eckersteins.com

These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.

Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between “fun” and “serious,” he said.

The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo’s search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft’s Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.

Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others’ such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo’s senior vice president for consumer experiences.

Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.

“We’re pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience,” Bhat said. “In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first.”

Yahoo's revamped front page.

The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo’s effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo’s profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft’s online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.

Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company’s developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they’ll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.

The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. “We’re creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context,” he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.

Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo’s. It began “bucket testing” it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.

In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.

Bhat wouldn’t share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it’s possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.

The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done “in the coming months,” Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can’t choose to use or not use the new design.

A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company’s search page will follow suit starting next month.

There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.

More changes
Opening up Yahoo’s content to other sites’ operations–and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates–is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users’ activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

“The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback–tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn’t,” Bhat said. “It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn’t.”

Yahoo's new home page permits applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook.

“Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo,” Bhat said. “We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged.”

Clearly seeing the writing on the wall, Universal said today it will drop its support for HD DVD and instead produce its high-definition films on Blu-ray Disc.

“The path for widespread adoption of the next-generation platform has finally become clear,” said Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Universal Pictures Digital Platforms, in a statement.

The only other major studio still contracted to support HD DVD is Paramount, which is widely expected by industry insiders to make a similar pledge of allegiance to Blu-ray by the end of the week.

But while Paramount used to support both Blu-ray and HD DVD, Universal has always been in the HD DVD camp. That means it likely has much more work ahead of it to switch from HD DVD and produce discs in the Blu-ray format for the very first time.

The announcement from Universal comes only hours after Toshiba said it would no longer produce HD DVD players. As Toshiba was the only hardware manufacturer producing standalone HD DVD players, its exit leaves little choice for the remaining members of the HD DVD Promotional Group.

“The emergence of a single, high-definition format is cause for consumers, as well as the entire entertainment industry, to celebrate. While Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray,” he said.

Riffing off the Eclipse Foundation’s Mike Milinkovich, CIO.com writes:

Amen. Proprietary software is all about vendor-driven innovation. Open source is all about user-driven innovation, collaboratively married to vendor innovation. It’s a two-way street, and it’s much, much better for both vendors and users.

[I]f you develop in an open source model and other companies adopt what you develop, you have a higher chance of longevity in the code base. In other words, you can develop a custom solution to a unique business problem with less fear that your solution will turn into a dead-end legacy system when things, inevitably, change in a few years. Milinkovich also sees more CIOs banding together with industry peers to develop common open-source solutions to standard industry processes, thereby saving money by sharing costs and ensuring interoperability.

CIO.com suggests that open source may be the future of enterprise innovation, echoing the Bank of New York Mellon’s comments on the subject last week. The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source.

commentary

Well, maybe not for long.

By putting traditional desktop applications, e-mail, word processing, and calendars into the cloud, Google relieves corporations of the administrative burden of having to buy hardware, install software, and hire people to maintain it.

“Securing the current enterprise environment is futile,” Philippe Courtot, chief executive of Qualys, which offers security as a service to corporations, said in an interview on Friday. “This is a problem Microsoft should have fixed a long time ago.”

On Thursday, Google unveiled a re-branded Web Security for Enterprise based on the Postini technology it acquired last year. The Web-hosted service protects corporate Web and e-mail users from viruses, spyware, and malicious Web sites, and extends protection directly to remote workers if needed.

This greatly reduces the costs for corporations and allows them to focus on their core businesses. And by beefing up the security of its hosted offerings, Google has removed a large impediment to widespread corporate adoption of its hosted services.

This is all part of Google’s hosted apps business, but targeted at corporate customers instead of consumers who expect–and get–hosted services for free, at least for now.

Microsoft certainly recognizes this trend. The company turned its FrontBridge acquisition into Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, which includes security. But the software giant doesn’t have a pure, software-as-a-service-based messaging security platform like Google or MessageLabs, says Paul Roberts, senior analyst for enterprise security at The 451 Group.

Sure, software as a service and cloud computing don’t sound as sexy as free e-mail and pay-per-click, but they are the wave of the future, experts say.

“Microsoft says ‘here’s the software.’ Google says ‘it’s already there; we just create the accounts and you can start today,’” Dhanjani says. “We’re seeing, from an IT perspective, that in the next couple of years services will move into the cloud, even security services, so Google is really thinking ahead.”

With an arsenal of search, Web-hosted apps and the advertising-supported “money-making machine…Google is going to kill Microsoft,” he predicted.

Google’s offering is compelling for corporations because of the ease with which they can be up and running without any IT headaches, says Nitesh Dhanjani, senior manager and leader of application security services at Ernst & Young.

Peter Firstbrook, a program director at Gartner, summed it up this way: “I wouldn’t ring the bells yet, but it is another feather in Google’s cap; another service they can offer so that they become more strategic to their customers.”

With every Google enterprise announcement Microsoft must hear the war drums beating.

Sure, Google owns the search market. And, as a result, the company is the online advertising leader. But Microsoft has all those Windows desktops out there, and owns the corporate market, right?

“Microsoft clearly sees the light that the Web and the Internet are the OS (operating system) of the future and that selling shrink-wrapped software isn’t going to be feasible,” Roberts says.

Also, ever since February, when Microsoft came to Yahoo with intent to acquire, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been on the defensive. Farber argues that we haven’t really seen or heard of plans for it to move forward. Are they simply holding out for more money? Or does it have legitimate reasons for wanting to maintain its independence?

In Thursday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber about the state of Yahoo. Company news seems to emerge on a daily basis, but what does it all really mean? Farber, who has his finger on the pulse of the company, explains that at least personnel-wise, the search giant has been in a state of turmoil for the last year and a half.

Apparently, only Charlie Babcock at InformationWeek really listened to the music selected for the Open Source Business Conference earlier this week. In an excellent article, Charlie walks through Microsoft’s troubled patent claims on open source, and notes its dissonance with the open-source harmony:

Every song I play at OSBC has a purpose. I’m one of those people that really does listen to the lyrics. I’m glad Charlie was paying attention. Was Microsoft?

There’s a lot of open source code running on Windows now, so much that Microsoft wants to forget about those claimed infractions and work more closely with open source developers. Smith said Microsoft believes in the patent system and won’t back off its patent portfolio. But at the same time he acknowledged Microsoft has a lot to lose if it doesn’t achieve greater harmony with open source communities….

[But at OSBC]…[i]f you listened carefully, you could hear this refrain on the public address system above the pre-keynote hubbub, “When we want something, We don’t want to pay for it.” The name of the song: “Been Caught Stealing” by the rock & rollers, Jane’s Addiction.

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Motorola Krzr K1m for Boost Mobile

(Credit:
Boost Mobile)

[Source: Slashphone]

The Krzr K1m is also the launch device for Boost Mobile’s new unlimited monthly plans that range from $45 to $55 a month, arguably one of the most affordable unlimited plans in the nation ($45 is for just calls, $50 for talk and text, and $55 if you add Web access to the mix). If you’re a new customer, you can get the first month free. Boost Mobile is only available in 13 states though, so enter in your zip code to see if you’re in luck.

Boost Mobile is often known for their iDEN/Walkie-talkie phones, as their “Where you at?” ads would suggest. However, the youth-oriented Sprint-Nextel offspring also offers a few non-iDEN phones, and its latest is the Motorola Krzr K1m. The K1m has all the features of the Sprint version, such as an MP3 player, a 1.3-megapixel camera, GPS, as well as EV-DO support, and is available for $249.99. It also includes a preloaded service called “The Latest,” which gives you access to information such as news, sports, and stock market updates throughout the day. Premium channels have driving directions, unlimited 411 searches, and more. A basic subscription is $2.99 a month, and a premium one will cost you $4.99 a month. Boost is offering a trial of “The Latest” service for free for the first seven days.

- Order Ask.com to delete all previously retained information, before the implementation of AskEraser.

Rotenberg is right that using opt-out cookies may not be the cleanest design technique. If I were coding it, I’d have created a special “ask.com/eraser” site–the same way Google set up its google.com/unclesam government search — or a private.ask.com subdomain. No cookies would be needed.

Lawsuits, in other words, have risks. Firing off an inaccurate letter to the federal bureaucracy, on the other hand, merely results in the sender looking a little silly. The next time you see them complaining to the FTC about some alleged wrongdoing, remember these attorneys’ odd reluctance to litigate.

A zealous band of pro-regulation privacy groups made a valiant effort a few days ago to convince the Feds to forcibly pull the plug on a new feature on the Ask.com search engine.

EPIC’s filing is flawed in the sense that the document they filed is
factually inaccurate, and simply shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
the functionality of our product. In addition, many of the issues they
raise are outdated, while others are completely misguided from the
outset, and others deal with changes that Ask.com already made to
AskEraser weeks ago, and were subsequently posted publicly on our
website.

- Require Ask.com, as a condition of offering AskEraser in the future to:
a) Cease using the opt-out cookie
b) Cease creating a Persistent Identifier on customers
c) Provide meaningful notice if the service will be disabled…

But this episode is useful to note because it exposes how the Washington practice of advocacy groups using federal agencies to sabotage political enemies can be bereft of facts and logic. (From EPIC’s perspective, this was supposed to be a no-lose situation: it’s a win if AskEraser is taken off the market, and if the Republican-led FTC refuses to do so, the FTC and the Republican appointees can be slammed as insufficiently sensitive to “privacy interests.”)

Which is why Ask.com changed the cookie value in early January to be just “off” or “on”–meaning there’s no longer the same kind of privacy issue. Unfortunately for the pro-regulatory privacy activists, they never actually checked before firing off their this-illegal-practice-must-be-halted missive on Saturday. It said that the FTC must:

And so on. Now, I admit that anyone can err. And in fact I’ve known the folks at EPIC to be careful, honest, and principled, even if I may disagree with them from time to time. I think this is an honest mistake.

AskEraser is turned on or off by a link on Ask.com that changes the value of a cookie titled, reasonably enough, “askeraser.” Originally, when AskEraser launched last month, the value of the cookie was set to the time that the service was activated.

By way of background, this particular posse disagreed with the way Ask.com implemented a privacy feature called AskEraser. The idea is that instead of recording your search terms for a year or two the way other search engines do (see our survey from August), Ask.com was offering never to save them at all.

- Order Ask.com to inform all current users of AskEraser, by prominent notice displayed on the Ask.com Web site, that they should delete the Ask.com AskEraser cookie.

EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg replied to me in e-mail on Tuesday evening:

EPIC’s weekend filing regarding AskEraser is both flawed and
unfortunate. It’s unfortunate in the sense that Ask.com tried to engage
in a constructive dialogue with the group last week, and was rebuffed.
Privacy is an issue that demands collaboration and partnership between
online companies and advocates, for the benefit of all consumers.
Ask.com’s relationship with the Center for Democracy & Technology is
proof-positive of that.

- Order Ask.com to cease engaging in and unfair deceptive trade practices.

Then again, I’m not privy to how Ask.com’s software is designed and the trade-offs that would be involved. More to the point, probably, companies should have flexibility in how they try to offer new privacy features–and it’s hardly clear that a bunch of permanent Washington insiders or FTC bureaucrats know more about scalable software engineering than, well, actual software engineers. As long as Ask.com is honest about what it’s doing, and it seems to be in its FAQ, it should be allowed to keep on offering new features.

After all, EPIC is staffed by attorneys, and their complaint to the FTC alleges that AskEraser is, beyond any doubt, “an unfair business practice.” If true, that would violate state consumer protection laws, including California’s section 17200, which says private attorneys may sue a company engaging in “unfair” business practices.

If Ask has now fixed the problem, (1) that means we were right,
(2) they should have responded to our letter. But that doesn’t solve the problem with opt-out cookies, which I think you will agree is a nutty approach that does not scale, i.e. it requires users to keep cookies for all the companies they don’t want to be tracked by. Even the FTC should be able to see the problem.

I think I know what the answer is. Judges have little patience for plaintiffs that waste their time. If this had been a lawsuit, a judge might well have fined EPIC et al. for wasting his time with frivolous claims, and its staff attorneys might even have been subject to individual sanctions.

The only problem? Those supposedly pernicious practices don’t actually exist.

There’s one more question worth asking: if EPIC and CDD and their ideological allies believed they had such a strong case, why not file an actual lawsuit instead of asking the FTC to undertake an investigation that would likely take half a year or more to complete?

Instead of applauding the idea as perhaps flawed but better than the status quo, EPIC et al. worked themselves into a state of high dudgeon. (These are the same groups that once claimed Google’s Gmail service was illegal.) They sent a letter to Ask.com on December 19 saying the timestamp–down to the second, but not a fraction of a second–could be used as a kind of unique tracking number.

For his part, Ask.com spokesman Nicholas Graham told me on Tuesday:

They had a point. If Ask.com encounters a thousand people signing up for AskEraser per second, the potential privacy intrusion is minimal (everyone has the same timestamp). If only one person per second signs up for AskEraser, however, the potential privacy intrusion is higher (the timestamp is unique).

- Order Ask.com to withdraw AskEraser from the marketplace.

The groups, which include the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, told the Federal Trade Commission on Saturday that a formal injunction was necessary to halt some supposedly pernicious practices on the part of Ask.com.

Ask.com already had voluntarily changed the way it handled its new privacy feature weeks earlier. This self-appointed posse of liberal nonprofits, which also includes Consumer Action, was riding to bring to justice a problem that had long since vanished (and that’s assuming it existed in the first place).

What games do you think are missing from the Wii virtual console? Sound off here!

Double Dragon (1988, NES, 500
Wii points): Double Dragon is the ultimate side-scrolling action game. What started as a phenomenon in arcades eventually made its way onto the home console, which, in turn, lead to countless sequels. In this classic original, you’ll take on a group known as The Black Warriors as you make your way through various stages with nothing but your martial arts training to save you.

There’s only one game available for download on the virtual console this week, but it’s a classic!

The Samsung Omnia could come to AT&T.

Q: I’m curious as to whether Bluetooth headsets also emit radiation, which could prove harmful to one’s health. What can you tell me about this?
- Craig

A: Bluetooth headsets do emit radiation, but they do it at a much lower power than a cell phone. In fact, it’s so low that it’s almost negligible. Keep in mind that while cell phones need to connect to a tower that could be a couple of miles away, a headset has an effective range of just 30 feet. However, if the prospect of Bluetooth radiation really worries you, I would suggest using a wired headset instead.

A: Though the selection of Sprint and Verizon Wireless smartphones isn’t quite as extensive as with the GSM carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile), I’d say they have some very decent options. Verizon has the XV6900, the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8330, and the Samsung SCH-i760, while Sprint offers the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8330 and the Motorola Q9c, to name a few. And though it’s not a smartphone by our standards, the LG Dare is a solid option as well. I’d agree, however, that the CDMA phones are lacking in Wi-Fi support. AT&T in particular does better in that department. And incidentally, if anyone is getting the Omnia, Bonnie Cha thinks it will be AT&T.

Q: Why do Sprint and Verizon Wireless appear to get sloppy seconds when it comes to the best and brightest new smartphones? It seems as if AT&T and T-Mobile get the most interesting phones, even though their networks aren’t as extensive as Verizon and Sprint. I know Sprint has the Samsung Instinct, but that phone has no Wi-Fi. Will Sprint be getting something like the Samsung Omnia for the holidays?
- Eric

The Aliph Jawbone 2. Is its radiation harmful?

(Credit:
Samsung)

Because CDMA has a smaller global footprint, some cell phone manufacturers are less inclined to make CDMA phones. Just look at Nokia and Sony Ericsson, for example. Nokia has dabbled in CDMA phones, but it has never had a clear-cut strategy for doing so. And Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, shuns CDMA completely. The technology does get attention from Japanese and Korean manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and Kyocera, but that’s mainly because they have CDMA in their own back yards. Moto spends a good deal of time in both sectors, but there again, Moto operates in a country that uses CDMA.

Kent German, CNET’s cell phones guru, answers your questions about cell phones, services, and accessories and reports on the state of the industry. Send him a question.

As for the lack of Wi-Fi on Sprint and Verizon phones, I’d blame that on the peculiarities of the carriers. In my experience, the CDMA carriers tend to be much more controlling and protective than T-Mobile or AT&T. Verizon was the last carrier to remove Bluetooth restrictions in its phone and it was only last year that Sprint and Verizon said they would start allowing unlocked phones on their networks. I’d theorize that they’re slow to adopt Wi-Fi because they want to keep their customers using their calling minutes.

A: As a new customer you will have to pay an activation fee, even if you’re using an unlocked phone. Yet, you might be able to avoid signing a contract that includes an early termination fee. The only reason carriers charge an ETF in the first place is to recover the cost of selling you a new phone at a discount. But, if you’re not getting such a discount or rebate then there’s no reason you should be stuck with an ETF. If AT&T tries to press you with one, I’d argue that point.

(Credit:
Aliph)

Q: I bought a new unlocked phone and would like to start a new account at AT&T. Can I get out of paying an activation fee and signing a contract?
- Elisa