While BEA was looking “up” at its biggest competitor IBM, JBoss was busily undercutting BEA at the bottom end….JBoss launched an innovator’s dilemma attack against BEA, not with a revolutionary product, but with a revolutionary business model, one that BEA couldn’t hope to copy without cannibalizing its existing revenue stream. BEA fell right into the trap.

The rest is history. Oracle is exceptional at integrating companies. But I think IBM (WebSphere + Geronimo) and JBoss (and Tomcat) now have too much momentum. Oracle acquired the rights to yesterday’s application server. Tomorrow belongs to open source and those founded upon it.

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I didn’t know all the history behind JBoss until I read Shaun Connolly’s blog on the topic. It turns out that JBoss has been stalking BEA for some time. Unfortunately for BEA, IBM and JBoss now appear to be poised to eclipse its once-thriving business altogether.

From my perspective, it’s not the marketing of Windows Mobile that needs work. It’s the software.

Todd Peters, who has also worked at Intel, joined Microsoft on Monday as corporate vice president for Windows Mobile Marketing, reporting to mobile-business head Peter Knook. Peters fills the spot created after Suzan Del Bene left last August.

Ahh, would that Microsoft really were adding an easy button to its Windows Mobile software. But alas, Microsoft is only announcing that it has hired one of the marketing executives behind Staples “easy button” campaign.

“Microsoft is gaining a real foothold with its mobile products and services in the consumer world,” Peters said in a statement. “I am looking forward to helping make Windows Mobile a brand not only that people recognize, but that they seek out when choosing the phone that’s right for them.”

Here’s hoping Peters and the Windows Mobile team have more up their sleeve than a large, non-functioning button.

Especially because the commission would be organized under the legislative branch, and would have subpoena power with the authority to enforce its subpoenas in court, it could result in some embarrassing disclosures about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

The debate before the vote was contentious, with more hoots and catcalls than usual. The lack of retroactive legal immunity for telephone companies also drew accusations from several Republicans that Democrats were handing out favors to lawyers who would ostensibly profit from the court proceedings moving forward. The bill is “nothing more than an earmark for the trial bar,” charged Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)

The Commission shall ascertain, evaluate, and report upon the facts and circumstances relating to electronic surveillance activities conducted without a warrant between September 11, 2001 and January 17, 2007 (and shall) evaluate the lawfulness of such activities

Democrats repeatedly accused the Republicans and the Bush administration of engaging in a smear campaign designed to undermine their bill’s passage. “The president has said our legislation will not make Americans safe,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “The president is wrong, and I think he knows it.”

But the primary obstacle remains President Bush, who has threatened a veto. The White House circulated a statement after the vote calling it a “a significant step backward in defending our country against terrorism” that was “not a serious effort to move the legislative process forward.”

Republicans also assailed the Democratic leadership for failing to permit an up-or-down vote on the Senate version. They attempted, but failed to push through, a procedural move that would have allowed the House to consider the Senate version of the bill automatically if the House version didn’t pass.

Some pointed out that telephone companies and other corporations who open their networks lawfully to the government already have “immunity” under law. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) read from that passage of existing law and then proclaimed, “I think the administration is more concerned about their liability than the phone companies.”

But now, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both opposing retroactive immunity, with a new Justice Department report critical of FBI surveillance abuses, and with a stronger public perception of the Bush administration as having gone too far, the Democrats are more willing to fight back. Nineteen Democrats released a statement this week saying that they’ve seen classified documents and no immunity was necessary; an unusual closed session on Thursday was intended to make the same point.

The 213-197 split, with most Democrats voting in favor of the bill (PDF) and most Republicans opposing it, hardly means that the political tussle over retroactive immunity is over. It now shifts to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said he was “encouraged” to see the House vote.

Another section that the Republicans dislike is this, which I’ll excerpt:

News.com’s Anne Broache contributed to this report.

Republican leader John Boehner accused Democrats of failing to bring up the Senate bill “because it would pass.”

Friday’s vote also signals that the political climate has changed since last August, when Republicans outmaneuvered their opponents into voting for surveillance legislation with scant debate or hearings. Democrats acquiesced for fear of being perceived as soft on terror, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying the bill did violence to the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday narrowly approved an electronic surveillance expansion without immunization for any telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to intelligence agencies.

ESTABLISHMENT OF COMMISSION.–There is established in the legislative branch a commission to be known as the “Commission on Warrantless Electronic Surveillance Activities”

I’ve seen a lot of noise over the past year about which presidential candidate would be best for open source, most recently this blog post in TechRepublic suggesting that Barack Obama would be better for open source.

I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble, but anyone looking to the U.S. presidency to make any material difference for open source needs to pass the bong around one more time. It’s not going to happen.

Yes, there are things that a president can do to create an atmosphere accommodating to open source, or other technology choices like Net neutrality. But let’s be clear: there are far bigger issues in front of the U.S. president than whether the government adopts open source (and, regardless, the U.S. government is already adopting open source at a rapid pace, so who needs a presidential preference for open source?).

If a U.S. president has limited impact on the economy–you and I impact the economy more than a presidential speech because we’re the ones working, saving, and starting new businesses–then why would we expect them to make much of a dent on technology policy? Would I like McCain and Obama to use open source? Sure. I’m just not going to think about that when I vote.

I personally could not possibly care less whether John McCain or Obama use Linux. It has never entered my mind. I’m much more concerned with their policies on domestic and international issues, like health care, Iraq, etc.–you know, things that have the potential to help or hurt lots of people.

According to a copy of the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco, Craigslist accuses eBay of unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, false advertising, and breach of fiduciary duty. Craigslist has asked the court to force eBay to surrender its interest in the company.

On Tuesday, eBay issued a statement: “We regret that Craigslist felt compelled to resort to unfounded and unsubstantiated claims in order to divert attention from actions by Craigslist’s board” adding that Craigslist and eBay always agreed that the two sides have the “absolute right to compete with each other.”

In the months leading up to the U.S. launch of Kijiji, “eBay used its shareholder status to plant on Craigslist’s board of directors the individual responsible for launching and/or operating Kijiji,” Craigslist said in its suit.

Meg Whitman, eBay’s then CEO, declined to sell but the reasons for Buckmaster’s change of heart were outlined in Craigslist’s suit.

The two companies have been circling each other ever since eBay, which is a minority shareholder in Craigslist, opened a U.S. version of Kijiji, a Craigslist competitor. The hostilities between the Web’s top auctioneer and classifieds section were kept quiet until last month when eBay filed a lawsuit against Craigslist alleging that the company tried to dilute eBay’s 28 percent share.

Craigslist, the Web’s No.1 online classified site, has filed a lawsuit against eBay, in a move that will surprise few.

The two sides have coexisted relatively peacefully since August 2004, when eBay bought a minority interest in Craigslist. Last summer, when eBay launched Kijiji, Buckmaster told CNET News.com that he wasn’t worried about having a competitor sitting on the board. His attitude changed just weeks after when he asked eBay to sell its position in the company, according to court documents filed by eBay.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval)

Craigslist's headquarters in San Francisco's Sunset District

The move was designed by Craigslist’s founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to remove eBay from Craigslist’s board of directors, eBay alleged in its suit.

Craigslist also said that eBay has “hounded” Craigslist managers with “improper demands for confidential Craigslist information, which could be used for anticompetitive reasons.”

In March, when TorrentSpy executives shut down the site, they noted that the cost of defending the case was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An MPAA representative could not be reached for comment.

In December, TorrentSpy got into trouble with U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, who presided over the case, when she determined that TorrentSpy operators intentionally destroyed evidence, making it impossible for the MPAA to get a fair trial. TorrentSpy had earlier been fined $30,000 for violations of discovery orders.

The MPAA disagreed, claiming that unlike Google, TorrentSpy existed primarily to help people rip off Hollywood.

“What is really going on here is a Hollywood public-relations stunt,” Rothken said. “The reason for the size of the judgment was so a bunch of news organizations would write that ‘a $100 million judgment was issued against a bunch of pirates’ when, in fact, it was declared against a company with no appreciable assets that has already declared bankruptcy.”

But Rothken said the case has no precedent-setting value because TorrentSpy never got its day in court. This may come as good news to IsoHunt, one of TorrentSpy’s former competitors, which has also been sued by the MPAA for allegedly violating copyright.

According to Rothken, TorrentSpy filed bankruptcy in England last week and is without the ability to pay even a fraction of the $100 million, rendering the judgment’s dollar amount meaningless.

TorrentSpy attorney Ira Rothken

Ira Rothken has defended TorrentSpy since 2006, when it was accused in a lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of encouraging copyright infringement. In an interview with CNET News.com on Wednesday night, Rothken said the judge’s decision was an “abuse of discretion” and suggested that the large dollar amount was an attempt to draw attention to the case.

“The decision means absolutely nothing as it relates to other (BitTorrent cases),” Rothken said. “It issue was not decided on the merits. It’s obvious we are going to appeal.”

Cooper took the unusual step of terminating the case, which meant that she had found in the MPAA’s favor and simply had to determine the damage amount.

TorrentSpy intends to appeal a court decision that requires the now-defunct search engine to pay $111 million in damages to the six largest film studios, according to the company’s attorney.

Yahoo and Time Warner have held talks on a deal designed to thwart Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Under a possible deal, Yahoo would acquire Time Warner’s AOL in exchange for the media conglomerate taking a large minority stake in the combined company, according to unidentified sources familiar with the matter. The companies could save $1 billion a year, the sources said. Talks between the companies held earlier heated up when Yahoo reapproached Time Warner about a proposal to take to its board.

Microsoft has recruited Alan Schwartz, chief executive of Bear Stearns, as well as Morgan Stanley and Blackstone Group, to help figure out a winning acquisition strategy.

Microsoft is expected to propose its own candidates for Yahoo’s board and has until March 14 to do so, but Yahoo could try to push the deadline back, the sources said. If the deadline doesn’t change, Yahoo and Microsoft could hold discussions this weekend and avoid leaks affecting their stock prices, a source said.

The sources told the Journal that Microsoft will likely end up purchasing Yahoo, despite the Time Warner and News Corp. talks.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and News Corp. continue to talk as well, discussing a deal under which News Corp. would sell its MySpace.com social network to Yahoo in exchange for a stake in the company, the report said.

Last week, Howe and I spoke about where this crowdsourcing phenomenon fits into our world. I had hoped to ask him to spell out the differences between his book and that of Surowiecki, but before I could, he had to leave to be with his family at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

That, maybe, was the chief differentiator of Howe’s discovery from James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds: that far-flung people are able to achieve great things outside the box.

He called the phenomenon “crowdsourcing,” and the term quickly caught on, joining others, like “tipping point,” “wisdom of the crowds,” “the long tail” as household phrases for the ways that things were changing all around us, often thanks to the democratizing reach of the Internet and the commoditization of tools, like high-quality digital cameras, that had previously been out of reach of most.

Crowdsourcing is also having a big impact in corporate science, through companies such as InnoCentive and YourEncore and, you know, my suspicion is that it will continue to migrate into other fields, especially creative services.

(Credit:
Daniella Zalcman)

One example you talk about where a business is getting it right is the Netflix Prize, where Netflix offered $1 million to the first person who could improve his or her recommendation engine by 10 percent. What makes that your favorite problem-solving network application?

Howe: Because it got such a robust response very quickly, and it showed what brilliance was out there in the crowd. It’s got all the elements of crowdsourcing. I was only theorizing about this two years ago, so to see practice mimic theory in this case was gratifying. And it was great to the see that the contestants were collaborating with each other, despite the fact that they were helping competition.

You talked about Gannett being one of those news organizations, right?

Howe: I think Gannett has done smart stuff. It’s the largest newspaper publisher in America, and it has made some smart community-oriented moves. But Gannett just laid off 1,000 people, so the fact that it’s engaged its readers doesn’t make it immune from market forces.

Since this meritocracy is opening up doors to everyone, how can endangered businesses like journalism save themselves?

Howe: By thinking creatively and streamlining. Journalism faces a lot of challenges. The advance of the crowd is only one of those. But smart news organizations are realizing that having their readers engaged in the media production process–in a richer, more sophisticated way–is its own end. It sells papers, it sells Web sites, it brings readers in.

In 2006, Wired magazine reporter Jeff Howe published a story about a phenomenon he’d been following in which the power of large numbers of people was being harnessed to make things happen that hadn’t been possible before outside the auspices of corporations or other big institutions.

Jeff Howe’s new book ‘Crowdsourcing,’ explores the power of people who collectively work on projects even when they’re strangers to each other.

(Credit:
Random House)

You have a lot of people who can do low-end design. You know they can create a logo. They can lay out a Web page, even though they’re not professionals. They’re adequate enough that they can make a supplementary income doing it or do it for fun, which is why photography works: because a lot of people love to take pictures.

Q: Is there a bit of a tragedy-of-the-commons element to crowdsourcing, to content on YouTube and things like that, where the 80-20 rule–that 80 percent of content is low-quality–governs?
Howe: There’s an antidote to the 80-20 rule, and it’s that the crowd filters itself. I just put up a blog post about Dell IdeaStorm, which is just a modern-day suggestion box.

The essence of crowdsourcing is to take an overwhelming task, and by breaking it up into little chunks and distributing it to a large number of people, it becomes feasible. The good ideas rise like cream to the surface.

What are the best industries for crowdsourcing?

Howe: It has totally transformed stock photography. So the question I pose in my book is, “Is stock photography the canary in the coal mine?” We might be beginning to see this with graphic design. I don’t know yet because I haven’t done the reporting on it, but it’s at least something similar.

Dell receives about 9,000 ideas, and some 500,000 people vote on them. And what those votes do is drive the best ideas up to the top. A lot of those ideas suck, but you don’t have to read them, and Dell doesn’t have to take action on them.

And the fact is they probably don’t. So those companies will get out, or they’ll get smart. As crowdsourcing continues to penetrate the mainstream, more companies will use it, but only the smart companies will succeed at it.

Howe’s book publishes on Aug. 26 and is based on a 2006 article he wrote for ‘Wired’ magazine.

What diversity of experience brings is, even if someone may not be well-versed in that subject matter, she is able to apply her expertise from another subject matter entirely and say, “Well, you know, but wait, what if we try this?” And when you have a crowd, because you have the power of large numbers, there are times that taken as a whole, they excel because they are trying so many different things all at once.

On Tuesday, Howe published his first book, appropriately titled, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. And as he prepares to storm the book world on a promotional tour, he is also giving interviews far and wide about the topic. On Tuesday alone, he writes on his blog, he will speak on 27 different radio programs around the country.

If you have the talent, you can make it. This is one of the central themes of crowdsourcing: There’s a meritocracy, where people count no matter whether they have the connections or the budget or expensive equipment. And it’s everything from astronomy to science to graphic design to photography to writing.

You wrote that diversity of experience trumps expertise. Why is that?

Howe: Well, these aren’t my ideas. I’m merely re-presenting what are pretty standard collective-intelligence principles. A diverse group of problem solvers will almost always beat a homogeneous group of problem solvers. The reason is, very smart people tend to come from the same institutions, and they tend to try to solve problems in the same way. And sometimes that works, but often, it doesn’t.

One of the elements of Howe’s defining crowdsourcing was a new understanding of how, when brought together to utilize collective intelligence, big, disparate groups of people working on a common task can be extraordinarily productive and deeply creative.

He likes to talk, for example, about how a large number of people are now able to take great photographs, thanks to their high-end but relatively inexpensive cameras. This enabled a new kind of stock photography world to emerge–one that seems to be doing away with the traditional model in which only a select few photographers could have their work collected by stock photo agencies.

So there is more opportunity?

Howe: There’s enormous opportunity for amateur filmmakers with talent. The bar is no longer, “Do I have access to 16-millimeter film or enough money to get it developed?”

Suddenly, every corporation wants the crowd to create their own ads, and that’s often a disaster. Everyone wants to throw out a shingle and create a social-networking site.

How will crowdsourcing change in the next few years?

Howe: We’re seeing Crowdsourcing 2.0 emerge, a more intelligent form of crowdsourcing. Dell is using it intelligently. But I see a lot of the early adopters getting out of it.

It’s really exemplified by MDotStrange, who literally created a feature-length movie that got screened at Sundance in his little studio apartment in San Jose, using software that he’d presumably pirated and with a budget of zero dollars. It was simply labor, and that means that the game is open to anyone.

We saw like Wal-Mart try to do this, and it created fake entries about kids who were buying Wal-Mart products. Any of us who track stuff like this thinks, “do you have no one smart in your entire organization? You’re the largest employer in the world.”

The ThinkPad W700’s case also incorporates VGA, DisplayPort, and Dual Link DVI-D connections to support larger external displays. Hard-drive options go up to 640GB of storage and include a 64GB solid-state drive (which will surely be too small for a digital content professional), and optical drive options include a Blu-ray drive.

As you might suspect, the ThinkPad W700 is intended for graphics professionals, such as those in the digital content creation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, or digital photography fields. As such, Lenovo has configured the W700 with heavy-duty components to handle complex rendering tasks. In fact, the components are so new they haven’t even been officially announced; Lenovo can only tell us the ThinkPad W700 will include a “next-generation Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processor” and the “latest Nvidia Quadro FX graphics.”

Pricing will start around $3,000; with the digitizer pad, color calibrator, and the highest-end component options, the price could reach $5,000. It seems like a lot, but we suspect the ThinkPad W700’s intended audience of graphics professionals will gladly pay that amount to have all the tools they need in one mobile workstation.

The 4.7-inch-by-3.2-inch digitizer is essentially a mini-Wacom tablet that sits next to the laptop’s touch pad. The digitizer pad can be mapped to the entire screen or to a defined area so you can manipulate images by hand. Above the digitizer pad sits an X-rite Pantone color sensor that’s capable of color-calibrating the display when the lid is closed, eliminating the need to carry a separate calibration device. True colors will be especially noticeable on the ThinkPad W700’s 17-inch WUXGA display, which offers 72 percent color gamut (meaning it can display 72 percent of the entire range of visible colors).

Set to debut on Tuesday at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, Lenovo’s new ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation is full of firsts. The 17-inch laptop is the first time ThinkPad has ventured into desktop replacement territory, and its larger-than-ever case will pack in not only the latest-generation components, but also two features we’ve never before seen on a laptop: a digitizing pad integrated into the wrist rest, and a built-in color calibrator.

In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash.

But it’s still an uphill climb for AOL. Just this week, the company confirmed that Platform-A president Curt Viebranz was departing the company amid a management shakeup.

Additionally, despite the fact that performance monitoring firms have pegged it as sluggish, Bebo’s technology was likely appealing to AOL. The social network’s developer platform supports both OpenSocial and Facebook applications; it also has an “Open Media” platform for audio and video content from big-media names like CBS and MTV as well as online production outlets like Next New Networks and Ustream. AOL, meanwhile, has opened up AIM to developers.

Read more of News.com’s coverage: “What Bebo means to AOL”

“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said AOL chairman and CEO Randy Falco in a statement. “What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities…This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”

Rumors had floated over the past few months that Bebo, which has over 40 million members, was up for sale. Reports suggested a $1 billion price tag, but there were few hints as to potential buyers. Though Bebo had already partnered with AOL’s AIM messaging client to facilitate friend-invite interoperability between the two services, even the most creative blogger speculation didn’t seem to point to AOL eventually buying the social network.

(Credit:
AOL)

Ironically, AOL itself has been talked about as an acquisition target. Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, which operates AOL, has spoken recently about plans to spin off or sell divisions of the company.

“The distribution aspect of linking up with AIM and ICQ is an extraordinary opportunity for us,” Shields said in the conference call.

In a conference call on Thursday, Falco and Ron Grant, AOL’s president and COO, as well as Bebo president Joanna Shields, said that integration between Bebo and AOL’s AIM and ICQ messaging properties will be crucial. Combined, they said, AOL will own a “social graph” of 80 million people, bigger than the 67 million that the independently-run Facebook currently counts but still significantly smaller than News Corp.’s MySpace.com.

Joanna Shields, president of the San Francisco-based Bebo, will continue to run the social network and will report to Ron Grant. The deal was brokered on AOL’s side by Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. Bebo had hired investment bank Allen & Co. when it opted to put itself up for sale.

AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched “17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008,” as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company’s international expansion strategy.

Grant estimated in Thursday’s conference call that the deal will ideally be complete within a month.

This post was expanded at 6:43 AM PT with details from the AOL-Bebo conference call.