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To succeed, he said, the company will have to find a way to fundamentally change the experience and the economics of search. “You have to redefine the category,” Ballmer said. “We’ve taken some steps in that direction.”

“I think at the end of the day, cloud computing will be dictated by the interests and the degree to which you capture the imagination of developers,” Ballmer said.

The Seinfeld-Gates ads: “It was a two-week campaign but man did it get people talking for more than two weeks,” Ballmer said.

He said RIM and Apple may have nice and profitable businesses, but they are likely to be niches. “We’re kind of battling for the big part,” Ballmer said. “That doesn’t mean Apple and RIM wont make lots of money.”

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company may be the only one with a chance to rival Google in search over the long term, but acknowledged that it will take several more years and a whole lot of money.

With Vista, Ballmer said Microsoft made a choice, right or wrong, to change some things that caused compatibility issues in the name of security.

On other topics:

“It’s a five-year task,” he said, with a smile. “It’s a long-term task.”

“It’s going to take us a while,” he said, during a speech at the Churchill Club. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

He did say that Red Dog and other cloud computing efforts are key to winning the battle for developers, particularly Web developers.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

He said that it would be easier if Microsoft was trying to build a fixed-function device rather than an open, general-purpose platform. Still, he said, the goal is a system that everyone likes. “Every day we’ve got 5,000 people…that come to work just focused on that single challenge.”

“You don’t really brute force your way into any market,” he said. (I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone choke on their water over that one.)

On Windows-related headaches: “Every version of Windows statistically… gets better than versions before,” he said. “I’m not saying that we are there yet.”

The phone business: In five to ten years, Ballmer said all of the one billion cell phones sold a year will be smartphones. He said that means that software and hardware are likely to separate, at least in the mass market. He said of the players in that area–Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux mobile and Android–Microsoft’s is the most mature.

On the antitrust front, Winblad asked Ballmer if he had any advice for Google’s executives. “I’d probably keep that advice to myself,” he said.

Venture Capitalist Ann Winblad, who was moderating the talk with Ballmer, noted that when Ballmer addressed the club in 2006, he said search was a five-year battle.

He also stayed silent on several other topics, such as a question about “Red Dog,” the company’s rumored competitor to Amazon’s EC2. He did promise Microsoft would have much more to say in six weeks at the company’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

Still, over the longer haul, Heavy Reading predicts that FTTH will eventually reach 80 percent or more households in developed nations sometime over the next 15 to 20 years.

Fiber to the home (FTTH) installations are expected to shoot up 30 percent annually over the next five years, according to a report released Thursday by Heavy Reading.

“FTTH deployments continued to make strong progress in 2008 and early 2009, despite the economic downturn, and prospects for continued growth through 2010 look good,” says Graham Finnie, chief analyst with Heavy Reading and author of the report. “Last year, more than 9 million homes were added to the FTTH total, and in 2009 we expect that total to increase by almost 9 million again, to reach 47 million homes worldwide at the end of the year.”

The economic downturn has stalled the progress of some companies deploying FTTH. Major firms like Verizon, which has been very successful with its FIOS rollouts, have been relatively unaffected, Heavy Reading says. But other supplies say FTTH business has dropped as much as 40 percent year over year.

FTTH installations employ fiber-optic cables to replace the traditional copper wiring used in the last mile from the central office to the home. Fiber can deliver significantly higher speeds and greater bandwidth than copper, making it ideal for sending voice, video, and data.

The continuing demand for high bandwidth by consumers will pressure companies to roll out FTTH. However, price will still be a factor, says the report. The cost per household of FTTH (estimated to be between $500 and $2,500 depending on circumstances) will limit mass rollout in certain countries.

Growing from 36 million households with fiber hookups last year, a record 130 million are likely to have fiber by 2013, according to a summary (PDF) of the report from Heavy Reading, the market research arm of Light Reading, an event company serving the worldwide communications market.

Over the next five years, Asia will account for a large portion of FTTH deployments, with almost 85 million Asian households connected through fiber by 2013, the report says. Around 23 million connections are expected in the Americas, with most in the U.S., while 24 million households will have fiber throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The group’s pitch, which is explained through a silent video “Sandbag in 60 seconds,” is that if polluting is made expensive enough, companies will invest more in technology to clean up their processes rather than buying emissions credits to cover their excess pollution.

The group has started to gain a following. The Guardian Newspaper Group became a corporate sponsor earlier this year, and on Monday, two London hospitals agreed to sell Sandbag 2,000 tonnes worth of carbon credits. It’s the equivalent of taking 1,000
cars off the road, according to Sandbag’s founder Bryony Worthington.

A map of the U.K. showing areas with excess carbon permits to sell.

The report goes on to say that as a result of the economic downturn, there is a glut of permits and no real economic incentive for companies to reduce pollution.

“Industry is likely to have nearly 400 million tonnes worth of surplus permits across the period 2008-2012. (As a result, industrial sectors will not have to reduce their emissions.) They will either be able to sell their surplus for windfall profits of over 5 billion euros (at current market value) or bank them for future use depressing the price of carbon in the next phase of trading,” Sandbag said in its July 2009 report.

In July 2009, Sandbag put out a report (PDF) on the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System (EU-ETS), the EU’s current program that regulates about 50 percent of carbon emissions in the EU and doles out about 2 billion tradable permits each year.

The U.K.-based not-for-profit community organization, whose motto is “real action on climate change,” launched in September 2008. It uses donations to buy up EU carbon credits and cancel them in an effort to drive up the price of carbon credits in the marketplace.

In addition to its carbon credit report and buy-back plan, Sandbag has also mapped out by country how emissions credits have been allotted.

Interested people can use the organization’s Web site tools to view Google Maps plotting emissions data for 2008 in relation to how many permits are allotted or needed for a given area. Maps are by country with an option to zoom in to a particular area of interest.

Part environmental watchdog and part social-networking site, Sandbag
lobbies the United Nations and European Union for tighter caps on carbon emissions and permits, while buying up carbon credits.

(Credit:
Sandbag)

Sandbag has been lobbying the EU to address the issue by following the suggestion made by France and Ireland, which is to essentially reduce the amount of carbon permits made available going forward, according to its report.

Sandbag asserted in the report, as it’s been widely reported, that pollution has been reduced not so much as a result of big industry cleaning up their processes but because production itself has been down due to the recession.

(Credit:
Sandbag)

Seesmic on Monday released an update that adds more minor features to the Twitter and Facebook desktop manager.

The cross-platform Adobe AIR app will now auto-complete Twitter usernames, a feature that competitor TweetDeck has offered for a while. Seesmic 0.5 also adds a home timeline configuration, so you can include or exclude replies, private messages, and search results from one column.

Other minor changes include maximizing and bringing to the front the Seesmic window when you click on the notification pop-up window, and optionally minimizing the program to the system tray in Windows. The full list of changes can be read here.

“a recognition that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” The shift toward open source software will strengthen journalism and transparency, Pilhofer said, because it enables news companies to leverage the smarts of large communities of software developers and technologically skilled journalists outside of the Times to continually improve the software…

There’s no question that enterprise IT is adopting open source in droves. Gartner speculates that 85 percent of enterprises already use open source. (The other 15 percent are, too, I suspect, but the CIOs at those companies simply don’t know about the Mule, JBoss, Postgres, etc. that is running rampant through their halls.)

I’ll feel a lot better, however, when we hear less about vendors writing open-source software and more about enterprise IT releasing open-source code.

You have nothing to lose…

For such organizations, it’s time to start contributing back. No, not because doing so is somehow morally superior to using but not writing open-source software, but rather because there are tangible business benefits to contributing open-source code.

While some governments (the U.K. most notable among them, as Glyn Moody highlights) fear coloring outside the lines of proprietary software, others, like the Mongolian government, which has moved all of its Web sites to open-source Joomla, have embraced open source as a way to lower costs and increase vendor independence.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been calling on enterprise IT to contribute back to open-source projects. His is not a plea for charity. It’s a call to recognize and fuel self-interest.

The companies and governments that get the most from open source, however, are those that view technology as a competitive differentiator and look to open source to deliver “high productivity, flexibility, robustness and considerably lower costs,” like the London Stock Exchange recently discovered in its move to Linux.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Take The New York Times, for example, which is releasing its Document Viewer under an open-source license within the next few weeks. According to BayNewser, Aron Pilhofer, the Times’ editor for interactive newsroom technologies, said this is:

This is precisely the sort of thinking that could lead the media industry out of its current struggles and into a more productive, collaborative future. Open source is no panacea for struggling newspapers, but it does offer a compelling way to increase outside contributions, improve user interaction, and help make its future a communal effort.

If I needed a clear sign that commercial open source is alive and well, reading Roberto Galoppini’s remarks on the five Open Innovation Awards winners provided that and more. I used to be able to count every open-source company on two hands. Galoppini mentioned four of which I’ve never heard.

[T]he Times expects that other organizations that use the tool will build new functionality on top the Times’ code and then, in true open source spirit, share their enhancements back so that all organizations using of the Document Viewer will benefit.

Carroll spoke with Larry Magid a few days before the site’s launch.

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StudentAid.com is far from the first Web site to help parents or would-be college students learn about how much schools cost. But at the end of the day, it’s not just the price-tag that matters, it’s what you actually have to pay out of your own pocket after factoring in available financial aid.

The new site, according to Craig Carroll, CEO of parent company Rezolve Group, provides more depth and specificity than other sites by having parents or students fill out a detailed questionnaire that helps determine what colleges they can actually afford after considering all available resources.

Although Pachter said he thinks console sales will be “relatively flat for the balance of the year,” he did say that the price cuts could “benefit the PS3 the most in coming months.” Not only does Pachter believe Sony’s console will outsell the Xbox 360, but he contends that it’s possible that the PlayStation 3 will lead Xbox 360 sales for the rest of the year.

PS3 victory?
But it’s Pachter’s next topic that might easily attract the most attention. According to the analyst, he estimates that September’s NPD figures will show a “sell-through of 390,000 Wii hardware units (down 45 percent from last year), 350,000
Xbox 360 units (up 1 percent from last year), and 410,000 PS3 consoles (up 76 percent year-over-year), as the price cuts for all three consoles spurred demand.”

As interesting as they might be, Pachter’s comments are purely speculation at this point. Look for the official sales figures to drop next week, when NPD makes them available.

It’s a good sign that after months of decline, the video game industry is finally rebounding. That said, overall sales are still far behind 2008 figures.

(Credit:
Sony)

The PlayStation 3 Slim is helping spur console sales.

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The video game industry is poised to make a rebound, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. The analyst also predicted that it will be Sony’s
PlayStation 3, and not the
Nintendo Wii, that will lead console sales for the month, when NPD releases figures next week.

Another Xbox 360 price cut?
Pachter isn’t convinced that the price cuts are over. He wrote to clients that “Microsoft has the ability to lower price yet again,” but he cautioned that a more likely scenario would see the company offer a “more feature-packed Xbox 360 in early 2010 (likely with a 250GB hard drive) at the same $299 price point.” It could cut the price of its console if “it begins to lose significant market share to Sony.”

“After six consecutive months of double-digit declines, we expect a return to double-digit sales growth (on video game software),” Pachter wrote to clients. “We forecast sales of $750 million, up 21 percent, compared to last year’s $618 million.”

(Credit:
BetterLesson)

“Teachers mine content on other sites,” says Erin Osborn, the field director for BetterLesson, based in Somerville, Mass.

“We want people to stay teaching longer than two years.” –Erin Osborn, field director for BetterLesson

Similar to Facebook, each user has their own profile and can join groups and networks. Members can “colleague” each other and then keep up through a news feed. On each person’s profile page, there is general information, courses taught, and curriculum overviews.

What do you get when you cross teachers, tech, and social networking? A BetterLesson.

Grodd joined forces with Osborn, and two other team members, another teacher, and a techie; they brainstormed and came up with BetterLesson. They’ve spent the last year doing research, outreach, and coding to get the site ready for private beta. The goal?

(Credit:
BetterLesson)

But here, teachers are compelled to create and add content, she says. The Web site, still in beta, has been built with a curriculum organizing and filing system specifically for teachers, that’s done using cloud computing, so teachers don’t need to worry about carrying around a flash drive.

Part of what can help teachers stay teaching is to give them a strong network and support system that assists them to creating robust lesson plans tailored specifically to the needs of their kids, she says. This is where social networking comes into play.

Members have rating charts that show how many people have downloaded each lesson plan, which encourages content contribution. And teachers can do key word searches to find information on specific topics and click “add to my curriculum.” There’s also a state standard tagging tool, so teachers can tag and search for files that use state standards.

Right now, there are dozens of social-networking Web sites for teachers, but most fall into one of two existing models, intranet or open source, they say. With the intranet model, the community tends to be limited to one school, network, or district, which makes for limited material and oftentimes locked platforms that can’t be build out.

BetterLesson lets teachers create, organize, and share curriculum.

The part that really differentiates the site, its creators say, is the teacher-specific design, where teachers can upload their multifile 180-day curriculum. They can show supplies, texts, related lessons, and create discussions. Digital files can also be exchanged, including video, audio, and images.

BetterLesson has been in private beta for the past five months. Starting this month, it will bring in 10 select schools to start building up content and giving feedback. Over the course of this upcoming school year, it plans to do serious ramping up and bring in hundreds of schools. By next summer, it hopes to be fully open with a content-rich site that can fold in teachers who need extra support.

Although not the first or the only Web site that hooks teachers up with friends and new curriculum, BetterLesson takes a different approach.

Conversely, the open-source model, whose goal is to make all knowledge shareable, has massive open sharing platforms. While there is a lot of material, it can often be overwhelming and difficult for teachers to navigate, they say. Also, the actual networking aspect and community feel is lost.

Most new teachers, for example, start at square one, testing what works and what doesn’t, and often feel like it’s difficult to sustain re-developing content year after year. This is something the founder of BetterLesson is familiar with, since he, too, was a teacher.

This post was updated at 3:05 p.m. PDT to better describe the founding team members.

As for a business model, Osborn says they don’t have plans to advertise because they’d like to keep the user’s experience as clean and unencumbered as possible. So, the start-up is looking at several other ways to monetize the site, including a freemium model, in which it will offer free services while charging for advanced or special features.

Teacher's stats show how many of their lesson plans have been downloaded.

“We want people to stay teaching longer than two years,” says Osborn.

After two years of working in a high needs school for Teach for America, BetterLesson founder and CEO Alex Grodd felt a certain frustration at having to reinvent the wheel with each lesson plan. He thought getting a job at a high-achieving charter school, Roxbury Preparatory, would be better. But it wasn’t, he still had the same frustrations.

“Hopefully they take this and cobble what’s out there to create something meaningful in what they teach,” says Osborn.

“We’re taking an intermediate approach,” says Osborn. “It’s the nexus of technology and personal teacher experience.”

The investigation was driven by complaints from rival AMD.

In May, Intel was fined 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion) for engaging in, according to the Commission, illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips based on the x86 architecture–the design that both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices use in their microprocessors.

The ombudsman cannot change the outcome of the case, according to the report.

Intel did not comment.

The ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, chided the Commission for “maladministration” by not formally citing an August 2006 meeting between Commission investigators and a senior Dell executive, according to the Friday report in the Journal. The Dell executive was providing evidence in the case and “is believed to have told investigators that Dell viewed the performance of Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as ‘very poor,’” according to the report.

The Journal report concludes that this “could imply that Dell chose Intel chips for technical reasons, rather than because it was muscled into doing so.” This would contradict the formal EU decision that claimed that PC manufacturers bought chips from Intel strictly because they did not want to forfeit hefty rebates from Intel.

The European Union’s ombudsman has criticized the antitrust regulator in a recent case against Intel, saying the regulator did not include evidence that was potentially exculpatory for the chipmaker, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

“Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years,” competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement at the time.

A tap of the Read Post button takes you to the actual post (in the source blog) but keeps you in the Regator app instead of bouncing you out to
Safari. Very nice.

The obligatory Search option taps Regator’s mammoth archive of handpicked posts, meaning you’re not limited to new or recent items.

In the meantime, Regator is a freebie, and a must-have one at that. If you have even a passing interest in blogs (and if you’re reading this, you must), this is a terrific way to keep tabs on the blogosphere.

Regator also provides a full directory of more than 500 topics, so you can really drill into the areas that interest you most. (Beekeeping? Check. Museums? Check.)

Instead, the app employs “qualified human editors” to bring you “topical, well-written, frequently updated, and relevant” posts. In other words, the cream of the blogosphere crop, at least according to these guys.

An offshoot of the eponymous Web service, Regator (agg-regator, get it?) differs from traditional RSS feed readers in that it doesn’t rely on you to choose the blogs you want to follow.

However, the app lacks the personalized MyRegator tools available at Regator.com, which include options like saving favorite blogs and searches. According to the developer, those features may be added to a premium version in the future.

So many blogs, so little time. If you feel like the blogosphere is passing you by, check out Regator, a new app that culls the Web’s best posts.

Each listing shows the post headline, blog of origin, and first couple of sentences. Tap through for a longer summary, a Share option (e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook), and related posts, tags, and images.

You can browse the posts any number of ways, starting with “popular” items from the Web at large or looking within a couple dozen specific topics (from Academics to “What the?”).