xnmfzx.com

As VentureBeat notes:
The “for free” part isn’t so much a dig at Twitter, which also lets you message for free, but a dig at simple text messaging services (also known as SMS), that cost money to use.

Via VentureBeat

(Credit: Facebook on the iPhone)
Will the new Facebook
iPhone application be the death of Twitter?

Facebook out-Twitters on the iPhone

Twitter is interesting and sorta fun but it’s annoying that I can’t interact with it the way I want to–at least not consistently. Any limitation or change that forces people to change their behavior is a negative. SMS is bit annoying too in that you can’t mass communicate, at least not for free.

If Facebook offers a “communication utility” consistently, as part of their platform, it has way more users than Twitter and should be able to push it aside pretty quickly.

T-Mobile USA said Monday that it’s finally launching its long-awaited 3G wireless network.

T-Mobile may not stop with its 3G rollout in its efforts to expand its market in the U.S. Parent company Deutsch Telekom is also supposedly in talks to acquire Sprint Nextel, according to a story published Monday in The Wall Street Journal. But I think this scenario is highly unlikely. Stay tuned for a follow-up blog detailing why I think it would be dumb for T-Mobile to acquire Sprint and its cadre of problems.

T-Mobile, which is a distant fourth place in the U.S. wireless market with about 29 million customers at the end of December, spent more than $4 billion to buy spectrum in the 2006 Advanced Wireless Service auction held by the Federal Communications Commission. The new spectrum more than doubled the company’s spectrum offering and finally gave it the necessary bandwidth to build a high-speed wireless network.

Often seen as a laggard in the U.S. wireless market, T-Mobile has mainly competed against the other big three mobile operators–AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel–by offering customers value service plans that are often cheaper and include more free talk time. So far, the company hasn’t released details of new pricing for its 3G network, but it’s expected to once again beat its competitors on value.

T-Mobile’s 3G network will initially use a GSM-based technology called UMTS, which typically provides download speeds of 220Kbps to 320Kbps with bursts at 384Kbps.

While UMTS is considered a 3G technology, there is an even faster version of the technology known as HSDPA. AT&T, which also uses GSM, has already begun upgrading from UMTS to HSDPA. And it typically gets average download speeds of 967Kbps, with peaks at 1.63Mbps.

While many T-Mobile customers will likely rejoice that the carrier has finally added 3G capability to its network, it will be interesting to see how quickly the company can get the service to all its markets, and how much it will ask subscribers to pay.

HSDPA is based on UMTS, so upgrading the network is supposedly easy. T-Mobile has already said that it plans to offer its first HSDPA device within a few months. Its parent company Deutsche Telekom is already rolling out HSDPA throughout T-Mobile networks in Europe. So it’s very likely that T-Mobile’s network will catch up in terms of speed very quickly.

The blog Electronista reported earlier this weekend that T-Mobile customers in Brooklyn, N.Y., who already began using the new service before the official launch, have reported UMTS downloads at 300Kbps or more. This is faster than the typical download speeds found using the current 2.5G EDGE network, which offers downloads at about 200Kbps or less.

New York will be the first city to use the new network, which will initially use a technology called UMTS, or Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, but will eventually use an even faster technology standard called HSDPA, or High-Speed Downlink Packet Access. T-Mobile will continue rolling out the network across other major cities throughout the year. By the end of the year, the company expects that its high-speed data network will be up and running in most major metropolitan areas.

The company is also augmenting its 3G service with an expansion of its T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi network. The hope is that customers will use dual-mode Wi-Fi and cellular phones to leverage both T-Mobile’s 3G network as well as fast Wi-Fi networks.

That said, T-Mobile still has some way to go in matching data speeds of its competitors. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, whose networks both use the CDMA technology, have 3G networks that use EV-DO. This technology provides data download rates of 500 kilobits per second to 1,000Kbps, peaking at 2Mbps.

Share your thoughts on the T-Mobile 3G launch and tell us what you think.

These carriers are currently upgrading their networks to the next version of the technology, called EV-DO Revision A, which will give downloads a 10 percent bump in performance and triple upload speeds.

Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google’s Offline Calendar FAQ page.

The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.

As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google’s online tools a bit more competitive for business users.

Google declined to say when read-write access will arrive or when offline calendars will arrive for ordinary Google Calendar users. “We’ve seen the strongest interest in this feature from our enterprise users, so we’re bringing it to them first,” spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.

As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person’s computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.

The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.

Update 8:59 a.m. PST: Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager, discussed the offline Calendar move at the Google Enterprise blog.

“Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7,
Firefox 2 and 3, and
Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon,” according to the FAQ.

Update 8:46 a.m. PST: Google confirmed it’s begun activating the offline support. It will be available for customers using the free, ad-supported Standard Edition of Google Apps and the Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year, Google said.

Viacom CEO on Google’s ‘rogue company’

Also, a financial warning from Apple gets people guessing what new products might be unveiled this year, and is the home server an idea ahead of its time? Get those stories and the rest of today’s news in this podcast.

Apple getting ready for ‘product transition’

Servers in the home remain scarce

Listen now:

An unlikely drama is playing out in, of all places, the security research field. Researcher Dan Kaminsky says that earlier this year, he discovered a serious flaw in the Domain Name System that drives the Internet. He’s spent the last few months coordinating a huge project to get the flaw patched by all necessary companies before disclosing details about the flaw. But now a fellow researcher has taken a public guess at what the flaw was. And whether he’s right or not, Kaminsky is warning companies to patch their software immediately. Reporter Robert Vamosi joins me in the podcast studio to talk about the story.

Amazon offers automatic credit for S3 outage

Is Kaminsky’s DNS flaw public?

MySpace confirms OpenID support

Yahoo earnings decline, miss estimates

Viacom’s CEO doesn’t publicly badmouth Google very often. But at a small press conference Monday night, he made an exception. CNET News’ Greg Sandoval has the story on why Viacom thinks Google failed to crack down on copyright issues on YouTube.

Adobe revs media player, signs up Sony

Are Google Maps good or evil?

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

SAN DIEGO–Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to the contact information from all your friends, family, and business associates in one place on your smartphone?

SkyData Systems announced at DemoFall on Monday a new mobile application that combines corporate and personal contacts and puts them one click away on a smartphone.

It also searches across structured and unstructured sources, offering targeted news feeds, data from the Web, and from back office apps.

The service is available for Windows Mobile. An
iPhone version is coming at the end of the year, the company said.

The mobile “mashup” allows easy access to information from a variety of sources, including contacts in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others.

Time Warner has been examining several options with respect to splitting up the company, including selling off both pieces of the business or partnering with other companies.

Time Warner is expected to announce Wednesday that it has completed the internal process of separating AOL’s dial-up Internet access business from its advertising business, the newspaper said.

But separating the business hasn’t been as easy as it sounds as the company tries to figure out how to divide revenue, staff, and liabilities. Earlier, Bewkes had said he expected to have the process completed by the end of the second quarter. Time Warner will announce second-quarter results on Wednesday.

EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff said last week when the company announced its second-quarter earnings that it is interested in buying AOL’s dial-up business. He didn’t give specifics, but he said that AOL’s 8.7 million subscribers would provide a big revenue boost to the company. EarthLink currently has only 2.2 million dial-up subscribers.

Once the separation of AOL’s advertising-content and dial-up businesses is concluded, it may aid potential suitors like Yahoo and Microsoft in sizing up an offer price.

And in the latest AOL-Yahoo turn of events, Time Warner nixed any plans for former executive Jonathan Miller to serve on Yahoo’s board, citing his no-compete clause.

Even though dial-up is a dying business, it still generates cash and a predictable revenue stream, which makes AOL’s dial-up business particularly attractive to EarthLink and potentially other dial-up providers.

CNET News senior writer Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.

In the past few weeks, the hubbub of an AOL-Yahoo, or AOL-Microsoft deal has quieted down, following a truce between Yahoo and its investor activist Carl Icahn, who was waging a proxy battle with the hope of pushing Yahoo and Microsoft to do a deal.

AOL has continued to talk with Yahoo as the on-again-off-again Yahoo-Microsoft buyout talks plodded along, and later expanded to involve a potential AOL-Microsoft deal.

Time Warner has been talking about splitting the company into two different entities for a while now. And it’s been a main focus of Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes, who took over as CEO seven months ago. AOL has long been viewed as a problem for Time Warner, as its dial-up business declines and its advertising business struggles to compete.

Time Warner has taken a step closer to splitting up AOL’s business, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Yahoo reportedly turned to Time Warner and its AOL division as a potential white knight, after Microsoft announced its unsolicited bid for the company in February.

“The challenge is to ensure that the diffraction pattern (from the light) that is produced is basically the pattern you want to print,” he said.

The Computational Scaling initiative will include support from several of IBM’s partners, including Mentor Graphics and Toppan Printing.

“In straightforward physics (22nm) is kind of a tall order,” said Iyer. IBM’s new computational-intensive method takes the circuits that designers lay out and transforms them into a pattern on the mask that allows IBM to print the 22-nanometer features with 193-nanometer light, he said.

“If I had x-rays, I would be able to print this in a jiffy. Problem is, that technology doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t look like it will exist in time for 22 nanometers,” according to Iyer. “This allows us to do it not using very, very advanced lithography tools, but combining our existing tools with a computationally intensive technique.”

The initiative is also linked to IBM’s cloud computing strategy, which offers scalable, more energy-efficient Web services. Through cloud computing, customers can access these services “in a highly flexible and open environment,” according to IBM.

“There’s a tremendous amount of computation involved in taking that design data and converting it to a mask which will illuminate with the right kind of illumination,” Iyer said. “We build very fast computers. So, it’s a matter of taking advantage of these very high-performance computers and doing these computationally intensive things.”

After 45nm, comes 32nm, which doesn’t present any great manufacturing process hurdles. But 22nm is a different story. And IBM is trying to lead the way–ahead of Intel.

At its most basic, photolithography–the conventional process for making semiconductor chips–means using a mask to cast a shadow onto a light-sensitive material called a resist. Based on this, the circuits are then “printed.” This is where 22nm is hitting a wall. “Once the wavelength of light becomes comparable to the size of the thing you’re trying to print, things break down,” said Subu Iyer, an IBM distinguished engineer. The challenge is to use a light wavelength of 193 nanometers because “extreme ultraviolet” radiation is still impractical.

IBM is tapping into its computing know-how to get to the next-generation 22-nanometer chip technology.

Generally, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip becomes. Both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are moving their processor lines from 65-nanometer to 45-nanometer technology. (AMD, which does joint chip R&D with IBM, is slated to begin doing this in the fourth quarter.)

The struggling company recently became the target of a roughly $1 billion takeover bid from movie rental giant Blockbuster. Circuit City said Friday it has received a letter from Blockbuster responding to Circuit City’s request for information concerning Blockbuster’s ability to successfully finance its proposal and to secure shareholder approval.

Circuit City has retained Goldman Sachs to help it explore “strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value,” the electronics retailer said Friday.

“While the Circuit City board has confidence in the company’s ability to successfully implement its turnaround plan and generate shareholder value, we believe that we can best serve the interests of our shareholders by exploring all possible alternatives to enhance shareholder value,” Circuit City CEO Philip Schoonover said in a statement. “Let me be clear that our decision to allow Blockbuster and Carl Icahn to conduct due diligence should not be taken as an indication that the board has completed its review of the Blockbuster proposal, that the board has taken a position on the company’s value, or that it has settled upon a particular strategic course of action.”

Blockbuster’s letter included a note from Carl Icahn, a Blockbuster director and its largest shareholder. The note stated that, assuming his satisfaction with the due diligence review, he and his affiliates “stand ready” to purchase Circuit City if Blockbuster can’t secure financing or shareholder approval. Circuit City officials said they will grant that due diligence.

Twitter
Although well-used by many and even relied upon by some (like me), Twitter has yet to turn on a revenue model. It’s not like the company would lose users, if it set up a minor advertising strategy as a test; people want to see the company make some money. Please, Twitter, turn on the revenue before it’s too late.

Ask
Why isn’t it dead yet? It’s really a good search engine, and even a small piece of the search economy can generate significant revenues. But running fourth place in a three-horse race is not a good position to be in when the costs of competing are high, as they are in the search market.

Netvibes’ much smaller competitor, Pageflakes, was acquired earlier this year, and that’s what needs to happen with Netvibes. But media companies–the natural acquirers for Netvibes–are about to get hammered by a retrenching advertising market, and that may spell the end of Netvibes’ survival plan. (The upcoming release of a Facebook product might help growth, but I don’t think that’s the real issue Netvibes is facing.)

DailyMotion
This popular mostly European video-sharing site isn’t under the protection of a major moneymaker like YouTube is, and it hasn’t yet found a way to offset its streaming costs with advertising revenue.

Zillow
The real-estate site’s revenue model is advertising. Real estate and bank advertising. Unless the real-estate research site starts charging for foreclosure listings, I don’t see it doing too well in a hunkered-down economy, in which people are trying to hold on to their homes for dear life, not upgrade.

Meebo
This is one of the coolest online communication companies I’ve seen. I like its products and services. But the revenues for running branded chat rooms cannot be all that large. Meebo belongs under the wing of a larger company like Facebook or Microsoft, but with Meebo’s expensive valuation and the coming cutback in M&A, I fear that its exits may be blocked.

“We are going to lose some good companies.” That’s the warning cry from investors in tech these days.

Pandora
People love this product. It helps them find music they like. What’s wrong with that? Here’s what: unfavorable royalty rates could make it too expensive to run. Survival depends on ongoing negotiations with the music industrial complex. They appear to be going well, but the company is very exposed.

See also: The tech downturn: How long and how bad?

MySpace
Wounded. Although it’s generating a lot of revenue, and under the aegis of Rupert Murdoch, the notoriously ruthless businessman could easily cut loose this social network of yesterday. The momentum is certainly not with this one. This item has been updated from the original post.

Here, in no particular order, are 11 online services companies that could face a similar fate. Several of them are 2008 Webware 100 winners. Like I said, popularity isn’t enough.

And for ongoing coverage: Tough times for tech

Skype
The revolutionary VoIP service was acquired by eBay, which someday may be seen as its downfall. A noncore service to the auction site, eBay may well want to spin off Skype to maintain focus. But who would buy it at the valuation that would make eBay stockholders comfortable?

The problem is that being loved is no guarantee for success. Even being used isn’t enough. Remember Kozmo, the munchie messenger service from the last bubble? Not a person who used it didn’t love it. In the interest of building a user base, the company was OK with losing money on every transaction in its early days. But when the time came for it to become a real business, it was too late. It couldn’t transition to a viable company, and it folded. It was a tragedy.

Netvibes
Here’s another product I have used and still like a great deal (occasional frustrating slowdowns notwithstanding), but that has a limited upside as a standalone business.

TripIt
A very useful service for organizing travel information. Wait, travel? Who’s going to be traveling more often during the economic storm we’re heading into? People are going to sit at home on their mattresses filled with cash, teleconference instead of go on business trips, and take vacations in their backyards. I fear for this company and other clever travel start-ups.

Second Life
The Web interface and social network of the future. Except that it’s expensive to run, hard to use, and suffers from empty-restaurant syndrome.

Some we won’t miss, of course: the lame, me-too, or single-featured “products” masquerading as businesses. But be prepared. Some Web 2.0 start-ups that are well-loved by many are in serious danger of falling off the cliff.

commentary

Imagine that. Studies have shown that peer-to-peer downloaders tend to pay more for music, but I think the larger trend is that many of us simply want easy ways to consume digital goods and that forcing us into an offline purchase was a losing strategy.

Clay Shirky, a new media professor at New York University, recently noted that the music industry is the “skull on a pikestaff as a warning to others about how not to deal with the Internet.” Finally, however, things may be changing.

Ars Technica has the dirt on an admission from Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy: digital music downloads might not be evil, after all.

As Ars Technica reports, Universal’s music business is up 3 percent, halting a long-term slide toward oblivion:

Just in case you don’t know, Universal Music Group–one of the Big Four record labels–is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi. So this is a big deal.

The music industry now needs to continue its experimentation with digital downloads, making it ever easier to discover and consume online media. That’s the future.

Digital, of course, is the big driver of better economic performance. At Warner, for instance, it made up 20 percent of total revenues in the second quarter and generated 39 percent more income that it had a year before. Universal notes that its growth is fueled, in part, by “the momentum of digital sales growth.”

Apple has made it easy to buy music online and has an 85 percent market share as thanks.