Analyst Predicts Rise in PC Sales

IDG is reporting that sales of PC desktops and laptops are rising ahead of Windows 7′s October 22 launch date. The strong demand is unexpected, analysts said.

PC sales in July and August caught Manish Nigam, director of technology research in Asia for Credit Suisse, off guard, IDG is reporting. Credit Suisse had held the expectation that consumers would hold off purchasing new equipment until after Windows 7 ships.

Microsoft’s pre-sale marketing campaign, where it offered customers discounted upgrades for a limited time, appears to have been successful. But I question whether enthusiasm for Windows 7 PCs will be sustained after its launch, or if those early adopters were just being extremely cost-conscious.

In March, Gartner predicted a significant drop in PC sales for the year, noted the rise in popularity of low-cost netbooks, and said that PC users were extending the lifetimes of their equipment. Windows 7 will be a sales boon for Microsoft, but it might lack the potency of previous Windows releases.

Ticketmaster Goes Paperless to Cut Out Scalpers

The middleman’s days may be numbered by a new paperless ticketing system that is being introduced by Ticketmaster, according to reports.

I have yet to go to any concert or sporting event that didn’t have scalpers soliciting sales outside, and they are not alone–brokers buy lots of tickets and sell them on eBay at inflated prices. That frustrated me when I attempted to purchase U.S. Open tennis tickets earlier this month.

Although I am not a fan of Ticketmaster, paperless ticketing is a good idea. The paperless system requires that tickets be purchased online by customers, and customers prove their purchase by showing gate attendants their credit card and identification when they arrive at an event.

Ticketmaster was mindful to set up an electronic exchange where customers can resell their tickets. Naturally, it charges a “convenience fee” for transactions, but it helps keep prices down by eliminating the need for secondary ticket exchanges including eBay subsidiary StubHub.

My U.S. Open tickets were purchased through StubHub, and I felt like I was ripped off by paying an additional mark up. The AP reports that Ticketmaster’s exchange transaction fees amounted to $1.95, or 15 percent per ticket, during a pilot at Penn State University.

Fees were raised to $7.89 during the Nittany Lions’ home opener, and revenue was shared with the university. There’s a reason why the company has earned the not so endearing nickname of “Ticketbastard.”

Ticketmaster has  a near-monopoly over ticket sales, but competitors including TicketSherpa.com have sprung up, and musicians who have taken a stand on behalf of fans have helped to keep its fees in check.

Nine Inch Nails, which has been critical of TicketMaster in the past, is supportive of its paperless system. On its Web site, the band said that the system was “an effort to keep tickets in the hands of the fans and out of the hands of brokers/scalpers.”

I welcome paperless ticketing, partly because I do not see why it is necessary to print out tickets anymore during the digital age, but also due to the fact that scalpers really annoy me. I think that we’d all be better off if they took up selling beer in stadium parking lots instead.

5Words: Microsoft vs. Malware Ads

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Microsoft sues malware advertisers. Good!

Hulu’s readying a subscription service?

Hey, yet another Skype lawsuit!

Burglars: Don’t check out Facebook!

Wireless charging for Dell laptop?

Dell and HP doing 3D?

Wimax users are apparently nonplussed.

The great Apple tablet giveway.

Mac application installation’s pretty confusing.

Google’s Google Voice FCC Letter: Uncensored!

Last month, Apple, AT&T, and Google all responded to the FCC’s request for information on the circumstances regarding Apple’s failure to approve some Google applications for release on the iPhone App Store. The letters became public, and helped to explain what was going on. Except that Google chose to redact its answer to a really important question in the version of the letter released for general consumption:

Several people filed Freedom of Information Act requests to see the unexpurgated letter, and rather than fight the requests, Google has decided to accept publication of the full letter. Here’s the section we didn’t see before:

On one level, there’s nothing surprising here: In Apple’s own letter to the FCC, it said it hadn’t approved Google Voice largely because it “altered(d)” and “replace(d)” placed Apple’s own phone-related features with ones designed by Google. (Alter and replace probably aren’t the right words here: Google Voice would be an additional way to make calls on the iPhone, and Apple’s features would remain unchanged. But you get the idea.)

But here’s one bombshell: Apple’s letter denied that the company had rejected Google Voice and said that it was still “studying” and “ponder(ing)” the app. Google’s letter, however, says that Apple told it that Google Voice had been rejected, period. The real-world difference is pretty much moot, since an application that enters a permanent limbo of being studied and pondered is no more useful to the world than one that’s been rejected. But it still seems to be a fundamental disagreement on a matter of fact: Apple says it didn’t reject the app, and Google says it did.

Also interesting: Google says the matter went all the way up to Phil Schiller. That would remove the possibility that Google Voice ran into trouble because of hasty and/or inconsistent decision-making by lower-level employees involved in the App Store. Apple knew what it was doing.

Just how directly was Google CEO’s exodus from the Apple board tied to this disagreement? Your guess is as good as mine, but if Schmidt were still on the board today it would be particularly strange given the Rashomon-like situation that’s developed.

As I’ve said before, I want a phone that lets me replace standard functionality with new and useful alternatives. Apple says that doing so may confuse iPhone owners, but I have a hunch that most of them are smart enough to deal with it–and hey, if they’re baffled, they can always delete the app in question.

I continue to think that Apple will eventually come to the conclusion that a more open-minded approach to iPhone app approval is in its own best interest. I just hope it decides that sooner rather than later, and without further nudging by the FCC.

Accepting and releasing Google Voice in the form Google originally submitted it wouldn’t address the larger issues here, but it would be an awfully good start…

A Cool Mac. But Not a First

The auction house that’s planning to sell a Mac presented to Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry by Apple has changed their minds and now says it’s not a Mac Plus, let alone the first Mac Plus. Instead, they’ve decided that it’s an original Mac 128K that was later upgraded, and that its F4200NUM0001 serial number doesn’t mean anything in particular.

I shoulda figured out something was amiss on my own, given that every Mac Plus I’ve ever seen had a Macintosh Plus label on its front and a numeric keypad on its keyboard. Roddenberry’s didn’t, marking it as an earlier model.

Oddly enough, the auctioneers still say that the Mac is worth $800-$1200 even though they’ve realized it’s not quite as historic as they’d thought…

The End of the Line for Landlines?

Ivan Seidenberg thinks that more and more people are going to decide that they simply don’t need a landline telephone anymore. Which is an interesting take on things given that he’s CEO of landline giant Verizon. Over at the New York Times, Saul Hansell has posted a story in which Seidenberg says he thinks the future of wired communications will be all about using FiOS connections to deliver video. If people dump their wired phones in favor of using their cell phones as their only phones, that’s OK.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story on Technologizer before, but I recently decided that the time was right for me to get rid of my landline and go with my cell phone full time (supplemented from time to time by Skype). After all, weeks go by when I don’t use my Comcast landline at all, and most of my incoming calls are wrong numbers or debt collectors looking for someone who apparently had the number before me. (I don’t ever give it out–in part because I can’t remember it.)

But when I called Comcast to cancel, the rep had news for me: The “triple play” bundle I subscribed to was such a fabulous deal that canceling the phone portion would…increase my monthly bill by four bucks. I’m still figuring out exactly how to respond to that, but for the moment I remain a landline subscriber and am trying to use it more to keep my AT&T minutes under control.

Anyhow, this is all leading up to a T-Poll (I did a similar one a few months ago, but I think things are shifting so rapidly that the results might be different this time):

eSwarm: Forums With a Twitter Twist

Online forums might lack the pizazz of a Web 2.0 technology, but the conversations folks hold in them consistently remain on topic. A Boulder, Colorado startup called eSwarm has applied the relevance of forums to microblogging in a grassroots business effort to unseat Twitter –starting at local universities.

The eSwarm Web site went live in August, and the company intends to release client applications for the Blackberry and iPhone by the end of October, said co-founder Matt Etlinger. Swarms look a lot like Twitter, but they’re really microblogs that are managed by the person who initiates them; they can be public or private.

Continue reading this story…

Palm Ditches Windows Mobile

Almost exactly four years ago, I attended a press conference in San Francisco at which Bill Gates and Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced that Palm was going to start selling Treo smartphones running Windows Mobile. It was one of those decisions that made rational business sense at the time but which was all wrong emotionally: It was just plain sad that Palm, one of the greatest mobile software companies ever, had to adopt the not-very-exciting Windows Mobile to appeal to business types. (I tried to like the WinMobile Treos: I even bought an unsubsidized one to replace my Palm OS-based Treo 650. But it was neither a great Treo nor a great Windows Mobile device, and I ended up selling it after a few months.)

Today, Gearlog’s Sascha Segan notes that current Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein said during Palm’s earnings call today that the company won’t be making any more Windows Mobile phones–starting with the Pre and Pixi, it’s betting everything on its own WebOS. Which isn’t the least bit surprising given Windows Mobile’s diminished state. This time around, the hard-nosed business move is also the one that feels truest to Palm’s character as a company.

HP’s Do-Everything DreamScreen

At first glance, HP’s new DreamScreen looks a lot like a garden-variety digital picture frame. When I mentioned that to an HP product manager he got pretty defensive. But he had a point: Despite some built-in limitations, the DreamScreen goes well beyond the digital picture frame. It plays Web radio, streams music and pictures from your PC (Macs are not supported), and allows you to access (but not modify) Facebook or Snapfish pages. It also lets you play video–but sadly, not streaming video–works as an alarm clock, a calendar and gives quick access to a weather page.

The DreamScreen comes in two sizes and two prices. The DreamScreen 100, which I tested, is 10.2 inches, and sells for $249. The larger DreamScreen 130 is 13.3 inches along the diagonal and will sell (it will be available later in the fall) for $299.

HP has done a fairly good job with the hardware. The screen is bright, the frame is an attractive piano black, and the built-in speakers aren’t bad, though if you play a lot of music you’ll want to connect real speakers to a port on the back. The device comes with a small remote and can also be controlled via virtual buttons on the frame. A handy slot in the back holds the remote when not in use. And HP thoughtfully put a rubber boot on the end of the stand so it won’t scratch the dining room table.

Although navigation is reasonably simple, it would be much, much easier with a touchscreen. Entering passwords, user names and the like with a remote can be frustratingly slow, although some of the work can be done on your PC using a utility that comes with the device. Future iterations of the DreamScreen may come with a touchscreen, or possibly a Blackberry-like external keyboard on the remote, HP told me.

I was able to set up the device pretty quickly, and had no trouble getting it on my home Wi-Fi network. However, getting it to stream files from my laptop was tricky; ultimately I got it to work by tweaking settings in my firewall. Alternatively, you can copy digital content onto the DreamScreen using a USB drive, a direct Ethernet connection, or several types of memory cards. But with only 2GB of built-in storage, you’ll run out of room pretty quickly.

As you’d expect, the DreamScreen supports most common digital photo, video, and music formats, including unprotected AAC tracks from iTunes. However, songs you downloaded from iTunes prior to 2009 are still copy protected and won’t play on the DreamScreen. But that’s Apple’s fault, not HP’s.

Would I buy it? It seems a bit pricey for what it does; after all it costs more than an iPhone. But being able to play Web radio or stream my music and photo collection into the living room is a pleasure.

Where No Mac Had Gone Before

[UPDATE! The auction house selling this Mac is now saying that it's an original Mac plus that was later upgraded--not a Mac Plus--and that the serial number doesn't mean it was the first Mac of any sort. I should have figured out something was amiss about their identification when I noticed it didn't have a Macintosh Plus label on its front. And as a former Mac Plus user, I should also have remembered that their keyboards had numeric keypads, which Roddenberry's Mac didn't. Still a cool collectible, but not quite as cool as the auctioneers led us to believe.]

Attention, antique computer collectors and Trekkies Trekkers! The first Mac Plus to roll off the assembly line is going to be up for auction, and so is Gene Roddenberry’s Mac. And they’re the same computer.

An auction house called Profiles in History is auctioning off the Mac Plus with serial number #1 (or F4200NUM0001 to be precise), which Apple presented to Star Trek’s creator, presumably in 1986. It’ll be up for bid at a Hollywood collectibles auction on October 8th and 9th, comes with a letter of authenticity signed by Roddenberry’s son, and is estimated to be worth $800-$1200. (Not that I plan to bid, but that sounds cheap to me for a Mac that’s historically significant in two ways.)

Here’s the serial number…

And here’s the computer in all its boxy glory, complete with its optional second floppy disk…

And here, for no particular reason, is my uncanny simulation of Gene Roddenberry’s Mac as it might have appeared if it had been a prop way back when, a couple of decades before the Mac Plus debuted.

Actually, you don’t need to be much of an expert on the voyages of the Starship Enterprise to recall that a Mac Plus did make a Trek appearance–but it wasn’t until Star Trek IV in 1986. It would be cool if it were Roddenberry’s Mac Plus, but if the above photo is accurate, that one didn’t bear a “Macintosh Plus” logo on its front–and the one Scotty encountered did.

One other Trek-Macintosh (Trekintosh?) factoid: In 1992, Apple engaged in an abortive attempt to design a Mac based on Intel’s 486 processor. Its code name: Star Trek. Maybe you know some more tidbits?

The Problem With Musicians and Music Games

With The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5 released earlier this month, several musicians have spoken their minds about music games. And I wish they hadn’t.

To recap: Last week, singer Courtney Love decided to sue Activision when she realized how her late husband, ex-Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, was being used in Guitar Hero 5. When letting Activision use Cobain’s likeness, Love didn’t realize that in-game characters can perform in any song, resulting in a rather troubling video of Cobain rapping and singing 80s metal. The rest of Nirvana then added their disapproval, and so did, of all people, Bon Jovi.

Earlier, former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason expressed their disdain for music games, based on the tired belief that these games kill the motivation to learn a real instrument (Mason said he was open to a game based on Pink Floyd, simply to make money).

Topping it all off, Paul McCartney admitted that he hadn’t yet played The Beatles: Rock Band. His rationale? The former Beatle can play an actual concert any time he wants.

McCartney’s dismissal, however justified, is disheartening, and I’m saying that as a fellow musician. Having played guitar and drums since childhood, I initially pooh-poohed Guitar Hero as well. But then I tried it, with people who aren’t musicians, and everything clicked.

What Guitar Hero offers musicians is the ability to enjoy music with everyone, not just for the words and beat, but for the musicality and the intricacies that become most apparent when you’re performing. It’s too bad McCartney, Mason and Wyman can’t see that.

Courtney Love’s case is a bit different, but the underlying issue, that she obviously hasn’t spent time with the game, is the same. Instead of experiencing why Guitar Hero and Rock Band are special, these musicians only see two potential rewards: relevance and money. Ideally, music should be about neither.

Microsoft Office’s Slow Road to the Web: First Hands-On Look

Last October, Microsoft casually dropped a bombshell at its PDC event: It was working on a new version of Microsoft Office that would include browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The Web version of Office is part of the suite later officially dubbed Office 2010, which won’t arrive until next year.  But it tiptoed a little closer to reality today: Microsoft has released a “technical preview” of the Office Web Apps, a pre-beta, invite-only test version which it’s using to get early feedback from a limited number of users.

If you’re not one of the lucky few, don’t feel too deprived: Microsoft provided me with access to the technical preview this morning, and judging from my first couple of hours with it, it’s a very incomplete rough draft of the Web-based suite to come. Word only lets you view documents, not edit them; Excel and PowerPoint are missing wide swaths of basic functionality; OneNote is missing altogether. Two of the most useful-sounding features–the ability to open documents stored on the Web from within a local copy of Office as if they were stored on your hard drive, and to view documents in phone browsers–aren’t ready yet. And I encountered multiple technical glitches as I tried to use the features which are available.

Continue reading this story…

More Details About the Intuit-Mint Deal: Quicken Online to Get Mint-ized

I just spoke with Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint and general-manager-to-be of Intuit’s personal finance group, about Intuit’s planned $170 million acquisition of Mint and what it means for consumers. A few notes from our discussion on what’s in the works, assuming the merger goes off as planned:

Quicken Online will become a reskinned Mint. It doesn’t make sense for one company to have two Web-based personal-finance services that, while far from identical, are trying to do similar things. The battle between Quicken Online and Mint will end, and it’s Mint that will be the victor: The Quicken Online service will be pretty much the same service as today’s Mint except with Quicken’s red-and-white color scheme, Patzer told me. Current Quicken Online users should see their transactions move into the Mint-powered version, and Patzer hopes that other items such as categories will also be able to make the transition. Why not just kill Quicken Online? Patzer says the Quicken brand name is so familiar that it makes sense for Mint to adapt its identity as well as to keep its own moniker.

Mint features will migrate into Quicken’s desktop software. One core aspect of Mint from the start (and a major part of its business model) has been the way it analyzes your financial life and attempts to recommend offers that make sense for you, such as credit cards and mortgage refinancing deals with lower interest rates. Patzer says the plan is to bring some of this stuff into Quicken’s traditional software version, too.

Quicken desktop isn’t going anywhere. At the moment, it has more advanced features than either Mint or Quicken Online in some areas, such as investments and tax handling. Patzer says Quicken users tend to be older than Mint’s customers (in their 40s and 50s vs. 20s and 30s) and like the security of keeping their financial details local rather than stored on distant servers. So even as Mint and Quicken Online get more sophisticated, there will be a need for Quicken in software form.

Mint will take advantage of Intuit’s back-end. Intuit has a deep portfolio of technologies and partnerships in the areas of online billpay, banking, and the like. Patzer says this should let Mint become a more transactional service–instead of just seeing that a bill is due for payment, you might be able to pay it right inside of Mint.

Mint and TurboTax will meld. You’ll be able to push all the things Mint knows about your financial status, such as gains and losses, into TurboTax Patzer thinks this could dramatically reduce the drudgery of tax time.

Patzer says he knows that some Mint fans are apprehensive about the acquisition, but that they needn’t worry–especially since the Mint management and engineering team will “take a leadership role” in the combined companies.

In other news, he told me that Mint has submitted a new version of its iPhone application to Apple’s App Store. Among the changes: a PIN for added security, push notifications for stuff like bills that are due, and a slicker look.

5Words: Windows 7′s Hidden Treasures

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Secret advantages of Windows 7.

Motorola getting Android phone soon?

Snow Leopard is selling well.

Zune apps sport preroll ads.

Andy Ihnatko raves about Zune.

Use Twitter as a telephone.

Windows Mobile 7′s social networking.

iPhone OS 3.1: troubled upgrade?

A Kindle for $150? Deal!

It’s next-generationTeddy Ruxpin!

Old Operating Systems Don’t Die…

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

Still, for an operating system that never succeeded in the first place, BeOS has been remarkably…successful. It’s still embedded in at least one professional audio product, is the subject of multiple news sites and blogs, and boasts an impressive array of applications. It may not have changed the world, but it was both useful and loved. And even if Haiku is a quixotic project, it gives BeOS a new lease on life.

The Haiku release got me thinking about other once-signficant OSes, and what happened to them. Herewith, some quick updates on a few major ones from the 1970s and 1980s. Remarkably enough, they haven’t been done in by disinterested owners, obsolete technology, and legal wrangling–they’re all still around in one form or another, and it’s entirely possible that some of them will outlive us all.

Continue reading this story…

HP’s DreamScreens: Photo Frames on Steroids

A couple of days ago, HP unveiled an array of new PCs. Now it’s announcing a couple of gadgets that aren’t PCs at all–or quite like anything else on the market. It’s calling them DreamScreens. And while I don’t think HP thinks of them this way, they strike me as upscale, next-generation photo frames that do a lot more than display photos.

The DreamScreen 100 (with a 10.2″ display) and DreamScreen 130 (with a 13.3″ one) are designed to sit on a table like a photo frame. Both have direct wireless connections to the Internet, and can display photos shared on the Web (on HP’s Snapfish site), stream music (from Pandora and a service called HP SmartRadio), and show Facebook updates and weather reports. They can also grab music and video from their own 2gB of flash storage, from thumb drives and memory cards, and from PCs on your home network.

All of this reminds me a little of the weird and wonderful Chumby, but Chumby is a platform that third-party developers can write apps for. For now, DreamScreens only run the software that HP supplies for them–but when the company showed me DreamScreens recently, a representative told me that it might allow them to use additional apps in the future.

The DreamScreens are meant for fairly passive consumption of content; you control them with an infrared remote and with capacitive buttons that only light up when you need them, so the gadgets maintain a clean, streamlined look. (Looking at their slick on-screen interfaces, I’ll bet I’m not the only person who silently thought “Gee, it would be cool if these had touch screens.”)

The DreamScreen 100 is $249 and is available now; the 130 is $299 and will be available later in the Fall. We’ll have a review up soon. See photo below; gallery of more images here.

Are you at least provisionally intrigued by the idea?