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A number of news nuggets related to the marching order in the perpetual parade of progress: * Motorola Droid owners will start seeing the Android 2.1 update showing up on their phones this week. The new version brings most of the goodies seen first on Google’s own Nexus One (notably...

We’re all familiar with the Google mission statement, spelled out at its creation (”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”), but since then, we’ve come to recognize the search sovereign’s unspoken mission statement for...

“This tweet sent from an iPad. Does it look cool?” — A Twitter post from WSJ online executive editor Alan Murray sent last week during a very private show-and-don’t-tell briefing from Steve Jobs and quickly deleted, reportedly at the insistence of the livid Apple CEO. ...

Opacity photographically explores abandoned buildings (thanks, Pat) and Internet Archaeology preserves abandoned Web graphics. Also, the customer reviews are mixed but generally favorable in response to an Amazon listing for This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You. ...

We know from science fiction that some kind of universal translator gadget will be as essential a part of our future as it is now to screenwriters (if the folks on the Enterprise had to start each episode without any idea of what the aliens were saying, it would be slow going indeed). The most [...]

For an advertising giant, Google advertises itself very little, a luxury that comes with being the overwhelming leader in your core markets. So it took a lot of people by surprise to see a rare Google ad on TV Sunday and in the most expensive slot a company can buy — during the Super Bowl....

“We in Sacramento are not under the delusion that we have a monopoly on good ideas. We would like to channel the energy and enthusiasm of your readers to help us strengthen how we build and deploy IT in the State of California. … Let’s ‘walk the talk’ and use a...

Some visual information today: The State of the Internet and a batch of impressive infographics; and a pair of new Google Earth goodies — the addition of aerial images taken over European cities during World War II for then-and-now comparison, and the Ocean Showcase, featuring narrated...

Beware not only the cloud hype, but also overreaching by cloud vendors that may cause crashes over the coming year.

A Fortune 100 financial services company is the first customer for Digital Realty Trust's POD Architecture Services, the company's new service to design and build data centers for enterprise clients.

VMware (VMW) is going on the road to showcase its virtualization technology. And it's bringing all its equipment with it in a rolling mobile data center packed with gear from Cisco Systems, NetApp, Dell Xsigo and parent EMC Corp.

Answers Corporation (ANSW) has signed a multi-year agreement for colocation services for its Answers.com web site with C7 Data Centers, Inc., a data center and managed services provider based in Lindon, Utah.

Business service management (BSM) is a requirement for businesses taking to the cloud, but the offerings from management providers are at differing stages of maturity.

Carbon emissions trading schemes are not specifically aimed at data centers, they will impact how data centers operate and the amount of energy used. As a result, data centers will need to implement mechanisms for monitoring, managing and reporting carbon emissions.

Roundup: Computerworld provides an update on the skills crisis facing the data center industry, Juniper Networks (JNPR) updates its core routers, and Verisign (VRSN) discusses its data center consolidation.

Data from Akamai shows an enormous spike in Internet traffic late in the fourth quarter of Sunday's Super Bowl, and Go Daddy says the burst of traffic was tied to its ad spot during the two-minute warning.

Shares of Internap Network Services (INAP) are higher this morning, apparently due to growing interest in the company's shares in investment funds.

CloudSwitch, a startup developing a software appliance to simplify the deployment of cloud computing applications, is starting to share more information about its offerng as it prepares for a public beta. Here's a video overview.

When Google makes changes to its network, it gains attention. In recent days Google has reportedly cranked up usage of IPv6 for YouTube, and begun routing large volumes of traffic through a "mystery domain."

Facebook has taken its promising Lexicon tool down from the site. Perhaps this happened when they pushed their new redesign. Lexicon, like Google Trends, provided limited yet interesting data on site-wide trends. You can read more about it here. From the

Last week Edelman, my employer, published our tenth annual Trust Barometer study. You can read the full report here. One of the more juicy statistics that Advertising Age and others noted is that trust in peers surprisingly dropped dramatically from 47% to 27%. Tom Foremski says this is bad for PR: "This is bad news for PR agencies because social media has been the ‘point of the spear’ for so many firms. This is what brings in new business." While he's

Michael Arrington laments about about the decentralized nature of social content on TechCrunch today... "The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way. You might be sick of hearing this from me, but strongly believe that Facebook is the next Google. It took me a while to "get religion," but now I have it. Just as Google brought a simpl

In a big victory for a new kind of memory chip and the little startup making it, Micron Technology announced today it is buying Numonyx in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.27 billion. Boise, Idaho,-based Micron is the largest U.S. maker of main memory chips used in PCs and other electronics. Numonyx, meanwhile, is a decade-old startup that has been working on a universal memory chip — which combines the best features of multiple types of memory chips. Micron plans to issue 140 million shares to Numonyx shareholders. The deal is a big win for Numonyx investors Francisco Partners, Intel, and ST Microelectronics. Micron will issue up to 10 million more shares to Numonyx shareholders, depending on Micron’s average share price fo

Real Networks is spinning off digital music service Rhapsody by the end of the quarter. While it will still own a significant stake in the new, independent entity, it won’t have more power than the other major interest Viacom. (They didn’t specify their exact share except to say that it was below 50 percent.) The move is intended to lighten the load on Real Networks while simultaneously freeing up room for more investors in Rhapsody. Even Rhapsody can raise more money, the music service’s prospects appear dim. It actually lost about 300,000 subscribers over the course of 2009. Plus Apple’s iTunes and companies like Europe’s Spotify may soon be competing against it in the U.S. with a subscriber model.

Fisker Automotive, maker of the luxury hybrid Karma, says it will probably receive its $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy by the middle of March, according to Dow Jones VentureWire. This follows the company’s announcement that it will shutter its research and development center in Michigan (PDF) — bad news for a state that needs all of the automotive dollars it can cling to. Even though the DOE gave the loan guarantee to Fisker back in September, the company had a hard time scraping together enough private investment to actually receive the money. Finally, in January it announced a $115.3 million round of equity (PDF) from A123Systems, Ace Investments and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The equity

Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has just opened a massively-multiplayer, browser-based game called Glitch to alpha testers, giving the world a taste of what Glitch might look like. There are essentially two schools of multiplayer gaming right now. Massively-multiplayer games, most notably World of Warcraft, have been popular for a long time. They typically have huge worlds, tons of players, and a never-ending number of things you can do and explore. On the other side of the coin are the social games like Farmville and Petville, which are so popular on Facebook and the like. They’re typically simple, run in the browser, and aren’t particularly in-depth. Glitch appears to be somewhere in the middle.

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room. But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine. Would

For some types of searches, Google totally sucks. Are you looking for a senior editor at Wired to pitch? Until recently, Google’s built-in directory returned me as a top result, seven years after I’d lost the job. If you’re a salesperson, marketer, recruiter, or competitor researching company executives, Google is full of non-leads, and its website results are often out of date. That’s because one in four Americans changes jobs each year, according to the international Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Lead411, founded in Santa Barbara in 2001 by entrepreneur Tom Blue, offers a curated directory of personal contacts and profiles that’s much more focused and efficient for salespeople, recruiters, a

The first big hit in gesture control technology was the mouse. If you’re too young to have any pre-digital memories, this might seem like an odd claim. My three-year-old is no more mystified by mice and touchpads than she is by building blocks. Once upon a time, though, we needed lessons in how the motion of a peripheral device rolling around on the table related to the motion of something on the screen called the “pointer.” We caught on quickly, of course. But it was alien territory for a while. I bring this up because in some circles these days, gestural control of digital devices is being spoken of as the next big thing. At the same time, others have wondered about the feasibility of the concept. Will I accidentally erase my Word do

Google tapped its sleeping giant of a social network today with Buzz. The new product lets people follow Gmail contacts for status updates and shared articles, photos and videos. While Google has fumbled on many of its other social efforts, Buzz holds more promise than earlier products like Orkut or Latitude. According to ComScore, Gmail had about 176 million unique visitors in December so there’s a very low cost of new user acquisition. But there’s also another advantage — Gmail is intimate, while Facebook is semi-private and Twitter is public. E-mail takes more thought and effort and Gmail’s interface encourages constant interaction with a small number of people. It’s about depth over breadth. T

Toyota’s having a bad week. It is already recalling millions of cars to fix floor mats and gas pedals that have led to unintentional acceleration — a snafu costing the company more than $2 billion. Now it has announced that it will recall about 150,000 of its hybrid vehicles due to problems in the software controlling the anti-lock brake systems in its 2010 Prius and 2010 Lexus HS 250h models. The majority of the recalled cars, 133,000 to be exact, are Priuses. Will this knock Toyota off its green automotive throne? A lot of rivals are looking for the hybrid-maker to mess up. The Prius made Toyota the green brand — the name everyone thinks of when they hear the word “hybrid” (and the Lexus line brought

Mayfield Fund has partnered with First Round Capital to host a networking event with the theme Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs.   The two firms have assembled a dream team of founders including Jay Adelson/Digg, Caterina Fake/Flickr, Aaron Patzer/Mint, Gina Bianchini/Ning, Max Levchin/Slide and Mark Pincus/Zynga who have donated mentoring sessions, which will be raffled off at the event. To participate in the raffle, entrepreneurs need to go to www.mayfield.com/raffle and fill out a short online application.  Raj Kapoor and Emily Melton of Mayfield and Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes of First Round will select 100 of the most promising applicants to attend the private event on Monday, March 1, 2010.  At that event, six winners will be

Much of the talk surrounding Google Buzz, the search giant’s new social sharing tool, has focused on new capabilities it will bring to the web through its integration with Gmail. But the new mobile features are also an important part of the announcement, because they add a compelling location-based component to the service. Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said Google Buzz is being integrated into three of Google’s mobile websites and applications — Google.com, a new Buzz.google.com website, and the Google maps mobile application. If a user visits the main Google site from their smartphone, there will be a Buzz button, which allows you to make post updates to Buzz remotely. Using your phone’s GPS capabilitie

On this morning’s earnings call for Warner Music, CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr said that the company’s $1.29 tracks — a 30 percent price boost over Apple’s standard 99 cents — have been a “net positive” for the company. Yet as media pundit Peter Kafka observed, the entire music industry’s iTunes sales growth is slower than a year ago, when consumer confidence and willingness to spend were much lower: Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit growth” was at five percent in the December quarter, down sequentially from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent in the June quarter. And since iTunes sales make up the majority of Warner’s digital revenue, growth is contracti

Known for its international relief efforts, rock band U2 is now raising funds in Turkey to pay for the country’s Dora-1 geothermal plant. It is also selling carbon offset credits for $1.89 a pop. The credits will go toward purchasing clean power to neutralize the 127 kilograms of greenhouse gases each of the band’s fans, on average, generates to see the band play. Incidentally, the Dora-1 project could save as many as 30,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year. A modest facility by most standards, the geothermal plant is designed to generate 7.9 megawatts of power. In Turkey, however, this represents more than one-fifth of the national geothermal capacity. And the country itself contains one-eighth of the world’s geothe

Google Buzz, the social sharing tool that Google just announced at a press event in Mountain View, Calif., isn’t just for fun. The company said it’s going to be launching an enterprise version of Buzz as part of its Google Apps bundle of business applications. During the presentation, Google was pretty vague about Buzz in a business context, both in terms of how it might be used and when it will launch (“soon” is all the company would say). During the question-and-answer session, Google co-founder Sergey Brin offered one example: When he was writing his New York Times op-ed about the legal battles over Google Book Search, he found sharing with one person at a time to be “frustrating,” so he solicited feedback fro

Google announced a new product today called Google Buzz, bringing credence to previous rumors that social networking features would be added to Gmail. Buzz is a service for sharing and talking about content. In the same way that the company calls Gmail “a Google approach to email,” it’s calling Buzz “a Google approach to sharing.” Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, demonstrated the product on-stage at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. He highlighted five key features: Auto-following — Buzz is built into Gmail, so instead of forcing you to reform connections on new sites, it takes advantage of existing social connections and groups in Gmail.

Krugman: "...a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis." Coyote: "OK, sign me up." Me too.

Sign of the times – check the full story for more details and Woolley’s user comment on iTunes U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a video about poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds. After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tou

Check the full post for more context-setting and results But do not take my word for it. Or rather, please do take my word for it exactly as it is being processed by those two technologies. After drafting this little blog entry I decided to put Google to the test. As a Google Voice user I already get access to their famous speech recognition, so I called my own Google Voice number and recorded this script. I then took the transcription that Google provided and fed it through the Google Translate service twice: once translating it into German, an

Another real-time run for Google – I wonder how the Google Wave team feels about this Gmail role expansion The search company is preparing to announce new features for Gmail that would extend the capabilities of the internet-based e-mail service to mirror some aspects of the fast-growing social networking site, according to a person familiar with its plans. However, earlier Google efforts to establish a presence in social networking have failed to gain much traction and analysts said that the company was still likely to find it difficult to turn the tables on Facebook with its latest plan. […] According to a report on the tech website TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to upgrade this messaging servic

Check the full article for a timely and encouraging reality check from the world of asynchronous communication The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.” But it turns o

Supply-side suicide? Google has been talking about entering the direct e-book market, through a program it calls Google Editions, for nearly a year. But in early discussions with publishers, Google had proposed giving them a 63 percent cut of the suggested retail price, and allowing consumers to print copies of the digital books and cut and paste segments. After Apple unveiled the iPad last month, publishers indicated that Apple would give them 70 percent of the consumer price, which publishers would set. According to several publishers who have been talking to Google, the book companies had balked at what they saw as Google’s less generous terms, and basically viewed printing and cut-and-paste as deal breakers.

Sign of the times It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.

And probably 10 – 15 million did so with laptops in hand The New Orleans Saints’ victory over Indianapolis in the Super Bowl was watched by more than 106 million people, surpassing the 1983 finale of “M*A*S*H’’ to become the most-watched program in US television history, the Nielsen Co. said yesterday. Super Bowl was the most-watched program in TV history - The Boston Globe

Check the full article for an update on Google’s plans We know from science fiction that some kind of universal translator gadget will be as essential a part of our future as it is now to screenwriters (if the folks on the Enterprise had to start each episode without any idea of what the aliens were saying, it would be slow going indeed). The most amusing, and ultimately devastating, of these devices is the Babel fish from Douglas Adams’ “

More book business evolution The publisher, through a new imprint named FT Press Delivers, has quietly begun selling what it is calling Elements and Shorts through the Kindle electronic bookstore on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore. The Elements, which the publisher has priced at $1.99, are stripped-down, 1,000- to 2,000-word versions of already-published books, while the Shorts are newly written essays of about 5,000 words, priced at $2.99. Titles include “Reengineering the Rules of Man

Surprised to see this On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle's liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB. While Jacobs doesn't give an explicit reason for his departure, he does hint at disappointment that he was not selected to run MySQL's database business post-acquisition. "I imagine you all know that I will not be leading the MySQL GBU, as I had expected," he said.

The future of Internet journalism? Demand uses a three-part formula of search terms, potential ad results and what competitors are doing to feed an algorithm that, with a human assist, comes up with headlines that are full of clickable, salient language that serves as bait for readers and search ads. (News is expensive to produce and not really a part of the formula because the company is looking for durable content, so “How to avoid a tiger attack” will have more value than, say, “Tiger’s not out of the woods, yet.”) The topic is then fed into a central database where freelance writers sign up for the assignment. The articles they write are run through an automated plagiarism checker, an actual copy editor and

iFollo, a site that lets members share stories about their run-ins with celebrities, has raised $1 million in a funding round from real estate investor Robert Trump, who is also a backer of game publisher ZeniMax Media. On iFollo, anybody can post an anecdote about meeting a celebrity and rate them (A sample entry from today: a member describes Blink 182 as the “biggest Jerks EVER!” because of an interview he or she did with the band once on the radio).