HTC Snap

The Snap, which debuted at CTIA 2009, is a messaging-centric smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a feature called Inner Circle that lets you prioritize messages based on your preferences. It also offers Microsoft Direct Push Technology for real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server, as well as support for POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts.

(Credit:
Bonnie Cha/CNET)

Aside from the messaging options, the Windows Mobile 6.1 device includes Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 2-megapixel camera, a microSD expansion slot, and more. The HTC Snap for Sprint will also be available from Best Buy for an unsubsidized price of $519.

(Source: Information Week via Phonescoop)

See also: Complete coverage of campaign ‘08 from CBS News.

You can check out the post-debate Webcast from the first presidential debate, between John McCain and Barack Obama, here: CBS Webcast: Examining McCain-Obama debate No. 1.

The debate kicks off at 9:00 p.m. EDT, and you can follow it live online at the CBS News Debate Webcast site. Immediately after the debate, stay with the site for Web-only analysis and commentary with Katie Couric, the CBS News political team, and guests.

We’ll do the same for the final two presidential debates, on October 7 and on October 15.

The 90-minute debate will take place at Washington University in St. Louis and is set to be moderated by Gwen Ifill of PBS.

You can also submit your own questions, now or during the event, at the Debate Webcast site.

(Credit:
Nyko)

At first glance, the new Wing Wireless Classic Controller from Nyko looks like it’s everything the original Nintendo Classic Controller should have been. While the Nintendo controller is oddly rounded, the Wing looks much more ergonomically satisfying with its edgier sides and form factor. It’s almost as if they combined the Nintendo Classic Controller with a PlayStation DualShock.

Like the original Nintendo Classic Controller, the Nyko Wing will work with all Virtual Console games, select Wii games, and the recently added WiiWare library of games.

The Nyko Wing Wireless Classic Controller will ship sometime in October for $30, about $10 more than the Nintendo original. Check CNET in the coming weeks for a full review. For now, click through for some more photos of the Wing.

Most noteworthy, the Wing will use a wireless dongle system, similar to the Kama Wireless Nunchuk setup where a dongle is attached to the
Wii remote. This will eliminate the awkward wired connection that the Nintendo Classic Controller uses, but will also require two AAA batteries to work. However, if you decide to use rechargeable batteries, Nyko has fitted the Wing with a mini USB port that will allow for convenient charging.

Google’s stock closed at $539.41 per share, up $89.87 from the previous day when Google reported after the market’s close its first-quarter earnings and blew past analysts’ estimates.

Moran also expressed concern over Google’s growth rate.

The folks at ComScore explained the discrepencies in a blog posting, noting they only count U.S. paid search clicks, while Google’s figures include not only international figures but also “affiliate site ads.”

“We continue to remain concerned at the rate of deceleration in paid clicks,” Mahaney said in his research note. “(But) on the other hand, cost-per-click growth remained strong.”

Google’s shares closed with a 20 percent gain Friday, marking the largest-ever one-day gain for the Internet giant.

The last time Google’s shares had such a tremendous rocket ride was on October 22, 2004, when it jumped 15 percent in one day, according to analysts. The company’s stock that day soared to $172.43 a share, up from $149.38 the previous day.

Driving that October jump was Google’s first earnings report as a public company. Newly minted public companies are always especially concerned about their first earnings report because missing revenue and earnings numbers can put a company in the penalty box with investors for a very long time.

Update at 10 a.m. PDT April 18: Google’s gains have now reached 21 percent.

Analysts, meanwhile, were busy this morning, pumping out their revised Google estimates.

During intra-day trading Friday, Google’s stock rose as high as $545.11 a share, climbing 21 percent, before edging back a bit.

Clayton Moran, an analyst with the Stanford Group, increased his earnings per share to $20.63 for 2008, up from his previous forecast of $19.50.

“While last night’s report provided relief that trends had not materially worsened, growth is slowing and margins are pressured,” Moran said in his research note. “As such, we maintain a somewhat cautious view and a ‘hold’ rating.”

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

Google’s year-over-year growth in paid clicks rose 20 percent worldwide in the first quarter, but fell short of its 30 percent growth in the fourth quarter.

ComScore’s share price took an 8 percent hit in after-hours trading after Google reported its first quarter results, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. By morning trading on Friday, though, its stock regained most of its ground.

Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup Global Markets, for example, upped Google’s 2008 revenue estimates to nearly $16 billion, up from $15.6 billion. He also bumped up his earnings estimate to $16.80 per share, up from $16.17 a share.

Update at 1:15 p.m. PDT April 18: Google ends trading day up 20 percent, capturing largest one-day gain

Despite Google’s better-than-expected performance and Wall Street’s increased estimates, analysts still issued words of caution.

Investors had been concerned that Google would post weak results Thursday, given the doom-and-gloom forecasts from research companies that monitor paid-clicks and traffic.

ComScore, prior to Google’s earnings release, put out figures that Google’s paid-click growth in the U.S. grew a paltry 1.8 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period last year. That gave investors a scare, as they feared Google’s growth was slowing.

During the brief period we played with it in Barcelona, it seemed to perform well. A full assessment will come just as soon as we can get our hands on a review model. But in the meantime, check out our Samsung GSMA slide show.

In case you don’t recall, the Soul is an attractive slider phone with a sleek design and a unique touch-pad navigation control. The well-stocked feature set includes a 5-megapixel camera, a music player, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, 100MB of internal memory with room for a 6GB memory card, messaging and e-mail, and various personal organizer functions. Though it is quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900), it’s optimized for European 3G bands only.

When we were at the GSMA World Congress two months ago, the Samsung Soul was the cell phone from which we couldn’t escape. Gigantic Soul posters papered every part of Barcelona, from the airport to the convention center. All that hype can make you a little weary, but we were glad to hear today that the phone will make it into the hands of consumers. Starting this month and continuing into May, the Soul will land at major wireless carriers in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. As usual, U.S. carriers are holding back, if they decide to pick it up at all, but Samsung is promising that the Soul eventually will be sold in most GSM markets as an unlocked model. Retail price will be about $635 (400 euros).

Samsung Soul

HP, the worldwide PC leader for more than a year now, saw its shipments rise both at home and abroad, though it was somewhat affected by stagnating growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to IDC. It now has 19 percent of the worldwide market.

“From a Dell perspective, part of going from minus-5-percent to 15-percent positive (growth) this quarter is the fact that year-ago shipment was pretty low,” said Loren Loverde, director of IDC’s quarterly PC report. “So some of that is factoring in, but they have also launched a lot of new products, and lot of new (retail) channel arrangements.”

Despite some anticipation of weakening U.S. consumer confidence, PC shipment growth here nearly doubled between the third and fourth quarters of 2007, to reach 8.8 percent, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report released Wednesday.

Though the market for computers–and both business and consumer technology across the board–appears healthy, it could drop off next year. But thus far, there are no signs of it in the PC space.

Acer also made a big push in retail this year, continuing the rapid gains in the U.S. (it’s grown 294 percent since the same quarter a year ago), and appears to have finally nailed down its coveted No. 3 spot in the worldwide ranking of top PC vendors. When combined with Gateway, Acer shipments achieved 9.6 percent share worldwide in Q4, compared with 6.9 percent a year ago.

“There’s some risk of having an impact on PCs, but a certain amount of it is because we just went through the holiday season and Wall Street is under pressure,” he said.
“If you look at the broader technology trends…some recovery in 2007, commercial Vista adoption, pretty strong portable (PC) adoption, (and) we’re still getting lower prices and new users…A number of tech environment factors that suggest we should expect still some pretty solid growth. The risk that we might not maintain double digit growth in the next couple years would be if we had a recession and consumer spending really started to cut back.”

In the U.S., it’s Dell (31.4 percent market share), HP (26.1), Acer (9), Apple (6.1), and Toshiba (5.3). Apple has stretched its share of the U.S. market to 6.1 percent, from 5.1 percent a year ago. Gartner also notes that for the second consecutive quarter mobile PC shipments exceeded those of desktops.

Though there’s been ample hand-wringing over interest rates, credit problems, and weak retail sales, the computing industry is staying immune so far, according to Loverde.

Rival analyst firm Gartner ranks the companies in the same order as IDC, according to findings also released Wednesday: the worldwide leader is HP (with 18.2 percent market share), followed by Dell (14.3), Acer (8.9), Lenovo (7.4), and Toshiba (4.0) to round out the top 5.

Lenovo has been going strong for three straight quarters. It ended the year behind Acer with 7.5 percent of worldwide PC shipments. It’s not in the top 5 of vendors in the U.S. market, but recently introduced its new IdeaPad consumer notebook line, which the company hopes will follow in the tradition of its business-oriented ThinkPad line of laptops.

Dell actually expanded its market share in the fourth quarter, after a string of disappointing quarters while it reshuffled its ranks and its product lineup. Dell used momentum derived from its new retail push to drive its shipments up by more than 15 percent in the quarter–growth far ahead of the rest of the U.S. The Texas PC maker finished the year with 29.6 percent of the total PC market in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, IDC said.

It also broke new legal ground and would have made Indiana the first state in the country to require that all data breach reports impacting state residents be put online at the state attorney general’s Web site. This is something that the New Hampshire Department of Justice already does, but out of a voluntary effort to help consumers and not due to a legal mandate.

Update: The text below was deleted from the post on February 18th. More details on its removal can be seen here. The original text has now been put back.

Update 2: When I wrote that original blog post back in February, detailing which members of the committee had received donations from AT&T, I neglected to do a bit of research. My efforts had been focused on just the members of the Senate Committee. I completely forgot to look up the donation history of Senator Brandt Hershman, the Republican Majority Whip, Senate “sponsor” of HB 1197, and the author of the amendment that stripped away 3/4 of the provisions in the original bill.

It turns out that while the senators on the committee each received $2000 from AT&T over the past few years, Senator Hershman has received even more love from Ma’ Bell. He received $4000 from AT&T in 2004, and another $2500 in 2006 — AT&T was his top contributor that year.

With regard to the reports, she stated that “we have them online so that anyone–the media, the public–can look at them, just to see what’s out there in the world of security problems.”

In a committee meeting Tuesday morning, Republican committee members successfully eviscerated the bill, reducing it to a mere 17 lines of text from the original 72. The Web site report provision and the requirement that companies notify the state attorney general whenever a data breach is discovered were stripped. A section of the bill that created incentives for companies to follow encryption and key management practices “in a manner consistent with the best practices common in the industry” was also removed.

A pro-consumer, bipartisan data-breach bill was stripped of most its provisions before its feeble remains were finally passed by an Indiana Senate committee on Tuesday.

At least 10 lobbyists were waiting at the committee meeting, many having flown in from Washington D.C., and were going to do their best to have the bill eviscerated. The lobbyists represented household names such as AT&T, Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, and LexisNexis.

Lanane told me that his vote was strategic, as he knew that “the (Republican) chairman was not likely to pass the bill (as originally written). Rep. Pierce knew that too.” In the end, he added, it was “better to have something come out of committee rather than nothing.”

Noether told me that that she hasn’t heard a single complaint about the Web site and that she hasn’t received any information to suggest that criminals were using the site to add credibility to their phishing attacks.

This came after two weeks of intensive lobbying by AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and LexisNexis, all of which wanted to kill the bill. For the most part, they were successful.

So much for the claims of the lobbyists. It’s worth noting, however, that LexisNexis, one of the firms that flew a Washington D.C. lobbyist to Indianapolis to testify against the bill, has three
different data breaches from 2007 listed on the New Hampshire DOJ site. Perhaps the company should spend more resources on protecting its customers’ data, and less on lobbying?

The New Hampshire Department of Justice has posted data breach reports to its Web site for over two years. In order to learn more about the site, I recently spoke with Lauren Noether, the bureau chief of the New Hampshire DOJ’s Consumer Protection Office. She told me, “I think it’s important for the public to know that there are these types of breaches.” She added that “any information that helps a consumer to make decisions about with whom they want to do business is helpful.”

AT&T donated
over $170,000 to Indiana state legislators in the 2006
election cycle while Verizon
donated $48,000. Furthermore, while I’m sure that all 11
of the senators on the committee are all upstanding and honest
legislators, I think it’s worth mentioning that only one senator
(Arnold) has not received thousands of dollars from AT&T in the
past. The rest have all taken Ma Bell’s money: Steele
(R), Bray
(R), Drozda
(R), Zakas
(R), Waltz
(R),
Waterman
(R), Howard
(D) Young
(D), Tallian
(D),
Lanane
(D).

Indiana’s existing data-breach statute has a number of major loopholes. The most critical of these is that companies are not required to disclose a data loss/theft incident, as long as the device in question is protected with a password. The law does not require encryption of all confidential user data, but instead lets companies off the hook as long as they employ a Windows log-in password. These passwords do little to protect data, as they can be broken in a matter of seconds using free tools–or an attacker can use a Linux boot CD to read the data directly off the drive.

The bill sailed through the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, passing 94-0. Unfortunately, when I drove up to the state capital last week to testify in front of a Senate committee, I discovered that big business was gunning after the bill.

The lobbyists claimed that consumers could be easily confused by online breach reports, that such reports could be misused by evil phishers and fraudsters as a way of adding authenticity to their attacks, and finally that the reports could act as an unfair scarlet letter for companies that make mild data-breach mistakes.

In a blog post last week, I explained how I had worked with my state Rep. Matt Pierce (D-Bloomington) to draft and submit a data-breach bill. The bill fixed a number of major loopholes in the existing laws and borrowed heavily from existing laws in pro-consumer states such as New York, California, and New Hampshire.

She also noted that the reports have been useful for businesses that have recently suffered a breach. “People have called me and asked do I have a form?” She said that she is able to tell them that “you may want to take a look at the ways that other companies have reported it to us.”

Update: This blog post has been modified since it was first published. Click here for more details, or scroll to the bottom to see the original text.

“I certainly didn’t support the amendment,” he told me, “but I also heard Rep. Pierce (the author of the bill) say that he preferred to have a bill pass, as opposed to it dying in committee.”

It only took six votes to completely gut the bill–as the other five members of the committee failed to show up for the vote. On Tuesday afternoon, I spoke with state Sen. Tim Lanane, one of the two Democrats who voted on the bill.

Thankfully, the most important part of the bill (which requires real encryption and not just a Windows log-in password) remains, for now.

Lanane told me that it is still possible to have the original pro-consumer provisions added back into the bill once it reaches the full Senate, and later if it comes up in a House/Senate conference committee.

I’m sure this in no way influenced their votes on Tuesday, but it sure
does give you food for thought.

Your thoughts?

Surely, there are many things to not learn from Microsoft. Usability, however, is not one of them. Say what you want about Microsoft, but it has led the industry in lowering the bar to computing for average people. When I was in law school Microsoft used to give me free software so that it could come by my house to watch how I work. Microsoft spends considerable resources in the field to determine how people use, or could use, software.

Importantly, there is something inherent in open source that can be better about usability than proprietary software: The users write the software for other users. There is no intermediary that processes product requirement documents to translate use cases to engineers. There are just engineers.

The trick for open source will be finding ways to bring non-developers into the conversation. I’m not sure how to accomplish this, despite spending five or six years thinking about it.

commentary

At today’s Open Source Business Conference Jim Zemlin, president of the Linux Foundation, said something interesting (and hope-inducing) about open-source development. The session was on what the open source world can learn from Microsoft.

I suppose this isn’t all that different from the proprietary world. Microsoft is good at usability, but many of its proprietary peers are not. There is nothing inherent in proprietary software that is better than open source when it comes to usability. Rather, it’s either a core cultural priority or it’s not.

Jim suggested that it’s a question of leadership. That is, within open-source projects that place a premium on usability, this trickles down within that project and eventually expands beyond to adjacent projects. He noted Ubuntu as a classic example of a project that is making usability a top priority, which is having an effect on other desktop and server Linux distributions.

Among the reasons for the growth, according to study author Mark Kirstein, is that companies are trying to monitor the spread of copyrighted files shared over networks or social-networking sites. “Fox has already communicated that they will mandate watermarking for early-release high-definition content,” Kirstein said.

From 2007 to 2012, the market should more than quadruple for technology called watermarks or fingerprints that can endow photos, video, and audio with unobtrusive digital identifiers, according to a new study.

The market for watermarking technology should grow from about $131 million in 2007 to $171 million this year and $588 million in 2012, MultiMedia Intelligence said in a study released Tuesday.

Digital watermarks modify a digital file slightly so that specific information can be embedded, but the techniques are subtle so people don’t notice the change when viewing or listening to the media file. The technology is a less-obtrusive cousin to digital rights management (DRM), which at least in theory encrypts files so they can’t be used except by those with authorization.

The small downloadable AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application, which is a semifinalist in this year’s Adobe Design Achievement Awards, lets you plug into your Flickr account and view photos on a virtual canvas. Once it’s pulled in thumbnails, it doesn’t need to do it again (unlike Flickr’s own site). This means if you’re going through a bevy of photos (like in a contact’s photo stream) you’ll only have to grab that data once. Also, each task offered by the app is kept in a separate compartment, called a “workspace.” Once that’s been loaded it exists like an open browser tab, letting you zip back and forth between various tasks or albums.

In addition to its photo viewer is a drag-and-drop uploader for when it comes time to give something back. You can simply grab a shot or an entire album from your computer and drag it over. While it’s not as comprehensive as Flickr’s own uploader, it’ll get the job done quickly. I still think with Flickr’s recent improvements to its Web uploader, you’re better off using that if only for its post-upload editing tools.

DestroyFlickr is not without its quirks. For instance, the app requires you to manually refresh each page to see any changes, even after you upload new shots from it. Also, the refresh option is tucked away in a submenu and the same goes for any sort of back or undo button which I think will confuse novice users. Regardless, if you’re looking for a really fun and engaging way to view Flickr photos outside of your browser this is an excellent alternative to browser plug-ins like Piclens.

The vast majority of Adobe AIR apps we’ve seen thus far have been heavy on the eye candy, so what’s a better service to give the treatment than Flickr? It’s a decidedly simplistic site with jaw-dropping photos uploaded by its users. Some might be looking for a little more though, which is where DestroyFlickr comes in.