Software

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The story behind Google Chrome

Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it’s possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox’s core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.

Widgets Live! conference in San Francisco on November 6

The first ever conference dedicated to widgets, gadgets, and modules will take place on Monday, November 6, in San Francisco. The one-day conference will capture and summarize the emerging widget economy and allow developers, business leaders, and content producers to collaborate and better understand how they might participate in syndication at the edge of the network. A small web loosely joined. I am organizing a conference named Widgets Live! next month in partnership with Om Malik to capture the emerging webspace of widgets. There’s so much happening in the fast-moving widget space right now it’s a bit difficult to keep…

Data launchpads of the cloud wars

The war of the data clouds will really start to heat up in 2007 as large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft open huge data centers in the Pacific Northwest fueled by cheap power and bandwidth. Our digital lives continue to be fueled by the cloud, with new data services and software that replace or complement desktop tasks coming online every month. Software as a service is the new development push, and custom build outs next to a few large dams and fiber highways are a sign of what’s next. Internet giants are building up their server…

Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing

Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer. Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one “share.” The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99. I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product’s online presence, but…

Narrowcasting with customized homepages

Personalized homepages have been around for over 10 years and recently have gathered increased attention as a new generation of personalized homepages enter the space. The programmed personal homepage is changing, with cobrands and individual users increasingly taking command of their own content. Users might customize their homepage with cookie-stored preferences, a logged-on account, an affinity group such as a Dell computer, a broadband connection from AT&T, or a membership in the Sierra Club. In the future these pages might change over time, adapting to the changing online interests and behavior of each user. In this post I will provide…

Programmed personal homepages over the last 20 years

The web is changing, but it all starts with your personal home page. What is the first thing you see when you start your browser? Is it useful and tailored to you, or a collection of advertisements and meaningless promotions for portal services? The recent $15 million funding of one-year-old startup Netvibes combined with the ramp-up of Microsoft’s Live.com and iGoogle are changing the worldwide web doorway into a customized experience combining many brands and services. In this post I’ll summarize the history of pre-programmed start pages and take a look at where we might be headed in the near…

Watching a Firefox beta rollout

I visited Mozilla HQ this afternoon to discuss product strategy and positioning with a few full-time staffers. My visit happened to coincide with the release of Firefox 2 beta 2, giving me a brief glimpse into a world where your every move is both public and frequently reported (accurately and inaccurately) to a tech news hungry audience. A few news sources read the Firefox 2 status meeting notes from Tuesday and noticed beta 2 should go live today, August 31. Each release includes internationalization into 40+ languages, so rollouts are handled in stages as each piece is integrated and…

Open Source Lab Rackathon

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State is having a fundraising drive to continue their existing work and take on a few new projects. OSL serves up hosting and download space for Apache, Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, PostreSQL, and many others. A $20 places your name in 10-point font on a piece of paper attached to the server cage for a whole year! Each additional $20 donated increases your font size by 1 point size. OSL sysadmins will have to look at your name for a full year and you’ll be helping a good cause. You…

Firefox in the next 9 months

I heard a few questions yesterday about the future of Firefox and its product goals, differentiating factors, and its positioning against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. I’ve been following the Firefox process intermittently so I’ll outline some of what I know in an attempt to spark community involvement and feedback on behalf of Mozilla and the Firefox team. The Firefox planners is divided into a few different functions such as planning, development, user interface, test, internationalization, and quality assurance, just to name a few. The product planners are currently engaging the community to determine what should be the…

Online spreadsheets in the real world.

Google officially launched its Spreadsheet product in its alpha labs, allowing a small user base to poke around and experience the new ideas and integration. I can see the immediate benefit from online spreadsheets integrated with a portal experience such as Google. I’ll give you two concrete usage examples: my soccer team and my mom. First, realize that although Microsoft’s Office suite is probably the best selling piece of packaged software in the market, it’s not a staple of every household. Microsoft created a special basic version of Office 2007 to increase sales from home users. My mom doesn’t…

Skype thoughts

Skype updated its Mac client today with some new user interface features, improved call quality, and some additional member information. I like the small touches such as the new blue dock icon and the ability to automatically pause iTunes when you receive a new incoming call. I just realized today that Skype works over local Bonjour networks. The feature has been around for a few months, but none of my coworkers knew about it either. Om points out that many of the Skype 2.0 features were previously available as plugins from third party developers. I have not used any of…

Skype 2.0 – video and customizations

Tonight around midnight Skype will release version 2.0 beta of their popular peer-to-peer voice and instant messaging client. Version 2.0 adds client support for video, customizations such as avatars and ringtones, . The new version is currently available for the Windows platform only. The video transmission uses the On2 Truemotion VP7 compression format which is easily throttled for bandwidth differences and was designed with video conferencing and dropped packets in mind. The video format appears to only support the Windows operating system and could constrain any plans to expand Skype with video to other platforms. On2 claims their video…

Mozilla Foundation looking for product managers

Yesterday Joi introduced me to Mitchell Baker, President of Mozilla. We talked about the Mozilla community, gathering feedback, and planning new products that build upon or extend existing features. Mozilla’s two main products are Firefox and Thunderbird, used by millions to interface with the Web, e-mail, and RSS. Sunbird currently a community project but not a Mozilla product. The Mozilla Foundation has been very successful gathering the technical talent it needs to develop its open-source software. It is currently in need of good product managers to identify critical features and keep everyone on track to release a competitive and innovative…

Steve Ballmer selling Windows 1.0

Michael Heilemann pointed out a video of Steve Ballamer selling Windows 1.0. Hilarious….

Microsoft’s geography lessons prove costly

Paul Brown of The Guardian writes about the hundreds of millions of dollars mistakes in geography have cost Microsoft. The company has now launched geography classes for its staff. “[I]n all cases the mistakes made were simply through ignorance but this was not how they were seen in the countries concerned. They were all seen as deliberate policy.” (via Techdirt)…

New York Times on the impact of Microsoft Office

Steve Lohr of The New York Times takes a look at Microsoft’s Office unit and its future. As a stand-alone business, Office – which on average sells for about $275 – would be slightly larger than the second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more profitable. Only the Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is slightly larger….

Microsoft announces Windows XP Starter Edition

Microsoft announced a five-country pilot program for Windows XP Starter edition, a cheaper version of Windows tweaked for beginning users. Users can have up to three programs and three windows per program running concurrently. The display is set to 800×600 maximum and there is no home networking support. 128MB of maximum RAM. Seems like Windows XP Starter edition would also be a good candidate for Wal-Mart….

Roxio sells consumer software division to Sonic Solutions for $80 million

Roxio is getting out of the consumer software business. Today Roxio announced the sale of its consumer software business (Easy Media Creator, PhotoSuite, VideoWave, Easy DVD Copy, and Toast) to Sonic Solutions for $70 million cash and $10 million stock. Roxio will change its corporate name to Napster….

Tor: Onion-routing system for anonymous activity

Ann Harrison of Wired News writes about Tor, an onion-routing system developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. Tor allows data routing through nodes that are only aware of their previous node and next node. Tor is distributed as free software under the 3-clause BSD license….

IBM alphaWorks aDesigner

aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers “test the accessibility and usability of Web pages for low-vision and blind people.” Only available on Windows 2000 and Windows XP….

MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! to interoperate on instant messaging software

News.com reports Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 will allow corporate users of AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger to communicate. Microsoft will pay AOL and Yahoo a royalty for connecting to Live Communications Server….

Salon.com on social networking online

Andrew Leonard of Salon.com delivers a social networking primer and profiles the different approaches of big name social networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut. Marc Canter is mentioned as social networking taken to the extreme but there is no mention of FOAF or how to move common data between social networking providers. The article does a good job examining the privacy trade-offs when a user provides a profile to an online site. “Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they’ll happily expose their most intimate secrets.”…

Scientific American on Microsoft Research

Gary Stix wrote about Microsoft’s Research division and its history in Scientific American June 2004 issue: “Can Microsoft’s assemblage of all-star researchers transform computing?”…

Peter Loforte video demo Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005

Robert Scoble interviewed Peter Loforte, general manager of the Tablet PC team, and asked him to show off some of the new features of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. The interview is posted on Channel 9. Context based inking is very cool. I did not know the level of context involved until I watched the video. Entering a state name in the United States? The recognizer will try to match your scribble to one of 50 options. Entering a URL? The recognizer was trained on top site URLs from around the world, and also checks your history for a…

Chris Pratley on the history of Word

Chris Pratley writes a history of Microsoft Word from his point of view. Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn’t really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. That puts the competition into reaction mode….

NetStumbler 0.4.0

NetStumbler 0.4.0 is now available. Adds support for new devices and new scripting features….

OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview

Microsoft released the OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview today. Chris Pratley is a much better source for the intricacies. SP1 includes an API and SP1 will be the new OneNote baseline. OneNote now has real-time note sharing. It would be great if we were able to discover available documents similar to SubEthaEdit instead of negotiating IP addresses. At least they did not require Passport logons. You can also take video notes. My favorite feature of OneNote is the ability to synchronize your notes to a point in an audio recording. That ability is now expanded to video….

BitTorrent 3.4.2

Bram Cohen released BitTorrent 3.4.2 yesterday. Trackers can now send non-fatal human readable messages to clients. See Rerequester for details. New array-based bitfield for memory efficiency….

NY Times: Photo sharing, desktop to desktop

David Pogue has an article in today’s New York Times about peer-to-peer photo sharing, free of charge. ShareALot and OurPictures, are designed to shoot your photo files directly to the desktops of designated friends and family members, completely bypassing e-mail and Web sites. ShareALot appears to be the better product since it is free and supports Windows, Mac, and soon Linux….

European Commission finds Microsoft guilty, imposes conduct remedies and a fine

The European Commission has concluded, after a five-year investigation, that Microsoft Corporation broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players. Fine of € 497.2 million. Jupiter Research has a first take on the decision. Microsoft must provide a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player. They must also provide interface documentation for server interfaces. What does this mean for Longhorn? Pushed back another year?…

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