Microsoft announced this morning that it plans to acquire Portugese mobile application company Mobicomp, makers of some very cool mobile tools that we're excited to get our hands on. Microsoft watchdogs Liveside saw the news first and have a good description of the Mobicomp offerings, which we'll discuss below.
One thing's for sure, though - the iPhone is not the only mobile game in town. We continue to see things that Windows Mobile phones can do that iPhones cannot and we expect that to continue after the launch of the iPhone app store. Check out what Mobicomp offers, presumably a feature set that will be included in all Windows Mobile phones in the future.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.
Update: ICANN just approved these changes.
YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.)
In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.
Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Xobni, an inbox add-on for Microsoft Outlook. This application is designed to tap into the hidden social network everyone uses: their inbox. More recently, another inbox addon called Xoopit came onto the scene. This one is for your Gmail inbox and provides a way to find files, photos, videos...and people, although that feature is not as obvious. Both of these applications are extending the possibilities of the inbox while turning them into hubs for for our real-life social connections.
Watching Yahoo's decline is rather sad. If you take any pleasure watching it, you must've enjoyed a weak kid getting beat up by a couple of bullies in the schoolyard. Yahoo's decline is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What's so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.
This afternoon at Structure 08 an interesting discussion was had about the birth, growth, trials and tribulations of Salesforce.com. Om Malik from GigaOm was joined by Michael Copeland from Fortune Magazine and Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. While the 'fireside chat' was titled The Endgame for Boxed Software?, the focus was on what lessons can be learned from the venerable CRM vendor.
Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.
Lidija Davis is reporting for ReadWriteWeb from the Structure 08 conference in San Francisco
In a recent report, Gartner predicted that early adopters will forgo capital expenditures, and instead purchase 40% of IT infrastructure as a service by 2011. Alistair Croll, senior analyst at Bitcurrent, and MC for the first Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, sees things differently. According to Croll it will be a lot sooner: "Right now, almost every company has someone in their IT department using the cloud to some degree." Croll predicts that by 2009 it will no longer be almost every company; it will be 100% of companies.
According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.
With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.
Curl is another player in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe's Flex platform, and OpenLazlo, among others. The Curl platform provides developers a way to build web-based apps that can't be easily built using Ajax or other web-based technologies. Those apps can be deployed both within the web browser or on the desktop via Curl Nitro, an extension of the Curl platform. To show off what Nitro can do, the company has recently released a demo app featuring a visual representation of the Facebook social graph.
