Which Browser Would You Vote For?

More news about monopolies and governmental action against them: The European Union has ended its antitrust case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer after Microsoft agreed to give European Windows users a ballot screen which will let them choose between IE and eleven (!) other browsers.

A hundred million Europeans will get this feature next year, and at least a few of them are reading this post. But even if you’ve never set foot in an EU country, how about taking this quick poll? The browsers listed are the ones that Microsoft will offer when the ballot screen rolls out.

The FTC Sues Intel

Last month, Intel and AMD settled their differences with an agreement that ended the long-running legal battle between the world’s largest CPU maker and its much smaller rival. Today, Intel is in hot water with an organization far more powerful than AMD: the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is suing the company, accusing it of abusing its dominating market position to stifle competion. And the most interesting parts of the FTC’s list of complaints involve not CPUs but GPUs. Which is not a market that Intel controls in the least–Nvidia and AMD dominate discrete graphics, and Intel was recently forced to indefinitely delay its Larrabee GPU.  But the FTC says that Intel makes it difficult for PC manufacturers to choose Nvidia or AMD graphics options by charging them higher prices for CPUs than if they opt for Intel’s less powerful integrated graphics.

Here’s Intel’s response to the suit, in which it says it was on the verge of a settlement with the FTC, and that it’s the victim of a rush to judgment.

I don’t know enough about the backstory to have an opinion of the specifics of the FTC’s charges, and I like free markets more than government interference, but this I know: Consumers benefit when there are multiple healthy competitors in a category. If PC manufacturers make technology decisions based primarily on fear of Intel–which is what the FTC claims–it’s not good for anybody except Intel.

Fake Steve Jobs Spurns Real AT&T Protest

It started out as a joke for Dan Lyons, known to us all as “Fake Steve Jobs,” but it has now taken on a life of its own. Operation Chokehold was supposed to be a fake protest that would attempt to take down AT&T’s network by overloading it, according to a post on Lyon’s site. It was meant to look as if it was real, but Lyons apparently was saying it in jest.

His fans apparently want to make it real, however. A Facebook group has been created urging people to do what Lyons suggested — run a data intensive application on the 3G network for a full hour on Friday at Noon PST — and currently sports about 1,600-plus members. The media is having a field day with it (heck look at us, we’re even covering it), and AT&T is peeved.

Check out this statement from the company to Apple web log Cult of Mac if you think they’re just blowing this off:

“We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.”

Maybe AT&T needs to take a bit of a pill — why give this publicity as I doubt this will amount to anything — but who knows with the way their 3G network runs. I guess if this does happen, we’ll find out if that report from Mr. Turner on AT&T’s network issues we blogged about in October was actually true, no?

Blogger and Technologizer contributor Dave Zatz really takes it to Lyons though (and I’m paraphrasing):

It’s a spiteful and selfish act …. spearheading a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against one of the largest US communications networks may also attract the sort of attention he’ll be less pleased with … (Dan Lyons) is a professional journalist. And this is a call to action in the real world, not the ‘fake’ one.”

Not sure that I would go to that extent. While it was stupid, I would not call it spiteful or selfish. Lyons just didn’t think this one through before releasing it to the masses. As much as we can make jokes out of AT&T’s shoddy 3G service, for some its actually enough that all they would need is a call to action to vent their frustrations through something like this. In any case, I HIGHLY DOUBT it would be able to get to the level where it would actually do any damage. It ain’t the 1960′s — we’re too lazy to protest these days.

Facebook Allowing Status Update Replies Via E-Mail

Those Facebook status update notifications that we’ve all received at one time or another from the service just got more useful. The social networking site has apparently flipped the switch on allowing replies from e-mail rather than having to log in to the service. All that is needed to do this is replying back to the message itself.

It appears not to be live across everyone yet. I just checked the alert e-mails I’ve received recently as late as the wee hours of this morning East Coast time, and I am not seeing the functionality as its being shown by sites such as Download Squad. However it will be rolling out systemwide shortly, reports seem to indicate.

While statuses are now enabled with this feature, Facebook mails — which you’ll also receive alerts for — are not. No word from the company on when we could expect that functionality, but I’d venture to guess that’s a logical progression for where this feature is headed.

Last Call for 2010 Tech Predictions

Want a chance at winning Olive’s cool Olive 4 Hi-Fi Music Server? Or just feeling in a predictive mood? Enter our 2010 tech predictions contest–and do it very soon. It ends at 5pm PT today. We’ll give away the Olive to a lucky prediction-maker, and use the best predictions in an upcoming story.

The 15 Top Technologizer Stories of 2009

Don’t look now, but it’s very nearly 2010. Which makes this a good time to recap the most popular articles we published all year long. Here they are, in case you missed any or would like to revisit them. (And congrats to computer archeologist Benj Edwards, who wrote three of the top four.)

1. 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes: Benj critiques vintage PCs, from the era’s masterpieces (the Apple II) to its forgotten curiosities (Mattel’s misbegotten Aquarius.)

2. Atari’s 1984 Touch Tablet: A Retro Unboxing: Benj finds and buys a shrinkwrapped peripheral from the golden age of home PCs, and documents the experience of unwrapping and installing it.

3. Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3GS: The most detailed comparison of a really old computer and a really neat phone you’re likely to see.

4 15 Classic Game Console Design Mistakes: Benj follows up his PC mistakes piece with one about regrettable game console “features.” (I like the Nintendo Entertainment System’s dreaded “blinkies.”)

5. Hey, Lauren! Is Apple’s 17-Inch MacBook Pro Expensive?: Inspired by a new Windows commercial that paints Macs as pricey and excessively hip, I compare the MacBook Pro to a bunch of Windows laptops, spec by spec and feature by feature.

6. Windows 7: Download It if You Dare: I briefly note that the public beta of Microsoft’s OS is available.

7. Mouse Trouble: 20 Weird Pointing Device Patents: Fascinatingly odd pointing devices, including my favorite: the pointy, palm-threatening pyramid mouse.

8. The Secret Origins of Clippy: A look at Microsoft’s multiple attempts to make computing better through animaed onscreen helpers, from Bob to Clippy to a bunch you never knew about.

9. Game Boy Oddities: In celebration of the iconic Nintendo handheld’s twentieth anniversary, Benj Edwards looks at some of its many offbeat examples–from the Game Boy that dispenses nitrous oxide to the one that went to Iraq and back.

10. The Amazing World of Version Numbers: I ruminate on such essential questions as “What’s the highest version number ever?”

11. Your First Look at Nook: A review of Barnes & Noble’s ambitious, feature-filled, and rough-around-the-edges e-reader.

12. Do You Think This is Sony Ericsson’s Answer to the iPhone? Idou!: First photos of a fancy phone that went on to ship as the Satio.

13. Is Gmail Down? Ask Twitter!: It dawns on me that Twitter is a good place to go for answers to real-time questions. (Hey, this was back in February–that’s a decade or two ago in Twitter time.)

14. The Patents of Steve Jobs: We all know about the gadgets Apple’s co-creator worked on that have changed the world. Here are a few that haven’t, from his staircase to…a tablet computer. (Sounds interesting!)

15. The Press Releases of the Damned: Yes, there was a time when the AOL-Time Warner merger, the release of Palm’s Foleo, and the layoff of Circuit City’s most experienced staffers were trumpeted as good news.

Can we draw any lessons from the above stories? Absolutely: The only thing folks like to read about more than the newest tech products are some of the oldest ones. Thanks to everyone who made these pieces hits–and I’ll let you know if any story we publish in the next two weeks squeaks onto the top fifteen for 2009.

3 in 5 Homes Have Game Consoles

With Nintendo’s Wii worming its way into the homes of unlikely gamers, the number of U.S. households with video game consoles has spiked dramatically.

VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi has the details on the State of Media Democracy report from consultancy Deloitte, which found that game console ownership jumped from 44 percent of homes three years ago to 60 percent this year.

That’s probably because Generation X and Baby Boomers have either rekindled a lost love for video games or discovered it anew thanks to the Wii. Roughly 70 percent of Gen Xers now own a game console, compared to 53 percent in 2006, and 44 percent of Boomers own a console, up 13 percent from three years ago.

There are certainly other contributing factors besides the Wii. The recession may have caused people to seek video games, which provide more hours of entertainment on the dollar than a vacation or even a movie. I’m also hesitant to pin the entire rise in game console ownership on the Nintendo. Though the Wii has dominated sales charts since its debut, the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 have appealed to broader audiences by functioning as Blu-ray and DVD players, respectively, and by offering videos on demand. But the Wii’s success shows that people don’t necessarily need those extra multimedia features in a game console. They want to play games, and in that regard, the Wii still reigns.

As I read back over this information, a lot of it seems pretty obvious, but when you realize that the majority of households have a game console — not just a PC for playing casual browser games — it’s pretty remarkable.

What Microsoft’s Surface Can Mean for Businesses

Microsoft put its weight behind touchscreen applications at its Professional developers Conference (PDC) last month, but that does not translate to immediate adoption by real people. That could change –sooner rather than later—as companies that develop business-oriented applications for Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer try to take Surface out of its niche and into the office.

Last month, I reported on how Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer team has graduated from being a Bill Gates pet project to a group that stands up on its own, and contributes back into other parts of Microsoft. Companies that work with Surface are riding its coattails.

Continue reading this story…

Android Market: 20,000 Apps and Counting

Android’s Market store now boasts 20,000 apps. That may still be a fraction of what’s available on the iPhone, but it’s enough to brag about. To me, the bigger disparity is now quality: If there’s a single program among those 20.000 that’s as impressive as, say, Tweetie, I don’t know about it yet…

Cherrypal’s $99 Laptop: Small! Slow! Sufficient!

Last year, a Web site reported that low-end electronics manufacturer Coby was going to release a $99.95 mini-laptop. It was exciting news–and a hoax. But Cherrypal has announced something that sounds more or less like the machine that Coby didn’t. The Cherrypal Africa has a 7-inch screen, 2GB of flash memory, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, two USB ports (one of which is of the obsolete USB 1.1 flavor), and either Windows CE or Linux. And yup, it sells for $99.

The Africa isn’t going to replace your MacBook Pro. Or your netbook. Or, really, any other computing device you own–it’s profoundly basic, and as the name suggests, it may be of most interest in developing nations where there are plenty of people for whom even $99 is going to be a stretch.

Actually, the Cherrypal Web site describes the Africa with a word I’ve never, ever heard a computer manufacturer use about its own product: “slow.”

In another place, the site calls the Africa a “no-thrills laptop.” Also refreshingly honest! The company seems to be more excited about its $389 13.3″ Bing notebook. (Which, confusingly, has nothing to do with Microsoft’s search engine–Cherrypal had the name first.) In fact, it says the Bing is “the fastest and most affordable laptop on the market today.” I haven’t seen the Bing, but I kind of suspect both claims are, um, false.

I’m not going to buy a Cherrypal Africa, and neither are you–but do you think it’s a noble experiment, a goofy oddity, a desperate cry for attention–or all three?

Microsoft Does The Right Thing, Juku Beta Scrapped

Kudos to Microsoft on acting fast on the Juku-Plurk fiasco: the company said Tuesday afternoon it would be suspending the Juku beta indefinitely, and has assumed responsibility for what is now a definite case of intellectual propery theft. According to a statement, the third party developer behind Microsoft’s service has acknowledged that it had indeed stolen code from Plurk to build Juku. Ouch.

Microsoft stressed that its contracts with its vendors expressly indicate that work provided must not infringe on the work of others (a no brainer, don’t you think?). “We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done,” it said.

Officials with Microsoft will reach out to Plurk to explain what happened as well as update the affected paryy on what Redmond plans to do to resolve the situation. It also is launching an inquiry into its own practices surrounding code offered by third-party vendors. So far we haven’t seen anything publicly on what Plurk’s future moves, but you have to think that this might just prevent this from going to court. My guess is we’ll be hearing from Plurk real soon. But as everyone’s saying, this publicity can do nothing but help the service, don’t you think?

Older iPhones Get Video Recording With New App Store Adds

Recording video on your iPhone is no longer a luxury of just the folks with jailbroken phones or an iPhone 3GS. Apple has approved two separate apps this week in the App Store — Camcorder and iVideoCamera — both retailing for 99 cents. Unfortunately, there are memory considerations with these older models, so don’t expect much. Regardless, its a nice addition.

Camcorder (which is only available for a limited time at the 99 cent price) allows for the recording of videos at a 320×426 resolution. But don’t think of doing anything with these videos: currently Camcorder only allows for the recording and playback of the videos from within the application itself and nothing else. You can get to the videos somehow through peering through your iTunes data backups, but that takes some knowledge and patience.

Another downside according to TUAW are meager audio recording and a frame rate that is described as “slow.” Then again, how many cell phone videos have you seen that looked like they were shot with a Mini DV cam, so I do digress.

The second app, iVideoCamera, allows for more functionality on what you can do with your videos, however it comes with the tradeoff of even poorer recording quality and time constraints (160×213 resolution, 3 frames per second, and one minute maximum recordings). The ability is there though to save videos to the camera roll or share them to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. The company behind the application, Laan Labs, says improvements to frame rate and longer recording times will be coming in a future update.

I haven’t seen anything on whether recorded videos in the camera roll then become available to send as MMS. If anybody has tried this, I think our readers (and myself) would want to hear about it. Occasionally, I’ve gotten the urge to send a video to somebody, but since I only have a iPhone 3G that’s not possible at the moment directly through the phone.

Comcast’s Subscriber-Only Content Goes Live

Comcast’s online version of its OnDemand TV service is live. (For some reason, the company changed the name from the perfectly-logical Comcast OnDemand Online to the overly-fancy Comcast Fancast Xfinity TV.) It’s a Web-based streaming service with exclusive streaming content–movies and TV shows–for folks who get their cable TV and broadband service from Comcast.

I still go back and forth on the idea of getting rid of cable for Internet-only TV, but Fancast Xfinity could be an argument for continuing to tithe  to Comcast.

All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka has more details. I’ll check it out as soon as I’m at a PC for a bit of time (and can remember my Comcast e-mail address, which the company assigned to me when I subscribed, which I never use, and which is required to log in…).

Twitter Begins to Play Around With Business Accounts

Twitter has dipped its toe into the waters of business accounts on the microblogging service, saying Monday it would be allowing an account to be tweeted to buy multiple twitter accounts in the  near future. Called “Contributors,” those particpating would be given a small byline acknowledgement at the end of the tweet.

The service says the move allows businesses to make these corporate tweets more personable by letting the reader know who is behind the company. However, the new functionality is not ready for public consumption, so its release will only be limited to a select group of business users and partners. Use of Contributors after the beta period ends looks to be limited to business-centric accounts and partners, so no allowing your girlfriend to tweet for you when this is ready for prime time.

Contributors is apparently only one of several features that the company is working on, although it is not being specific on what the others may be. In any case, this seems a natural move for the company considering so many businesses are turning to the service in order to reach out to their customers.

While some may wonder why Twitter is seemingly stepping on the feet of its partners such as CoTweet, those partners are saying that’s not the case. In a blog post on Monday, CoTweet said that Twitter was committed to the success of its partner ecosystem and would not purposely do anything to disrupt those relationships.

“Businesses will continue to require functionality such as CoTweet’s advanced work flow and conversation history that allow them to engage in authentic, two-way dialogs with their customers and communities,” it argued. “There is a large area of opportunity between what Twitter will be offering and what businesses require.”

Chrome on OS X=More Chrome Users

Over at Computerworld, Gregg Keizer is reporting on new browser stats from Net Applications that show Chrome overtaking Safari as the #3 browser last week, presumably as a result of the launch of the first beta of Chrome for OS X. For last week, 4.4 percent of people in Net Application’s pool used Chrome, a leap of .4 percent. That puts it above Safari’s 4.37 percent, but it’s a squeaker.

To satisfy my own curiosity, I checked out the same numbers for Technologizer visitors.

Continue reading this story…

Microsoft Pulls The Plug (For Now) on Plurk Clone

We’ve gotten a response out of Microsoft on the Plurk debacle, and it looks like the company’s been caught with its pants down. As you may remember from our post earlier this afternoon, the Canadian microblogging service accused Microsoft of outright intellectual property theft, saying as much as 80% of the Juku microblogging service it had launched in China was based off of Plurk.

Microsoft has decided to take down Juku while it performs a full investigation of the incident. The company said that when Plurk first posted its accusations, it was the middle of the night in China which made it impossible for work to begin until Microsoft China employees reported back in for work, which they would have right around suppertime here on the East Coast of the US.

The similarities are certainly there, starting with the user interface. What’s even more surprising is the whole incident was allowed to happen in the first place by the biggest software company in the world. Now it must rush to prevent what certainly could become a public relations nightmare.

“Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via microblogging and online games,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This MSN Juku feature was made available to MSN China users in November and is still in beta.”

It does seem like a little bit of passing the buck, but still Redmond shares some culpability in not knowing its competitors well enough to have an eye out for possible issues. No matter how this ends, as Michael Arrington put it on TechCrunch, “this is the best thing to happen to Plurk, ever.”

You got that right.