It is not hard these days to find companies with their sights set on GrandCentral. GrandCentral, of course, is the Google-owned company that hopes to simplify telephone communications by giving people one number and the ability to forward calls among their cell phones, land lines, etc.
At the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show in San Francisco, DiVitas Networks showed off its own plan for converging telephone calls onto one phone. The company’s software also manages a mobile phone’s ability to switch between the cellular network and WiFi wireless hot spots.
There’s a trend toward providing flexibility in how people communicate, said DiVitas CEO Vivek Khuller.
Newber, short for new number, also launched an application this week for Apple’s iPhone with a similar goal. It assigns a number to the iPhone and uses the iPhone’s location-determining technology to route calls to the closest nearby phone, including in a hotel.
The idea is to save battery life and minimize periods of bad reception.
Today, Sunny Gosain (pictured), the VP of Development of software developer Compiere shared with me his perspective on Google's new web browser.
Fastest!
So let's start with the good news. For the open source ERP developer, Google Chrome is 5% faster than Firefox 3.0, 20% faster than Internet Explorer 8 and an order of magnitude faster than IE 7. But to be fair, Gosain admits that Compiere's Web application is still 20 to 25% slower than its native Java application running on the desktop.
Compatible!
Because Compiere is using Google Web Toolkit to convert its Java application into Javascript, Gosain suspects that Google developers have optimised Chrome for GWT code. Another surprise is that Compiere's Web application ran almost without any modification - just 1 line to change!
"That came as a good surprise as it usually takes a month to qualify our Web application and it's 10 million lines of source code for a new Web browser. We have to make sure the aesthetic of our application in the new browser, the client interactivity, the performance and the security. With Google Chrome, the rendering is pixel perfect", Sunny Gosain explains.
The popular social-networking destination decided this week to migrate the rest of its users to its new site design.
Almost 30 million of Facebook’s 100 million users already use the new design, which the company describes as cleaner and simpler. The rollout should be completed in a few weeks, the Internet firm said in a press release.
The new design was launched in July at the company's f8 conference for developers.
Americans viewed 11.4 billion online videos during July, 5 billion of which were found on YouTube, according to comScore.
Three in four people online tuned into at least one clip and, in total, Americans spent 558 million hours behind their computers watching online video.
Google, which owns YouTube, was the leader with 44 percent market share, followed by Fox Interactive Media, owners of MySpace, with 3.9 percent, comScore said. So if you have some more spare time, check out the UberPulse video channel on YouTube :-)
One might think so. But that didn’t keep a handful of entrepreneurs from promoting sites they hope will prove otherwise.
Several picked unlikely niches to address. Footnote plans to use Social Security death records to create profiles of deceased people that visitors, who pay a subscription fee, can embellish.
Closet Couture wants to help women get dressed by creating virtual closets of their clothing and putting them in touch with stylists (for a fee) and merchants. Birdpost intends to appeal to bird watchers, aiding them in finding new bird species to observer.
Perhaps the most promising is Causecast, which wants to connect non-profits with people who hope to make a positive impact on the world (and donate money).
Niche social-networking sites don’t often seem to work well, said Sean Parker, co-founder of Causes on Facebook and MySpace. Yet companies such as Causecast are addressing a “really important space,” with billions of dollars of transactions moving online in the next several years.
Following Sun Microsystems' virtualisation announcement this morning, I sat down with Nathan Brookwood, analyst at Insight64, to talk about Intel's 6-cores server processor dubbed Dunnington that the chip maker will announce next Monday in San Francisco.
Impressive performance chip... great mid-life kicker if you're already on Caneland. Otherwise you'd better off waiting for Nehalem in 2H09
"Dunnington is the first time Intel has done a multi-core chip that has all of the cores united as opposed to do a multi-chip kind of packages [what Intel did so far]... very nice mid-life kicker for enterprises that have already moved to Caneland [Intel's current multi-processor platform that will be compatible with Dunnington]. But if they didn't move yet to Caneland, then they might wait for the 8-core Nehalem [expected in 2H09]", Brookwood said.
Making money from and sense of new media on the Web – video, photos and social interactions – may be the job of the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Up to now, few startups have figured out how to turn the public’s spiraling interest online social connections, video clips and sharing information into successful business models.
Don’t expect any quick change to this imbalance of audience and money. Still, several young companies took their cut at this intractable problem Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.
If one thing is clear at this year’s TechCrunch50 it is that Web 2.0 is permeating the business world.
Entrepreneurs, having watched the rapid adoption of consumer Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are hatching companies to take and adapt these technologies for the corporation.
“I think there is a big movement toward the enterprise,” notes Keith McCarty, marketing manager for Yammer.
Last but certainly not least for all the iPhone 3G users, is the new software update dubbed OS X 2.1 that Steve Jobs announced for this Friday for the iPod Touch and the iPhone.
The patch will cost $9.99 for iPod Touch users that have not yet upgraded their device to the previous 2.0 software version.
"This is a big update, and it fixes lots of bugs", Jobs admitted.
With the new software expect fewer call drops and applications crash, better battery life, and faster back-up to iTunes.
Jobs boasted that the company is unveiling a new iPod Touch, a thinner device with built-in volume controls on its side (the #1 request Apple got for the iPod Touch). The device also has a speaker.
Apple's new iPod Touch machines will come with lover prices: $299 for 8 GBs, $299 for 16 GBs and $399 for 32 GBs
And the company billed it and the iPhone as emerging platforms for games. In that veins, the company demonstrated several games for the iPhone, and iPod Touch including a version of the Electronic Arts' "Need for Speed – Undercover" expected in November.
Separately, Apple said it would sell new, stand-alone headphones. They will come with volume controls on the cord including a feature to advance a song and will cost $29.
Apple introduced a sleek new oval iPod Nano for the Christmas season. The device has a large curved screen and is the thinnest iPod the company has made. It also includes an accelerometer - just like the iPhone! - so pictures can be displayed sideways, and a feature that allows someone to shake the device to shuffle the music playing.
Apple said its new iPod Nanos would come in a variety of colors, from orange to blue and keep the same price, with the least expensive one selling for $149 (8GBs) and the more expensive at $199 (16GBs).
The iPod Classic, "the iPod that started it all", also is being upgraded for Christmas. It will now hold 120 GBs for the same $249 price. The larger 160 GB is being shown the door though.
Jobs, boasting a 73.4 percent market share for his iPod line, said the company has sold 160 million iPod since starting the product line.
An energetic Jobs, who did look thin but healthier, said NBC is bringing some of its top television programming back to iTunes, including the popular Heros and 30Rock and in HD.
With over 8.5 million songs available, 125,000 podcasts, 30,000 TV shows, 2,600 movies, 3,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch and 65 million user accounts, iTunes is the largest music retailer, passing even Walmart!
"Oh, and by the way, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, Jobs said.
Uberpulse Editor at Large, Mark Boslet, is at Apple's music event in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts. Believe it or not (probably not as you've been at one of these launch events or at Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynotes), the Wi-Fi actually works! It's about to start so stay tuned for more of Mark's live coverage and relax!
