fm984.net

Possible primary rivals include State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a former Silicon Valley exec who founded SnapTrack, a cell phone locating company, and sold it to Qualcomm for $1 billion in January 2000. Another GOP rival is expected to be Tom Campbell, a former U.S. congressman and dean of the business school at University of California at Berkeley.

(Credit:
eBay)

Likely contenders for the Democratic nomination include Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was already governor 30 years ago, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Whitman, 53, will become a leading Republican candidate to succeed outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will retire because of term limits.

Meg Whitman

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is expected to officially declare her candidacy for governor of California on Tuesday.

Whitman stepped down as CEO of eBay in March 2008, a decade after she transformed the company from a tiny auction site to an Internet icon. During her tenure, the company’s split-adjusted share price leaped from just over $1 to a 2004 peak of almost $60, before plummeting to a recent price of under $14.

Whitman, who has never served an elected public office, will announce her bid for the Republican nomination in 2010 during a speech in Fullerton, Calif. She will reportedly campaign on a platform of cutting state spending by $15 billion and reducing the state’s workforce by 17 percent.

In the past year, the billionaire Internet executive has taken a more high-profile role in the Republican Party. Whitman served as an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and endorsed him during a speech at the party’s convention in St. Paul, Minn., last year.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET) If there is a record for the number of times an application can be rejected by Apple, Ninjawords might have a shot. The dictionary app was denied access three times due to “objectionable” words users could find in its dictionary.

(Credit:
South Park Studios)

(Credit:
R7 Developers) CastCatcher Internet Radio was enjoying its placement in Apple’s App Store until the company decided to release version 1.3. The new iteration was rejected by Apple for a strange reason.

Apple’s rejections of apps accused of infringing a patent or copyright make sense to most industry insiders. But some App Store rejections have raised quite a few eyebrows.

South Park
“South Park” might be an extremely popular animated television show, but it just doesn’t have what it takes to make it into the App Store.

In one fell swoop, a Web firestorm erupted. Journalists started questioning why Apple would reject the app. Consumers felt disenchanted. And the Federal Communications Commission decided to investigate.

Nullriver's NetShare app was here and gone.

Apple wrote in a letter to CastCatcher’s developer, Amro Mousa, that the application’s update was rejected because it transferred “excessive volumes of data over the cellular network.” Mousa was a little perplexed by Apple’s decision to suddenly deny the application access to the store, considering that the new version of the app didn’t transfer more data than previous, approved versions. Worst of all, Mousa said, his app was using the same amount of data as competing streaming-radio applications.

Apple didn’t reject the South Park iPhone app once; it rejected it twice because of “potentially offensive” content included in the app. The application featured several clips from the long-running show. Boing Boing reported that Apple did tell South Park’s creators that it might eventually allow the application into its store, since its policies have evolved in the past. According to the company, it didn’t originally allow explicit lyrics into iTunes, but it now does.

At first, the application was made available in the App Store for $9.99. But Apple promptly removed the application from its store. NetShare’s removal is suspected to be related to wireless carrier AT&T’s agreement with Apple over use of its data network.

Frustrated programmers have highlighted what they believe to be double standards, strange policies, and flip-flopping among Apple’s App Store guards.

Current status: It’s available on your television, and it has won an Emmy, but you won’t find “South Park” on your iPhone because of its “offensive” content. Yikes.

The objectionable content Apple was referring to came from “The Downward Spiral,” a 1994 Nine Inch Nails album, which was played in the app. That album contains explicit mentions of sexual activity.

FreedomTime

(Credit:
Mac-Addict)

Current status: After having some discussions with Apple, a Eucalyptus developer wrote on the company’s blog that Apple had relented and would allow the full version of the app, Kama Sutra and all, into the App Store. It’s currently available for $9.99.

Apple rejected the application on the grounds that it was “defaming, demeaning, or attacking political figures.” That’s an App Store no-no, evidently.

Freedom Time takes on former President Bush.

Lessons learned

CastCatcher

Current status: The events surrounding Google Voice’s absence from the App Store are still unclear. AT&T says it was not involved in an approval decision, and Apple said it didn’t actually reject the application from the store. In a statement, the company said its review of the app is still under way. It doesn’t look like this will be over any time soon.

Several developers whose applications have been rejected from the store, which hosts third-party software developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch, have published their correspondence with Apple.

Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor has embraced technology and the social Web unlike many other artists in the music industry. Perhaps that’s why it was so shocking that his band’s iPhone app update was denied access to the App Store for, what Apple called, “objectionable content.”

In an attempt to highlight–and perhaps make some sense of–a few of the more questioned rejections, I’ve compiled a list of those that caused me to scratch my head.

Current status: FreedomTime is still not available in the App Store. In its place, a Web site has been built to countdown the number of days former President Bush has been out of office.

Pull My Finger was sophomoric, for sure. The app allowed users to “pull its finger.” When they did, it played a sound mimicking flatulence. Apple blocked the application from entering the App Store because it had “limited utility” to the community. It seemed believable. But when one considers that the store is filled with absurd applications, Pull My Finger might have fit in quite well.

Ninjawords’ developers were desperate to get their app into the store, so they removed as many objectionable words as possible within a reasonable time frame. Their app was rejected again for containing fewer, but still some offensive, words.

After Ninjawords’ developers worked out some design issues, which Apple requested, the company rejected the application again, after finding that the dictionary contained vulgar words that “could be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod Touch users.”

Current status: After realizing that it allows at least several useless applications into its store, Pull My Finger was eventually accepted and offered in Apple’s Store. It’s currently on sale for 99 cents.

Current status: Eventually, Mousa and Apple were able to reach a middle ground, and new versions of the application were allowed into the App Store. CastCatcher 1.4.4 is currently offered in Apple’s store for $1.99.

Current status: The application was allowed access to the App Store after removing any word that might be construed as objectionable. It’s currently on sale for $1.99 in the App Store.

Ninjawords

Current status: The Nine Inch Nails update was eventually allowed into the App Store after Apple realized its double standard. The full, unedited content is available in the Store.

The app featured President Bush on an analog clock as it counted down until President Barack Obama’s inauguration. When users clicked on the President’s body, it played so-called “truthisms,” clips from speeches President Bush had given about leaving office.

In a letter sent to Eucalyptus developers, Apple said that the app was denied because it gave users access to “objectionable” material. If the developers removed the Kama Sutra from its book listings, Apple would have allowed the app into the Store.

But in the end, determining what Apple will allow into its App Store isn’t an exact science. Developers want better direction from Apple on what types of applications will get approved for–and remain in good standing with–its App Store. Until the parameters are clearer, and the approvals and rejections are consistent, they will continue to face the risk of seemingly arbitrary rejection.

Although that might be enough for some to agree with Apple, it’s worth noting that the same exact album, unedited, was already available in the iTunes Store.

Google Voice
Google Voice is an application that allows users to to assign a single number to their home, office, and mobile phones. It was denied access to Apple’s App Store, along with already-approved third-party applications that used Google Voice to work.

The rejection led to outcry on the Web, as comparisons were drawn between software bundled with Mac OS X and those applications that users can install on their Macs that mimic or improve those bundled applications. To some, there was no difference.

CastCatcher is still in the App Store.

The shock starts here

Pull My Finger
Catalog this under the Apple-needs-to-find-humor-in-apps-to-accept-them category.

Current status: Although Podcaster is still not available in the App Store, a Podcaster-like application called RSS Player Podcast Client currently allows users to download more than 10,000 podcasts. That said, it doesn’t let users search for podcasts through the app (another Apple request). It costs 99 cents.

South Park won't see the App Store.

Ninjawords is (finally) in the App Store.

Current status: Nullriver’s NetShare is not available in the App Store and will likely never make its way to the store. Internet tethering is a feature that’s built into the iPhone’s latest system software and will be made available to AT&T customers later this year, meaning that NetShare would be duplicating existing functionality–another App Store no-no.

Podcaster
Podcaster was an app that allowed users to download their favorite podcasts without using iTunes to do it. After submitting the app to the store, Podcaster developers received notice that their app was denied access because it “duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET) In a political statement, a group of developers created an application called FreedomTime, to count down the days left until former President George W. Bush has been out of office.

Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus, an e-book reader app, was denied access to Apple’s App Store after the company found that it allowed users to read the Kama Sutra. The ancient book on sexuality was downloaded from Project Gutenberg, which the app used to acquire books.

NetShare
Prior to the release of the iPhone 3GS, one of the most requested iPhone features was tethering, or using the phone’s wireless connectivity to connect another device to the Internet. Nullriver’s NetShare application provided the modem-like functionality last year.

Although this is just a short list of many applications that have been denied access to the App Store, there’s a common thread among the rejections: Apple wants nothing to do with apps that can be found “objectionable,” have functionality similar to Apple-built features, or might conflict with a contract it has established with AT&T or other partners.

So the Presently strategy is to sell companies an architecture they can get behind today and will presumably be there for them when they drop their objections to running a corporate communications system through a hosting service. But the company will have to wean its customers off the installed software and back to the hosted service, and there’s no way that will be easy.

And, of course, Sacks is happy to rattle off the advantages of focusing on the service-based product model: No tedious and expensive upgrade distributions; no need to support legacy users who don’t upgrade; the freedom to spend 100 percent of product development on one version of the product (and features for it); and the speed with which updates can be rolled out to customers.

Regardless of the feature comparisons, and even regardless of numbers of current customers, I give the strategic nod to Yammer, because it’s not building for today’s market, but tomorrow’s, and it has the resources to wait it out. The whole enterprise Twitter space may collapse (if, for example, Twitter releases a strong business-focused service on its own), but if it does survive, over the long term, it looks like Yammer is better positioned to slide into the market that will be.

I recently talked to execs from two companies that do exactly the same thing but in completely different ways. In one corner, Yammer, the 2008 TechCrunch50 darling. It’s a Twitter-for-the-enterprise service that’s hosted by Yammer. Any company can get its employees on to the service, but all the data is run through, and hosted by, Yammer itself.

Naffis does believe that, “Over time, customers will get more comfortable with data in the cloud.” But, he says, “a lot of these large companies are not there yet. Maybe in three to five years.”

Yammer has stopped work on the hosted version of the product and is now aligned completely around the SaaS service. Sacks cites a few Fortune 1000 customers using the product, like AMD. The market for his type of communications service is not as big as he wants it to be yet, but, he says, “It’s big enough to support us today.”

Yammer has the strategic advantage in the hosted-vs-software model due to its deeper pockets (it raised $5 million in venture funds), which allows it to bet on the future instead of selling products based on today’s architecture.

Which is better? Dave Naffis, co-founder of Presently maker Intridea, told me that most of his customers are on the self-hosted version. “They try the SaaS (software as a service) version briefly then install the on-premises version. Over 70 percent of our customers are hosting internally,” he says. Presently is installed at more than 50 companies, he claims.

I don’t have enough information to judge the products on purely technical merits. Corporate customers will want to talk to Yammer and Presently reps themselves to see which service they’re more comfortable with when it comes to scalability, reliability, and security.

In the other corner, Presently (found at Present.ly), another Twitter-for-the-enterprise product. Customers can use Presently in the cloud, just like Yammer, but the company makes its money from, and has most of its users on, its software that customers can install on their own networks, “inside the firewall,” as they say.

Meanwhile, Yammer, which has more funding, has dropped its downloadable software strategy entirely. CEO David Sacks did tell me that early in the young company’s life he heard the reservations of corporate IT guys about running a service like this off-site. His company announced that it would create a downloadable version of Yammer.

Given what Naffis’ customers are saying and paying for, it’s understandable that he’s going in the software direction. Just announced is a new self-install kit: Companies can sign up for free online and get a 30-day free trial license for the Linux version of the software (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS 5). There’s a predictable, one-time license fee of $2,000 (for up to 1,000 users) with maintenance fees running 5 percent to 20 percent a year on top of that, depending on services needed.

Yammer keeps getting better, but its critical advantage is its architectural philosophy.

I didn’t really like Yammer when it launched a year ago. In fact, I liked Presently a lot more and awarded it a special Webware 100 award in 2009. I felt Yammer was too spare. Since then, Yammer has added features (such as integration with Twitter), and rolled out more client apps, including one that embeds Yammer into enterprise e-mail client Outlook. It’s a much better service now than it was when it launched.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But over time, Sacks says, he came to believe that all his clients were all going to get with the program on cloud-based computing eventually. And, he says, Yammer-as-a-service started selling. The service costs $3 to $5 per user per month, depending on features needed.

But here’s what’s good about it: After a year and a half of public scrapping, behind-the-scenes drama, and dysfunctional communications through leaks to the press, Microsoft and Yahoo now can get back to business.

The company clearly wants to make a third big business out of its online operations to complement its Windows and Office cash cows. Getting Yahoo’s search technology and Web site traffic gives it a better stronghold but by no means a victory.

The companies also gave themselves two full years to fully implement the deal, too, so there’s time to work out such details. In the meantime, Yahoo can’t afford to stand still. SearchMonkey is one element of a new hybrid search page that Yahoo said it will start testing with its users starting in August.

Investors panned Yahoo’s search and advertising deal with Microsoft on Wednesday, sending Yahoo’s stock down 12 percent. IDC’s analysts called it a “strategic mistake.”

Some awkwardness remains where those two visions overlap. One is the work Yahoo has done to augment search results through a program called SearchMonkey, which can interpret tags on others’ Web sites so they can be spruced up with new information when those pages appear in search results. To work, it requires the cooperation of the Web crawlers that index the contents of Web pages and the servers that present the search results.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, has shown herself to be a pragmatist who prefers picking her battles. With the Microsoft deal, she’s chosen to sit a big one out, freeing the company from having to out-Google Google. What the company sacrifices in ambition it gets back in goals that are actually attainable.

Nobody will notice any difference immediately from the outside. First comes regulatory scrutiny, with the companies hoping for approval in early 2010. But already, the deal provides a framework that should make it easier for the companies to establish their new identities.

Yahoo plans to make its search pages more like its main page.

To me, that looks like the sort of chore that will require Microsoft and Yahoo to work together in search. Fortunately, Microsoft and Yahoo have a 100-page playbook that had better address such aspects, and Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi declared Wednesday he likes the SearchMonkey approach.

The Microhoo concept has been reduced from a giant cloud of uncertainty hanging over both companies to merely a complicated partnership between two rivals with Google as a common foe. The range of possibilities for Microsoft and Yahoo, which ran all the way from nothing to Yahoo disappearing altogether, has been pruned back to a much more manageable scope.

For Microsoft, though, the struggle against Google becomes more intense. The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft still is half what Google has, and the fact that Wednesday’s Yahoo pact is smaller in scope than some earlier possible incarnations means Microsoft has that much more hard work before it.

With Microsoft acquiring license to Yahoo’s search technology, applying its search-ad auction process to both companies’ searches, and offering jobs to many Yahoo employees, it appears Redmond is carrying more of the Ph.D.-intensive fight to Google. Yahoo, keeping its display advertising business and focusing on its home page redesign, becomes more of a hub for people’s online activity and platform for outside Web sites’ developers.

Yahoo’s new search results page include not only SearchMonkey, but also display advertising and the key element of its new home page, a customizable list of applications down the left side. The search results themselves become just part of a broader package, so Yahoo outsourcing the actual search engine duties to Microsoft isn’t giving away as much of the core business.

There’s some important context for these changes and for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal: search results are growing beyond the plain list of 10 hyperlinks with accompanying snippets of text. Google, for example, blends in ever larger quantities of “universal” search results such as maps, YouTube videos, photos, and news.

Outsourcing search has a cost, of course. The partnership means Yahoo will get only 88 percent of search-ad revenue on its sites for the first five years, down from 100 percent today. Yahoo, though, also gets lower operational expenses and thus, it expects, greater profitability over the long term. Yahoo expects $275 million more each year in operating cash flow.

I found out Thursday that AT&T hasn’t been very nice to me.

AT&T charges an iPhone user with a service that's not available on the iPhone.

I brought this up to Gilbert and we found out that I’ve been paying for that service since forever (the last bill kept on the record, May 2008, also showed that I paid for it.)

And this didn’t happen twice, first when I purchased the iPhone 3G in August 2008 and the second time when I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS just a while ago.

I called the company’s customer service as there was a noticeable increase on my August bill. A helpful customer representative named Gilbert immediately took care of the false charge without much ado. While waiting for him to get the job done, I ran through my online bill and found a monthly charge of $9.99 for MobileTV service, which I had no idea existed in my plan.

I’ve been a customer of AT&T ever since 2003, when I got myself my first cell phone ever, and I’ve been a very good one. The proof: I set my bill to autopay from day one and even convinced a few friends to move to AT&T (mostly so that we don’t have to use the minutes to talk to each other.)

I asked him for a copy of the policy, but he told me I needed to go to a store to get a copy of that. I tried to find that online but none of the AT&T’s terms of service mentioned anything about the refund policy. In doing this I, by the way, couldn’t find any place where the company’s terms of service would enforce the fact that customers must be informed on what they pay for, either.

Anyhow, what bothers me the most is the fact that when you get the iPhone, the AT&T (or Apple) representatives who sign you up will inform you that you’ll need to pay for a unlimited data plan and there’s no way out of it. They then go ahead and change your phone plan to meet this requirement. Yet, at the same time, in my case, they didn’t remove or even inform me about a subscription-based service already on my plan that I wouldn’t be able to use with the iPhone.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

I tried to reach AT&T for comment and further information on its policy, but so far my call hasn’t been returned.

MobileTV is a service available only to select AT&T smartphones. The service is generally included on the new handset as a trial. I must have accidentally subscribed to it way back when I was still using the AT&T Tilt (I moved to the iPhone 3G in August 2008) as, honestly, I didn’t recall even trying this; I hardly ever watch TV. The sad truth is I wouldn’t have been able to use MobileTV at all for more than a year even if I had wanted to, as the service has never been available to the iPhone.

In the meantime, if you use AT&T, make sure you check your bill once in a while, because chances are you might be paying for something you can’t use at all.

If only AT&T had a policy to make sure its customers know what is in their plan so that unsuspecting ones like me won’t have to waste $10/month for something that’s never used. Hopefully this will change in the future.

I explained that to Gilbert and asked if I could be refunded in full for the time I obviously couldn’t use the service. After taking some time to talk to his manager, he told me that according AT&T’s policy he could only refund me up to three months. “Basically if you don’t wanna change anything on your plan after three months, that means you are happy with it,” Gilbert added.

A few years ago a similar GSM cracking project was embarked upon but was halted before it was completed after researchers were intimidated, possibly by a cellular provider, Nohl said. By distributing the effort among participants and not having it centralized, the new effort will be less vulnerable to outside interference, he said.

“I think, potentially, this could have as much impact as the breaking of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) had a few years ago,” said Stan Schatt, security practice director at ABI Research. “That shook up the industry quite a bit.”

A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the matter.

Once the look-up table is created it would be available for anyone to use.

“Clearly we are making the attack more practical and much cheaper, and of course there’s a moral question of whether we should do that,” he said. “But more importantly, we are informing (people) about a longstanding vulnerability and hopefully preventing more systems from adopting this.”

Security researcher Karsten Nohl is launching an open-source, distributed computing project designed to crack the encryption used on GSM phones and compile it into a code book that can be used to decode conversations and any data that gets sent to and from the phone.

Taking precautions
Carriers should upgrade the encryption or move voice services to 3G, which has much stronger encryption, Nohl said.

Participants download the software and three months later they share the files created with others, via BitTorrent, for instance, Nohl said. “We have no connection to them,” he added.

The encryption problem is particularly serious for people doing online banking, where banks are using text messages as authentication tokens. Banks should instead offer RSA SecurID tokens or send one-time pass phrases through regular mail, Nohl said.

This weakness in the encryption used on the phones, A5/1, has been known about for years. There are at least four commercial tools that allow for decrypting GSM communications that range in price from $100,000 to $250,000 depending on how fast you want the software to work, said Nohl, who previously has publicized weaknesses with wireless smart card chips used in transit systems.

(Credit:
Hacking at Random)

For data encryption there is Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) for e-mail and virtual private network (VPN) software for connecting to a corporate network, he said.

To snoop on someone’s phone, a would-be spy would need to be within eyesight of the target, Schatt said. Or, spies could point a recording device in the direction of a building and grab whatever conversations were nearby, he said.

“Vendors will jump in with interim solutions, like Cellcrypt,” Schatt said. “Mobile operators themselves will have to jump in and offer additional levels of encryption as part of a managed service offering for people who want a higher level of encryption.”

As a result of breaking that encryption, enterprises were reluctant to rely on wireless LANs so the Wi-Fi Alliance pushed through an interim standard that strengthened the encryption scheme, he said.

It will take 80 high-performance computers about three months to do a brute force attack on A5/1 and create a large look-up table that will serve as the code book, said Nohl, who announced the project at the Hacking at Random conference in the Netherlands 10 days ago.

However, consumers aren’t likely to want to pay extra for the boosted encryption strength, he said.

Karsten Nohl talks about his distributed computing, open-source AE/1 cracking project at the Hacking at Random conference.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said, “We take extraordinary care to protect the privacy of our customers and use a variety of tools, many technical and some human approaches. I can’t go into the details for security reasons.” He declined to elaborate or comment further.

Nohl wasn’t certain of the legal ramifications of the project but said it’s likely that using such a look-up table is illegal but possession is legal because of the companies that openly advertise their tables for sale.

Using the code book, anyone could get the encryption key for any GSM call, SMS message, or other communication encrypted with A5/1 and listen to the call or read the data in the clear. If 160 people donate their computing resources to the project, it should only take one and a half months to complete, he said.

If you are using a GSM phone (AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S.), you likely have a few more months before it will be easy for practically anyone to spy on your communications.

“If you stand outside a building of a competitor you could get conversations between product managers and about sensitive corporation information, like acquisitions,” he said. “Corporations put even more sensitive information over their phones, in general, than they do over their e-mail.”

“We’re not creating a vulnerability but publicizing a flaw that’s already being exploited very widely,” he said in a phone interview Monday.

He hopes that by doing this it will spur cellular providers into improving the security of their services and fix a weakness that has been around for 15 years and affects about 3 billion mobile users.

In the meantime, people can use separate encryption products on the phone, like Cellcrypt, or handsets with their own encryption, Nohl said. Amnesty International and Greenpeace are using phones with stronger encryption, for example, but it only works if both parties to a conversation are using the same technology, he said.

Update Wednesday August 26 8:01 a.m. PDT: The project web page is here and the the talk with slides is here.

Distributed computing, which has long been used for research and academic purposes, like SETI@home, and which companies have built businesses around, not only solves the technical hurdle to cracking the A5/1 code, but it could solve the legal ones too.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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?”).

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Individually, these features in Chrome 3.0.195.4 (download) are niceties. Collectively, they show Google is steadily moving ahead with its browser project, which was ambitious even before Chrome OS arrived on the scene. Fighting for a piece of the browser market is tough, but offering an operating system solely for Web-based applications is a lot tougher.

Google gets dinged with some justification for moving sluggishly with Chrome. The Mac OS X and Linux versions are only now beginning to come into their own, for example. But there’s a subtext to that criticism that bears mentioning.

Of course, a lot of my feedback is from change-embracing early adopters who care, sometimes passionately, about browsers. Getting Chrome to appeal to mainstream folks will be another, harder challenge for Google.

After some on-again, off-again wavering, I’ve gone back to Chrome as my default browser. I like its interface and a handful of features, but the main advantage is its priority on speed. Google’s Chrome ambition is to improve the Web as a foundation for applications and more generally to get people to do more online, and speed is of the essence.

Specifically, it looks to me as if some perceptions are shifting from “Why should I bother with Chrome?” to “Google isn’t moving fast enough with Chrome.” That shows expectations are shifting in Google’s favor. It positions the company better to win over converts through the gradual delivery of extensions and other high-demand features.

Features that Google brought to its developer preview version of Chrome–themes, a revamped new-tab page, a tweaked Omnibox for searching and entering Web addresses, and support for HTML 5 video–have now arrived on the browser’s better tested beta version intended for broader use.

Chrome themes, such as this one called Grass, are in the new Chrome beta.

Beyond the improvements in JavaScript execution in this latest beta, there are a host of other improvements that should help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection. For example, when you open a new Web page while other Web pages are still loading, Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page–for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page–ahead of the requests from the older pages. Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config.

That’s why the shiny new features such as Chrome themes actually are less interesting to me than some of the fine print in Google’s announcement of the new beta:

OK, so that gets deep in the weeds at the end there, but suffice it to say that Google is tackling browser speed in a number of areas, not just its V8 engine for executing Web programs written in JavaScript.

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Is it time to drop the Netbook label? CNET News reporter Erica Ogg thinks so,louis vuitton handbags, and she joins the podcast to talk about why. That, and other headlines of the day,chanel bags, on Thursday’s CNET News Daily Podcast.

Facebook disables rogue phishing apps

Micro injections: Score 1 for needle-phobes

Nintendo: We killed the DS lookalike app

Listen now:

Not so fast,prada bags, Twitter: ‘Tweet’ isn’t yours

Sony PlayStation 3 Slim review

Time to drop the Netbook label

America’s first Internet addiction detox program

A panel of Microsoft executives and customers talked about the pending launch of Windows 7 at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday.

There, he said, it will come down to whether Windows 7 really can make business workers more productive, something he clearly believes it can.

10:20 a.m. Ballmer has switched into the full-on sales pitch, highlighting the cost savings that can be achieved. Customers can expect to save $90 to $160 in costs each year per computer that they move onto Windows 7, largely from lower support and management costs. (It wasn’t clear if this was as compared to a PC running XP or one running Windows Vista.)

The gathering of invited corporate IT users here is designed to serve as the beginning of the business push for Windows 7, which is already available to larger businesses and goes on sale to consumers and small businesses on October 22.

10 a.m.: Ballmer starts his pitch for Windows 7.

(Credit:
CNET)

CEO Steve Ballmer presided over an event that was, effectively, the business launch of Windows 7.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who earlier Tuesday sent out an e-mail to customers arguing for “the new efficiency” driven by software, is slated to speak shortly at the event being held at the at the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus.

“It’s a very strong pull,” Bryant said.

(Credit:
CNET News)

10:30 a.m.: On to questions and answers. Microsoft starts with a few written ones that came in over the Internet. First off: No, Ballmer is not free for golf next Monday–he’ll be in London.

Although a good business case can be made for upgrading our machines, it can still be a tough sell, said IDC analyst Al Gillen.

Still, he said, it’s a “very good place in the product cycle” to embrace Windows 7,” Ballmer said, noting that businesses that move now would be early adopters, but not the first companies to do so,chanel bags, pointing to a list that included Ford, Fiat, BMW, Bombardier, Continental Airlines, Intel, Halliburton and Starwood.

Update 9:55 a.m.: The panel has wrapped up and Ballmer has taken the stage. So far, we’re hearing familiar talk about doing more with less and his case that technology is at the early stage of its influence on business.

10:32 a.m.: Well, he took a couple more written questions but no live questions from the audience before the event wrapped up.

Ballmer said he expects most companies will start moving to Windows 7 as they add new PCs, but won’t do large-scale upgrades of existing machines and probably won’t rush out to replace all their PCs either.

Among those already trying out Windows 7 is Intel. The chipmaker did a lot of work to make Windows Vista work, but like many companies, it decided not to put it on its own desktops.

Ballmer said his hope is that,gucci bags, once the new operating system hits the market, that individual workers will be going to businesses asking them to put Windows 7 on their corporate computers. “I think we are going to see a lot of that kind of demand,” Ballmer said.

“The problem is it costs money to save money,” Gillen said.

But, he acknowledged that alone won’t sway businesses. “Even with that swell of interest, you are still going to have to confront the new efficiency.”

Windows 7 can also make it cheaper to deploy new software, though Ballmer acknowledged that skeptics will point out the cheapest thing is just not to deploy new software at all. “I got that,replica handbags,” Ballmer said.

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft trotted out some of its biggest customers on Tuesday to make its case that it still makes sense to spend money on software in a tough economy.

By contrast, Intel is adopting Windows 7 rather quickly. Already about 500 employees from throughout the company are testing the software, said CIO Diane Bryant. Of those workers, 97 percent said they would recommend the operating system.