with more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries using it.

Index Ventures, backers of Skype, MySQL and other European success stories, took part in the Series A round, along with First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

The latter is the Web 2.0 and open-source proponent Tim O’Reilly’s fund. He blogs today on how Openads could be the Red Hat or MySQL of online advertising, selling services to customers on the back of free software.

Jeff Jarvis says this could be the first steps towards an open-source online ad network, while Donna Bogatin says Openads’ strength in emerging markets could thwart Google’s global growth.

For now, Openads represents an easy next step for small publishers wanting to go beyond Google’s AdSense and open up their sites to other forms of advertising. But its open-source nature means the web community could grow its use significantly and adapt it in any number of interesting ways.

Fans of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website Flickr.com have been struggling to access any of its images in recent days, and the company says it seems Beijing’s censors are to blame.

Nothing too surprising there: China’s Communist party blocks thousands of international sites, even though the secretive culture commissars generally go easier on ones that like Flickr are in foreign languages and run by big internet names.

The censors never explain themselves, but Flickr may have drawn their fire for hosting photographs of the Chinese army’s brutal suppression of student-led protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. China’s digital scissors are always extra busy around the anniversary of the killings on June 4 every year. Flickr has also allowed users in China to see photographs of more recent protests that local media have been barred from reporting on.

What’s interesting about this case is that the censors have refrained from simply blocking the whole Flickr site, which can still be access from within China, but have instead merely prevented it from displaying pictures. Page-links and text can still be seen.

It is a relatively subtle approach that highlights the Chinese government’s sophisticated approach to internet control - but not one likely to be of much comfort to a photo-sharing website.