The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘take-the-deal’

If your carrier offered to take a hefty chunk of change off the cost of a mobile handset be it that you let them put advertisements on the home screen, would you take the deal? Nokia thinks you might.

Our source deep within Nokia’s headquarters has just leaked us a bunch of information about the company’s future operating system release, Maemo “Harmattan”. It’s jam-packed full of unexpected twists, including their new-found love for home screen ads.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

With our Silicon Valley screening a success, we’re looking ahead to where else we can spread our geekiness. TechCrunch Screenings is heading to Tel Aviv.

This Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows. Keep an eye for a follow-up post tomorrow evening Israel time for the sign-up link. Thanks to Jay Yun from Trapster, we’ve got photos of the Screening and Meetup in Silicon Valley after the jump.

Thanks to the sponsors that helped make this screening possible:

Kenshoo is an innovator in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) technology and applications with offices in Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco. MetaCafe, an independent online video site, makes it easy to find videos from top content creators - and help discover new ones. Conduit offers an on-demand Marketing Platform that helps more than 180,000 web publishers put their content and applications on a branded community toolbar to increase their site traffic, revenue and brand loyalty.

And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

Star Trek Screening and Meetup - Silicon Valley




Also, thanks to our sponsors that supported the screening in Silicon Valley. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, bought everyone a soft drink at the theater. Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), bought everyone popcorn. SugarSync, a digital life management service that lets user back-up, sync and access documents, photos and music across all of their devices. And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Microsoft’s Silverlight product is most directly a competitor of Adobe Flash. But that’s not who they’re calling out in some data they sent our way today. Instead, the company (or at least their PR firm) is noting that with 300 million installs of Silverlight 2, the platform is installed on more machines around the world than the web browsers Firefox, Safari and Chrome — combined. Damn. Them fightin’ words.

Of course, that also not-so-subtly speaks to Microsoft’s own web browser, Internet Explorer, being by far the biggest in the world — despite falling market share. But it’s a bit odd for Microsoft to call all those other browsers out since Silverlight not only works on all of them, but to some extent needs them, if it’s to survive.

What’s impressive in Silverlight’s big install number is that it’s just for version 2, which was only released about 6 months ago. That was undoubtedly thanks largely to a few huge events that used the Silverlight platform to stream on the web recently: notably, March Madness and President Obama’s Inauguration. And Microsoft is going to need those kind of deals if it’s going to be able to compete with its aforementioned real competitor: Flash, which has something ridiculous like a 99% adoption rate on U.S. web-connected computers.

One of those big partnerships for Silverlight was Major League Baseball’s MLB.com live-streaming service. But back in November, the league announced it would drop Silverlight in favor of Flash. The stated reason was the Flash performs better, though specifics weren’t given. Since that time however, Microsoft has released the beta version of Silverlight 3 and even won an Emmy for the Olympics coverage last summer.

Microsoft estimates that some 300,000 developers and designers are working on the Silverlight platform. But it’s still going to be about big time partnerships in getting people people to use it instead of, or at least along with Flash. I fall into that latter category for that very reason. I have Silverlight on my computer simply to be able to stream Netflix movies. That’s a huge partnership for the platform, and one that isn’t likely to go away considering that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on Microsoft’s board of directors.

Microsoft recently revamped its Silverlight blog and is looking for feedback on it.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

OpenID is getting a big boost today as Facebook goes live with its support as a relying party for the standard. It’s a major win for OpenID, which has long had to deal with major companies only half-heartedly embracing the standard, sometimes announcing support to reap the press coverage only to let the effort languish for many months. Facebook announced its intended support of OpenID in April, and less than a month later they’ve delivered.

So what changes for users? You’ll now be able to link your Facebook account with your Gmail account, along with those from other OpenID providers. This means that if you’ve logged in to Gmail to check your messages, and you pop over to Facebook, you won’t have to sign in with your Facebook username - you’ll already be logged in. New Facebook members will also be able to register with their Gmail accounts.

Now, Facebook isn’t the first major company to hop on board the OpenID movement - we’ve seen announcements from Google, Microsoft, and a bevy of others. But for the most part these are only signing on as “issuing parties”, which means they’ll let you log in with their accounts on other OpenID supporting sites. But they’re not “relying parties”, which means that they won’t accept OpenID logins created through other services. In other words, Google is happy to let you use your Gmail account to log in to Facebook, but you can’t use your OpenID-enabled Microsoft ID to login to a Google service.

Depending on how much Facebook promotes the new feature, it could help OpenID get broader recognition than it currently has (most people have no idea what it is, and many of us who do still find it more than a little confusing). But even if it does see wide use on Facebook, don’t expect big players like Google or Yahoo to follow suit and become relying parties any time soon.

Facebook has really been a relying party since its inception - there’s never been a “Facebook ID” because you’ve always used your university Email (or more recently, your personal Email) to log in. So the site isn’t really sacrificing anything by enabling OpenID support. The likes of Google and Microsoft have build many services tied to their own proprietary accounts, and they’re going to be far more hesitant to give those up.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors