Techgeist

The Story

According to Reuters, some regulators in the US government expect that broadband stimulus could cost as much as $350 billion. This dwarfs the previously allocated funding of $7.2 billion. This new prediction is the result of several workshops the government held with people inside the broadband industry.

The new report, which admittedly says that broadband stimulus could only run the government $20 billion (still a whole lot of money), doesn’t have any suggestion for how to raise the necessary money. While the information we have is bereft actual numbers or reasoning, it does seem there is a consensus that the infrastructure for broadband is going to cost a whole lot more than $7.2 billion.

Well, Crap

It’s hard to say whether or not this report is accurate as we don’t have any of the information from it. I suspect, however, that it’s off as the people who participated in the panels, the source material for this report, probably came from members of the broadband industry. But other than that, we have no real information other than that if this report is correct, then we’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t think the …

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The Story

The UK has claimed the record for being the first industrialized nation to have its internet advertising spending eclipse all other forms. This past year, advertisers spent £1.75 billion ($2.8 billion) online, which made for 23.5% of the total market. Television, the next biggest sector for advertising, only 21.9% of total spending.

There are a lot of numbers about what’s changed in the past year, though the most notable come from ads in search and online videos. 60% of the entire budget was spent on search, meaning a whopping total of £1.05 billion ($1.68 billion). That’s up 6.8% from last year. Online video grew 300% to about £12 million.

One UK analyst suspects that the online ad market may have peaked this past year. Adam Smith at Group M said that the continued growth of social networking sites, which have yet to gain massive support from advertisers, could well cause the online advertising market to shrink in the next year. Aside from that, Mr. Smith said that television could well rebound.

It Keeps Going

Mr. Smith is dead wrong: we have not yet reached the apex of the online ad market in the UK …

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For all you techies that think Yahoo! is dead, think again. With over 130,000,00+ visitors a month, Yahoo! is still an attractive suitor, whether the valley believes it or not. Yahoo! is now using this as their selling point for developers to start making plug-ins for their new (and supposedly improved) homepage.

Using the proprietary Yahoo! Application platform (YAP) developers can easily create slightly more advanced widgets that users can “install” on their homepage. Currently there are 80+ apps that you can install on the Yahoo! homepage ranging from the standard weather apps to social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. In another words, there is sure to be an app you will enjoy on your homepage.

While this is a worthy attempt to make Yahoo! your destination site of choice I still have a feeling that Yahoo! isn’t quite doing enough to differentiate itself. Many personalized homepages do what Yahoo! does and I believe in iGoogle’s case, much better. Some of the apps also seem slightly buggy. When using the Wordpress Quickpost application it was not uncommon for me to run into some issues trying to load the application in …

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Before we begin this post, I want to make it plain: I love Twitter. But, even with that, the madness has to be slowed. Everyone is having their own cow over Twitter being valued at around a billion dollars in their last round, when they sold around 10% of the company at that valuation. Who am I to stay above the fray? Twitter is here to stay, and will change our lives, but we need to get our hats on straight. Let’s talk math, valuations, revenue, and the future.

I have already tangled with Scoble and Fred Wilson to a lesser extent about all of this once. The Week summarized it well. At the very end of my post on the subject I took the position that Twitter was “worth” probably something around two billion dollars. That number was what someone would have to pay to purchase Twitter outright. Now with Twitter being valued at one billion, they have moved that number up. No VC is going to be happy with Twitter being purchased for my paltry two billion; they need a multiple of return much higher than that to stay in business. …

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FiveRuns, a startup that had raised nine million dollars from Austin Ventures, by WorkThink. FiveRuns was a provider service products around Ruby on Rails. Major products include TuneUp and Dash. WorkThink, according to my looking and TweetCrunch, WorkThink has yet to launch. Their website claims that they are working on getting to launch.

Odd that FiveRuns was acquired by a company that has yet to launch.

We do not have details on the terms of the deal at the moment, but when we do, we will update this post with more. It is always nice to see M/A movement in the market, especially after the announcement of yesterdays NewEgg IPO. Things are moving again folks, get ready.

If you are an avid gamer and a social media nut then I am sure you have heard all about the future updates for Xbox Live that will integrate Twitter and Facebook. While no release date on the matter has been released, it definitely is in the works.

The tweet you see to the left is from Microsoft Xbox Live general manager, Marc Whitten. A few other tweets have also been spotted in the wild as well from various other members of the Xbox team.

This is ever-growing proof that Microsoft wants to be the hub of your entertainment experience. Tight integration with online video streaming service Netflix and future updates that will bring some of the biggest social networks to your big screen, it is hard to argue that any other system really can contend with Xbox 360’s feature set.

Thankfully, there exists a $29.99 messaging kit including a keyboard and a mic which will make typing out 140 characters a little less daunting of a task to do on the Xbox 360 controller. This will work out to Microsoft’s benefit as well since this will equate to more sales for accessories (where the real money …

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The Story

Today Microsoft released its free antivirus software for users of Windows whose installs of the operating system pass a validation test. That means it’s free to everyone with a genuine copy of Windows.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a small download that seems to provide a whole mess of features. Once you get the 5 megabyte file, the program will update the virus definitions and do a quick scan. And when Microsoft says quick, they mean quick. On a 320 gigabyte hard drive with a whole bunch of stuff on it, the scan took around fifteen minutes. Plus unlike Avast Antivirus, you can schedule scans.

Ars Technica did a fuller review of MSE, and they were fairly impressed. The most notable feature they mentioned was how MSE doesn’t just check definition files to find malware, but also monitors how programs are behaving:

MSE is the first Microsoft security product to make use of the company’s new Dynamic Signature Service (DSS); the next version of Forefront will also use DSS. When MSE detects that a file is making suspicious actions (such as unexpected network connections, attempting to …

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The “DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER” notice at the bottom of that picture is not a Photoshop job, nor is it the from someone who is in the anti-Windows camp. This piece of paper is the front a syllabus distributed today to students at the University of Chicago for a Biology class.

The University of Chicago uses some software called Chalk that’s incompatible with Internet Explorer. Students use Chalk to access documents and information relevant to their academic work. Chalk, however, does not support the caching system that IE uses. As this class in particular relies on the Chalk service a lot, the professor made sure to include a note to his students that the use of IE “will mess up and make you sad.”

Bye Bye, Internet Explorer

More and more, we’re seeing that much of the internet is just done supporting IE’s backwardness. YouTube recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6, which is unfortunately still the most popular browser in the world. A few months back, if you had visited YouTube with IE6, the site would have …

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Courtesy: Mobiletor

The Story

After getting a stern letter from the USB-IF, Palm has stopped forcing the Pre to sync with iTunes. But that doesn’t mean Palm is going to leave its users without a cool means for music.

Today Palm announced that in the recent WebOS 1.2 firmware release, users will be able to download music from the Amazon MP3 Store directly from the Pre. Yes, that means both via WiFi and cellular data network. One article points out that this is arguably better than integration with the iTunes music store as music from Amazon is generally a whole lot cheaper. Additionally, Palm’s decision to not turn syncing with iTunes back on in WebOS 1.2 seems to indicate that Palm is done playing the “Apple is the bad guy” game, and is now instead focusing on building its own network of partners.

Hit the Ground Running

As it stands now, Palm is in a lot of trouble as a company. The WebOS platform is what they’re banking on as their ticket back into the land of important tech companies. So it makes sense that Palm would …

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If you are anything like me, a ringing cell phone is a cringe worthy event. In all honesty, my iPhone exists for email and Twitter. Other people want to use it with me for telephony, but that is not its real purpose. My love for mobile email aside, do I have news and a deal for you. May I re-present the Peek, a diminutive mobile email device that does just that, email. Integrate with Ping.fm, and it does Twitter.

And guess what, no matter how you swing it, the Peek cannot call you at 3 am, asking you to clarify the project objectives. At the same time, you can email from the sack guilt free. This device is brilliant. Best part, according to CrunchGear, you can now get one without a monthly plan. Simply shell out $299 and the device is yours for life. Or, if you feel so inclined you can pick one up for $60 and a 15 dollar monthly plan.

Either way, the next time you drop your iPhone, think about it. No more ringtones, now that is a sweet sound.