MySpace Says Twitter Is Closer Competitor Than Facebook

MySpace’s recent reorientation to emphasize entertainment over friends makes it more similar to Twitter than Facebook, said News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “Twitter is about asymmetrical relationships,” said Miller, while Facebook users have mostly symmetrical friend relationships. “MySpace is in between. One of the things we have to focus on right now is you have to declare a major.”

But ultimately MySpace will end up more like Twitter. “MySpace is more about interests, which is followers and followed, than just the pure friend thing,” said Miller. “But obviously I believe we have the ability to be much richer [than Twitter].”

In some respects this shift is quite obvious, but it’s interesting to hear News Corp spell it out. And Miller is right: Though Twitter is quite the phenomenon right now, MySpace does have more features. Twitter is at its core a broadcast system, whereas MySpace can get a lot deeper into music and other content.

Will the Bing/Google Twitter Deals Squeeze Out Real-Time Search Upstarts?

After Microsoft and Google announced search deals with Twitter yesterday, several startups that focus on real-time search — OneRiot, Wowd and Collecta (see disclosure at the bottom) — put on a positive front in an article by Jolie O’Dell at ReadWriteWeb, saying their businesses will be around for the long haul. But the entrance of the two tech giants in a market originally dominated by startups is likely to send shivers down any company’s spine.

Without a doubt, it will be a tough road ahead for real-time search upstarts. Not only are Google and Microsoft household names, but Google has long dominated the U.S. search market — it captured 80 percent of it last month. A slate of real-time Twitter search engines sprouted up over the summer, and though many of them are compelling products, here’s a reality check: How many of your non-tech savvy friends actually know about them?

But it’s not all doom and gloom for some. After viewing Microsoft’s demo of its Twitter search feature on Bing, I discovered it’s lacking some of the features offered by other real-time search engines. TweetMeme, for instance, aggregates the most popular links on Twitter, including YouTube videos and photos, based in part on the number of times people have retweeted them. While Bing lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic, so far it’s limited to just news and blog articles.

Another startup that offers something Bing doesn’t is OneRiot, which launched a product last month that offers up sponsored links to content related to the real-time search results it renders. OneRiot’s founders believe this product will be the standard monetization model for Twitter-focused apps, which could be potent enough to help the company stick around in the long-term.

There’s one caveat, however. Google’s Twitter search offering has yet to be released, so we’ll have to wait and see what kind of a threat it poses in the real-time search engine space.

Disclosure: Collecta is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

When and Where to Find 4G in Q4

Clearwire, Comcast and Sprint today provided a timeframe of when during the fourth quarter of this year they plan to launch 4G wireless broadband service in 11 U.S. markets. Comcast will be pairing up with the other two providers in Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago. Clearwire’s 4G service is already available in 14 U.S. cities, including Las Vegas and Atlanta, and has said it plans to roll out 4G to Silicon Valley in 2010.

Want to see when 4G is coming to your area? Here’s a guide:

State	City/Region	4G Rollout Date	Service Provider
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	In the next several weeks	Clearwire, Comcast and Sprint
Illinois	Chicago	November	Clearwire, Comcast and Sprint
North Carolina	Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh	November	Clearwire and Sprint
Texas	Austin, Fort Worth/Dallas, San Antonio	November	Clearwire and Sprint
Hawaii	Honolulu, Maui	Early December	Clearwire and Sprint
Washington	Seattle	Early December	Clearwire, Comcast and Sprint

8 Flexible, Open-Source (or Just Open) Telephony Resources

Sure, you’re up on Android smartphones and perhaps other Linux-based phone platforms, but the freewheeling world of open source includes many hugely useful telephony applications and platforms that are more unusual. There are useful offerings for businesses and consumers, and you can download and start using many of them for free. Here are eight flexible choices, including several brand new ones.

Birthing Voice Mashups — Jaduka, which has been an influential young company in the VoIP arena, offers open APIs that facilitate many of the “voice mashups” — voice, data and applications that are combined to create new services — appearing on the web. You can find out more about Jaduka here.

Android On the Desktop — Check out Cloud Telecomputers’ desktop VoIP phone based on the open-source Android OS. The touchscreen device runs on an open development platform called Glass, which former Motorola CEO Ed Zander has said “all business phones will look like” in 3-5 years — with Android at the core. Cloud Telecomputers is targeting OEMs that want to design around its hardware and software platform.

Central Communications Hub — Asterisk is an extremely powerful open-source telephony engine and platform that is especially popular with small businesses trying to keep communication costs down. It’s a full-blown PBX that includes call waiting, caller ID, distinctive ring, text-to-speech recognition and more. Businesses can also get subscription support for it.

Skype Meets Asterisk — Speaking of Asterisk, Digium, the company behind it, recently announced the availability of Skype for Asterisk. With the new download, Asterisk users can call landlines, cellular devices and other Skype users, right from any Asterisk-based phone. Cool, and another example of Skype’s focus on all aspects of business telephony.

See Me, Hear Me — Linphone is a free VoIP app for Windows and Linux that includes instant messaging capabilities and works with almost any web camera for either audio or video conferencing. It complies with the SIP protocol, an open standard for online telephony, and interoperates with most SIP-compatible phones and proxies.

Kissing Cousins — Open-Xchange and Racksoft recently announced a partnership that combines Open-Xchange’s open-source groupware with Racksoft’s telephony products. The combined solutions they’re working on could make conference calls, desktop calendars and mobile calendars work together seamlessly.

A Small Fox — Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the open-source browser Firefox , is now out in an advanced beta that works on several platforms, and is native in Nokia’s new N900 device. Fennec is loaded with numerous imaginative user interface implementations, and is slated to work with many of the more useful Firefox extensions. Download it for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux here.

No Name, No Trail — Many people use the open-source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the people behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use it to do the same. You can find the links you need to get going here.

Microsoft Beats the Street, But Windows 7 Is Its Bet Going Forward

Microsoft’s week of positive news continued this morning as the company turned in earnings and revenues that beat analysts’ expectations, but it remains clear that the company’s prospects going forward will depend heavily on the reception of its Windows 7 operating system. Sales in the company’s fiscal first quarter fell 14 percent to $12.9 billion, down for the third quarter in a row, and earnings fell 18 percent to $3.6 billion. The Redmond giant has been battling razor-thin profit margins in the portable computing arena, though, and its results today were expected to be worse. Meanwhile, there are signs that the PC market may be improving, and Microsoft is indeed riding a positive tide surrounding Windows 7.

Microsoft’s Windows sales were actually down 39 percent for the quarter as the company’s Windows Vista business stalled while it gave out upgrade coupons for Windows 7. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its first-ever layoffs, which it attributed to a profit margin decline caused by netbooks. As it noted in its 10-Q earlier this year:

“The decline in OEM revenue reflects an 11 percentage point decrease in the OEM premium mix to 64 percent, primarily driven by growth of licenses related to sales of netbook PCs, as well as changes in the geographic and product mixes.”

Microsoft’s challenges when it comes to trying to make money in the portable computing market won’t go away anytime soon, but there are signs that cost-cutting at the company is working. And a very positive quarterly earnings report from Intel may also imply that better times lie ahead in the PC market. Above all, though, Microsoft’s fortunes are likely to improve because of the positive reaction to Windows 7. It has already set records for pre-orders, and has more momentum than any Microsoft operating system in years.

Microsoft Beats the Street, But Windows 7 Is Its Bet Going Forward

Microsoft’s week of positive news continued this morning as the company turned in earnings and revenues that beat analysts’ expectations, but it remains clear that the company’s prospects going forward will depend heavily on the reception of its Windows 7 operating system. Sales in the company’s fiscal first quarter fell 14 percent to $12.9 billion, down for the third quarter in a row, and earnings fell 18 percent to $3.6 billion. The Redmond giant has been battling razor-thin profit margins in the portable computing arena, though, and its results today were expected to be worse. Meanwhile, there are signs that the PC market may be improving, and Microsoft is indeed riding a positive tide surrounding Windows 7.

Microsoft’s Windows sales were actually down 39 percent for the quarter as the company’s Windows Vista business stalled while it gave out upgrade coupons for Windows 7. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its first-ever layoffs, which it attributed to a profit margin decline caused by netbooks. As it noted in its 10-Q earlier this year:

“The decline in OEM revenue reflects an 11 percentage point decrease in the OEM premium mix to 64 percent, primarily driven by growth of licenses related to sales of netbook PCs, as well as changes in the geographic and product mixes.”

Microsoft’s challenges when it comes to trying to make money in the portable computing market won’t go away anytime soon, but there are signs that cost-cutting at the company is working. And a very positive quarterly earnings report from Intel may also imply that better times lie ahead in the PC market. Above all, though, Microsoft’s fortunes are likely to improve because of the positive reaction to Windows 7. It has already set records for pre-orders, and has more momentum than any Microsoft operating system in years.

Windows 7 Website Redesign + Demo Videos

Yay, it’s finally out! Now that Windows 7 is finally available in stores, Microsoft re-designed their websites. The starting page is now green and filled with quotes of Twitter users.

Microsoft featured quotes of popular PC magazines in their advertising campaigns before, so it’s nothing totally new, but it’s great to see what other people like about Windows 7. If you want to find out what’s not so good about Windows 7, simply listen to a MAC fanboy for a while (or better don’t).The green starting page will probably be only up while Windows 7 is still hot.

Here are two of the quotes of their starting page:

“I really like Windows 7 (3mo usage so far). Smooth running, snappy and great on my notebookcomputer. “

“Windows 7 now installed, loving it already Startup with drivers was so easy, it just works. “

You will find plenty of other reviews on their site. To get some more objective reviews I’d suggest to visit some other sites as well and read through the posts on this site.

If you are a Windows 7 newbie, you should also check out the Windows 7 demo videos over at:

Windows 7 Video Tours