pit-senegal.com

Are these really leaked pics of a redesigned MacBook, widely expected later this year? Probably not, as Apple has always done an excellent job of keeping its new designs under wraps. But the Interwebs are abuzz with this series of shots that generally fit in with the conventional wisdom–that the MacBook line is getting an aluminum makeover, to look more like the high-end MacBook Pro.

Mac accessories store AppleOwner.com and a Taiwanese site called apple.pro are both showing off the allegedly leaked shots, which don’t offer much in the way of detail, besides an aluminum chassis with the MacBook name stamped into it. Check out the pics for yourself after the break and let us know if you think they’re legit or fake.

(Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com)

I’m trying to find something in the above that begs for a desktop-based offering (a la Pointcast), but I’m not seeing it. I already have much the same thing in Arsenal TV. Even the vanilla Internet provides everything that is mentioned above. (Try NewsNow.)The only thing Manchester United will be doing with this service is limiting its reach to Windows users.

The application gives more flexibility in delivering the service than a web-based tool because the content is pushed out by us. It is discreet and compelling because it uses rich media, is simple and easy to control.

Manchester United (the other English Premiership team, second only to Arsenal) is rolling out a new desktop service that will provide “video, match results and Old Trafford news in real time.” The club’s reasons for going with a desktop software model is interesting, if misguided:

commentary

But then, I already knew Manchester United fans have no class.

The question for the market is whether anyone can “out-Microsoft Microsoft” in the collaboration space. I believe we can. My own company, Alfresco, does so, but there are a range of other competitors (Jive, Liferay, MindTouch, Drupal, etc.) that go after the same general problem of connecting people around productivity tasks.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Alfresco, an open-source collaborative content vendor, and am an advisor to MindTouch.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft does lower the bar to computing. Its products can be shoddy (SharePoint is no winner in that department - just try scaling it) but that’s a trade-off many are willing to make in order to have something, anything that works reasonably well at a reasonable price.

Microsoft’s SharePoint has now topped $1 billion in licenses and is perhaps the fastest-growing product in Microsoft’s history. What is driving that growth? The same thing that has driven all of Microsoft’s most successful products: Microsoft removes complexity (and cost) from existing markets, as Craig Roth notes:

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products. The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.

commentary

This, I believe, is enterprise software’s most interesting market going forward. It will be a chance to compete with Microsoft at the top of its game, on a business problem that will persist and be exacerbated by a recession.

Strength in its wireless operations helped propel AT&T to healthy earnings growth for the first quarter.

On Friday, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailed AT&T’s plan to lay off about 1.5 percent of its workforce, with an ensuing pretax charge of $374 million for the first quarter.

In its statement Tuesday morning, AT&T did not offer any updates on its sales of Apple’s
iPhone, for which it is the exclusive carrier in the U.S. The company also declined to give hard data in its conference call with analysts. “The iPhone again continues to be very popular with customers, and customer feedback on the device is very good,” CFO Rick Lindner said, according to a Barron’s report. “Through the first quarter, it was pretty stable” in terms of sales, Lindner said.

The company’s wireline operations, by contrast, decline 2 percent in both earnings (to $2.8 billion) and revenue ($17.6 billion).

At midday Tuesday, AT&T’s shares were up less than 1 percent to $37.91.

For the period that ended March 31, the telecommunications giant reported net income of $3.5 billion, or 57 cents per share, on revenue of $30.7 billion. Net income was up 22 percent from the year-ago quarter, while revenue rose 6 percent.

Income for AT&T’s wireless segment nearly doubled, leaping 95 percent from a year earlier to $2.9 billion. Revenue for the wireless business was $11.8 billion, up 18 percent. The company also reported gains in broadband and Internet Protocol-based services.

RedLasso records TV shows and then indexes clips so users can find, pull, and embed them on other Web sites. Reporter Liz Gannes over at Newteevee.com saw this one coming. Two weeks ago, Gannes noted that RedLasso had grown from 2 million unique users in November to 24 million in April.

I was in Los Angeles for the Digital Hollywood conference earlier this month and there was plenty of discussion about the influx of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs moving in to make deals with the studios. The big entertainment companies were more open to cutting deals than ever, insiders told me.

Disclosure: CBS has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Fox News Network, NBC Universal, and CBS sent a letter on Monday, accusing the company of “building a business based on the unauthorized syndication of” the content owners’ news, sports, and entertainment shows.

Executives from King of Prussia, Pa.-based RedLasso were unavailable for comment.

Three of the largest broadcast TV networks have sent a cease-and-desist letter to RedLasso , a little-known but rapidly growing video syndication site.

She added later that RedLasso executives told her they were on good terms with broadcasters. The executives’ assertions, however, are untrue, the networks said in their letter to RedLasso. In the letter, the entertainment companies wrote that such statements “falsely convey an affiliation…when there is none.”

At a time when the networks are giving their content away for free, one has to wonder why RedLasso would even get into this business. Anyone can go to Hulu and grab embed code for many NBC Universal shows without violating the law.

They also said that partnerships awaited those that could help the entertainment industry solve problems of advertising, marketing, and syndication on the Internet.

(Credit:
Redlasso.com)

Gannes wrote: “Now might be a pretty good time to get permission.”

commentary

It was he who set up Adebayor’s header into the net, and it was he who drilled an absolute screamer into the net from 25 yards. Flamini, who I reviled and despised last season, has become Arsenal’s secret weapon.

This puts Arsenal top of the Premiership, though Manchester United can reclaim the top spot tomorrow when it plays Portsmouth at Old Trafford tomorrow. If only Chelsea and ManU can lose tomorrow, I shall be a very happy man.

Blessed technology.

It was bound to happen. No, not another Adebayor goal. At his rate, that’s bound to happen almost regardless of whether he steps onto the pitch. No, this time it was Fabregas who surprised by returning to the score line for the first time since November. I haven’t been able to watch the game yet but listened to the last 20 minutes while driving down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley, my trustee broadband card working overtime to keep streaming Arsenal TV for me.

Despite Fabregas’ return as a scorer, the match really belonged to Flamini.

Adebayor heads it home

Intel posted price cuts on Sunday that included reductions of 50 percent on select quad-core processors. The chipmaker also introduced new Celeron and Core 2 Duo processor models.

Intel Core 2 Quad processor

Celeron price-cut highlights include the Celeron 430 (1.8GHz), reduced 23 percent from $44 to $34 and the dual-core Celeron E1200 (1.6GHz), falling 19 percent from $53 to $43.

The dual-core Xeon 3085 (3GHz) was reduced 29 percent from $266 to $188, and the Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz), from $266 to $183, or 31 percent.

New Core 2 Duo chips were also introduced. The E8300 (6MB cache, 2.83GHz) and the E7200 (3MB cache, 2.53GHz) at $163 and and $133, respectively.

The chipmaker introduced the dual-core Celeron E1400 (2GHz) at a price of $53 and Celeron 570 (2.66GHz) at $134.

(Credit:
Intel)

Pentium dual-core chips saw price drops too: The E2200 (2.2GHz) and E2180 (2GHz) were cut 12 percent and 14 percent to $74 and $64, respectively.

The price of the Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz) fell 50 percent from $530 to $266, while the quad-core Xeon X3230 (2.66GHz) saw an identical cut: from $530 to $266.

Update 2:55 p.m. Pacific: A spokesperson for GMZ Energy confirmed Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested in the company in April 2007.

Clary said that the company’s first product is a material that can withstand temperatures of about 400 degrees Fahrenheit used in a range of industrial products.

The thermoelectric effect has been understood for a long time, but the researchers were able to use nanotechnology to make the process of generating electricity from heat far more efficient.

Researchers at Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of technology have found a way to more efficiently convert electricity from heat, a breakthrough they claim could make a wide range of products more energy-efficient.

A company has been formed to commercialize the thermoelectric research that CNET News.com wrote about on Thursday.

The technology researchers included Boston College physicist Zhifeng Ren, MIT professor of mechanical engineering Gang Chen, and famed nanotechnology MIT researcher Mildred Dresselhaus.

Cars that are partly powered from the heat of their exhaust systems are a good application of the technology, but the company intends to first target utility-scale power plants, which give off a great deal of waste heat, Clary told VentureBeat.

The CEO of GMZ Energy, Mike Clary, told VentureBeat that the company has received seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and described the Newton, Mass.-based start-up’s plans.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

There’s no excuse for Sony deciding to not drop the price of the Playstation 3. Although Sony zealots will claim it doesn’t, price matters to the average person who wants to play a couple games every now and then. And if Sony’s product is a whopping $100 more than its competitors, why would anyone choose that over competing products?

And although he may never admit, I think Kaz Hirai knows that his claim that Sony provides the best bang for your buck is ludicrous. His comments strike me as nothing more than marketing-speak that try to justify a strategy because no other alternatives are possible. In this case, Sony simply won’t drop the price of the Playstation 3 for fear of lost revenue or something we don’t know about.

Uh huh. Keep dreaming, Sony.

Hirai is obviously referring to the Playstation 3’s Blu-ray player in his case for “value proposition,” but I think he unfairly ties the price of the
PS3 to that single component.

Do I get enough out of my Playstation 3 to justify spending that much cash on it? And more importantly, is it worth the additional $100-$150 it’ll cost to have a PS3 instead of an
Xbox 360.

Recently, Nielsen VideoScan released figures that must have made Sony worry (to say the least). According to its figures from a couple weeks ago, DVD commanded 92 percent of the market and Blu-ray trailed far behind with a measly 8 percent market share. That isn’t the kind of performance that will sell too many units.

Yeah, I know, I know: Blu-ray.

As I’ve pointed out on these pages before, companies need to differentiate on product or on price if they want to be successful. Sony is differentiating on product, but it’s abundantly clear that it’s just not working. And considering it’s unwilling to differentiate on price, how can it honestly say that it will be the victor this holiday season?

Sorry, Sony, but I just don’t think it is.

Realizing that, how can Sony expect to compete on Blu-ray alone? Sure, it’s trying to get into the online market and its third-party library is getting better, but with a general lack of exclusives, even that’s pushing it.

“The answer is yes, if you’re asking, ‘Are these the prices we’re going with this Christmas?’” Hirai told the Financial Times. “When you really compare apples to apples, then I think we have a very good value proposition.”

Sure, the Blu-ray player is arguably one of the most expensive parts in the Playstation 3 and you can’t argue that it adds value, but the real consideration isn’t “value proposition.” Instead, Hirai needs to realize that most consumers are deciding on their next console purchase based off a cost-benefit analysis.

Meanwhile, as economic tumult rocks the world, consumers will flock to stores in just a few weeks and look for game consoles for themselves or loved ones. And as they feel the strain on their wallets, they’ll need to consider that before they make a decision. Once they compare the prices of each console, doesn’t it stand to reason that the Playstation 3 will sink to the bottom of their lists once they see how much more expensive it is than its competitors?

Worse, Blu-ray suffers from a slew of issues, including expensive media, no mobility, and a population of people that either don’t know or don’t care about it.

Now that the Xbox 360 can be purchased for as little as $199 and the
Wii is still selling out at the affordable price of $249, Sony needs to do something to take the lead in at least one category. It thinks that it’s leading in its third-party library, but it’s tied (at best) with Microsoft in that category and it’s losing miserably in innovative gameplay and online gaming. The only thing Sony has going for it is the Playstation 3’s Blu-ray player. And even that may not be the kind of an advantage Sony thinks it is.

Sony’s Gaming chief, Kaz Hirai told the Financial Times recently that his company has no plans to drop the Playstation 3’s price leading up to the holidays because he believes the company’s console provides the greatest value proposition out of any device on the market.

To be fair, it’s just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

commentary

In both cases, it’s still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source…but paying money to Microsoft.

I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld’s website:

www.LinuxWorldExpo.com:
Microsoft JScript runtime error ‘800a138f’
‘brandGlobalXML.selectSingleNode(…)’ is null or not an object
/live/template1.asp, line 42