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Also, programmers don’t need to know which underlying mechanism provides the service. “Because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop and
mobile browsers, you can even use the same code on both platforms,” Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google mobile team, said in the Google Code Blog post Tuesday.

“Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time, and the user can either allow or deny your site permission,” Wiles said.

Google has updated its open-source Gears project so Web sites can take advantage of location services in Gears-enabled Web browsers.

“The premise is similar to what we do with cell tower information: information transmitted by nearby Wi-Fi access points is used to pinpoint your location,” said Adel Youssef and Arunesh Mishra, programmers for Google mobile. “Since the range of a Wi-Fi access point is smaller than that of a cell phone tower, this often results in a much more accurate position.”

Update 12:33 p.m. PDT: The Wi-Fi location feature also is now built into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps for Mobile, according to Google’s Mobile blog.

That means that a Web site that might benefit from showing a person’s location–most anything mapping-related, for example–can be personalized better, as long as there are wireless network signals around. Google uses Gears to try to advance the Web application state of the art, but only a small fraction of users have it installed.

Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user’s location. That service is being built into Firefox 3.1, too, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS or presumably Gears, to retrieve location information.

The underlying technology, which used signals from cell phone towers, was initially developed so mobile-phone users could get a rough fix on their location, even without GPS technology. Now, though, Gears has been augmented with location smarts based on signals from Wi-Fi networks so that people with laptops also can figure out their location to within about 200 meters in many major cities.

Sharing one’s location information with Web sites, of course, raises privacy concerns, but as with Mozilla’s Firefox extension, those sites must obtain explicit information.

Gears is an extension that augments the ability of
Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple
Safari. But it’s not the only way to get geographic information into a browser.

DoubleClick In-Stream is integrated with Google’s DART technology for letting publishers serve ads over the Internet as well as target ads at specific categories of users, track ad campaign success, and create ad forecasts.

Microsoft is betting on the Olympics to help spur adoption of Silverlight, a browser plug-in technology that competes with Adobe Systems’ Flash for bringing multimedia, animation, and other rich content to the Web. Distributing the Olympics online coverage, both prepackaged and live, is a technologically complicated task given how popular the sporting event is among viewers.

Google’s DoubleClick technology now can be used to deliver video advertising shown with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, and it will be used for that purpose with the Olympics video that NBC Universal plans to show online using a player based on Silverlight 2.

Google announced the Silverlight ad capability, called DoubleClick In-Stream, on Tuesday. It already could be used to deliver video ads using Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media technology. In-Stream also can show static ads within video, which Microsoft and NBC concluded was the best approach for live video.

(Credit:
Susan Dove/CNET News)

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

NBC Universal, already a DoubleClick customer, was bullish about the Sliverlight support. “Thanks to DoubleClick, In-Stream’s new support for Silverlight 2, we are able to monetize our groundbreaking online-video coverage on the same platform we already use for display and mobile advertising. This lets our sales and operations teams work together really efficiently,” Steven Gold, vice president of sales planning and operations at NBC Universal Digital Media, said in a statement.

Google on Thursday announced Android Market, an online center that will let people find, buy, download, and rate applications and other content for mobile phones equipped with the open-source operating system.

These screen shots show the Android phone interface to the Android Market. The software shows what applications can be downloaded and reviews of applications that people are browsing.

Attracting developer attention is a key part of the Google-led Android software effort, and those who produce applications will have an easy time getting them to the market, Eric Chu of Google’s Android project said in a Thursday blog post.

The move was expected. Google said in May at the Google I/O conference that it would provide a central repository of Android software.

“Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it,” Chu said. “We chose the term ‘market’ rather than ’store’ because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available.”

(Credit:
Google)

Though the first Android phones are planned to arrive later this year, Chu said to expect the initial phone-based Android Market application to be a beta version that might only support distribution of free applications. An update later will handle different versions of applications, support for different profiles of Android phones, and analytics to help developers track adoption.

For those who mistakenly feel that open source is a stick-in-the-eye to “The (IP) Man,” you’re wrong. Open-source licensing depends upon and indeed presupposes copyright and trademark law. Without copyright there is no copyleft.

Clint Boulton, whose blog I enjoy and read daily, suggests:

Some are apparently up in arms that Google is refusing to allow Chrome developers to use its trademarks and the comic book it released to help explain Chrome. To these and others that equate open source with “up for grabs,” please pay attention:

To which I’d reply, “I would be very careful if I were Google to be as stringent as required by law to ensure I didn’t lose the rights to my trademarks.” Google needs to protect its trademarks or it risks losing them.

Surely it’s not too much to ask people to respect Google’s IP so that it can release more of it as open source?

Open source is governed by US intellectual property law. It is not above the law.

I would be very careful if I were Google not to be too stringent with the trademark. If people are trying to pass themselves off as Google property that’s one thing, but let’s not send letters to every person using a Chrome logo.

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The Commodore UMMD 8010/F, announced at the IFA consumer show in Berlin, will sport a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and will have an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and optional Bluetooth. The machine will have 10-inch display and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Prices are expected to start at $610.

Updated at 5:54 p.m. PDT to clarify that the “Commodore” in the Commodore UMMD 8010/F is most likely only an homage to the company of yore.

The Netbook joins the fast-growing new category of small, cheap laptops exemplifed by Asus’ Eee PC.

If you have any insights on the new Commodore devices and the company behind the name today, let us know in the comments section below the story.

No doubt some consumers will be drawn to the Commodore UMMD 8010/F for its nostalgic appeal. The Commodore name is indelibly linked to iconic computers of the ’80s such as the C64 and the Amiga. But times change, and old companies often fade away–several years back, Dutch company Yeahronimo Media Ventures bought the rights to the Commodore name, with the express goal of selling gadgets and trading on “not only the brand name but also the heritage of Commodore.”

(Credit: Liliputing)

Gadget watchers on the tubes are atwitter with news that the Commodore name is having a decidedly 2008 moment in connection with the nascent but red-hot Netbook market.

And before you go shopping for any Netbook, you might want to take a look at CNET editor Dan Ackerman’s tips for finding the perfect Netbook.

With low-power processors, and tiny screens and keyboards, most Netbooks available today aren’t good for much more than surfing the Web, checking e-mail, working on office documents, and maybe a little minor multimedia fun–though those tasks do comprise a bulk of what most people do on their laptops.

Fossett was a successful businessman and world-class thrill seeker. He was the first balloonist to fly solo nonstop around the world and set 116 records in five different sports.

“The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched investigators to California to investigate the crash of a small plane that was found (Wednesday),” the NTSB said Thursday in a statement.

Fossett, who was flying a Bellanca 8KCAB, has been missing since September 3, 2007. He took off from Yerington, Nev., for a local flight. Investigators say they found wreckage at about a 10,000-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada in the vicinity of Mammoth Lakes, Calif.

In November, Fossett’s wife filed a petition to have the court declare him legally dead. Her request was granted in February.

Steve Fossett, who has been missing since September 2007, was declared legally dead in February, despite the lack of a body.

There has been no word yet on whether a body was discovered. There were reports earlier this week that a hiker found some of Fossett’s belongings.

(Credit:
Virgin Atlantic)

Authorities may have found the wreckage of the plane that adventurer Steve Fossett was flying when he went missing last year.

More amusingly, Hougton Mifflin recently had the audacity to release Philip Roth’s “Indignation” as an $25.99 iPhone app via ScrollMotion (it makes the Iceberg Reader). I love Philip Roth and all, but I wouldn’t pay more than $2.99 to read his book on the iPhone, if that.

And let me tell you: free sells. I know a little something about this because I have a book that’s a free iPhone app. The book has been averaging about 700 downloads a week–and it was averaging more than that, when it first came out. By contrast, the Kindle version of the book, which sells for $3.98, is averaging about four sales a day (that currently gets you a ranking of 5,000 to 8,000 out of 230,000 books in Amazon’s Kindle Store).

I’m not sure why, but some analysts seemed a little surprised about Amazon.com’s announcement on Wednesday that it would begin offering Amazon e-books on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and move beyond the confines of the Kindle.

First of all, the company had effectively confirmed off-Kindle reading access in February, so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Second, anybody who knows anything knows that it’s all about the razor blades (the e-books) and not the razor (the Kindle).

The bestsellers list in Apple's App Store.

Of course, the Kindle app isn’t the first way to read e-books on the iPhone–there are already dozens of paid and free reader applications (and books-as-apps) available on the App Store. And taking a look at the list of top paid (nonfree) book or reader apps will give you an idea of how pricing works.

But there’s just one problem. While Amazon might be able to find a market for $9.99 books on the Kindle, the
iPhone-iPod Touch world is a very different place. Very few people are willing to pay that kind of money for any sort of application, let alone an e-book.

So, yes, selling e-books to iPhone users–and a broader audience, in general–is a good move for Amazon that will bring some nice incremental revenue. But the ultimate moral of the story is that e-books have to be cheaper and that pricing for different platforms will have to vary.

To be sure, with all the publicity surrounding the launch of Amazon’s Kindle app for the iPhone, Amazon will get a quick boost in sales of e-books to iPhone owners. And for those who own a Kindle or Kindle 2, the idea of being able to read books from your e-book library on both your Kindle and iPhone or
iPod Touch is appealing (with Whispersync, you can shift your e-books from one device to another, and even keep your reading place). But in the long run, Amazon clearly faces some pricing challenges, and I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of books that will ultimately get downloaded to the iPhone will cost less than $2.

Books in the “Twilight” series, and one app called “50 Great Books for 10 Bucks,” are the only ones in the top 20 that have a $9.99 price tag. Arguably, the perfect book for Apple’s smartphone, “iPhone: The Missing Manual” (written by The New York Times’ David Pogue), sells for $4.99. But it took a big hit in sales when the publisher tested a $9.99 price point.

Paying $10 for an e-book bestseller on any platform is just too much, especially when the paperback versions of the book will end up costing less. Unfortunately, at the present time, Amazon can’t do anything about that because it’s barely breaking even on bestsellers (and might even be taking a loss on certain titles) because the publishers’ list price on e-books is so high that the $10 is as low Amazon can go. (It’s a different story with backlist titles, which can net Amazon a profit of a buck or two). In time, of course, as the Kindle platform becomes more popular, Amazon will be able to put the screws into publishers and bring the list prices down so it makes a profit. The fact is bestsellers on the Kindle should cost $7, while bestsellers on the iPhone should cost no more than $4.99–and probably less. Of course, it will take publishers a while to figure they can sell a lot more books at those prices, and to stop wasting everybody’s time by putting out books on the iPhone for $25.99.

But while we’re doing the math, here’s what makes the razor model so attractive for Amazon. I get 35 percent of the $4.98 list price of the book–and Amazon gets the rest. In four days, my book has generated about $35 in revenue for Amazon. If the book were to continue selling at the same rate, it could end up putting close to $200 into the bank for Amazon this month. And I’m just a fledgling fiction writer–imagine what a known author selling hundreds or thousands of e-books would do for the company. (Interestingly, Apple’s terms are much more generous: sell an e-book–or any other app–on the App Store, and you keep 70 percent of the price, while Apple takes just 30 percent. Also: Sony goes 50-50 with authors in its eBook Store.)

(Credit:
Apple)

If you haven’t noticed yet, as part of the move to Kindle 2, Amazon added tons of free public-domain titles to its Kindle Store. If you’re into classics and esoteric titles from the 19th century, there’s lots of free reading to do.

By contrast, the margins on e-books should remain pretty beefy, and you can imagine all the cost savings involved when you don’t have to deal with warehousing and shipping physical books. It’s a great business model.

Like the game console world, the real profits aren’t in the hardware but rather the software. Yes, the Kindle 2’s hot now, but to reach a larger audience, Amazon will eventually have to reduce the price for the reader and shrink its margins.

As always, feel free to comment. And here’s a question for iPhone or iPod Touch owners who don’t have a Kindle: How much would you pay for an e-book to read on those devices?

In the Apple application world, the sweet spot for selling anything seems to be less than $4.99–and more like $.99 or $1.99. Sure, you’re going to get some bestselling series with almost cult-like followings (read: “Harry Potter” and “Twilight”), but the vast majority of books being “sold” on the iPhone are very cheap–and rightly so because the overall iPhone-reading experience doesn’t justify you spending $10 (or even $5) on an e-book. (See Nicole Lee’s in-depth piece on comparing the Kindle 2 reading experience to that of the iPhone’s).

3. Brocade now has two doors into the data center. It can leverage storage customers for networking introductions or vice versa.

I often joked in the past that Fibre Channel switching leader Brocade Communications Systems followed an “old woman who swallowed a fly” acquisition strategy. To bolster its market position, Brocade grabbed Fibre Channel director vendor McData which purchased CNT which purchased Inrange. What was once a market with over a half dozen vendors is now centered on two: Brocade and Cisco Systems.

Of course, Cisco is no pushover, and other networking firms like Extreme, HP, and Juniper Networks have pretty good Ethernet switches of their own. Nevertheless, you have to admire Brocade’s chutzpah on this one. It has a chance to unify storage and communication networks and fight a much bigger fight beyond the storage back-end alone.

Even in this enviable position, Brocade faced two dilemmas: One, Fibre Channel itself will be challenged by 10, 40, and 100GbE moving forward. Ethernet, as you know, is the domain of Cisco, Extreme Networks, and Hewlett-Packard but not Brocade. Two, in spite of its success, Brocade really depends upon storage vendors like EMC, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to pull them into deals. The storage device vendors then own the customer.

2. The Foundry sales force lets Brocade target the customer directly. Cisco is already doing this with hybrid Fibre Channel/Ethernet switches. Brocade will certainly follow.

1. It can be transport independent. Brocade could now care less whether users buy Fibre Channel or Ethernet switches–heck, it will gladly sell them both.

So how can Brocade fight these trends? Through acquisition. When the market closed on Monday, Brocade announced it will acquire Foundry Networks in a $3 billion-plus deal. This may help Brocade because:

Given that times are now a-changing and we are all a-working together to blunt the parts of capitalism that the finest algorithms failed to anticipate, might some readers hope that by paying for news they might just get a product of slightly better quality?

Of course it’s true that, in times gone by, these same news organizations had little clue how the Web would develop. They believed in unlimited free sampling of their product online, in the interesting belief this wouldn’t devalue the one thing they had to offer.

I had to confess I knew many who clicked on those little Google thingies, but not many who clicked on display ads. And even fewer who would admit to it.

But it used to be free to park on many Main Streets in America. Then they put in parking meters and, though we might show McCainish grouchiness on occasion, we pay. Could it still be the same with online news?

That’ll be $49.99. Thank you.

Might this also allow the news organizations to reverse their tendency (their need, they might say) to pepper their pages with so much display advertising that their online content sometimes looks like a teenage acne-ridden cheek?

A very wise (and, strangely, important) person in the news industry said to me the other day: “Do you know ANYONE who has ever clicked on an online ad?”

So imagine if all the (supposedly) reputable news organizations got together one night, in a dark room owned by Rupert Murdoch and decided that they would all start charging for their online content. Not just one or two of them. All of them.

No more linking by the Drudge Report without a fee. No more getting up in the morning to read the election latest online before you put on your lucky underwear, without, at the very least, a subscription.

Where, in fact, does the thing we call “news” come from anyway? Don’t we imagine that somewhere out there are paid journalists of some repute, battling past press releases, spin surgeons, and proprietorial prejudice in order to sniff out something akin to truths and bring them to their readers?

(Credit: CC Sillygwailo)

What if the proprietors suddenly grasped the times they were living in, clutched the concept of truth like a man rolling off a cliff grabs at a dried-up branch, and shared a little of their business model with their readers?

What if they then promised their readers that for, say, a $25 subscription (yes, not much more than 6 coffees or a pack of 24 condoms) they would guarantee a 25 percent expansion in online news coverage?

If, at noon tomorrow, all news organizations announced they would immediately start charging for their hard-earned and, presumably, valuable online product (I’m imagining Rupert Murdoch and The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger making a joint statement, their arms linked in solidarity, each reading every second word of their pronouncement), would people refuse to pay?

Some organizations did try charging (a few, like The Wall Street Journal, still do) and then backed away like Alaskan moose when faced with an armed news crew.

This led us to consider how news organizations might make more (some) money in the future, given that untold riches are not exactly flowing yet from online display advertising.

Isn’t there just the smallest, tiniest chance that readers might buy into this new commercial relationship? If the financial folks can all get together to save themselves, er, I mean, to readjust their business principles, isn’t this a good time for online news organizations to do it too?

Yes, there would still be competition from new free sites, financed solely by advertising. But these would have to be new brands. Would people trust them? Remember, I am talking about every single news organization coming together and sticking to a joint principle. (Yes, I know, I know. Please dream with me, won’t you?)

The balloon, which was launched on December 28, 2008, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, is 7 million cubic feet and is said to be the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully sealed balloon ever flown. When the project–which NASA is conducting in coordination with the National Science Foundation–is completed, the space agency should have a 22 million cubic foot balloon to work with.

(Credit:
NASA)

NASA said Thursday that it has tested a balloon that ultimately will be able to carry one ton of research equipment to more than 100,000 feet.

“The flight tested the durability and functionality of the scientific balloon’s unique pumpkin-shaped design and novel material,” NASA said in a statement. “The material is a special lightweight polyethylene film, about the thickness of ordinary plastic food wrap.”

The test flight made it to an altitude of 111,000 feet and has been at or near that height for 11 days so far.

NASA said that long-duration high-altitude balloon missions are far more cost-effective than satellites and that a chief benefit is that the instruments used can be easily retrieved and re-used.

NASA said Thursday it has performed a test of a prototype super pressure balloon that could carry as much as a ton of research equipment to heights of 110,000 feet or more for up to 100 days.