Steve Ballmer on Google

It takes a certain sort of nerve to attack a company for only being good at one thing when you're worse at that one thing yourself. Also, in news for Steve Ballmer, Google is good at two things, search and advertising:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday bad-mouthed Google for being successful at only one business (even though it's a business Microsoft has been trying unsuccessfully to break into). But the target doesn't matter. It could have been Linux. Or Apple. I'm just worn out by the repetition. Ballmer's trash-talking is a tired routine. He needs to get a new act.

For a couple of years now Microsoft has been trying to figure out how Google does it -- how the world's premiere search company provides Web-based services and makes its money by selling advertising. Google has done extremely well at both, and its success has made it the darling of Wall Street.

By contrast, as hard as Microsoft has tried with MSN and its confusing Live announcements, it hasn't done very well at either: Its search services are mediocre, and its Live OneCare antivirus software has famously failed a couple of tests recently.

As far as I can see, Microsoft will never have any success in Web-based, advertising-supported services for two reasons. First, it doesn't trust the model -- Microsoft is unwilling to give away for free any service that might be really useful. And second, it doesn't trust its customers.

It's also true that Microsoft is only good at one thing: controlling the OS market.

Water on Mars

Nasa's made this great find, that there's enough water on Mars to cover the planet, to actually make a planetary sea.

 

MARK COLVIN: There's little in outer space that fires the imagination more than the possibility of life on Mars.
For life there needs to be water, and the latest news from NASA is that there is plenty of that.
A new radar that's measured ice deposits on Mars indicates that there's enough frozen water there to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 11 metres.
The find doesn't bring us any closer to knowing whether there was life on Mars, but it has revived the hopes of some that there could be life on the planet in the future, as Paula Kruger reports.
PAULA KRUGER: It has long been seen as the dry, dusty red planet.
But the latest discovery is pouring a lot of cold water, or, more correctly, ice on that belief.
In a joint effort by NASA, the Italian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express Spacecraft, scientists have discovered the frozen mass on Mars' South Pole is more than three and a half kilometres deep.
Dr Jonathan Clarke is an associate at Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. He says the find is a welcomed surprise.
JONATHAN CLARKE: Well, people have known about the layer deposits at the pole regions of Mars for a very long time, since the early 70s. Some very spectacular satellite images have been acquired from various missions since then, but we haven't really known what they've been made of. People have suggested there've been layers of dust or layers of ice mixed with dust, or other materials. What this recent finding shows is that they are almost pure water ice, at least 90 per cent pure, which is really very amazing and quite unexpected.

Roll on hte terraforming project!

New Directory!

As we should all know by now, the success or not of our efforts on the web depends upon how well we can get our results read by the search engines. Get a decent result, high on the listings, and you can make money. Even if money isn't the aim, visibility still matters, otherwise why are we bothering to do this?

In order to gain that visibility some form of marketing is necessary and the old methods really have been tried to death. Which is why this new directory looks so interesting. Based upon Wordpress software they've been very clever in turning the advantages of blogging software into a benefit to a directory. In effect, a Wordpress Directory.

For example, blogging software includes automatic (or semi- at least) pings, which are what tell the search engines that there's new content for them to spider. The traditional directories don't so this, they are simply static and don't tell anyone at all when the underlying sites have changed.

It looks like a very interesting approach and at a mere $3 per entry into the directory I have a feeling that they will be flooded with applications. Might be worth getting your's in now.

.EU domains

Those companies that have one think they're lovely, yet a majority of companies don't know what they are.

A large majority of British businesses with a .eu domain name believe it to be an effective business tool in a recent survey, while a separate survey found that half of UK businesses do not even know what the .eu domain stands for.

The surveys were both carried out by domain registration and hosting company 1&1 Internet, and found that business sentiment for .eu addresses across Europe was surprisingly positive.

...

The research, though, suggests that the businesses which have adopted European addresses have found it a useful experience. It found that 68 per cent of UK businesses which use a .eu domain thought it was effective, while half of users said that the domain enhanced their business's image. Around 43 per cent said it increased accessibility to vital European markets.

French companies were the most enthusiastic about the addresses, with 88 per cent of them willing to recommend using an address, 75 per cent believing them to be effective and 72 per cent saying that it enhanced their image.

Not surprising that the French companies love them. Have you heard about the bureaucratic hassle you have to go through to get a .FR?

 

Technorati tags: European Union, domains

Gmail Trademarks?

Now here's a surprise, it's not often that the little guy wins these sorts of suits:

Google has failed to win the right to register the term "Gmail" as a wide-ranging European trademark.

The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the body which is responsible for European community trademarks, rejected Google's appeal after a stiff battle with German-born venture capitalist Daniel Giersch.

This is the way the law is supposed to work:

Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in 2004. The German entrepreneur founded a same-day mail delivery service called GMail designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post.

Last year, a district court in Hamburg already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation and Google was ordered to remove all Gmail references from its German service.

It's just that it doesn't always do so. Good for the courts.

 

Technorati tags: Google, Gmail, trademark

iPhone

So it appears that Apple will announce the iPhone on Monday:

 

Apple will announce the iPhone on Monday, website Gizmodo has claimed. It cites no sources and provides no details, but a senior staffer guarantees the announcement - which he says was unexpected - will happen, for what that's worth...

Assuming, for the moment, it isn't a blatant attempt to generate traffic for the site - the story's too terse to warrant a link, by the way - why might Apple announce the iPhone on Monday, seven days before Christmas and less than a month before CEO Steve Jobs takes to the stage for his annual launch-fest, the Macworld Expo keynote?

Well, maybe. Or maybe it really is just a way for Gismodo to get lots of traffic by claiming that Apple will announce the iPhone on Monday.

 

 

Technorati tags: Apple, iPod, iPhone

Nokia 7250i

The Nokia 7250i is a mobile phone forthe North American market.

Details and specs are as follows:

Imaging
	Take photos with the integrated camera and send them to friends and family1,14
	Associate a picture to your contacts in the phone book
	Multimedia player - Edit images with frames, clip art and text - Adjust photo contrast and zoom in on images - Sequentially view all images in a folder as a slide show
	Use night mode when snapping photos in low light conditions
	High-resolution color display: 128 x 128 pixels, up to 4,096 colors
	Camera image capture at 352 x 288 resolution
	Use photos as wallpaper to personalize your phone

Multimedia Messaging Service
	Create, send and receive messages with image, sound and text1,14
	Edit and forward received messages with image and text to compatible phones1,14
	Received MMS images and MIDI ring tones can be saved in the Gallery menu†

Mobile Messaging
	E-mail, text and picture messages1
	Predictive text input

Connectivity
	Mobile Internet1,2,12
	High-speed data transmission via GPRS1,15
	Wireless modem capability via USB cable or infrared
	Send and receive data via infrared
	Synchronize your phone book, calendar and to-do list with your PC using Nokia 7250i PC Suite4
	TTY/TDD (Telecommunication Device for the Deaf) compatibility with phone adapter6
	Hearing aid support with the LPS-4 Loopset

Downloadable Java™ Applications
	Java™ support for application downloads
	Preloaded Java applications: Converter, Triple Pop game and Bounce game

Organization
	Phone book with up to 500 contacts, with multiple numbers and text entries per contact†
	Calendar with monthly view
	To-do list with priority levels
	Alarm clock with snooze, stopwatch and countdown timer
	Integrated speakerphone for convenient communication

Personalization & Fun
	Use the Go-To menu to quickly access the features you use most
	Xpress-on™ color covers, front and back
	Use wallpaper templates or customize your wallpaper by loading an image onto your phone display
	8 different color schemes to personalize display elements such as headers, battery strength and network indicators
	Polyphonic (MIDI) ring tones
	Stereo FM radio (headset required, stereo headset sold separately)

Specifications
	Tri-band international phone‡
	4-way scroll for easy navigation
	Internal antenna and vibrating alert
	Weight: 3.24 ounces
	4.13 inches long x 1.73 inches wide x 0.75 inch thick

Service
	GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz

7250i Battery Life
	Extended Li-Ion Battery 780 mAh
		-- Digital Talk Time up to 5 hours*
		-- Digital Standby Time up to 10 days*

Something you might find those internet entrepreneurs using perhaps?

For further and fuller details please go to the Nokia 7250i web page.