News: July 26

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TechCrunch

Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone
Ron Conway And Paul Graham Kick Off the Social Currency CrunchUp On July 30
LearnBoost Raises $975K To Help Teachers Manage Grades And Classrooms Online
Now Legal In The U.S.: Jailbreaking Your iPhone, Ripping A DVD For Educational Purposes
Snapgoods: Like Zipcar for Gadgets
17 More Countries Get the iPhone 4 On Friday
The 2011 Ford Explorer Goes Green(er): No V8, Front-Wheel Drive, Unibody Platform, V6 Or I4 EcoBoost
Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again

Mashable

Inside the 2011 Ford Explorer Facebook Reveal
“Guy Walks Across America” in Viral YouTube Video
AT&T Expands Free Wi-Fi Program to Alleviate Data Congestion
7 Superb Podcasts for Summer Listening
HTC Desire and Nexus One Are Getting Super LCD Screens
10 Cool Crowdsourced Music Video Projects
WikiLeaks Releases Afghan War Reports in Unprecedented Leak
Antisocial Social Media: The British Monarchy Joins Flickr
Top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience

GigaOm

7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception
Swift River: Trying to Filter the Social Web Firehose
Lessons From Google: How Facebook Can Reach One Billion Users
The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
In China, Baidu Fights Google for Control of Android’s Search
Virtual Desktops Are Hot Again
What a T-Mobile iPhone Would Mean

VentureBeat

Google Apps makes new push for government customers
Intel rumored to be buying Infineon’s wireless division
Forget antennagate:Apple to launch iPhone 4 in 17 more countries on Friday
Skype founders place $6 million bet on MadBid.com
Ex-Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s second career in games
Convoke Systems raises $5.5 million to help creditors collect debt
Fashion is the new black online
WikiLeaks.org’s post of classified Afghan reports causes a furor
EC Roundup: Financial reform and the lost decade for entrepreneurs
Roundup: India eyes iPad rival, Firefox revamps tabs, and more
YouTube expands its embrace of HTML5 with new embedding style
Study shows Twitter lags other social networks in reliability, load time
Playdom CEO John Pleasants: why “social gaming” will die
Dell buys Ocarina Networks as it moves deeper into storage | VentureBeat

CNet

Feds say mobile-phone jailbreaking is OK
Plastic-bottle boat completes voyage across Pacific
Tipping cows down on the Farmville
Just say no to fake Net neutrality
New design unveiled for Terrafugia flying car
Google Apps gets a government version
New iMac, iLife coming soon?
Standard set for universal wireless charger
Web ad network: iOS 4 on half of iPhones
Chrome 6: What made the cut--and what missed it
'Tab Candy' to bring calm to Firefox's tab chaos
Android stencil kit makes your apps look sharp
Facebook says Ceglia contract was likely 'forged'
Mimicking Apple an imperative for PC makers

BusinessWeek

Markets Say Growth Trumps U.S. Deficits
Deficits Don't Matter
Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next 'Black Swan'
America's Worst Investment
Obama Cameron: The Chilly Relationship
Consumer Reports vs. Apple—Dull Beats Cool
Stockpicking Tips from Obama?
Mutual Funds' Stock Buying Hits Bull High
BP Casts Dudley as Its Rebuilder in Chief
BP Resumes Work in Preparation for Kill
Blagojevich Tried to ‘Shake Down’ Obama, Jury Told
Charlie Rose Talks to Timothy Geithner
British Wind Plans Face $15 Billion Gap
British Retail Sales Get World Cup Boost
Louisiana Has the Most Sedentary Lifestyle
GM's IPO May Require Hefty Incentives
EU Sets Sanctions on Iran in Bid to Halt Nuclear Work
Pakistan Dismisses, U.S. Condemns, War Papers Leak

AllThingsD

Certification Came Quickly After One-Click Access to Wikileaks Was Removed
EU Launches Formal Antitrust Probe Against IBM
An Emancipation Proclamation for the iPhone
New York Times: In Hollywood, Everybody's a Digital Revolutionary
Reuters: Telcos Are Winning The Cable TV Battle But Are They Losing The Broadband War?
CNet: Wasn't The Kindle Supposed to be Firewood?
New TV Tech Could Be Boon for Venture-Backed Chip Companies
Reinventing The News Room: Algorithms Aren't Evil
If Oracle Doesn’t Have an M&A Budget, Then Larry Ellison Doesn’t Have an Ego
The Boku Founders Talk About Mobile Payments, Competitors and More!
If You Tweet It, Japan Will Come
Viral Video: Song-a-Day Guy on How He Writes a Song a Day
Yelp’s Stoppelman Talks About Geo-Location, International Expansion (And Not Google)
Using Flickr Photos as a Travel Guide

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Seth Godin On Failure

I just read a whole bunch of blog posts by Seth Godin. He casually calls himself the best business blogger in the world and I believe him. I once emailed him (and he emailed me back; that does not make me special, he emails everyone back) about adding a comments section to his blog. He did not say it, but I think his attitude is, if you want to talk to me, email me directly. But now his blog posts come with the Like button. I dig that. It's good to be able to share.

Seth is a thinker. He challenges. I doubt he would be a great manager of a restaurant, for example. But we got plenty of those. We don't have enough people of the Seth Godin kind.

I really like Seth's writing style. It is so direct and obvious and simple. So when he says something profound, it does not feel complicated but rather obvious. Seth will say the darndest things.

15% changes everything
The art of seduction
Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking
The paradox of promises in the age of word of mouth
Self marketing might be the most important kind
Is everything perfect?
The management of signals
A hierarchy of failure worth following
Information about information
Upstream and downstream
Two kinds of schooling
The big sort
So easy to talk about lunch
Insubordinate... 50th anniverary free ebook
It's not my birthday
Fans, participants and spectators
Low esteem and the factory
Payola
Betting on smarter (or betting on dumber)
What's the point?

My favorite of all these posts: A hierarchy of failure worth following.

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Zynga: The Google Of Games?

Image via CrunchBase

That is common practice. To use a well known entity as a metaphor. At an event I attended during Internet Week, an entrepreneur on the panel said, "We are the Netflix for fashion." You don't buy dresses, you rent them. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) That is a great way to describe your company. If your company is not very well known, it makes sense to use a well known company as a metaphor. I'd love to be able to say about this blog, we are the Zynga of blogging (we are not, I am not), because Zynga, let's face it, is a well known name and it is huge. At the layperson level people probably are more familiar with the Farmville name than Zynga, but Zynga is big. So you have to ask, what's going on here?

New York Times: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

Mark Pincus, Zynga’s 44-year-old founder....... he had set out to build an enduring Internet icon, one that was synonymous with fun. ..... There has to be more than “a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal ...... the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was “like search before Google came along.” ..... the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook ...... While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. ....... the games are free to everyone ...... has been profitable since shortly after its founding. ...... investors, including Google and the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, have put about $520 million into the company ...... Zynga has been valued at more than $4.5 billion ..... Silicon Valley’s next billionaire .... “He has nailed the next killer app, the next compelling thing that’s going to happen” in media. ...... Six million Facebook users, who grew tired of constant updates about their friends’ games, joined a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” ...... Facebook started restricting the messages, and Zynga’s traffic dropped sharply. ..... little effect on revenue because many players who dropped out didn’t buy virtual goods. ..... about four times larger than its nearest rival, Electronic Arts. Playdom is third ...... Pincus is something of an aging whiz kid. ..... A serial entrepreneur, he sold his first company, Freeloader, an early Internet broadcast service, for $38 million, and took public his second, a business software maker called Support.com. ........ talks of building a “digital skyscraper” ..... a visionary leader. ..... also known for his sharp elbows and irreverent style ..... brags about being fired from a consulting firm job for having little patience with his bosses. ...... “I didn’t believe in paying dues” ...... open about his distrust of many venture capitalists ...... a Silicon Valley firm turned down an investment in Zynga, telling him he was “not coachable.” ......"I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away." ...... “As the company has had more exposure and visibility, I have had to realize that more people take what I say seriously” ..... Twenty to 30 percent of visits to Facebook are to play games .... When Mr. Pincus first envisioned Zynga, most investors and peers doubted that a gaming start-up could become the next big thing. .....“Zynga has the most revenue, growth and happy customers of any three-year-old venture we’ve ever backed,” says John Doerr

Farmville was the next big thing because Farmville offered Facebook users that Facebook itself did not. Sitting down to catch up or talk serious topics can be socializing, but you can't do that all the time. That is why people play board games.

And traditional video games were missing a big point: the Internet. There was email before Hotmail, but they all missed a big point: the Internet.

There were other online games, but many of them were solitary exercises. To Farmville social is fundamental. Social has been as big a trend as search, and Zynga respected that.

And there has been the interactivity part. Playing Farmville is a very different experience from blogging. It is very different from taking pictures and sharing.

Free might not count for innovation, but it is. It is a big one. What if you did not have to download anything to play Second Life? What if it had been free? Keeping the game free has been fundamental to Farmville's growth.

There has been a monetization fit. Yahoo did display ads, fine. But Google could not have done that. Ads on Google had to act like search results to make sense. Similarly Farmville monetization had to be part of the gaming experience. There has been a great fit.

Pincus is not 22. Zuckerberg is not the norm in entrepreneurship. Most - the vast majority of - entrepreneurs are closer in age to Pincus than to Zuckerberg although the media will have you believe otherwise. I think Mark Pincus' age is an important detail in this story.

Pincus has had a track record of giving the finger. Out of the box thinking requires that. Bloomberg got fired too. And so he went ahead and started a company. Got to do something. What are you going to do with all that nervous energy?

Gaming as a basic fabric of the web experience, wow.

Every human activity ever, if you can figure out a way to take it online, there is a business model for that.

And there is room for reinvention. Believe it or not, Geocities was my first blogging platform. It was simple enough. But then platforms like Blogger came along and blogging took off. Geocities was a community before Facebook was a community. Facebook did not invent community, it reinvented it.

Farmville is a reinvention of gaming. The question to ask is, can Zynga re-reinvent gaming? Will it still be hot five years from now? Google is still around and fairly hot. Android and Chrome alone make it pretty cutting edge, I think.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me

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News: July 25

Image via CrunchBase

ReadWriteWeb

Less Than 1 Year Until The Internet Runs Out of Addresses
Facebook Credits: The World's First Global Currency?
70,000 Blogs Shut Down by U.S. Law Enforcement
Facebook Like Moves Beyond the Dumb Grunt, Adds Comments to Like Button
YouTube Begins Experimenting With HTML5 Embedable Player

TechCrunch

Firefox Just Perfected Tabbed Browsing. It's Like Apple's Expose Plus Spaces For The Web
A New Version Of Google Chrome Now Due Every Six Weeks
NY, NJ Parking Lots Sign Up to Charge Electric Vehicles
Pinning Down Zynga’s Revenues Is Like Playing Pin The Tail On The Bullet Train
Wisconsin: Land of Beer, Cheese, and…Startups
Big Money: AOL’s Beauty Pageant With Google, Microsoft For New Search Deal
Twitter Nabs Google’s Lead Android Evangelist. Next Target: Students
VH1 Will Be Promoting Foursquare On National Television All Summer Long
Jon Miller On New MySpace: “It’s Rock And Roll”

Mashable

HOW TO: Put Facebook’s “Like” Button on Any Website
Mashable Readers Choose Real Books Over E-books
Tab Candy: Firefox Invents a Better Way to Manage Tabs [VIDEO]
Should Facebook Add a Dislike Button?

AllThingsD

Weekend Viral Video: Mark Zuckerberg Gets the Kid-Glove Treatment From ABC’s Sawyer
A Facebook With Privacy?
Is the State Department’s Tweeter-in-Chief Headed to Google?
AT&T: Enterprise Loves the iPad
Dell to Pay $100 Million to Settle SEC Claims

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$35 PC

This is simply put awesome. This excites me like the Chrome OS got me excited when I first heard about it. Looks to me like my IC vision is coming to fruition with me simply keeping up with the news. Between the Chrome OS, the $35 PC and the spectrum bids in India, there is only one missing piece to the puzzle: how do you bring the costs of internet access down drastically by serving ads? How about bringing it down to zero? Maybe that will be a Chrome browser innovation.

Indian Railways
How To Date An Indian: Andrea Miller
India Broadband Spectrum Bids
Dropio's Indian Cofounder Darshan

This $35 price goes down to $10 when you mass produce it, and it goes down to zero if you splash ads on the back of the computer. I think plenty of companies will pay $10 to be permanently placed on the back of your computer.

The iPad Is No Laptop Killer
The iPad
iPad

Finally a tablet I am excited about.

India's $35 PC is the Future of Computing PC World will replace the bloated desktop and laptop hardware architectures in use today. .... runs on a variation of Linux. It has no internal storage ..... a Web browser... can also run on solar power.....far exceeding the $100 laptop developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ..... makes the $500 iPad seem significantly over-priced. ..... economy of scale will allow it to push the price down to $10 ......the iPad has also been embraced by corporations and is widely used as a portable computing platform for business professionals. .... What businesses need is a simple, cheap device that uses a secure cloud connection to keep data where it belongs and keep workers up and working without the down time of expensive, failure-prone hardware.
$35 computer taps India's huge low-income market Christian Science Monitor targets a vast, untapped market of 1.2 billion people. ..... ncludes an Internet browser, a multimedia player, a PDF reader, and video conferencing ability. .... its biggest attraction is the price: $35. ..... a thrilling prospect for the future of global education ...... how technology and ultra-cheap innovations are bringing new options to India’s 1.2 billion people, whose per capita income is $1,030. ..... by 2020 rural markets in India will grow to $500 to $600 billion from the current $487 million. ..... the nearly 742 million people across rural India are pushing retail demand faster than urban areas and accounting for more than 60 percent of the national demand ..... In 2008, Tata launched the world’s cheapest car – the bubble-shaped Nano – priced at $2,500. Its low-cost engineering fulfilled the aspiration of millions of moped-riding Indians for whom a four-wheel drive was far out of reach. The same company last year launched the Swach water purifier – its two models priced at 749 rupees ($16) and 999 rupees ($21) – with the promise of providing clean drinking water to millions of India’s poor. ..... The price of the new computer is expected to fall to $10 in the coming years
India unveils world's cheapest tablet computer at $35; may drop to $10 New York Daily News From the country that brought you the $2,000 open-heart surgery and $2,127 car comes the latest bargain – a supercheap, touch-screen computer..... The Linux-based tablet appears to do most things an $499 iPad can do - but at a fraction of the cost: Internet browsing, word processing, video conferencing and more..... Research teams at India's leading technical institutes - the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science -developed the tablet to compete with a $100 computer developed at MIT ..... part of India's initiative to modernize its schools
India's $35 tablet - vaporware or the real deal? ZDNet (blog) potential ODM interest in Taiwan to manufacture these devices at scale.
India unveils prototype of $35 tablet computer The Associated Press looks like an iPad, only it's 1/14th the cost .... India, which is home to the 100,000 rupee ($2,127) compact Nano car, the 749 rupees ($16) water purifier and the $2,000 open-heart surgery. ... $100 laptop .... India rejected that as too expensive and embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a cheaper option of its own. ...... Sibal turned to students and professors at India's elite technical universities to develop the $35 tablet after receiving a "lukewarm" response from private sector players. He hopes to get the cost down to $10 eventually. ..... The tablet doesn't have a hard disk, but instead uses a memory card, much like a mobile phone. The tablet design cuts hardware costs, and the use of open-source software also adds to savings .... several global manufacturers, including at least one from Taiwan, have shown interest in making the low-cost device ..... India plans to subsidize the cost of the tablet for its students, bringing the purchase price down to around $20. .... government subsidies or dual marketing — where higher-priced sales in the developed world are used to subside low-cost sales in markets like India — ..... the device could send a shiver of cost-consciousness through the industry. .... an ambitious education technology initiative by the Indian government, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to India's 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online.
India's Rs.1500 laptop a godsend for students Sify a built-in key board, a 2 GB RAM memory, Wi-Fi connectivity, USB ports and is powered by a 2-watt system for use in power deficit areas. ..... will support functions like video web conferencing facility, and multimedia content viewing. .... hopes to bring down the price to $10 after the device is mass produced. .... the ministry is reported to be in discussions with entrepreneurs, private firms and industries. .... One motherboard was reportedly designed by a student of Vellore Institute of Technology under his B.Tech project
India unveils Rs 1500 computing device Hindustan Times writing and storing text, browsing the internet and viewing videos

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Chrome OS: Round The Corner?

Image via Wikipedia

I am excited about the Chrome OS netbooks the way I never was able to get about the iPad. I hope they show up sooner rather than later. I have been saying for years now, the browser is all you should need.

I guess I am a Google fanboy the way some people are Apple fanboys.

TechCrunch: Forget All These Android Tablets, Let Me At That Chrome OS

e a tolerable replacement for a netbook or laptop ..... Chrome OS is a browser OS, and that will always be the focus. ..... Google will want this to be the simplest and cleanest browser experience out there. ..... Less need for storage and storage control, plus less demand on the CPU and other components means that the entire thing can be thinner and run cooler. .......a lightweight OS will always do more with fewer resources ...... Really instant on. All that really needs to be loaded into active memory is display, a blank browser page, and the wireless/IP stack. ..... a single-service device, crossed with the versatility of that single service ...... Chrome OS will offer a browser that you hold in your hand. ..... It’s a window into the web, and that’s all. ..... Viewing this rich, wonderful Internet of ours on a screen less than 7″ seems like self-flagellation to me. ...... the elegance and simplicity of the window into the web I hope Chrome OS will be.

Google's Nexus One Exit Has Chrome OS Implications OStatic (blog) Google has announced that it has received its final shipment of Nexus One phones and will be exiting its Nexus One phone business altogether ... the Nexus One sold in the neighborhood of 150,000 units .... In a matter of weeks, Google will be introducing Chrome OS to the world. Like Android, it's an open source OS, but is aimed at netbooks.

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Ghajini: Tu Meri Adhuri Pyas

Go Outside: Cults