Amazon is looking more like Apple every day in the audio department.

It now has an iPod (its Kindle electronic book plays MP3s), iTunes (its MP3 beta service), downloadable video to rent or buy (Unbox) and now podcasts and audiobooks ( it just bought Audible for $300m).

The Audible.com acquisition, announced today, is an interesting one as Audible supplies audiobooks for iTunes – no word yet on how that relationship might change.

Amazon said it would pay $11.50 a share for Audible, a 23 per cent premium on its closing price on Wednesday.

Audible, founded in 1997, has more than 500 spoken-word content partners and offers a subscription model for access to audiobooks, radio shows and podcasts.

Amazon recently scored a big win over iTunes, signing deals with the four major record companies to offer music free of digital rights management software. Apple’s only such deal is with EMI.

The one thing Amazon can’t add is Apple’s cool. When it comes to brand recognition in music, Apple still has the edge.

MySpace has confirmed that Josh Berman, COO, will leave the social networking site to take on a ’senior role’ at Slingshot Labs, a new venture backed by News Corp, whose mission will be to incubate internet startups. Rumours of the move had been circulating since last week when Chris DeWolfe, the MySpace founder, told the New York Times about the incubator.

MySpace also said it would brief reporters next week on details of its bid to open up to outside developers. The FT revealed in June that MySpace that the popular social networking site hoped to take a page from Facebook, its smaller rival, by launching its own equivalent of the Facebook Platform. In November, MySpace announced that it had joined forces with Google on OpenSocial, an open alternative to Facebook’s platform.

Now that MySpace is preparing to launch its platform, internet-watchers will be looking for further details about the kinds of incentives it will offer to developers. Facebook set a high bar by allowing its developers to advertise freely within their apps - just not on the Facebook home page. The pressure will be on MySpace to follow suit.

Palm Desert, California: Exactly one year ago at the DEMO 2007 technology conference, Adobe showcased Adobe AIR (then code-named ‘Apollo.’)

While many software developers have been focused in recent years on ways to move desktop applications onto the Web, Adobe Air makes it possible to move internet applications to the desktop.

Technically speaking, Adobe Air is a cross-operating system application runtime that enables web developers to use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications for the desktop.

At Demo 2008 now underway in Desert Springs, California the first batch of applications based on Adobe Air are being unveiled.

They include:

Acesis which is using Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex to create point-of-care applications for its target market of small medical practices with up to 10 doctors. The company’s physician information system provides two interfaces – an AIR-based interface for physicians designed to replace pen and paper, and a browser-based interface for patients.

Fabrik’s next generation online service, Joggle, uses Adobe AIR to provide a single, aggregated view of a user’s personal content, no matter where it resides. Joggle finds and catalogues digital content whether it is stored locally or remotely on a web-based server and makes it easy for people to find, mange, access and share their photos, music, videos, and files.

2Win Solutions’ KonoLive is instant collaboration software that aims to make it easier to collaborate with colleagues and share knowledge. The service uses Adobe AIR and Flex to facilitate instant and uninterrupted collaboration across a wide range of systems.

Among the advantages, Fabrik’s CEO Mike Cordano claimed using Adobe Air had enabled the company to build a desktop application without forcing the company to hire a new team of desktop developers.

Palm Desert, California: Online video creation, distribution and analytics are becoming more sophisticated as the industry matures. A number of companies focused on video are launching products here at DEMO 08. The highlights:

Xtranormal, based in Montreal, Canada, introduced "movie-making in a box". It can turn an IM-like chat into a movie, attaching the text to a 3D avatar and using emoticon-type animation icons in the text to add movements. It’s an intuitive interface that should be easy enough for children to construct school projects and adults to make their own chat shows, business presentations or animated blogs. Users can add their own mugshots to the avatar to make it more realistic and their animation can take place in a range of sets. Xtranormal will likely sell additional packs of props and sets. The finished result can easily be published to a blog or social networking site. Xtranormal plans to launch in April.

BitGravity launched BG LiveBroadcast, a Flash-based video streaming service. It showed video in high-definition quality and switched between sources in the rapid channel-hopping style of regular television.  There were also digital video recorder features - skipping back and forward. Perry Wu, chief executive, said the service was designed for live broadcasting. "The only thing traditional TV was better at was live broadcasts, today that’s all about to change," he said. To demonstrate its technology, BitGravity has been streaming the DEMO conference itself.

TubeMogul showed off how it could deploy video to different services such as YouTube, Metacafe and MySpace, saving content creators the bother of encoding for the different services and allowing them to instantly reach a larger aggregate audience. For anyone uploading less than 150 videos a month, the service is free. TubeMogul is also able to provide detailed analytics on where the video is being most watched and a breakdown of the demographics of the audience.

Visible Measures can give creators information on how viral their video is and how much it engages its audience. It demonstrated how the well known World of Warcraft Toyota ad lost 20 per of its audience online before the truck actually appeared. It has just acquired Vidmeter, a viral video ratings and distribution service. The Boston-based start-up has also announced $13.5m in second-round funding at DEMO.

Bill Gates faced a fairly benign crowd at the Institute of Directors in  London on Wednesday morning where he made  his last UK speech  before his retirement.

But it was not without a few moments of controversy.

When the 1000-strong  audience was given a chance to question Mr Gates, one IT manager of a law firm accused Microsoft of being overly dominant in corporate software and complained of the arrogance of the company’s sales force. With other suppliers, he said, he could fire and re-engage them if their terms and conditions changed, but not so with Microsoft’s Office package.

Mr Gates was immediately on the defensive, saying there was plenty of competition in corporate software.

“I’d like to see the terms and conditions you have with IBM and we can immediately match them,” he said, sounding more like a keen-as-mustard sales rep than an executive less than six months away from slipping the corporate leash.

Oracle and many other companies also provided competition, he said. The problem was competition in corporate software just wasn’t covered as much in the media.

Mr Gates went on to stress how innovative the software sector was.

“People should wish that other commercial sectors were as competitive and innovative as the software space. Just think what food would cost and the advantages you would have experienced.”

The competition issue was clearly still a very sore point with him. Earlier, when questioned about his most stressful moments at Microsoft he had sighed “Trying not to be sued by your own government. Especially when it is unjust.”

Perhaps it is not surprising given the recent US decision to extend its close anti-trust scrutiny of Microsoft by another two years, and the new competition case opened in the EU earlier this month.

Mr Gates was visibly happier when talking about his future plans at his charitable foundation, tackling the world’s health problems and giving away most of his fortune. Then, the shoe will be on the other foot, as he gets to chivvy governments for not being generous enough and demand large sums of money from them.

The Demo technology conference underway in Desert Springs, California always throws up a few standout start-ups – along with lots of ‘me-toos.’ Among the standouts this time around were a couple of communications start-ups with practical and interesting products and services that have the potential to disrupt.

My favourite was Toktumi (pronounced talk-to-me), whose product (also called Toktumi) provides small and home office businesses with a full-functioned PC-based office phone system at really low cost. Toktumi – described by one of my colleagues here as ‘Skype for grown-ups” – is actually a hosted PBX (private branch exchange) service running on the company’s servers in San Francisco.

“There are 40m people working in small businesses with one to nine employees, half of who work out of their homes,” says Peter Sisson, CEO and founder. “This market segment has been ignored by by most providers .”

The basic Toktumi software is a free download and runs on virtually any PC turning it into a powerful yet simple to operate office system complete with call transfer, voicemail, conferencing and auto attendant in less than five minutes. The software requires no special hardware, but helpfully Toktumi also offers an adapter that enables users to plug any standard analogue desktop phone into a USB port completing the setup.

The free version of the service comes with a free phone number (likely to be an out-of-the-way rural area code so don’t expect a 415 or 212 number) voicemail and free calling and conferencing with other Toktumi customers worldwide. For $13-a-month and 2-cents a minute, users can upgrade to a premium version that allows outbound calls to regular phones worldwide and allows customers to select their phone number or port their current POTS (plain old telephone service) number over to Toktumi.

None of this functionality is really new, but the way Toktumi puts the PC at the centre of the office phone system is unique. There is also one really cool feature called ‘Search Dialing’ which enables users to place calls from a PC simply by typing in the name of the person, company or category of company you want to call. Toktumi then trawls through your PC contact book and then the web to find the number you are looking for and presents them on screen ready to click and dial.

The Toktumi service is currently available as an invitation-only beta form but Sisson hopes to make it generally available shortly. In the meantime, he notes, about half of those signing up for the beta are overseas.

The other comms company that caught my attention at Demo was Ribbit which describes itself as “Silicon Valley’s first phone company.” Ribbit’s Amphibian technology platform is designed to bridge the gap between a mobile phone and an internet-connected PC.

Among its features, Amphibian enables users to manage mobile voicemail as though it is email on your computer and on your mobile phone, convert voicemail into text to make voice messages shareable and searchable, and make mobile calls from any browser or web page - such as iGoogle, Facebook et al. The interface is smooth and polished and because Ribbit’s APIs (application program interfaces) are open, the technology is already attracting a host of cool third-party add-ons.

Palm Desert, California: One of the themes of DEMO 08 is new web services that allow ordinary users to create content in forms usually left to the professionals.
Blist, Flypaper and Sprout showed how anyone could easily create databases, Flash presentations and widgets respectively.

Kevin Merritt, Blist chief executive, said mainstream users until now have tried to wedge all their data into an Excel spreadsheet. Blist in its list view looks like an Excel spreadsheet, with some columns you might not expect. Its impressively simple interface allows users to drag in columns such as star ratings, document links and pictures. Long lists can be included in single cells and icons can be inserted from drop-down boxes. There is the standard database record view and also a calendar view to show when tasks are due. Filters can be created just by dragging the relevant columns into a box and defining the criteria for them.

Flypaper says it has developed the easiest way to tell stories that stick on the web by bringing the power of custom Flash programming to everyone. Flypaper provides Flash page templates and model presentations that can be edited and adapted with drag-and-drop objects. It is also building a community of users that will share their models and extend its library. It demonstrated how to create a CV with text, pictures and video elements  that will play in Flash like a YouTube clip. In fact, it can be posted directly to sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.

Sprout has a similar widget creation tool, with pre-built templates and drag-and-drop features. It allows users to publish to a range of websites, make instant changes and see how much their widgets are being used through analytical tables and charts.

So now that anyone can do this web content thing, it looks like Flash programmers and widget developers are going to be relegated to the same lowered status as photographers and ….journalists.

  If you’re an investor in Yahoo! you’re probably starting to wonder just when all the upheaval will end. Consider these comments from some of its executives in the years since the dotcom bubble burst:

2003: "We changed the whole sales team. We started all over again." (Former CEO Terry Semel)

2006: "The internet is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, and we’re reshaping Yahoo to be a leader in this transformation." (Semel)

2007: "A year of transition in display" advertising. (Sue Decker, president)

2008: "An evolutionary and transformative year for Yahoo." (Blake Jorgensen, CFO)

Jerry Yang had the final word today as Yahoo warned that the latest repair work will not happen overnight: "This kind of transformation takes time." He’s not kidding.

Palm Desert, California: Here at DEMO 08, we have two days of product launches by 77 companies unveiling new web tools and services, hardware, software and the latest in consumer electronics.

Products like the Roomba vacuum cleaner and Pleo the robot dinosaur were introduced at DEMO and the room here is packed with media and venture capitalists watching six-minute demos of the next big ideas.

Some highlights from the opening session:

Iterasi unveiled its "Notarize" web toolbar. This is bookmarking on steroids. Iterasi captures a complete web page when you click on its button. That means not just the link, but an image of the page and a full html version that will render just as you first saw it. This has become more difficult as sites have become increasingly complex with the use of Ajax, but search results pages and annotated maps can be saved as you created them. The page can also be tagged and filed to make it more findable.

LeapFrog, the educational toy company which has sold 30m of its LeapPad platforms worldwide and more than 70m LeapPad books, introduced its new Tag device.  The pen-like peripheral is aimed at helping four to eight-year-olds to read. Pressing on any word or object in Tag-enabled books makes the pen speak the word. It can also be connected to a PC to download words for new books and to upload information on the child’s reading, showing a parent how their child is progressing.

One of the irritations of current mobile phone browsers is that they lack the software capabilities to play video. Skyfire launched a browser for mobile phones at DEMO that can handle Flash, Ajax, Java and Quicktime elements in web pages. The bad news is that is still in private beta and only works on Windows Mobile devices currently. The presenters said users could also listen to last.fm music, and later showed me how other kinds of non-Flash-based internet radio like the BBC could be heard.

The storage company Fabrik showed off Joggle, which it described as "aggregation through virtualisation". Joggle, built on the Adobe Air platform, finds your content whether it is online or offline and presents it in a single view. Fabrik showed a window of thumbnail pictures that were stored on a combination of Flickr, a USB thumb drive and a MyDocuments folder. Content such as photos and music can be dragged into a slideshow creation tool that can then be served as a widget on a users’ blog or MySpace page.

SpeakLike showed an instant-messaging translation service. An English speaker typed in English in his chat window, but his words appeared translated into Spanish in the window of his Spanish friend. The reply in Spanish was translated back into English. SpeakLike also demo’d an English to Chinese conversation. The company uses a mixture of machine translation and human interpreters, which raises questions about how the business will scale and make money.

Finally, Notchup showed off a job recruitment service for people not looking for jobs. The idea is that people happy in their jobs but interested in listening to good offers are the most sought-after recruits. Companies can pay tens of thousands of dollars to headhunters to reach these people, but Notchup cuts out the middleman. Workers enter their CVs and use a calculator for their skills to set a price of say $500 that they expect to be paid to be interviewed. Companies contact them directly although the worker’s anonymity is initially preserved. Notchup says 50,000 people and 400 corporate clients have signed up in the past eight days.

Graphics chipmakers are fond of making a case these days that their graphics processing units (GPUs) are becoming as important or more so than the central processing units (CPUs) of the PC microprocessor makers.

As bigger displays in high-definition dazzle consumers, most of the horsepower that drives them comes from the GPU.

Fourth-quarter numbers for the graphics market will begin to leak out after the market closes today. Ashok Kumar, CRT Capital analyst, expects Silicon Valley’s Nvidia to pick up a point or two of market share, to the detriment of its rival, Advanced Micro Devices (incorporating the Canadian graphics chipmaker ATI).

He says 2007 was a memorable year for graphics, with the release of richer interfaces in the Windows Vista and Apple Leopard operating systems, a series of new graphics-intensive PC games, the new DX10 graphics standard from Microsoft and a complete refresh of Nvidia and AMD’s line-ups.

Nvidia released its next-generation graphics chips and cards ahead of AMD, gaining market share.

“AMD had their low point pretty much the middle of last year,” says Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, who releases the fourth-quarter figures today.

He says they recovered in the third quarter as new products were released and describes the latest versions launched over the past week as “process-shrinks essentially” that offer improved performance and have reduced costs.

The ATI Radeon HD 3450, 3650 and 3870X2 boards are based on chips with circuit widths of 55 billionths of a metre, compared to 80 billionths in the previous generation. This allows a smaller die size, greater transistor density and lower costs.

The 3450 and 3650, available this month, are low-power sub-$150 boards, while the 3870X2, announced today, features two GPUs and, at $450, is being priced around $150 below Nvidia’s competing card.

Multi-GPU boards are likely to become a trend, as are hybrid graphics.

The graphics capabilities of low-cost PCs can easily be upgraded by adding a new board. But, in the past, this has meant switching off the integrated graphics chip already included on the motherboard.

With hybrid graphics, the integrated chip stays on and is boosted by the addition of the board. AMD says it is introducing this feature with its new boards, Nvidia says it already has the capability.