intelmirc.com

Enabling Technology
bluBuzz, LLC
eFormic, Ltd.
HowSimple, LLC
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc.

Small Business Software and Services
Citrix Online
Liquid Media, LLC
Technicopia, LLC
Zipadi Technologies, LLC

Ensembli will be trying–as so many have before–to apply some AI to finding content on the Web and in RSS feeds for individuals.

Rafe’s five preview picks for Demo 09

Consumer Devices
Always Innovating, Inc.
Avaak, Inc.
Coveroo, Inc.

Consumer Software and Services
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.
Cc:Betty, Inc.
deskNET SA
Ensembli, Ltd.
Evri, Inc.
Gazaro, Inc.
HAM-IT, Inc.
Home-Account, Inc.
Jadoos, Inc.
Kutano Corp.
Primal Fusion, Inc.
Promptu Systems Corp.
Qubes, Inc.
Skout, Inc.
SmartyCard
Symantec Corp.
Vokle, Inc.
Xandros, Inc.
XMARKS

Transformyx makes software for corporate crisis management. There will be a lot of corporate crises this year. Looking forward to seeing what it’s introducing.

IT Management and Infrastructure
AppZero Corp.

Enterprise Software and Services
7 Billion People, Inc.
BitGravity, Inc.
Document Depository Corp., LLC
Ontier, Inc.
Purewire, Inc.
Silverstone Solutions, Inc.
Transformyx, Inc.
Zuora, Inc.

Demo 09 presenting companies

Avaak has DARPA mesh radio technology and has applied it to video for its military contracts. Its entry into the consumer market will be a personal video system. Interesting.

Desknet, it appears, is trying to build a desktop client that aggregates all your social network activities.

The biannual start-up fest Demo kicks off Sunday in Palm Desert, Calif. There will be somewhat fewer launches–only 40 — at this show than at most previous Demos, but the lineup is interesting. Here are the companies whose pitches I am most looking forward to, based on public information about them. What actually happens at the show may make this list irrelevant, but this is the early take. The full rundown of presenters is after the jump.

Qualcomm MEMS Technology may be talking about some cool new display technology.

My Mufin Player installation went smoothly, though it took a little more time than I expected, because I had to download and install the open-source SQL Firebird desktop database. But when I began importing my music collection, Mufin could only recognize metadata from files that had been originally downloaded as MP3s.

Earlier on Friday, Mufin launched its music player, which analyzes the songs in your music collection based on their audio content, rather than on human analysis or genre.

Anything I ripped or converted through iTunes simply showed up as a file name. I suspect that there is some sort of incompatibility between how iTunes and Mufin use the ID3 metadata format, but who knows? The Mufin help file offers no help on this matter.

Human analysis, naturally, is subjective, and genre labeling is totally arbitrary and unreliable–I particularly hate the meaningless label “Alternative,” which can apply to everything from dead-slow acoustic to fast punk; it’s more about the hairstyles of the artists than the content of the music.

For instance, I selected “If You Want Me,” a downbeat acoustic-guitar-laden track by Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard from the “Once” soundtrack. Mufin selected Beck’s “Sing It Again” as the most similar, followed by Beck’s “End of the Day” and “Already Dead.” (I’m sure the results would have been more diverse, if the program had had time to analyze a larger portion of my collection.)

Acid jazz and punk? The songs do actually sound similar–noisy, abrasive, lots of cymbal. This is the kind of unexpected recommendation I was hoping for, based on the sound of the music rather than the mostly artificial “genre” categories that artists and labels pick.

Mellow, meet more mellow.

For my second test, I had it analyze Cuong Vu’s avant-jazz piece “Expressions of a Neurotic Impulse.” Mufin’s top similarity: a live version of “How I Learned My Lesson” by X, followed by the Butthole Surfers’ “Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales.”

Once they work the ID3 bugs out, Mufin could become a useful piece of software. Still, I don’t see it replacing iTunes any time soon–and for that matter, neither does Mufin.

Mufin took quite a while to analyze my collection–as I write this, it’s been plugging away for about 20 minutes and is through about 700 of the 3,400 songs on my hard drive–but once it got a reasonably large data set, the recommendations were spot-on.

Once Mufin has analyzed your tunes, it can recommend similar-sounding songs from your collection. It also catalogs songs in its online database and can recommend music from its own sources, if it doesn’t find anything similar on your hard drive.

If you want to apply Mufin’s similarity engine to iTunes, the company offers a free downloadable widget that plugs into iTunes. Or you could just keep using iTunes’ Genius feature, which may not be perfect, but is built right in.

Called EnergyWise, the software is a free upgrade to Cisco Catalyst switches that can monitor and manage how energy is used on IP-connected devices, including phones and wireless routers. This summer Cisco will release a version, based on Verdiem’s Surveyor PC management software, that reduces energy levels of PCs.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced software for controlling energy use in networked computing equipment as well as building heating and cooling systems.

Other large IT vendors, like IBM, are making similar efforts to manage both IT equipment and building management systems.

“The majority of these switches in this application are in the wiring closet, touching the endpoints–the APs (access points) and the IP phones,” Choe said.

On Tuesday, Cisco said it bought a company called Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence that makes software that translates information from building equipment, such as heating and cooling systems, into a format that can be read by EnergyWise and other software applications.

Early next year, EnergyWise will be able to manage building assets, including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, and employee badge systems.

With EnergyWise, a company can set policies on energy use, allowing PCs or networking equipment to go into sleep mode after work hours, for example.

(Credit: Cisco)

Cisco is also working with Schneider Electric to tie its building management system to the EnergyWise software. But William Choe, director of Cisco’s Ethernet switching technology group, told
Light Reading that many of the energy savings for companies will occur by installing the software on smaller routers in a business.

Cisco’s longer-term plan is to get beyond tech gear and into building-automation systems.

Llamas went on to say he expects the first half of 2009 to be challenging for cell phone makers as they attempt to clear their inventory. And he said the market might not recover until later in 2009 and possibly not until 2010.

”The fourth quarter was the perfect storm of factors to produce this result,” Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst at IDC’s Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team, said in a statement. ”A combination of weak end-user demand, currency volatility, and limited credit availability prevented the market from experiencing the usual seasonal increase in shipments.”

The reason is simple: mobile operators are making a lot of money on the data services they sell with these devices. That recurring revenue stream is worth the extra subsidy.

In North America, smartphone sales were up by about 70.1 percent, and in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, sales were up about 25 percent.

Cell phone sales around the world took a nose dive in the fourth quarter, as the weakened economy hurt demand for new devices. But sales of smartphones continued to grow.

AT&T, which activated 1.9 million iPhones during the quarter, saw its wireless-data revenue grow 51.2 percent during the quarter. AT&T noted that the fourth quarter marked the 12th consecutive quarter that wireless-data revenue grew at a rate above 50 percent. And the company said its iPhone users, in particular, generate about 1.6 times more revenue than the average AT&T customer.

Moving forward, the smartphone market looks like the place to be. And Reith expects traditional manufacturers to focus attention there. He also believes that operators will try to further drive this market by increasing the subsidy on devices to spur adoption.

Meanwhile, Research In Motion, which sells several different versions of its BlackBerry devices, actually grew sales from about 6.1 million devices at the end of its fiscal second quarter to 6.7 million devices in its fiscal third quarter, which ended November 29. The company’s fiscal fourth quarter ends February 28.

“As long as operators are able to continue to subsidize these devices, and developers continue to enhance applications, then this segment will be a silver lining to an otherwise gloomy market,” Ryan Reith, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobile Phone Tracker, said in a statement.

The one bright spot in the entire market was smartphones. These devices, which use advanced operating systems and provide Internet access and other data services like e-mail, were the hottest-selling devices in the fourth quarter. Device makers grew sales of these advanced phones by 22.5 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2007, IDC reported.

Verizon Wireless reported last week that much of the growth it experienced in the fourth quarter came from data services. The average revenue per user for data services was up 27.9 percent for the quarter, compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company also said 37 percent of new retail devices sold during the quarter were smartphones.

Worldwide smartphone growth was fueled by traditional handset makers, such as Nokia, which still ranks as the No. 1 manufacturer in the world, but it also got a boost from newer players, such as Apple and Research In Motion, Reith said.

According to IDC, overall sales of cell phones in the fourth quarter were down about 12.6 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2008, manufacturers shipped a total of 289.0 million units, compared to 330.8 million units shipped during the fourth quarter a year ago.

“I think everyone, including Apple, knew the initial bump in
iPhone sales wasn’t sustainable,” Reith said. “And RIM’s success shows the importance of a diverse product portfolio, where different products with different price points are sold across multiple carriers.”

That said, Reith also noted that the fourth quarter also highlighted the need for manufacturers to diversify their product lines within the smartphone category. He used Apple as an example. In the third quarter, Apple blew the doors wide open, selling about 6.9 million new iPhones worldwide in the quarter. But shipments slowed in the fourth quarter, and the company sold only about 4.3 million new iPhones.

So what does this mean? Well, if you go to a site that uses Google Friend Connect, you can opt to use your Twitter credentials to log in to it. Then, as the official Google blog explained, you can then find which of your other Twitter friends are using the same site. Also, you can send out a “tweet” announcing that you’ve joined up.

These data portability announcements keep rolling on: On Monday, Google announced that its Google Friend Connect product, which plugs social-networking features into participating sites, is now compatible with Twitter.

What’s not on Twitter yet? Facebook Connect, the rival log-in product developed by the social network, which rolled out to a full launch on the same day as Google Friend Connect. Rumor has it that Facebook tried to buy Twitter in a failed $500 million deal. There’s still no reason to assume Twitter won’t integrate Facebook Connect, but for now, it’s just Google’s alternative.

Twitter was one of the launch partners for the MySpace Data Availability service, now known as MySpaceID. That has yet to launch, but MySpace has used Google Friend Connect to power the standard, so this could be a sign that it’s still on the way.

Did Susan attempt to contact the receiver of this spectacular raunchy photo? And why would the husband take the picture and not send it to his wife? Or his chiropractor? Or his shrink?

Hellovon, who has never posted on the Support pages before, seems to offer a more masculine response: “Your husband is lying to you. I use the iPhone with work and and needless to say we have all sorts of private documents that get sent. The iPhone has fairly reasonable security measures and would not do such a thing. Not only is your husband cheating on you, he LIED. TO. YOU. AS. WELL.”

Take a poster called Judgement from Canada: “This has definitely happened to me a couple times too. At first I thought it was just accidental with the phone being in my pocket and just jumping around, but since the first two times I have made sure I have locked it. I don’t really know how to fix it but its starting to worry me. My phone has already sent pictures to the girl I like, my grandmother as well as a buddy of mine. Thankfully none of them have been too raunchy.”

Shockingly, Susan042764 replies: “Well, if you must know … it was a close-up shot of him pleasuring himself taken at the exact moment of maximum pleasure. (I’m trying to remain G-rated here.) It’s such a good shot that one must wonder if he actually practiced it a few times before getting it right!
Add that picture to the late night phone calls and some other miscellaneous texts and e-mails that I found … and this is not the first woman … and let’s just say that my atty is working on the divorce complaint.
Nonetheless, I wanted to remain open to the possibility that it was all some big mistake (I think that he is the big mistake) and thank everyone who provided input on this discussion.”

However, there are those who are Glitch Believers.

Then someone called Eldeecee offers some brass tacks: “I feel bad for Susan, but I am morbidly curious of what the picture looks like and the end results of her findings. I must not be the only one who is wondering about that.”

So, then, venerable tech experts of the world. Is it just a little glitch? Is marriage overrated? Or is it remotely possible that Susan042764 might be pulling the Apple forum’s, um, leg?

See if you are moved by Susan042764’s question:

(Credit: CC Johan Larsson)

You might find several questions knock on the inside of your forehead having read this.

Are you prepared to help Susan042764 from New Jersey?

This drama is being played out, very publicly, on the Apple support site.

A poster called Lythic, however, is convinced that Judgement is actually her husband: “The iPhone does not have this bug. Ditch the creep.”

“Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!”

Still the Apple forumists have flocked to communicate with Susan042764.

Is this man so handsome and egotistical that he is sending raunchy pictures of himself to another woman? How did Susan042764 know that this e-mail actually went to another woman? Were the sender’s name and number clear? Did he admit to knowing this woman? And why was Susan042764 sneaking a peek at his iPhone?

Apparently, her marriage is at risk, and only your knowledge of the
iPhone can save it.

First to reply was Tamara who offers nothing but female solidarity: “Images don’t automatically attach to emails. I hope you and your husband can work things out though.”

Someone who has survived a viral beat down is Alec Baldwin. An audio recording of Baldwin calling his daughter a “pig” and other names sent the actor and his handlers into spin control. Baldwin rebounded in his role as the bumbling entertainment executive on the hit show 30 Rock.

It should be noted that the cases of Richards and Allen involved racial epithets and Bale’s did not.

The same thing happened to George Allen, the former U.S. Senator from Virginia. On videotape, he called an Indian-American a “macaca,” and pundits speculate that the incident not only cost Allen his Senate seat but also derailed any presidential hopes.

Baldwin could moonlight these days by offering public relations advice to fallen actors.

“I want you off the (expletive) set, you (expletive),” Bale says. “Think for one (expletive) second. What the (expletive) are you doing? Are you a professional or not?”

An audio recording of the tirade has gone viral and is rapidly spreading on the Web. According to reports, it is Bale’s voice lashing out at the DP for walking into his line of sight during filming. (Warning, the tirade is profanity-filled and the audio is very clear–use headphones).

At one point, Bale threatens the man, whose job it is to make Bale look good, with violence.

A clip of David O. Russell, director of Three Kings, shouting the F-word at actress Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees was a hot Internet item for a while and Russell hasn’t directed since. Michael Richards, a former cast member of the TV series Seinfeld hasn’t worked much since his 2006 comedy performance in Los Angeles saw Richards shower racial epithets at a group of hecklers. The scene was videotaped and spread wildly across the Web.

Christian Bale is about to learn the power of the Internet.

Bale, who starred as Batman in The Dark Knight and in the western 3:10 to Yuma, apparently suffered a complete meltdown last summer on the set of Terminator Salvation, screaming profanities at the picture’s director of photography.

Bale, who was once accused of assaulting his mother and sister, sounds like he needs a vacation. If this thing plays out like it has with other stars, he may get one. Film and TV fans want to believe that their screen gods are, well, nice people. If that illusion is shattered, then they often don’t want to pay to see that actor’s movies or shows. (I remember a time when all it took to wreck an actor’s career was booze and drugs).

Google has begun testing ads that accompany the suggestions that appear when people begin typing in a search query.

I use Google’s search page less and less now that I’ve begun using Chrome, whose address bar leads directly is a Google search box. Has anyone seen search ads showing in Chrome’s search results suggestion drop-down?

The text ads that appear above or to the right of search results happen to be Google’s massive profit engine, but the company also said its tests show they improve people’s search experience overall. It’s not clear whether that will prove to be the case for search ads that appear in Google Suggest, but Google has been adding all sorts of ways to make more money from its site.

Google Suggest is a feature that provides a drop-down listing possible search terms; I find it handy for completing long queries with the down arrow and the Enter key. With some people, though, Google is testing a green search ad at the top of the list, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land reported.

Fortunately, he may never need to, as it seems all-but-certain that IBM will acquire Sun, perhaps as early as this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Yes. Sun’s products complement IBM’s.
Yes. Keep a few assets, and sell the rest as scraps.
No. There are too many product overlaps.
No. Sun brings too many problems.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

I’d call that strategy a success.

IBM also contributes to open-source projects that promise to undermine the profit margins of its competitors. The company has long been a big investor in Linux, in part to help provide a common operating system for its various hardware lines, but also as a way to lobotomize several key competitors, including Microsoft…and Sun.

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But it’s not the only way to run an open-source business. IBM contributes heavily to open-source projects and groups, such as the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Linux, and other projects, almost always with the intent to either create a low-cost on-ramp to its more expensive (and proprietary) products, such as Apache Geronimo as a lead-in for IBM WebSphere.

Even so, perhaps Sun’s influence could help IBM use open source to drive adoption, not merely to create low-cost complements for its various business. Schwartz describes the Sun approach:

IBM would pick up a slew of assets in buying Sun: Java, Solaris, OpenStorage, and more. But one thing it probably doesn’t need much of is Sun’s business plan for open source. IBM already has one, and it seems to have worked very well over the years, sometimes to Sun’s detriment.

Integration, innovation and, as a result of building atop open source and commodity components, we are the low cost supplier. (Our competitors), on the other hand, will be forced into all kinds of contorted partnerships and complex reselling arrangements.

Nearly 10 years later, IBM’s decision to seed Linux has succeeded on all fronts: Linux powers much of IBM’s hardware, and Sun’s share price has fallen precipitously since 2000. Even at the 100 percent premium of $6.5 billion IBM is rumored to be willing to pay for Sun, it’s still a fraction of the $200 billion IBM would have paid for Sun in 2000.

If you’re tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, (or) running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that’s our business model: we offer utterly exceptional service, support, and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It’s a good business.

For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support–for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions (of dollars) per minute.

In a nutshell, Schwartz argues that chief information officers decide to pay for for value, and value is more than just software. Schwartz seems to be suggesting that open source makes a great complement to a larger systems business, and/or that for mission-critical tasks, CIOs will pay to ensure that a company stands behind the code.

This is all true, but it also is potentially irrelevant, as several well-placed sources within IBM and Sun have confirmed to me that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun. IBM has been among the savviest of companies, when it comes to open source and its monetization; it’s unlikely that Sun has much to teach Big Blue about making money with open-source software.

CNET News Poll Should IBM buy Sun?
Big Blue reportedly is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.4 billion. Should it?

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Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has put forward a compelling argument as to how Sun will monetize open-source software.

They may ship the boxes, but they won’t control the platform software–or profit streams…Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it.

Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM’s senior vice president of customer service and support, said that with the abundance of social-media tools on the Web, people are turning to “crowdsourced” help with customer-service issues. I don’t blame them. When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?

With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.

Twitter customer service: It’s the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its “app exchange” so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It’ll be available this summer.

(Credit:
Salesforce)

“While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else,” he said.

Salesforce's Service Cloud dashboard. Click for larger version.

Service Cloud already helps clients keep tabs on the likes of Facebook, Blogger, and Web forums.