IBM offers Symphony on Keepod USB devices

IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is now available on Keepods - thin USB devices made by the Italian company NSEC. Big Blue's Symphony suite is based on OpenOffice.org and includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation creation. Keepods are roughly the size of a credit card and hold up to 16GB of data. The new Keepod version, available through the Keepod store, employs VMware's ThinApp virtualization software, which wraps applications into an executable file that is isolated from a computer's operating system, mitigating compatibility and security concerns. Prices start at €19.90 (US$29.78) for a 2GB "Base" version.

Eighty percent of respondents polled for a Forrester Research report earlier this year said their companies were using some form of Office, and 78.4 percent had no plans to deploy any alternatives. A 2GB Secure edition, which includes 256-bit AES hardware encryption, is priced at €69. Although a USB deployment option could make Symphony attractive to more users, Microsoft retains an iron grip on the office productivity market. IBM does not formally track Symphony installs but estimates about 10 million people are using the software, said product manager Jeanette Barlow. The Keepod announcement comes in response to "a huge push from enterprise customers for supporting mobile workers," she said. Many companies are still in the tire-kicking stage, running pilot programs or deploying the software on a departmental level, she said. IBM expects interest in Symphony to jump significantly next year, when a new version based on the OpenOffice 3 codebase is released, according to Barlow.

Browser Market Share Transparency a Given

It used to be when a new software product was launched, reporters dutifully asked the vendor how it was doing a few days or weeks thereafter. It's not like this anymore as evidenced by the Computerworld story assessing last Thursday's launch of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The story talks about how IE8 market share can be tracked hour by hour from the moment it was launched. Invariably, the response went something like this: Reporter: "How's the new spreadsheet software doing now that it's been in the market for a few days?" Vendor: "Great, we're on target." Reporter: "How many have you sold?" Vendor: "That's confidential." In other words, users, investors or whatever constituency had to rely on vague and sometimes misleading claims or third party estimates. In this case, it was two services that monitor such things, namely StatCounter and Net Applications.

Their results as of yesterday were within one tenth of one percent of each other, suggesting the data is reliable. It's the same transparency that President Obama talks about. As of midday, Net Applications"said IE8 had 2.1% of the browser market and StatCounter said 2.0%. Both companies, coincidentally, were founded in 1999. StatCounter tracks browser usage using something called a web tracker which is code put on the sites of StateCounter's two million customers. From that, StatCounter extracts a sample and from there determines which browser – IE8, IE 7, IE6, Firefox 3, Firefox 2 and so forth – was used for view each every page. "They're not measuring IE8 downloads, but rather what percentage of those four billion page views came from an IE8 browser," she said. That equates to three million web sites and four billion web pages a month, a spokeswoman said. For several years, the Internet has put everything in full view.

You can run, but you can't hide.

Crowdsourcing takes center stage at DEMOfall ’09

One unmistakable trend at this year's DEMOfall show is the number of Web sites and applications that rely to some degree on crowdsourcing. 13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 Crowdsourcing – a buzzword loosely defined as giving large crowds of users the ability to collaboratively create or change content on Web sites or applications – was made popular by open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia and has since become a staple of Web 2.0 applications. So why does crowdsourcing have such an appeal for developers? "With all due respect it's because developers are lazy," laughs Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal. "When I crowdsource it means that I don't have to do the work to get data myself." But crowdsourcing does have perks beyond getting other people to do your work for you. Among the new crowdsourcing technologies to debut at DEMO this fall are Article One Partners' AOP Patent Studies, an open-source enterprise service that employs an online community of patent advisors to research patent claims; Waze, a mobile application that can be used to update traffic conditions in real time; TrafficTalk, a mobile application that is similar to Waze but also lets users provide traffic updates simply using their voice rather than typing into their mobile phone; Micello, a mobile app that aims to be the Google Maps of indoor spaces; and Answers.com, a Web site that combines established reference resources and crowdsourcing to create a comprehensive information database.

Some crowdsourcing developers say if you can create an application that meets a common need and gives people a real stake for getting involved, then it can go a long way toward growing your product's popularity. It's a shared pain of being frustrated by traffic jams and the like, but our goal is to resolve that pain and to minimize the wait during commutes." Greenfield says that while larger crowds are obviously better for an application such as TrafficTalk, the application can be relatively successful even if only two people who trust each other are using it. TrafficTalk founder Larry Greenfield, whose product is still currently in its alpha testing phase, says that he has found fertile crowdsourcing ground in the form of frustrated commuters during tests he has run of his software. "For us, crowdsourcing has to create a sense of community among our users," he says. "There has to be something that binds people together. After all, he notes, if one friend who shares a commute route with another friend can notify that friend of a traffic accident using TrafficTalk, the application will have served its purpose. Demo's biggest stars of all time Answers.com, on the other hand, is a Web site that really does require massive participation if it is to meet its lofty goal of becoming a central hub for people seeking answers to their queries.

Even so, he says the application needs around a dozen or so people to really reach its potential. Right now, the Web site lets users ask questions whose answers are partially provided by information culled from licensed professional encyclopedias and dictionaries and partially provided by user-generated Wiki-style content. This past August, for instance, Answers.com got around 45 million unique visitors. "Crowdsourcing for us really starts to work when you get to a certain scale," he explains. "Right now we get 45,000 new questions asked each day and then about one third of those are answered every day. Answers Corp. founder and CEO Robert Rosenschein says that as the Wiki portion of the Web site has grown over the past year, participation has snowballed to the point where the company doesn't have to work as hard to promote itself. Those answers are the most valuable thing we have even though some are more detailed and some less so… When you start to get that sort of scale it just sort of happens.

As Rosenschein acknowledges, crowdsourced answers are far more likely to contain factual errors than are answers taken from professional sources. The more new questions you get, the more new answers you get." Of course, the paradox of success is that the more popular your crowdsourcing site is, the more likely it will become the target of vandals. This is why, he says, it's so important to foster a tight community that takes pride in keeping the site accurate and will work quickly to clean up any vandalism. Because the service uses its online community to research the validity of patent claims – a time-consuming task if there ever was one – it pays money to users who are the first to come up with a correct solution to whether a patent is valid or not. For AOP Patent Studies, developing a sense of community is also important, but it's not the only incentive it uses to push its users toward greater accuracy. It basically works like this: a company comes to AOP Patent Studies and pays them to look into a patent claim.

The first two people to get results get paid a portion of the money. The Web site then throws the case to its online community for research. Still, Article One Partners CEO Cheryl Milone thinks that monetary incentive can't help your crowdsourcing site if you don't first develop a strong sense of cooperation among users. "There really has to be a sense of camaraderie and loyalty," she says. "Whether people are brought to the site because they know a lot about a particular technology or because they feel strongly that the patent system needs to be strengthened, it's the feedback they get from the community that keeps them coming back and is in itself compensation for their efforts."

Google Chrome: Redefining end user computing

One of the most profound changes in how computing services are being delivered is the use of the Web as a frontend for just about everything. In the application development world Adobe's Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is perhaps one of the most profound re-thinks of what should be the underpinnings of application architecture by making it possible to deploy applications on the Web and the desktop of Windows, Mac, and Linux with more-or-less identical functionality. We have seen this transformation in the thousands of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that have appeared in the last few years that now cover the entire spectrum of applications from corporate accounting through to video editing (something that just a few years ago was hard to imagine becoming a reality). The 5 best, and 5 worst, features of Google Chrome OS Now the Web is redefining not just how processing functionality is delivered but also what an application is and what an operating system is. If you doubt the success of AIR consider that by January of this year, a scant year after the version 1.0 release of the SDK, Adobe claimed 100 million installations.

Entirely Web-based, Chrome OS sports a tabbed interface to manage concurrent applications which are all Web-based (you can forget all of your standard desktop applications, this is not a Windows alternative) and it eschews client-side hard disk storage for flash and cloud storage. Now Google is pushing the envelope with their recent release of details about the much rumored (and hyped) Google Chrome OS. Google also has a video explaining the end user context of GCOS which is useful (its cheery hipness may well annoy you as much as it did me). You could describe Chrome OS as the big brother of Google's Chrome Web browser. The intention of Chrome OS appears to be to define the netbook market and thus it is being designed to run on both x86 and ARM processors. That said, being open source it is guaranteed that the OSS community will jump on the chance to extend, enhance, and port Chrome OS onto just about every conceivable platform. The entire code base is open source but Chrome OS isn't intended to be something that you'll download and install on a netbook; rather, you'll get Chrome OS pre-installed on Google approved devices.

Some of the most powerful concepts in Chrome are about the issues that users complain about with Windows. With Chrome updates are intended to be transparent and automatic – you'll always have the latest version and patches immediately on refresh. For example, updating Windows is a messy, ugly business that users really hate. And should your Chrome OS instance get corrupted or compromised, the intention is the Chrome will self-heal. My money is on big-time success in the consumer market.

So, will Chrome OS succeed? We've already seen the surprising success of netbooks which address consumer market demand for low price and portability. The SMB market will certainly be paying attention and as their infrastructure investments life out the lure of cheap computing will become very strong. Add to that simplified maintenance and repair and Google's huge brand awareness and I'd say that the probability of success is very close to 100%. In the corporate market, Chrome OS will make slower inroads. The enterprise market will, in a limited way, embrace Chrome OS but only as much as they need to embrace user demand – enterprise manageability concerns will need to be addressed to allow Big IT to feel at all comfortable.

Google's Chrome OS is scheduled for release towards the end of 2010 and I believe will be, to say the least, an important event with long term implications for how consumers and the enterprise deal with personal computing. That said, enterprise IT will most likely have the same scenario they faced with users bringing their own laptops into the work environment and WiFi within the enterprise envelope –unstoppable trends that had to be controllable and, to some extent, accommodated.

European Parliament adopts telecom laws after bitter debate

After two years of often bitter debate, the European Parliament approved a raft of new telecom laws Tuesday. The laws are designed to give European citizens cheaper telecom services, more privacy and a faster Internet. Majority support for the package was achieved after the Parliament reached a compromise with national governments earlier this month on the controversial issue of illegal file sharing over the Internet.

They pave the way for a more competitive single market in telecom services across the 27-nation European Union. An E.U. regulatory authority will be able to intervene if it is dissatisfied with how national regulators police their markets. Incumbent operators will be forced to compete fairly with smaller rivals or face having their networks separated from their service divisions. Meanwhile, operators will be obliged to allow consumers to switch to rival networks, taking their phone numbers with them, without delays. With regard to file sharing, those suspected of illegally sharing copyright-protected content over the Internet will be assured the right of defense and the assumption of innocence rather than being summarily cut off from Internet access. Consumers will be granted the right to be informed about data breaches involving their data.

This last point nearly derailed the entire package a few months ago, when the Parliament tried to insert a safeguard for consumers that would have forced national authorities to seek a court order before cutting off a file sharer. A compromise was found earlier this month that leaves many opponents unsatisfied, but it did at least allow the legislative package to pass into law across the E.U. "The E.U. telecoms reform will bring more competition on Europe's telecoms markets," said Viviane Reding, the E.U.'s telecoms commissioner who initiated the reforms and played a pivotal role in getting lawmakers in the European Parliament and the national governments to reach agreement. National governments, some of which are already seeking ways of clamping down on Internet piracy, refused to accept the move. The new laws "put citizens in the center stage in telecoms regulation," she added. Telecom providers both large and small welcomed the adoption of the telecom package.

The Parliamentarians who fought hardest to safeguard citizens' rights of access to the Internet said the compromise reached was the best deal they could have hoped for. "The compromise approved by the European Parliament today is certainly not the alpha and omega of protecting Internet users' rights, but we did achieve the best possible result under the current constitutional constraints," said Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian member of Parliament from the Green Party. Failure to reach an agreement would have resulted in prolonged and costly legal uncertainty for them. A new pan-European telecom regulator, equipped with veto powers over its national equivalents will help ensure that all 27 countries in the E.U. play by the same rules. Larry Stone, BT's president of group public and government affairs said his company "strongly supports the European Union's drive for a more consistent Single Market." For smaller rivals in the market the key element of the new laws is the ability to threaten former incumbent operators that still control most of the telecoms networks, with functional separation of their infrastructure and services divisions. "The challenge now is for the Commission, governments and national regulators to remove the remaining barriers to competition," said Innocenzo Genna, chairman of the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA), which represents the smaller players. "We can no longer afford to be in the slow lane of the digital economy." ECTA said there has been no progress toward competitive broadband markets for more than two years, with incumbents continuing to dominate most markets. "We now must take the opportunity of the new framework to re-energise our quest for competition and promote deployment of fibre networks open to competitors at a fair price so that businesses and consumers can receive high speed services from a wide variety of providers," it said in a statement. The new agency, called the body of European regulators of electronic communications (BEREC) will be able to overturn a decision by a national regulator if they believe it unfairly favors the former local monopoly. The new telecom laws also pave the way for the move away from analog TV by stating how the radio frequencies made available when TV channels switch to digital should be distributed.

It will share this veto power with the Commission. Broadcasters were keen to keep this so-called digital dividend for themselves so they could offer interactive TV services, but lawmakers ruled that the spectrum must be shared with mobile phone operators and others providing mobile services. Some lawmakers wanted to introduce an opt-in system for all cookies, which would have slowed down people's experience on the Internet, according to IAB, a trade group representing the online advertising industry. "The E.U. legislature kept the existing opt-out regime for cookies and improved it to the benefit of Internet users. Meanwhile, publishers and online marketers welcomed clear rules on the use of cookies, files placed on Internet users' computers by Web sites they visit. This recognizes the established practice that Web users set their cookie preferences in their settings managers," said IAB Europe vice president Kimon Zorbas.

Industry lobbying on the issue was intense with AT&T on one side calling for the freedom to charge different rates for different online service providers across its networks, and Google and other Internet firms on the other demanding neutrality. Net neutrality, which sparked controversy, didn't get addressed directly in the new laws. The Commission weighed in on the side of the Internet firms and managed to secure a declaration to be attached to the new laws, that while not legally binding, could be used to ensure that the next European Commission that takes office early next year will follow the line of the current team led by Commissioner Reding. E.U. member states have 18 months to transpose the new laws into their national statute books. BEREC will be established in spring next year.

Report: FCC will formalize net neutrality rule

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is planning to create formal rules against Internet providers selectively blocking or slowing traffic, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Net neutrality rules would prohibit Internet providers from blocking or slowing their customers' access to Web sites or Web applications. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce net neutrality rulemaking during a speech Monday, the Journal reported.

A FCC spokeswoman did not immediately return a message seeking confirmation of the Journal story. But the FCC has never made formal net neutrality rules. Since mid-2005, the FCC has said it will enforce four broadband policy principles, saying consumers have a right to access the legal Internet content of their choice, and they are entitled to run Web applications and services of their choice. Broadband provider Comcast filed a lawsuit challenging the FCC's authority to enforce the principles after the agency ruled last August that Comcast had to stop slowing peer-to-peer traffic in the name of network management. The rules would apply not only to wireline broadband providers, but also to wireless networks run by companies such as AT&T and Verizon, the newspaper said. Genachowski is planning on launching a formal rulemaking process on net neutrality, the Journal reported.

Rulemaking could give the FCC more authority to enforce net neutrality. Net neutrality advocates welcomed the news. "The Internet was created and grew up under strict nondiscrimination rules," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group. "Those same ideas are as valuable today as they were 10 years ago. A bill in the U.S. Congress would also spell out that the FCC has that authority. Having rules in place will bring a degree of certainty that will help both carriers and consumers alike. Sohn disagreed. "Rather, as in the past, they will encourage investment in the kinds of innovation and technology that will help move our economy forward," she said.

Carriers will know what is allowed and what is not; consumers will be relieved to know they will be able to have access to any content and service on a nondiscriminatory basis. " Some critics have suggested net neutrality rules would hamper investment in new broadband pipes, because the broadband providers could not control what runs over their networks. Free Press, a media reform group, called the rulemaking a "big win for consumers." A representative of Comcast declined to comment pending Genachowski's speech. But Randolph May, president of conservative think tank the Free State Foundation, said it is "discouraging" that the FCC is considering new broadband regulations. "In light of the way competition is continuing to develop in the broadband marketplace, and with only a few isolated instances of complaints alleging net neutrality-like abuses ever having been filed, it is a mistake for the chairman to propose common carrier-type regulation in the broadband world," he said. Verizon Wireless will wait until Genachowski's speech before making a comment, a spokesman of that company said. The mobile-phone and Internet industry would be concerned "about the unintended consequences that net neutrality regulation would have on investments from the very industry that's helping to drive the U.S. economy," added Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA, a mobile trade group. "We believe that this kind of regulation is unnecessary in the competitive wireless space as it would prevent carriers from managing their networks - such as curtailing viruses and other harmful content - to the benefit of their consumers."