hnazyygs.com

Skype, perhaps the most well-known VoIP service, seized upon part of AT&T’s letter that promised a review of policies regarding VoIP apps running on 3G network as a hopeful sign that Skype would soon be allowed to work on cellular networks.

Still, Apple said it’s not like AT&T is an innocent bystander.

“There is a provision in Apple’s agreement with AT&T that obligates Apple not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T’s cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) session without obtaining AT&T’s permission. Apple honors this obligation, in addition to respecting AT&T’s customer terms of service, which, for example, prohibit an AT&T customer from using AT&T’s cellular service to redirect a TV signal to an iPhone. From time to time, AT&T has expressed concerns regarding network efficiency and potential network congestion associated with certain applications, and Apple takes such concerns into consideration,” Apple said in its statement.

“We welcome AT&T’s willingness to take a fresh look at authorizing VoIP capabilities on the iPhone over AT&T’s 3G network,” Skype said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “Skype hopes this is a step forward in enabling consumers to be able to use Skype together with their iPhones and 3G connections and looks forward to hearing more about any potential change to AT&T’s policy, in connection with the pending FCC proceeding related to the Skype petition.”

In response to inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T’s Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, told the agency, “Let me state unequivocally: AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store.”

Google Voice, which allows users to receive calls placed to a single telephone number in multiple places and make cheap international calls, was deemed unfit for App Store inclusion in July, after it was released for BlackBerry and Android smartphones. Several days after the story broke, the FCC requested that AT&T, Apple, and Google all comment on what led to the exclusion of Google Voice.

As for Google’s part, its decision to redact a key portion of its letter to the FCC will raise many eyebrows. The company asked the FCC to redact its part of its answer to the FCC’s because “the redaction information relates specifically to private business discussions between Apple and Google and, as such, it constitutes commercial data ‘which would customarily be guarded from competitors’…The Internet service industry is highly competitive, and the redacted material relates to business and operations of Google, warranting protection from disclosure under the commission’s rules,” Google said in a letter to the FCC asking for confidential treatment.

AT&T told federal regulators on Friday that it played no part in Apple’s decision to keep the Google Voice application from the App Store, while Apple said it never actually rejected the application.

Updated at 3 p.m. PDT with additional information and background.

But AT&T said it has little influence over the approval process.

Google also filed a letter in response to the FCC inquiry but redacted a significant portion of that letter when releasing it to the media. A PDF copy can be found here.

Apple, for its part, claimed that the application was never actually rejected. “Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and continues to study it. The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the
iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile-telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging, and voice mail,” Apple said in a statement.

Suspicion immediately fell upon AT&T after the Google Voice application did not make it through the approval process, based on the fact that the application lets users bypass hefty rates on international calls. AT&T has also been believed to be behind the delay or rejection of several other applications that could have placed a strain on its network, such as Sling Media’s SlingPlayer Mobile application.

“AT&T was not asked about the matter by Apple at any time, nor did we offer any view one way or the other. More broadly, AT&T does not own, operate, or control the Apple App Store, and is not typically consulted regarding the approval or rejection of applications for the App Store, or informed when an application is approved or rejected,” Cicconi said in the letter, a PDF copy of which can be found here.

Last.fm had previously offered streaming music primarily in 30-second clips. But thanks to licensing agreements with all four major music labels, the social music service now allows users to stream a song three times for free before being given the option to purchase the song at a number of digital music stores.

Fresh off launching an ad-supported streaming music service for its Last.fm property, CBS Interactive is already touting success.

CBS executives have remained optimistic, suggesting that big-media muscle may be the secret to making free streaming music work online.

According to a release from CBS on Friday, there were 85 percent more unique listeners on Last.fm on Wednesday, January 23–the day that CBS Corporation and Last.fm announced the service–than there had been on the previous Wednesday. The next day, Thursday, saw an 80 percent increase from the previous Thursday, which CBS took as evidence that it wasn’t just a single-day phenomenon.

Actual traffic to Last.fm hasn’t jumped quite so much: CBS reports 27 percent more unique visitors and 45 percent more page views over the same time period. That suggests that existing Last.fm visitors are indeed tuning into the new music offering, but that it might not be boosting membership numbers quite yet. Claiming early success, however, is important PR for CBS: many have lost faith in ad-supported streaming music. Once hyped as the solution to both peer-to-peer piracy and the iTunes monopoly, enthusiasm has faded as start-ups like SpiralFrog have made disappointing debuts.

That’s an unusual–albeit refreshingly frank–way to talk in public about a business partner. Give Jobs credit for speaking his mind, although I very much doubt Adobe appreciated his candor.

Thin gruel. Hopefully, I can get a fuller answer later on.

As my colleague Tom Krazit reported Tuesday afternoon, Jobs used the Apple shareholders’ meeting to publicly dismiss the the full-blown PC Flash version as “too slow to be useful” on the
iPhone. He then went on to describe the mobile version–Flash Lite–as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

I tried to get a comment from Adobe, which has worked closely with Apple over the years. Will Flash be supported on the iPhone or not? Here’s the official non-response, response to my query:

“”Flash and Flash Lite are a huge success. All major handset manufacturers worldwide license Flash today delivering a broad range of mobile devices ranging from feature phones to smartphones and consumer electronic devices. With more than 450 million Flash-enabled mobile devices shipped worldwide and 150 percent year-over-year growth we are on track to see 1 billion Flash enabled devices by 2010. Consumers demand a rich Web experience on any device and platform and Flash delivers just that. We look forward to our continued relationship with industry leaders to deliver engaging experiences to consumers worldwide.”

Was Steve Jobs trying to send an unofficial message to Adobe Systems? Something on the order of “get it in gear, guys, if you want to stay on my VIP list”?

Bloggers were eager to pounce on the news as a consequence of Twitter’s notorious scaling problems, which Cook should have been able to keep under control. But many members of the developer community immediately came out in support of him: Google engineer Kevin Marks said (ironically on Twitter) that Cook “has real-world experience of hard scaling issues that is worth more than any bloviating theories.”

And a member of the developer community told CNET News.com that Cook’s skills were highly respected and that now that the news broke, he’d likely be inundated with job offers.

Cook told several blog sites that he was indeed leaving, attributing it to the fact that he was moving to the U.K. But a source close to the snafu told CNET News.com that Cook had indeed been ousted from his role at the microblogging start-up in one capacity or another. In an e-mail to the Silicon Alley Insider, Cook called the departure “amicable,” that he was out as of two weeks earlier, and that he would likely stay on as an adviser to the company.

Luckily for Cook, his talk at Web 2.0 wasn’t directly about Twitter. It was also a lecture, not a panel, so there was no moderator to poke around the issue. And it was tech-heavy, with lines of code dominating the presentation screen, which meant that the folks showing up to listen were more interested in geekspeak than gossip.

The problem: Reports had surfaced earlier that morning that Blaine Cook was leaving the company. Awkward.

SAN FRANCISCO–Here at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of Wednesday morning’s talks was to feature Blaine Cook, Twitter’s lead architect, talking about the Jabber protocol and “building the real-time Web.”

After the panel, Cook told CNET News.com that there were “a number of factors” behind his departure, and that he would be relocating to the U.K. in the fall. In the meantime, he said, he was exploring a number of possibilities. He said he’ll probably end up in a role within a U.K. company to avoid the hassle of a semi-regular across-the-pond commute. With regard to the fact that he took the stage at the conference just hours after the news broke that he was leaving the company, he said, “It’s been kind of an insane morning.”

Citrix either got completely snowed in the acquisition or, much more likely, it’s getting pressure from its bosom-buddy, Microsoft. What it’s not getting is much value for its $500 million.

commentary

And now, a quarter after the deal was closed, Citrix officials have indicated that they will use the hot XenSource branding, but de-emphasize its identity as a virtualization company. Citrix’s flasgship Presentation Server has been renamed to XenApp Server, a fitting title considering its function as an application delivery platform. But it has no XenSource code.

Just what did Citrix buy when it bought XenSource? As Dana Blankenhorn analyzes, Citrix appears to be in a dead sprint to remove any and all value from open source, virtualization buzz, etc. that it may have acquired when it bought XenSource:

The data comes from a survey of Oracle database administrators, consultants, and developers by Sentrigo. It’s shocking.

More seriously, I wonder why enterprises don’t deploy the patches. Are they difficult to implement? Are they not explained well such that database administrators don’t know why they should use them?

Perhaps it’s also a testament to the robust security of Oracle’s products. Let’s assume that the respondents to this survey are representative of Oracle users generally. With 66% of Oracle’s databases essentially unprotected and yet rarely compromised, that says something about their quality.

I don’t know, but it would be fascinating to find out. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of MySQL users regularly patch their systems.

Or maybe it just means that database hackers are lazy.

commentary

If security is a process, Oracle’s users have checked out of the process completely. As CNET’s Dawn Kawamoto reports, two-thirds of Oracle users report that they have never installed an Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU). That’s “never” as in “not ever.”

“That’s the heart of the question,” Cloutier said. “Is there marketing promise in being community-created…in being people-created versus top-down” created.

That was the premise of a gathering here of executives from most of the leading companies in what might be called the “people-powered” industry.

The CafePress precedent
To many in the room, there is already one leading example of how to deal with some of the issues each company is facing: CafePress.

“To be able to say there’s almost a sense of movement, that there is something happening,” Cloutier said, “is an exciting thing. That is the greatest promise of this.”

Regardless of who had done the organizing, there’s little doubt that most, if not all, of the participants on hand want to move forward. They’ve already created a private wiki that they’re using to keep things moving even when they can’t be together in person, and a blog is also likely.

He said that in an industry where each company is making products based on designs submitted by customers, it’s essential to be sure that nothing is produced to which those users don’t own copyright.

So as many of the people behind these companies prepared to go to Austin for this year’s South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, Moo CEO Richard Moross decided that maybe this would be a good time and place to get everyone together and discuss whether a cooperative investigation and search for solutions to common problems would be a good thing for everyone involved.

I was originally invited to attend the gathering, but some of the participants balked at the idea of a reporter being in the room, worrying that having someone taking notes might make people feel like they couldn’t open up and say everything they’d like to. As a compromise, I was allowed to show up just as the formal discussions were ending but before anyone left and to talk to any of the participants about anything I liked.

But no matter how far these people and their companies take this and no matter how big their industry grows, the sense of the value of coming together and creating a set of standards and of working for a common purpose all started in a dark room in the bottom of a dingy club in Austin.

“The challenges that many of these companies are facing,” Popal said, “are things that we went through….As almost the grandfather of the industry, you’re seeing the children go through what you went through.”

After all, there’s strength in numbers, right?

Coming up with common terminology that each company–and newcomers to the industry–can use is crucial, the participants said, because it would go a long way towards building wider public awareness of what the industry is about. That would be a big step for the participating companies because that awareness could draw customers attracted by the very notion that such an industry exists.

“The takeaway is that this is a market,” he said, “and these businesses are starting to prove that.”

But on the heels of building a base of 6.5 million users that have created 170 million products, CafePress definitely has something to teach the Moos and 8020s of the world, Popal said.

These Moo notecards are an example of the kinds of products being sold by companies whose users do all the creation and design of the things they buy.

One way to achieve that, several of the executives on hand argued, could be to create some sort of logo that could be placed on the Web sites and marketing of any participating company, much as the “Made for
iPod” logo designates products certified by Apple that work with iPods. The logo itself, in other words, could be an effective marketing tool.

“For all of us to get in the same room as the others was hugely valuable,” said David ten Have, the CEO of Ponoko, a company that allows customers to design everything from chairs to lamps to
iPhone stands. It allows us “to learn from others’ mistakes….We all deal with communities (that) power us in one way or another. I’ve got this issue, and others are saying, ‘I’ve got the same problem.’ A problem that might take six or 12 months to solve might be solved (much faster) by getting together in a room and having a discussion with people who’ve done it (before).”

But each of these outfits has until now had to solve a set of problems unique to this nascent industry–legal issues, community management processes, and even questions of nomenclature.

And that’s probably why the energy level in the room at the end of the discussion was so high and so buoyant. Many of the participants told me that the gathering would never have happened without Moross taking the time and energy to get them all together, and the gratitude towards him seemed palpable.

These are companies like CafePress, Moo, Etsy, and 8020 Publishing whose business is manufacturing physical products designed by customers. CafePress, for example, makes T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and many other products emblazoned with logos and designs uploaded by users. Moo makes business and greeting cards adorned with users’ own photos and images, and 8020 publishes photo and travel magazines full of readers’ work.

AUSTIN, Texas–Why invent the wheel by yourself if you can turn instead to a group of peers and solve it together?

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).

“We struggle every single day with the fact that it’s really challenging to get a community to make something together,” said 8020 Publishing CEO Paul Cloutier. “So the chance to talk to others having similar problems is not very common.

“One thing we agreed on as a next step,” Moross said, “was linking up all of our legal departments to just get synchronized on those issues.”

Another big issue was the simple problem of what to call this type of business. For now, the term is “people-powered,” but as Cloutier noted, other terms could be “community-created” or even the familiar “user-generated.”

But as the industry veteran, CafePress has definitely impressed upon the newcomers that it’s possible to build a successful business on the idea of letting customers do the design work.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

“It’s flattering to see what was one company and one idea spawning all these micro-businesses and doing the same idea,” said Popal. “It was unimaginable at the time that this one business is going to spawn an industry.”

In addition to the companies named above, executives were also on hand from bag maker Timbuk2, shirt makers Spreadshirt and Threadless, custom framed art maker Imagekind and several others.

That company has been around since 1999, and so Moross invited CafePress vice president of business operations Abdul Popal to attend the gathering both to share in the group discussion and to be on hand as somewhat of a “grandfather” figure.

The copyright challenge
To Moross, the major issue that got tackled Sunday during the four-hour closed-door session was that of copyright.

“A lot of us are pushing some serious (legal) boundaries,” said ten Have.

Sonic Solutions is working with Nvidia, Samsung, and Mitsubishi to start delivering video in a variety of 3D formats to PCs and some 3D-capable TVs. Whenever it does become available–which is not clear yet because Sonic isn’t ready to discuss which hardware partners it’s working with–the movies will be delivered via the same method as the company’s CinemaNow service.

Though Sonic Solutions actually sees Blu-ray as the best way of delivering 3D content, there are several issues holding that up: the technology has not been agreed upon by all the parties that subscribe to that standard. In the meantime, Sonic says its video service will be a great way to fill the gap, since there are a growing number of 3D movies in the theater.

The technology, however, is still new. It will only work with devices with graphics processors optimized for 3D, which mostly means it will work on PCs with 3D-capable monitors. Some Samusng and Mitsubishi TVs that are 3D-enabled might also work. In all cases, you’ll still need plastic 3D glasses.

“We see an opportunity to bridge that time gap,” said Michael DiMaria, vice president of product management for CinemaNow. “Ultimately, we believe Blu-ray will be the dominant format for the distribution of 3D content. In the meantime, there’s plenty of content available and several ways to display it.”

You'll need these glasses at home if Sonic Solutions' 3D download service gets off the ground.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

The maker of the CinemaNow video service says it wants to start adding 3D movies to its repertoire.

“People are going to have content from a wide variety of sources–DVDs, downloaded from the Web, Blu-ray, CinemaNow–and they all may be in different formats or different resolutions,” he said. “We think anyone who’s buying this technology, especially in the early-adopter stages, they’re gong to want to throw at it what they can find. We want to make sure our player can play back whatever content someone reasonably has.”

While this technology still has a ways to go, 3D is clearly starting to get a bit of momentum. Box office sales have been a success this year, more 3D-enabled TVs are hitting the market, and several companies are working on how to make movies viewable in 3D in the home. That also goes for non-professional content, such as YouTube’s nascent efforts to bring 3D to the online video service.

They’re also making sure that a variety of 3D display formats can be handled by the CinemaNow delivery service, according to DiMaria.

Sonic is working closely with Nvidia to ensure that it takes advantage of the company’s graphics-processing technology used in many 3D-capable displays so that the videos are properly formatted.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The 8GB iPhone has practically disappeared from the U.K. after a price cut last week.

It was only a week ago that O2 cut the price of the 8GB model from 269 British pounds ($533) to 169 British pounds ($335), a move that was seen as a inventory-clearing measure ahead of the expected introduction of a 3G iPhone. Both Carphone Warehouse and O2 told Pocket-Lint they were “reviewing” whether to order more 8GB models from Apple, which is yet another hint we’re going to see a new model soon.

Does this mean Apple has a 32GB iPhone planned for the 3G launch, expected to come in June at or around the Worldwide Developers Conference? Perhaps, although it’s only been a few months since it upped the capacity to 16GB. At that time, Apple’s Greg Joswiak said the company still believed there was demand for a 8GB model, but that stance might have changed to reflect a “bigger is better” mentality.

The decision by U.K. carrier O2 to cut the price of the 8GB iPhone prompted shoppers to exhaust stocks of that model at O2′s Web site and at Carphone Warehouse, an authorized iPhone reseller. Pocket-Lint confirmed with Carphone Warehouse that the 8GB models are kaput, and O2 told the site that while online stocks of the 8GB model are gone, retail stocks are dwindling fast.

Price apparently was an object for U.K.
iPhone shoppers.

For example this Sunday morning, the Internet suggests that Apple’s new iPhone might be cheaper. That it might be thinner. That it might have video chat. That it might have GPS. That it might come with a four-core chip. That it might be late. That it might be here already.

This is an iPhone. Tomorrow, there's probably going to be a new iPhone.

Hopefully, that clears everything up. Come back tomorrow for live coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, when the company is expected to reveal actual details about its next-generation
iPhone 2.0.

I guess the thinking is if you toss enough possibilities in the air, at least one of them will come down right.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)