xnmfzx.com

Windows, which SugarCRM is calling “Cloud Views,” will pop up with relevant information, such as which of a user’s LinkedIn connections work at a certain company. Users can also import this information into SugarCRM.

SugarCRM also got a bit more social, with a new Social Feeds feature that provides alerts and status updates found in Web services like Facebook.

It’s a great way of opening up the SugarCRM system beyond mere source code, as PC World reports:

SugarCRM announced a new Cloud Connectors program on Monday that opens the leading open-source CRM solution to cloud services like LinkedIn.

If you’re logging into third-party sites “while you’re on the phone with someone, you’re going to be hemming and hawing and you’re not going to have it at your fingertips,” [director of product marketing Martin Schneider] said. “The idea is to drive adoption and keep people in one space, but also give them unfettered access to bringing content into the CRM system.”

Disclosure: I am an adviser to and customer of SugarCRM.

This is the next level of “source” integration. What was once purely about source code is now equally a matter of open, mobile data. While SugarCRM’s Cloud Connectors feature doesn’t break ground that others like Salesforce.com haven’t already covered, the combination of open source and open data is a potent combination for enterprises looking to expand CRM efficiency while reducing CRM lock-in.

I find myself using LinkedIn, as well as SugarCRM, all the time in the context of my work managing U.S. and Latin America sales for Alfresco. Having both in the same place or, rather, having data from LinkedIn tied into my CRM system, makes a lot of sense and should help me to save time.

commentary

More than 1 million G-1 units were sold in 2008, the year it was launched. Apple has raised its mobile music stake by enabling
iPhone owners to download music via cellphone networks.

Google’s a powerful music distributor
Let’s start with YouTube. Worldwide visitors to the site now number more than 100 million per month. Of the top 20 all-time most viewed clips at the site, 12 of them are music videos. The most watched YouTube channel belongs to Universal Music Group, the largest of the four top record labels. And YouTube has become one of the most popular ways to share music legally.

No one is saying, of course, that Schmidt will be hanging gold albums on his office wall or moving to Hollywood. For one thing, Google isn’t in the business of promoting talent or producing records. For another thing, the company hasn’t produced the kind of revenues that would put it on par with the likes of iTunes or even Amazon, according to one music industry source.

Google needs to drive more music revenue
Where things could get sticky for the labels is if they hand too much power to Google. They don’t want Schmidt to be able to dictate to them the way that Apple CEO Steve Jobs (registration required) has for the past few years.

Incredibly, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a lifelong technologist, could find himself becoming an accidental music industry titan, a sort of digital-age David Geffen or Ahmet Ertegun. Google, of course, has many challenges ahead of it before executives there wield that kind of influence. Geffen and Ertegun, after all, were two of the most powerful label bosses ever.

For example, Warner Music pulled out of talks with YouTube after Google reps declined to fork over upfront money, my music sources said. All three of the other labels receive advances but Warner doesn’t. The reason is Warner agreed to forgo an advance back in 2006 when it signed its original deal and YouTube wants to maintain those terms.

For example, Google could post “click-to-buy” links when someone keys a song title into Google’s search engine, Kevorkian said. The company could also conceivably use its search engine to suggest songs or alert people to local music events.

YouTube is trying to capitalize on the popularity of music videos by posting click-to-buy links near the videos that lead to Amazon or Apple’s iTunes. Google declined to provide sales numbers for the ads.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Google’s appeal as a digital jukebox is first that it’s free of charge to users and that many people are so familiar with the site. The site enables fans to embed songs on their blogs or Web sites and provides an easy and legal way to share music. If someone wants to send a song to a friend, they can just e-mail a link to the song’s YouTube video.

Google’s G-1 cell phone could become an even more powerful music platform than YouTube–that is if the phone continues to attract consumers.

Perhaps the biggest question is whether anybody wants Google to have a grip on videos, music, news, books, photos… all our media?

At the same time, the music store Amazon.com created on Android, Google’s mobile-phone operating system, is leading to big music sales. Google declined to provide numbers or to comment for this story, but my sources say that the labels are “very happy” with Android’s songs sales. In addition, Google could one day tap into a huge market by helping people discover and buy music using search, according to Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with research firm IDC.

For several years, YouTube has been a disruptive force in film and television. Now music poobahs are wondering what designs Google may have on their businesses. Three of the four largest recording companies are in talks to renegotiate music-licensing deals with Google’s YouTube. Sony Music is very near to inking a YouTube agreement, say my industry sources. Meanwhile, YouTube has reportedly started to generate “tens of millions” for some of the labels.

For Google, one of the main challenges is executing a new music ad model. Two music industry sources say that Google has done only a lackluster job of selling ads against music videos and other label content. Another hazard is in negotiating with the labels.

Studies show that sales of mobile music will skyrocket in the next two years. Songs purchased via handsets will reach $7.3 billion by 2011, nearly equal to that of digital downloads, according to a report from eMarketer. Together, they are expected to make up 56 percent of total music sales.

Google’s name is on the lips of music industry powerbrokers.

This is all mostly good news for the major labels. They need to find new distribution models as record stores disappear. They need competitors to iTunes, which has become too powerful for some in the music business. They need to have a strong presence in mobile music sales.

The top music labels are seeing big music sales from Google's G-1 mobile phone.

But in terms of influence, matching what the old record moguls accomplished isn’t that hard to imagine.

Not only that, Google at this point doesn’t possess the licensing rights to the music libraries from all four major labels. YouTube and Warner Music Group failed to reach a new licensing agreement and Warner’s content has been removed from the site.

Of course, there’s Apple. Anybody selling music, either downloads or the ad-supported kind, must consider Apple their biggest competitor. Apple’s iTunes appears on pace to sell 2 billion songs a year.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh hasn’t officially expanded to include Macs just yet, but the software maker has said that folks in more countries can now take part without having to wait for an invitation.

Several times a link has popped up on Microsoft’s site for an early
Mac version of the Live Mesh client, although Microsoft has promptly taken down the public links.

Although folks in Canada, India, and Ireland don’t need an invite, Microsoft said that there is still a cap for each geography, so those interested might not want to dally too long. The company is expected to broaden testing of Live Mesh ahead of its October Professional Developers Conference, with the service expected to expand to include new features at that point.

The Live Mesh team also posted an interesting blog last week on some of the limits in the current service. For example, individual files can be no larger than 2GB, while the size of all contents in a Live Folder can be up to 10GB. (There’s still a 5GB limit for how much data can be stored in the cloud-based Live Desktop.)

Live Mesh is intended to be a service, over time, that allows cloud-based applications to have desktop components and takes desktop applications into the cloud as well as allowing synchronization among many different devices. For now, though, Live Mesh is primarily a means of synchronizing data across multiple computers.

In a blog posting, Microsoft announced that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now join. Microsoft had already opened things up in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.–Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the country’s largest and most progressive utilities, will invest directly in solar power plants and solar panels distributed in different California communities.

But the financial environment and the structure of the solar subsidy has made building these solar facilities more tenuous.

PG&E has already signed deals to purchase renewable energy from a handful of solar power start-ups. These companies, such as BrightSource and Ausra, build and own power plants, using solar panels or solar thermal technology. PG&E or other utilities purchase the electricity they generate.

“We will do a filing (with regulators) in the next quarter to make an equity investment in renewable energy,” Darbee said. “We are going to move to an equity investment because we have a tax appetite whereas so many other entities do not.”

Darbee said that the renewable energy investment will include central solar power plants as well as distributed solar projects in municipalities that want to push clean energy in their communities, such as the California county of Marin.

He declined to specify how much the investment would be but said that it would be “significant.” After his talk, he acknowledged it would comparable in size to Southern California Edison’s program to spend $850 million over five years to put solar panels on commercial rooftops.

Darbee mentioned the solar initiative during a discussion on Wednesday here at the Clean-tech Investor Summit.

Investors for renewable energy projects get a 30 percent tax credit but with corporate profits slipping, fewer companies are willing to put money into these deals.

CEO Peter Darbee said the move represents the first time that PG&E–already a large purchaser of solar and other renewable energy technologies–will build and own solar installations. Right now, the utility purchases clean energy from third parties.

Peter Darbee (left), the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric is interviewed by venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis at Clean-tech Investor Summit.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

California utilities are some of the most important purchasers of clean technologies and vital customers for a raft of energy technology developers. The state mandates that utilities get 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

With distributed solar, PG&E could own and operate the panels installed on the rooftops of commercial buildings and homes. This sort of model, being pursued by Duke Energy and Southern California Edison as well, suits utilities well because the solar panels generate the most electricity during peak times of the day.

While everyone can save entire Web pages for offline viewing and enjoy Opera Mini 4.1’s improved compression speeds (Opera claims it’s 50 percent faster,) only Java-enabled cell phones supporting JSR-75 will be able to take advantage of uploading and downloading any file via Opera’s mobile Web. The good news is this will apply to most phones released in the last few years. BlackBerry devices older than 4.2, for instance, won’t be able to support this promised windfall of a feature. Users will still need to equip the phone with the right media players and readers to view the downloaded files.

On Tuesday, Opera sewed up a short beta run of Opera Mini 4.1. After a mere month and a half, the Norwegian software company declared the cell phone browser build stable enough to institute as the latest product standard.

Opera Mini 4.1, like Opera 9.5 Beta 2, can now guess the URL you want when you enter a search term in the address bar, a praiseworthy ability. It can also highlight terms on a Web page to let you zero in on most-wanted data bites. You’ll use this Find feature, common to desktop browsers, by hitting the Menu button and selecting Find in Page.

The wide world of Opera browser products can admittedly get a little confusing. As a refresher, Opera Mini 4.1 works well on most Java handsets, including BlackBerry, and on Palm phones running a Java environment. Those who download Opera’s browser to Windows Mobile and Symbian phones will get Opera Mobile, a more advanced, commercial browser with a 30-day trial.

Personally, this Twitter thing was fun for a while but it has become a burden.

I find myself following my Twitter list and posting my own inanities having little to no idea if there are implications or if what anyone posts is actually true. This requires a level of diligence that the brain isn’t necessarily prepared to deal with as well as a level of attention that goes beyond being a communications utility and into a part-time job.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.

Your brain lies to you, says the NY Times in an Op-ed piece about the upcoming elections. For me, the article illuminates some of the implications of the social-media world where information flies at you from every direction. You don’t know what’s true or false and odds are you can’t handle the volume of information in a manner that lets you process it effectively.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

Basically you hear or learn something, the brain processes it multiple times and by the time its fully part of your brain you’ve forgotten where it came from.

Bezos: Why?

Bezos (sheepishly): We’re working on that.

Bezos: I know.

Bezos: The Web is a value-added feature.

Jobs: You old softy.

Bezos: Why?

Bezos: A little Ayn Rand.

Jobs: I already told you. People don’t read anymore. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed.

Jobs: This works, too. And it fits in my pocket. And it’s in color.

While Steve Jobs has been critical of the Kindle’s chances, for anybody who doesn’t realize already, this is a completely fictional conversation. That said, feel free to comment on whether you agree with these theoretical opinions of the device and whether the Kindle 2 might appeal more to him–or not.

My Deep Throat simply goes by the handle “The Dude,” and it’s unclear whether he’s a disgruntled employee of Apple, Amazon, or the hotel where the meeting allegedly took place–or whether he’s employed at all. But he says, “It’s time this meeting came to light, man.” When I asked him why he chose this column as the venue for these revelations, he said, “I like your style. And I hear you bowl on the
Wii. We should roll sometime.”

Bezos: It works.

Bezos: Yeah. What do you think?

Bezos: We’ll see.

Jobs: How ’bout Europe? Asia?

Bezos: It’ll be all right. Had to get it out. The next one will be better.

Jobs: How ’bout “The Apple Reader powered by Apple?”

Jobs: Where is it?

The boardroom inside the Hyatt near the San Francisco airport.

Bezos: Yeah. Sorry, I needed that. No one can tell me I can’t do something like you can.

Bezos: What choice will they have? It’s better than what they get now from traditional publishers.

[Jobs turned the device over and looked at the back of it.]

Bezos: Not everything has to be supersexy looking to sell.

Bezos (ignoring him): It’ll have its own store. With thousands of books. And anybody will be able to create an ebook and upload it to the store. We’re going to take up to a 65 percent cut on the content.

[Jobs mulled over the comment.]

Jobs: Battery?

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos readies to take center stage Monday morning to release what will most likely be the next version of his company’s much-hyped digital reading device, I recently obtained some very interesting–and exclusive–information concerning a very hush-hush meeting between Steve Jobs and Bezos that took place on the eve of the launch of the original Kindle back in November of 2007.

Jobs: Oops.

Bezos: Bigger screen. No backlight. Better reading experience.

Jobs: I’ll give you that. But your soul, Jeff? Isn’t that going a little too far? How ’bout a nice 15 percent discount on the Nano or some Macbooks. We’ll make some real dough.

Bezos: Not yet. Everything goes out tomorrow to everyone at once.

Jobs: What percentage of that wants to read on a clunky looking reader that costs $400?

The meeting was supposed to take place at 8 a.m. at Hyatt Regency near the San Francisco airport, the same place where the two had come four years earlier to get a sneak peek at “Ginger,” which we now know as the Segway.

Jobs: Hi, Jeff. How’s it going? Now, where is it?

Jobs: You wanted my honest assessment. Well, that’s it. It’ll never work.

Bezos: We’re trying to being conservative.

Bezos: People don’t read books.

Jobs: Again, right here. And the content’s free.

Sunday, November 18, 2007–8:30 am

Bezos: You have 5 percent of the PC market. I’m looking at the 5 percent of people who read a lot. How’s that any different?

Bezos: You were the one who said people wouldn’t watch video on a tiny little
iPod screen–and then you brought out an iPod with video capabilities.

Jobs: Shame. Always better to give it first to a few light heavyweights, if you know what I mean.

Jobs: (Tapping the screen with his finger numerous times). Nothing’s happening.

Jobs: I give you what you want? Are we done here?

[Jobs continued playing with the device.]

Jobs: Their thing looks better than yours. But it sucks, too.

Bezos: Think about it. “The Apple Reader powered by Amazon.”

Jobs: You don’t.

Anyway, here’s the account of the meeting. There was a tape involved, though it was hard to decipher in patches due to the fact that it was well worn and may have been previously used in The Dude’s answering machine.

Jobs: High bar, Jeff. How many do you think you’ll sell?

Bezos (smiling): Why?

Bezos: How do I know this isn’t one, too?

Jobs: Best customer support in the world won’t make this thing fly.

Bezos: Removable.

Jobs: Will authors stand for that?

Bezos: We’re going to plaster this thing on our homepage day-in-day-out. It’ll sell. Anything we put on our homepage sells.

Jobs: That was a smokescreen.

Jobs: Safe flight.

Jobs (laughing): Surf the Web? On an Etch-a-Sketch?

Bezos: What do you think of the screen?

Bezos: If we didn’t have it, people would criticize us for not having it.

Jobs: How’s someone going to take this country to country? You’re going to get roaming charges. How’s that going to work? Different Kindle for every country? Where’s the scalability?

Jobs: If people don’t read books, why are they going to read ebooks?

Bezos: Anything else?

Bezos: I had a feeling you’d say that. Can you get more specific?

Jobs: You got any widgets?

[Bezos pulled the Kindle out of a padded briefcase. He held down the Alt and home buttons to take it out of its screen-saver mode and handed it to Jobs. The Apple CEO held it in his hand, staring at it.]

Bezos: That’s because it’s not a touch screen.

[Jobs turned the screen of his iPhone toward Bezos.]

Jobs: I’m standing on the street and I drop the iPhone it’s got a decent shot at not breaking. I take that bet. What happens when a customer calls and says her $400 device slipped out the crappy 50-cent case and went boom. What do you do then?

Jobs: No features are value added. They’re either features or they’re not.

Jobs: Feels good, right?

Jobs: Mystery’s good. Scarcity, too. It’s not a bad thing to be out of stock. Put a rope up. Don’t let people in the door. They want to get in.

Bezos: To take notes, type in URLs to surf the Web. I told you, there’s a built-in wireless connection. Sprint EVDO.

Jobs: Dumb.

Jobs: Let me give you some advice. Don’t tell people how many you’ve sold.

Jobs: Maybe not on your planet. On mine, it does.

Jobs: It just does.

Jobs: I think it sucks.

[Jobs whipped out his
iPhone.]

[He was taking a closer look at the protective case when the Kindle suddenly dislodged itself and fell on to the table with a loud thud.]

Jobs: Jesus. How many times can I say it? There are design firms out there that could come up with things we’ve never thought of–things that would make you crap in your pants. And this is what you come up with after three years.

Bezos: There newspapers on magazines on there, too–and blogs. Imagine the commuter going to work–”

Jobs: You seed it to reviewers?

Bezos: Thanks, man.

The two billionaires sat down.

Bezos: We aim to please.

Bezos: U.S. first. We see how it does.

Bezos: No, “Hi, Jeff, how’s it going?”

Bezos: You could do one for us. You do the hardware, we do the store. Sony’s toast.

When he came into the heavily guarded boardroom where the meeting was to take place, Jobs was wearing his signature sneakers, jeans and black mock turtleneck. The jeans had a hole in the front where a white pocket was sticking out. Bezos would later recount that for a second he thought they might have been the same jeans Jobs had worn at their meeting for the Segway in 2003. But they did look clean and washed. Bezos was dressed more formally, in a pressed shirt, but he wasn’t wearing a tie.

Jobs: Its shape is not innovative, it’s not elegant, it doesn’t feel anthropomorphic. And what’s with this big button here? I just turned a page and didn’t mean to. What’s this book?

Bezos: We offer to ship her another at a discounted rate–basically, at cost.

Jobs: Well, it sucks then. And the interface sucks. Why is there a keyboard? It adds an extra 20 percent to the dimensions.

Jobs: We’ll see.

Bezos: I’ll sell more Kindles than Apple TVs.

[Silence]

Bezos: Maybe we go Bluetooth and no wireless abroad. You connect your mobile to the device via Bluetooth.

Bezos: I think it looks pretty good.

Jobs: It won’t work.

Jobs: Three years, huh?

(Credit:
Hyatt)
Bezos, who was on his way to New York, flew down from Seattle for the quick tete a tete. Jobs was late. Apparently, he’s always late. Bezos knew that, so he came late, too.

Jobs: Until I make it cool to read ‘em.

To toggle it on you just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also summon it with a small button that sits next to the address bar, or by choosing it from the right click menu. Once opened, you simply pick which tab you want to see by clicking it, or simply scrolling with your mouse wheel. It’s not nearly as smooth as Tab Effect, an eye candy tab switching add-on Rafe wrote about back in September of last year, but it’s neat nonetheless.

One of my buddies just tipped me off to a must-have tab management add-on for
Firefox. It’s called FoxTab, and it’s a cross between
Mac OS X’s Expose,
Windows Vista’s Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you’ve got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, this offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one.

There are five different styles in all, and each one offers a different way to view the thumbnails you have open. My personal favorite is the standard grid view, which can be tweaked to include as many rows as you’d like. Windows Vista users are more likely to choose the stack view, which is identical to Vista’s Flip 3D. No matter what you choose, it’s a pretty svelte alternative to hunting down the page you want by favicon and text alone.

Note: This is an “experimental” add-on in Mozilla’s directory, so you must be registered there to download it.

FoxTab lets you see all of your open tabs as thumbnails. You can maneuver them with your scroll wheel, or swap what type of view you'd like on the fly. (click to enlarge)

Related: Surf your bookmarks by thumbnail with Bookmark Previews

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

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.