Category: Uncategorized

Apple's current mobile iTunes partner, Cingular Wireless, is going to raise the bar on their music offerings:

Cingular Wireless is expected to team up with online music services, including Napster Inc., Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Inc.'s Yahoo Music and eMusic, to launch a music service on its cellphone network, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The move by Cingular, jointly owned by AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and BellSouth (BLS.N: Quote, Profile, Research), may set the stage for a battle with Apple Computer's (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Ipod. The service would work on cellphones that double as music players.

According to the Journal story Reuters cites, the most interesting thing Cingular's new service will allow for is synchronization with Napster's and Yahoo!'s Windows Media-based subscription services where, for a monthy fee, customers have access to the entire catalog of music these services offer. This would be in addition to playback of individual song downloads from Napster, Yahoo!, and eMusic, and tracks ripped from a customer's audio CDs. The Journal also says that An Over The Air (OTA) music download service from Cingular (like the ones offered by other carriers like Verizon and Sprint)  is purported to be in the works for next year. I suppose the goal would be to allow Cingular customers to buy tracks from Napster, Yahoo!, and eMusic while mobile.

This reads, for now, like not much more than an extra bit of distribution for Napster and Yahoo! Music; they're adding a few devices that Cingular resells to their list of supported players. That alone is not a huge win for the subscription services. Their larger problem is convincing people of the value of the model, especially when it precludes using an iPod as your player. Part of the problem with that messaging is the platform, Windows Media, and PlaysForSure, which has acquired a reputation for not being quite such a sure thing. Between momentum and bad press, the Apple triad of iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Store has rolled over the Windows Media and PlaysForSure ecosystem to such an extent that even Microsoft's abandoned it with Zune.

Leaving that aside, does this point to a carrier- and phone-maker threat to Apple's dominance of digital music? After all, Sprint has sold 8 million tracks in the last 12 months, and Nokia plans to put 80 million music-capable phones in customers' hands in the next year.

The mainstream of the portable (if not connected portable, or mobile) music business is Apple. Whether this changes depends on your answer to a few questions:

• Does the world demand a converged device?

• What's the baseline user experience when buying, managing, and listening to music on the go?

• Where should this experience fit into the overall entertainment experience at home?

I see Apple as being able to bide their time as they address the first question (iPhone, anyone?), since they have a clear winning answer to the second issue, and an evolving strategy for the third, which we'll understand better as Apple brings their iTV product to market. In this last area, incidentally, none of the mobile players are credible—the real threats are Cisco, Microsoft, and Sony).

Does this rule out Cingular as Apple's exclusive partner for the upcoming iPhone everyone's expecting? Engadget doesn't seem to think so (or, at least they ain't sayin' yet).

Link

Tags: digital media, music, wireless, iPod, Apple, Cingular, Napster, Yahoo!

Update: I blew the relative introduction dates for the iPod, iTunes for Windows, and the iTunes Store. The original post implied that Apple managed to shift 1MM tracks in five days without benefit of the iPod adding to the demand, which would be amazing and totally wrong. Apple managed their amazing numbers without benefit of iTunes for Windows. That means they were selling exclusively to Mac users. Mea culpa.

Both the San Francisco Bay Area CBS affiliate and the San Jose Mercury News have stories about an explosion that took place at around 7:00 last night at the PayPal offices in San Jose (here's a Google map of their location). 26 employees were reported to be in the building at the time of the explosion, but thankfully, nobody was hurt. The damage seems to have been limited to some plate glass windows.

The report says that a bomb was placed outside the exit of the PayPal section of the eBay/PayPal building, and fire department Captain Jose Guerrero says that the damaged plate glass was pretty thick and that the explosion it had to be pretty strong to do that type of damage. The CBS affiliate's report also states that “some kind of evidence” was found in the debris and makes the eerie statement that “no radioactivity was found”.

Our good thoughts go out to the people who work at eBay and PayPal, who are probably (and justifiably) a little freaked out right now.

Link

(In case you missed my first attempt to install Windows Vista, it's here.)

1:10 p.m.: Okay, it's time for plan B: boot the machine from the DVD. Perhaps all is not lost.

1:11 p.m.: The welcome screen appears. I have 2 choices:

• Install Vista
• Repair Installation

Since it's possible that Vista has already been installed and it's just the bootloader that's been bunged up, I choose the “Repair” option.

1:12 p.m.: The “Repair” option does me no good. It's only good for fixing Vista installations on your hard drive, and one can't be found. This doesn't bode well — remember, I chose to upgrade XP to Vista, which keeps my programs and data.

1:13 p.m.: My suspicion is confirmed. I'm now at the screen which lets me choose between upgrading to Vista or doing a clean install, and the “new install” option is the only one available; the “upgrade” option has been greyed out. A prompt at the bottom of the screen says that I can only do a new install on this machine.

Since “new install” is the only option available, I choose it. I'm now being asked to select a partition on which Vista will be installed. There's only one on this machine, so I choose it. Just for kicks, I choose the option format the partition as well.

Formatting is quick. Now to install Vista!

1:14 p.m.: An error box appears: “Vista cannot be installed on the partition you have selected.” No “OK” button, no “Cancel” button, no button at all. I wait for a little bit, and I'm kicked back to the opening screen.

1:15 p.m.: Let's try that again. This time, I delete the partition, create a new one and then format it. That should do the trick.

1:16 p.m.: An error box appears: “Vista cannot be installed on the partition you have selected.” No “OK” button, no “Cancel” button, no button at all. I wait for a little bit, and I'm kicked back to the opening screen.

If I wanted my computer rendered useless, I would've saved myself some time by simply continuing to run Windows XP on it.

Next: Success!

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington reports that Reddit, the social bookmarking site that I think of as “Digg for the non-developmentally-delayed”, has been acquired by Conde Nast, publisher of Wired (as well as other fine publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Cookie).

No price has been disclosed, but I think it's more than sufficient to say that my friend Aaron Swartz, one of the two people who joined the founders, should be able to take me out for a nice dinner the next time I see him. I see that Aaron's been keeping track of what they've written about the acquisition on his blog, and here's the article in Reddit's own blog in which they comment on the sale.

According to the TechCrunch article, Reddit will be left as a standalone site, but will probably have its links integrated into other Conde Nast properties. I hope that they don't ruin the Reddit experience; it's one of the must-check sites that I hit several times daily.

Link

11:15 a.m.: With files backed up, the Windows Vista RC1 DVD goes into my IBM ThinkCentre's DVD drive and we're off to the races. When presented with a choice between a clean install and an upgrade (in which I get to keep my apps and files), I choose the upgrade option.

11:17 a.m.: Windows Vista reports which apps aren't compatible with it. My IT-department-installed Symantec AntiVirus? Not compatible. IT-department-installed auto-backup solution? Not compatible. Java Web Start? Not compatible.

Here's the kicker: Microsoft SQL Server 2005? Not compatible.

I tell George this over IM and he suggests that there's one more app that might not be compatible with Vista: “The Internet”.

11:32 a.m.: Copying files… (4% complete). Thankfully, I have better things to do, like have my weekly update meeting with the boss.

12:06 p.m.: Expanding files…(30% complete). I think about lunch. There is no cause-effect relationship between the two.

12:14 p.m.: Hey, it looks as though the machine is shutting down for reboot. We have lift-off!

12:15 p.m.: Hey, it looks as though the machine is still shutting down for reboot. Patience, young grasshopper…

12:16 p.m.: How long does it take for a machine to reboot, anyway?

12:17 p.m.: No drive activity. No screen activity. Ctrl-Alt-Del defibrillation failed. I call time of death at 12:17 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. I hold down the power button and shut down the machine old school.

12:18 p.m.: Power up! First the regular BIOS graphics, followed by…one line of DOS-text gibberish, about 10 characters long and a blinking underline cursor. I press a key.

The machine reboots, and seconds later, the same 10-or-so characters, followed by the underline cursor, which mocks me with every blink.

I IM George and say “Good thing I didn't have anything important on that box.” He says that that should be translated into Latin and put on the Microsoft crest.

More reports as I make my second attempt at installing Vista.

Don't forget, folks: at Global Nerdy, we ruin perfectly good computers so you don't have to!

Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, is a happy little goblin today:

OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn't be more excited.

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google's scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

This is a bigger deal from a business user and enterprise standpoint than for the individual user, but those lines are getting blurrier all the time.

While JotSpot's current pre-built application portfolio (calendaring, spreadsheets, text processing) may look redundant for Google, it actually expands Google Apps for Your Domain, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets by adding custom application development on a wiki framework—ideal when virtual teams working on projects together need something that the pre-built Google suite doesn't quite deliver.

It also allows JotSpot to go places it otherwise couldn't, thanks to Google's ad-driven revenue model. JotSpot will now be free.

TechCrunch's take on the deal adds the following forward-looking question about Google's rush to fill out their team productivity and collaboration services suite:

If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. How much longer until a web conferencing company is acquired?

This is yet another deal where Yahoo! was rumored to be a suitor, but Google wound up getting the girl.

Link

Tags: wiki, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, JotSpot, Google, collaboration

You're supposed to do scary things on Hallowe'en, and what could be scarier than installing the first release candidate of a new version of Microsoft Windows? That's what I'll be doing today.

I got my grubby paws on RC1 last night at a Microsoft presentation in Toronto, where some 'softies from Redmond did presentations coverig the new features for IT and security in Vista. I took notes and will blog them later.

Being a release candidate, the installation DVD doesn't come in the newly-announced packaging currently headlined on Techmeme; rather, it comes in a standard DVD case with the woodland scene that serves as the background image for the Windows Vista Team Blog.

I'll be installing Vista on the standard-issue Tucows PC desktop, an IBM ThinkCentre with a 3GHz P4 and half a gig of RAM (hmm…I should really fill out a request for more). According to the Windows Vista RC1 Reviewer's Guide, this may not be enough for the “Premium” Vista experience, for which 1GB is required.

I'll post my notes of the install experience, and later I'll take the newly-available Windows Media Player 11 (an early review appears here) and IE7 for a spin and post those experiences here as well.

Remember folks, Global Nerdy lives on the bleeding edge so you don't have to!