Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, now has 27 percent of the search engine market and is quickly gaining on Google, according to Hitwise. Bing’s share rose by 6 percent in the month of January alone.

The bigger news, and perhaps the underlying reason for the rise: Microsoft’s Bing might be the better search engine. Hitwise says that Google’s “success rate” is just 65 percent, compared with an 82 percent score for Bing. The success rate is the percentage of times users click on links yielded by searches.

Google is still by far the most popular search engine, with 68 percent of the market. Hitwise measures 70 other search engines, which together share 4.6 percent of the market.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan writes that “Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo [to run Bing results in Yahoo searches] appears to be paying off.” In one sense, that’s true: Without Yahoo, Bing’s market share would be just 12.8 percent. But searches on Yahoo fell in January, from 15.2 percent of the total to 14.6 percent, while searches at Bing.com rose by 21 percent.

I fully agree with Dignan, though, when he says that Bing is increasingly looking like a threat to Google.

Source: venturebeat.com

To use multicore processors effectively the technology industry needs to radically rethink the basic computer architecture it has used over the past 50 years, a University of Maryland researcher argues in the January edition of the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship Communications publication.

"The recent dramatic shift from single-processor computer systems to many-processor parallel ones requires reinventing much of computer science to build and program the new systems," argues Uzi Vishkin, a professor at the Un iversity of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, in the paper.

Vishkin even offers a new architecture abstraction, which he calls ICE (Immediate Concurrent Execution), and which he developed with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The basic computer architecture we use today is based on the concepts put forth by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1940s. In his architecture, data and programs are held in computer memory and fed to the computer's CPU. Programs are executed using a program counter, which supplies the CPU the address of the next instruction in memory to execute.

This approach allows what Vishkin calls serial computing, a design in which "any single instruction available for execution in a serial program executes immediately."

But it is limited because it allows only a single instruction to be executed at a time. In an age of multicore processors and large amounts of available memory, this limit is no longer necessary, Vishkin argues. Instead, multiple instructions can often be executed much faster in parallel -- all at the same time and in a single step.

Vishkin's alternative varies the von Neumann architecture by allowing an indefinite number of instructions to be executed at any given time, which could greatly simplify matters for programmers. With ICE, "You could dream up any number of instructions as long as the input for one is not the output for the another," he said. The programmer wouldn't have to worry about how many processors would be available for the task.

Such an architecture, Vishkin states, would require changes in hardware design. For the approach to operate, the chips would require a high-bandwidth, low-latency network between the processors and memory. The hardware would have a single processor core to control all the other cores. If the code is serial, it can be executed on that core. If there are additional instructions, the central processor can dole out additional instructions to the other cores.

Source: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103225-using-simple-abstraction-to-reinvent-computing-for-parallelism/fulltext [via news.yahoo.com]

Physicists have cloaked a macroscopic object for the first time. And they've done it using conventional materials and techniques

There has been no shortage of column inches devoted to invisibility cloaks since engineers built the first one back in 2006. This was an impressive device but it had some important limitations, not least of which was that it worked only for a single frequency of microwaves.

One of the biggest questions that physicists have puzzled over since then is whether it is possible to build similar devices that work over the range of frequencies visible to the human eye. Last year, a couple of groups announced a solution to this problem in the form of 'carpet cloaks' that lie over an object, hiding its presence over a range of optical frequencies.

Again, these were impressive feats but with some limitations. These cloaks are made of finely carved silicon microstructures and so were expensive to build. And they can only hide objects up to a few micrometres in size, not much bigger than the wavelength of light itself.

Today, Baile Zhang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge at a couple of buddies have done significantly better. They've built a carpet cloak capable of hiding objects in the millimetre range over a broad range of visible frequencies from red to blue.

More impressive than this is that they've built this cloak out of calcite, an ordinary and relatively cheap optical material, using conventional optical lens fabrication techniques. This makes the cloak cheap and easy to build.

Carpet cloaks sit on a surface covering the object to be hidden. Their trick is to make it look as if light is reflecting off this surface, thereby hiding any object that they cover.

Until now, this has only been done using artificially modified structures that steers light in a specially engineered ways. This so-called metamaterial is a kind of wonder substance that is the focus of great attention right now.

However, Zhang and co realised that there are naturally occurring materials that can do the same thing. Calcite is one of them. It is unusual because its optical properties depend on the direction that light passes through it.

By carefully exploiting this property, they've been able to create a block of calcite (actually two blocks of calcite) that acts like a carpet cloak. They've even demonstrated it by hiding a wedge of steel 38mm long and 2 mm high. Zhang and co say that this is the first time that a visible object has ever been cloaked. That's impressive.

Their cloak has its limitations, of course. The main one is that it only works in a single 2D plane, so the object is hidden only to those looking from a certain direction.

Another is that it works only with polarised light. But that's not as limiting as it may seem at first sight. Water tends to polarise light so it seems reasonable to think that the cloak ought to work well underwater.

It wasn't so long ago that some physicists were saying that optical invisibility cloaks would always be impossible (because metamaterials tend to absorb visible light faster than they can transmit it).

That's turned out to be of little concern and invisibility cloaks just get better and better. In fact, it's hard to think of a technology that has advanced so far, so quickly.

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1012.2238: Macroscopic Invisible Cloak for Visible Light [via www.technologyreview.com]

Inventor of the Web names Apple, Facebook, Verizon, and Google among the companies promoting harmful online practices.

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with creating the Web, warns that social-networking sites, efforts to prioritize Web traffic, and closed systems such as iTunes threaten the Web's capability to promote free speech and open doors to new scientific discoveries, in an essay published in Scientific American.

The essay criticizes an array of companies including Apple, Facebook, Verizon, Google, and generally, ISPs (Internet service providers), for actions that he says could significantly hamper the potential of the Web.

"If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want," he wrote.

He says social-networking sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster threaten the Web's universality. Such sites assemble data such as users' birthdays, email addresses, and likes into databases, reusing the information to provide value-added services. The hitch is that such services are available only within their sites, he said.

"Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site's pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site," he notes.

"The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space," he said.

Google recently also criticized Facebook for similar reasons. In early November, Google said it would no longer allow other sites to import data from Google services such as Gmail unless the site also allowed Google access to similar data. Notably, Facebook has never allowed Google to access its user contact information, although Facebook users can import Gmail contact data.

Facebook managed to work around Google's change, and in response, Google now warns users that if they export their data to Facebook, they won't be able to get it out.

Such closed worlds are also created when companies such as Apple decide not to use open standards. Berners-Lee gives the example of iTunes, where he says that although songs and videos use open URLs, their addresses begin with the proprietary "itunes:" rather than the open "http." That means users can't make a link to information in iTunes and send it to someone else. "You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace," Berners-Lee wrote.

The trend toward building smartphone apps, rather than Web apps, leads to similar problems, he said. Material in native apps is "off the Web," meaning that users can't bookmark it or link to it.

Such trends lead to similar scenarios as the walled gardens that were popular in the 1990s, such as AOL, that ultimately proved unsatisfying to users, he said. Those environments, even if they are easy to use, "can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates," he wrote.

He also wrote that net neutrality is key to the Web's future. "Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is," he wrote.

He sounded baffled by a suggestion from Google and Verizon earlier this year that net neutrality should not apply to mobile phones. "It is also bizarre to imagine that my fundamental right to access the information source of my choice should apply when I am on my WiFi-connected computer at home, but not when I use my cell phone," he wrote.

If the basic principles of the Web are upheld -- including support for open standards, making data openly shareable, and net neutrality -- the Web promises some "fantastic future capabilities," he said.

Linked data is one example of future promise. Tagging individual pieces of data, within a document for example, would allow applications to read and manipulate more information. That could help scientists, for example, more easily collect all data on a certain subject.

"The goal of the Web is to serve humanity," he wrote. "We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine."

Lee’s article can be found here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Source: www.infoworld.com

It seems like every time Facebook amends its privacy policy, the web is up in arms. The truth is, Facebook’s well publicized privacy fight is nothing compared to the vulnerability of all unsecured HTTP sites — that includes Facebook, Twitter and many of the web’s most popular destinations.

Developer Eric Butler has exposed the soft underbelly of the web with his new Firefox extension, Firesheep, which will let you essentially eavesdrop on any open Wi-Fi network and capture users’ cookies.

As Butler explains in his post, “As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed” in the window. All you have to do is double click on their name and open sesame, you will be able to log into that user’s site with their credentials.

One word: wow.

It’s not hard to comprehend the far-reaching ramifications of this tool. Anytime you’re using an open Wi-Fi connection, anyone can swiftly access some of your most private, personal information and correspondence (i.e. direct messages, Facebook mail/chat)— at the click of a button. And you will have no idea.

This is how it works. If a site is not secure, it keeps track of you through a cookie (more formally referenced as a session) which contains identifying information for that website. The tool effectively grabs these cookies and lets you masquerade as the user.

Apparently many social network sites are not secured, beyond the big two, Foursquare, Gowalla are also vulnerable. Moreover, to give you a sense of Firesheep’s scope, the extension is built to identify cookies from Amazon.com, Basecamp, bit.ly, Cisco, CNET, Dropbox, Enom, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Github, Google, HackerNews, Harvest, Windows Live, NY Times, Pivotal Tracker, Slicehost, tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, Yelp. And that’s just the default setting— anyone can write their own plugins, according to the post.

Within an hour of Butler’s post appearing on Hacker News, Firesheep was downloaded more than 1,000 times and evidence of usage has already popped up on Twitter in fantastic fashion. (Disclaimer: At the time of this post, I was not in a public setting and could not fully exploit the extension, however several users have reported success.)

(I had to pull one Tweet down at the request of the user, who had hacked into someone’s Twitter account).

Thanks to Bensign, aka Ben Schaechter (former TechCrunch developer) for the tip.

According to Butler’s post, he created this seemingly diabolical tool to expose the severe lack of security on the web. We spend so much time quibbling over the minutia in privacy policies, we lose sight of the forest, or in this case, gaping security holes.

“Websites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services. They’ve been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it’s time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win,” Butler says.

Update: Here is a Firefox extension that can prevent Firesheep from accessing your login information.

Second Update: Here’s Facebook’s official statement on the matter:We have been making progress testing SSL access across Facebook and hope to provide it as an option in the coming months. As always, we advise people to use caution when sending or receiving information over unsecured Wi-Fi networks. This tip and others can be found on the Facebook Security Page. However by accessing Facebook via SSL some of the features (like chat) won’t work.

The FTC’s OnGuardOnline.gov website also advises people about this :

Be careful about the information you access or send from a public wireless network. To be on the safe side, you may want to assume that other people can access any information you see or send over a public wireless network. Unless you can verify that a hot spot has effective security measures in place, it may be best to avoid sending or receiving sensitive information over that network.

Additional points:
- Facebook logins are always encrypted (more info here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=15504).
- Facebook offers a session control feature that allows people to view all of their active Facebook sessions (including those on unsecured networks) and close any they no longer want open. This helps if you forget to log out on another device or network. More info here.

Source: http://techcrunch.com

Last Wednesday (10/27/2010), Microsoft announced that its adCenter paid search platform is now powering 100% of search advertisements on Yahoo search results in the United States and Canada.

This is where the money starts to hit the road in the partnership the companies announced last year, in which Yahoo basically turned its search business over to Microsoft.

For Yahoo, outsourcing Yahoo Search results to Microsoft's Bing technology was a cost-saver, as Yahoo no longer has to invest in the insanely expensive task of keeping up with Google's breadth and relevance.

But the deal doesn't start to benefit Microsoft unless it drives up revenue per search.

Here's why. Every time a user clicks an adCenter ad on Yahoo's search engine, Yahoo keeps at least 88% of the money from that click. Microsoft gets no more than 12%.

But the deal also eliminates Yahoo's paid search platform as a competitor. Advertisers still have to buy search ads on Google because of its traffic--it has more than 70% search market share in the U.S., and higher overseas. But Yahoo Search and Bing now combine for most of the remainder. That makes it much more worthwhile for advertisers to bid on keywords at adCenter.

More bids means higher prices for keywords, meaning that Microsoft earns more revenue per search from the combined business than it was able to do when it had only Bing with about 12% market share. (It's also going to raise prices for advertisers.)

Powering Yahoo's search business also lets Microsoft collect far more data about the search habits of users and--critically--the types of ads they'll click on. This should help the company improve the relevance of the ads it shows, which drives up click rates. Again, more revenue per search.

At Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2009, shortly after the deal was announced, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer inadvertently displayed a slide that showed the company's detailed financial expectations from the partnership. (The slide was picked up and published by Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times before Microsoft was able to eliminate it from the official slide deck it published on its own Web site.)

According to that slide, Microsoft expects net revenue from the combined search business to be about $700 million more per year than it was before the merger. That net revenue will be split approximately 50/50 between traffic acquisition costs paid to Yahoo, and "uplift" to Microsoft. That "uplift" number only makes sense if revenue per search grows according to expectations.

Of course, if Google keeps gaining market share, the whole deal will soon become moot.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com

See Also:

• Suddenly, Bing Has What Google Doesn't: Data From 500 Million Facebook Users
• August ComScore Search Data: Google Share Drops Again, Yahoo Gains Again

This memo was written by Ray Ozzie and sent to Microsoft execs and employees:

          To:          
Executive Staff and direct reports Date:        
October 28, 2010 From:         Ray Ozzie Subject:     
Dawn of a New Day
        

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company.  In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change.

In the wake of that memo, the last five years has been a time of great transformation for Microsoft.  At this point we’re truly all in with regard to services.  I’m incredibly proud of the people and the work that has been done across the company, and of the way that we’ve turned this services transformation into opportunities that will pay off for years to come.

In the realm of the service-centric ‘seamless OS’ we’re well on the path to having Windows Live serve as an optional yet natural services complement to the Windows and Office software.  In the realm of ‘seamless productivity’, Office 365 and our 2010 Office, SharePoint and Live deliverables have shifted Office from being PC-centric toward now also robustly spanning the web and mobile.  In ‘seamless entertainment’, Xbox Live has transformed Xbox into a real-time, social, media-rich TV experience.

And in the realm of what I referred to as our ‘services platform’, I couldn’t be more proud of what’s emerged as Windows Azure & SQL Azure.  Inspired by little more than a memo, a few decks and discussions, intrapreneurial leaders stepped up to build and deliver an innovative service that, while still nascent, will over time prove to be transformational for the company and the industry.

Our products are now more relevant than ever.  Bing has blossomed and its advertising, social, metadata & real-time analytics capabilities are growing to power every one of our myriad services offerings.  Over the years the Windows client expanded its relevance even with the rise of low-cost netbooks.  Office expanded its relevance even with a shift toward open data formats & web-based productivity.  Our server assets have had greater relevance even with a marked shift toward virtualization & cloud computing.

Quite important to me, I’m also quite proud of the degree to which we’ve continued to grow and mature in the area of responsible competition, and the breadth and depth of our cultural shift toward genuine openness, interoperability and privacy which are now such key cornerstones of everything we do.

Yet, for all our great progress, some of the opportunities I laid out in my memo five years ago remain elusive and are yet to be realized.

Certain of our competitors’ products and their rapid advancement & refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy.  Our early and clear vision notwithstanding, their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction.

We’ve seen agile innovation playing out before a backdrop in which many dramatic changes have occurred across all aspects of our industry’s core infrastructure.  These myriad evolutions of our infrastructure have been predicted for years, but in the past five years so much has happened that we’ve grown already to take many of these changes for granted:  Ubiquitous internet access over wired, WiFi and 3G/4G networks; many now even take for granted that LTE and ‘whitespace’ will be broadly delivered.  We’ve seen our boxy devices based on ‘system boards’ morph into sleek elegantly-designed devices based on transformational ‘systems on a chip’.  We’ve seen bulky CRT monitors replaced by impossibly thin touch screens.  We’ve seen business processes and entire organizations transformed by the zero-friction nature of the internet; the walls between producer and consumer having now vanished.  Substantial business ecosystems have collapsed as many classic aggregation & distribution mechanisms no longer make sense.

Organizations worldwide, in every industry, are now stepping back and re-thinking the basics; questioning their most fundamental structural tenets.  Doing so is necessary for their long-term growth and survival.  And our own industry is no exception, where we must question our most fundamental assumptions about infrastructure & apps.

The past five years have been breathtaking.  But the next five years will bring about yet another inflection point – a transformation that will once again yield unprecedented opportunities for our company and our industry catalyzed by the huge & inevitable shift in apps & infrastructure that’s truly now just begun.

Imagining A “Post-PC” World

One particular day next month, November 20^th 2010, represents a significant milestone.  Those of us in the PC industry who placed an early bet on a then-nascent PC graphical UI will toast that day as being the 25^thanniversary of the launch of Windows 1.0.

Our journey began in support of audacious concepts that were originally just imagined and dreamed:  A computer that’s ‘personal’. Or, a PC on every desktop and in every home, running Microsoft software.

Windows may not have been the first graphical UI on a personal computer, but over time the product unquestionably democratized computing & communications for more than a billion people worldwide.  Windows and Office truly grew to define the PC; establishing the core concepts and usage scenarios that for so many of us, over time, have become etched in stone.

For the most part, we’ve grown to perceive of ‘computing’ as being equated with specific familiar ‘artifacts’ such as the ‘computer’, the ‘program’ that’s installed on a computer, and the ‘files’ that are stored on that computer’s ‘desktop’.  For the majority of users, the PC is largely indistinguishable even from the ‘browser’ or ‘internet’.

As such, it’s difficult for many of us to even imagine that this could ever change.

But as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.  This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and diverse the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the acquisition & lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts.  It’s undeniable that some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers:  your neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household; enterprise IT.

Success begets product requirements.  And even when superhuman engineering and design talent is applied, there are limits to how much you can apply beautiful veneers before inherent complexity is destined to bleed through.

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration.

And as time goes on and as software products mature – even with the best of intent – complexity is inescapable.

Indeed, many have pointed out that there’s a flip side to complexity:  in our industry, complexity of a successful product also tends to provide some assurance of its longevity.  Complex interdependencies and any product’s inherent ‘quirks’ will virtually guarantee that broadly adopted systems won’t simply vanish overnight.  And so long as a system is well-supported and continues to provide unique and material value to a customer, even many of the most complex and broadly maligned assets will hold their ground.  And why not?  They’re valuable.  They work.

But so long as customer or competitive requirements drive teams to build layers of new function on top of a complex core, ultimately a limit will be reached.  Fragility can grow to constrain agility.  Some deep architectural strengths can become irrelevant – or worse, can become hindrances.

Our PC software has driven the creation of an amazing ecosystem, and is incredibly valuable to a world of customers and partners.  And the PC and its ecosystem is going to keep growing, and growing, for a long time to come.  But today, as I wrote five years ago, ”Just as in the past, we must reflect upon what’s going on around us, and reflect upon our strengths, weaknesses and industry leadership responsibilities, and respond.  As much as ever, it’s clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk.”

And so at this juncture, given all that has transpired in computing and communications, it’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur.  How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today?  In what ways would it be better?  In what ways would it be worse, or just different?

Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.

In our industry, if you can imagine something, you can build it.  We at Microsoft know from our common past – even the past five years – that if we know what needs to be done, and if we act decisively, any challenge can be transformed into a significant opportunity.  And so, the first step for each of us is to imaginefearlessly; to dream.

Continuous Services | Connected Devices

What’s happened in every aspect of computing & communications over the course of the past five years has given us much to dream about.  Certainly the ‘net-connected PC, and PC-based servers, have driven the creation of an incredible industry and have laid the groundwork for mass-market understanding of so much of what’s possible with ‘computers’.  But slowly but surely, our lives, businesses and society are in the process of a wholesale reconfiguration in the way we perceive and apply technology.

As we’ve begun to embrace today’s incredibly powerful app-capable phones and pads into our daily lives, and as we’ve embraced myriad innovative services & websites, the early adopters among us have decidedly begun to move away from mentally associating our computing activities with the hardware/software artifacts of our past such as PC’s, CD-installed programs, desktops, folders & files.

Instead, to cope with the inherent complexity of a world of devices, a world of websites, and a world of apps & personal data that is spread across myriad devices & websites, a simple conceptual model is taking shape that brings it all together.  We’re moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do.  On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale.  They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds.  They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t.  By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives.  From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.

Our personal and corporate data now sits within these services – and as a result we’re more and more concerned with issues of trust & privacy.  We most commonly engage and interact with these internet-based sites & services through the browser.  But increasingly, we also interact with these continuous services through apps that are loaded onto a broad variety of service-connected devices – on our desks, or in our pockets & pocketbooks.

Connected devices beyond the PC will increasingly come in a breathtaking number of shapes and sizes, tuned for a broad variety of communications, creation & consumption tasks.  Each individual will interact with a fairly good number of these connected devices on a daily basis – their phone / internet companion; their car; a shared public display in the conference room, living room, or hallway wall.  Indeed some of these connected devices may even grow to bear a resemblance to today’s desktop PC or clamshell laptop.  But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-likeby design, from birth.  They’re instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss.  But being appliance-like doesn’t mean that they’re not also quite capable in terms of storage; rather, it just means that storage has shifted to being more cloud-centric than device-centric.  A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

Moving forward, these ‘connected devices’ will also frequently take the form of embedded devices of varying purpose including telemetry & control.  Our world increasingly will be filled with these devices – from the remotely diagnosed elevator, to the sensors on our highways and throughout our environment.  These embedded devices will share a key attribute with non-embedded UI-centric devices:  they’re appliance-like, easily configured, interchangeable and replaceable without loss.

At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today.  But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated high-scale consumer websites.  And those who build and deploy application fabrics targeting connected devices understand how challenging it can be to simply & reliably just ‘sync’ or ‘stream’.  To achieve these seemingly simple objectives will require dramatic innovation in human interface, hardware, software and services.

How It Might Happen

From the perspective of living so deeply within the world of the device-centric software & hardware that we’ve collectively created over the past 25 years, it’s understandably difficult to imagine how a dramatic, wholesale shift toward this new continuous services + connected devices model would ever plausibly gain traction relative to what’s so broadly in use today.  But in the technology world, these industry-scoped transformations have indeed happened before.  Complexity accrues; dramatically new and improved capabilities arise.

Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets ofsimplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success.  If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-likeconnected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets.

It may take quite a while to happen, but I believe that in some form or another, without doubt, it will.

For each of us who can clearly envision the end-game, the opportunity is to recognize both the inevitability and value inherent in the big shift ahead, and to do what it takes to lead our customers into this new world.

In the short term, this means imagining the ‘killer apps & services’ and ‘killer devices’ that match up to a broad range of customer needs as they’ll evolve in this new era.  Whether in the realm of communications, productivity, entertainment or business, tomorrow’s experiences & solutions are likely to differ significantly even from today’s most successful apps.  Tomorrow’s experiences will be inherently transmedia & trans-device.  They’ll be centered on your own social & organizational networks.  For both individuals and businesses, new consumption & interaction models will change the game.  It’s inevitable.

To deliver what seems to be required – e.g. an amazing level of coherence across apps, services and devices – will require innovation in user experience, interaction model, authentication model, user data & privacy model, policy & management model, programming & application model, and so on.  These platform innovations will happen in small, progressive steps, providing significant opportunity to lead.  In adapting our strategies, tactics, plans & processes to deliver what’s required by this new world, the opportunity is simplyhuge.

The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must emerge from within.  Those on the outside can strongly influence, particularly with their wallets.  Those above are responsible for developing and articulating a compelling vision, eliminating obstacles, prioritizing resources, and generally setting the stage with a principled approach.

But the power and responsibility to truly effect transformation exists in no small part at the edge.  Within those who, led or inspired, feel personally and collectively motivated to make; to act; to do.

In taking the time to read this, most likely it’s you.

Realizing a Dream

In 1939, in New York City, there was an amazing World’s Fair.  It was called ‘the greatest show of all time’.

In that year Americans were exhausted, having lived through a decade of depression.  Unemployment still hovered above 17%.  In Europe, the next world war was brewing.  It was an undeniably dark juncture for us all.

And yet, this 1939 World’s Fair opened in a way that evoked broad and acute hope: the promise of a glorious future.  There were pavilions from industry & countries all across the world showing vision; showing progress:  The Futurama; The World of Tomorrow.  Icons conjuring up images of the future:  The Trylon; The Perisphere.

The fair’s theme:  Dawn of a New Day.

Surrounding the event, stories were written and vividlytold to help everyone envision and dream of a future of modern conveniences; superhighways & spacious suburbs; technological wonders to alleviate hardship and improve everyday life.

The fair’s exhibits and stories laid a broad-based imprint across society of what needed to be done.  To plausibly leap from such a dark time to such a potentially wonderful future meant having an attitude, individually and collectively, that we could achieve whatever we set our minds to.  That anything was possible.

In the following years – fueled both by what was necessary for survival and by our hope for the future – manufacturing jumped 50%.  Technological breakthroughs abounded.  What had been so hopefully and optimistically imagined by many, was achieved by all.

And, as their children, now we’re living their dreams.

Today, in my own dreams, I see a great, expansive future for our industry and for our company – a future of amazing, pervasive cloud-centric experiences delivered through a world of innovative devices that surround us.

Without a doubt, as in 1939 there are conditions in our society today that breed uncertainty: jobs, housing, health, education, security, the environment.  And yes, there are also challenging conditions for our company: it’s a tough, fast-moving, and highly competitive environment.

And yet, even in the presence of so much uncertainty, I feel an acute sense of hope and optimism.

When I look forward, I can’t help but see the potential for a much brighter future:  Even beyond the first billion, so many more people using technology to improve their lives, businesses and societies, in so many ways.  New apps, services & scenarios in communications, collaboration & productivity, commerce, education, health care, emergency management, human services, transportation, the environment, security – the list goes on, and on, and on.

We’ve got so far to go before we even scratch the surface of what’s now possible.  All these new services will be cloud-centric ‘continuous services’ built in a way that we can all rely upon.  As such, cloud computing will become pervasive for developers and IT – a shift that’ll catalyze the transformation of infrastructure, systems & business processes across all major organizations worldwide.  And all these new services will work hand-in-hand with an unimaginably fascinating world of devices-to-come.  Today’s PC’s, phones & pads are just the very beginning; we’ll see decades to come of incredible innovation from which will emerge all sorts of ‘connected companions’ that we’ll wear, we’ll carry, we’ll use on our desks & walls and the environment all around us.  Service-connected devices going far beyond just the ‘screen, keyboard and mouse’:  humanly-natural ‘conscious’ devices that’ll see, recognize, hear & listen to you and what’s around you, that’ll feel your touch and gestures and movement, that’ll detect your proximity to others; that’ll sense your location, direction, altitude, temperature, heartbeat & health.

Let there be no doubt that the big shifts occurring over the next five years ensure that this will absolutely be a time of great opportunity for those who put past technologies & successes into perspective, and envision all the transformational value that can be offered moving forward to individuals, businesses, governments and society.  It’s the dawn of a new day – the sun having now arisen on a world of continuous services andconnected devices.

And so, as Microsoft has done so successfully over the course of the company’s history, let’s mark this five-year milestone by once again fearlessly embracing that which is technologically inevitable – clearing a path to the extraordinary opportunity that lies ahead for us, for the industry, and for our customers.

Ray

Today, Facebook dips its social-media chocolate into Microsoft Bing's peanut butter, introducing a "social search" engine where Facebook friends and their "likes" are factored into search results. The end product is what it sounds like: If you search for movies and restaurants, some of the results represent what your friends have selected. If you search for people, those with more connections to you pop up first.

Searching for things
Says Facebook: "Your friends have liked lots of things all over the Web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend's profile to see which restaurants they like, we're bringing everything together in one place." You'll type in something, say "Chinese restaurants in Seattle," and the results would include a segment saying "Liked by your Facebook friends." This doesn't just go for movies, bars and dining. If you're searching for some news story or blog, you'll see the ones your friends have publicly "liked."

Searching for people
The world is full of Brian Lams, but there's really only one who I want to find out stuff about. So when I type in "Brian Lam," I want to see the one who used to be my boss, not a bunch of other ones I never met. But say I am searching for people who I am not friends with on Facebook.

The search will employ the same connectedness that a people search does on Facebook. People with whom you have mutual friends or shared networks will appear towards the top. Of course, the people have to be on Facebook, but if they are, you can add them as a friend, directly from Bing.

Here's a video explaining the basic features:

How to get started
If you are logged into Facebook and visit Bing with the same browser, a pop-up will appear asking you if you want to participate. If you say "no thanks," the search results stay old-school. But if you accept the pop-up, you'll get the new, social-ized results. In that sense, it's "opt in." However, the pop-up will come back three more times, asking you to accept, so some people might get annoyed. (Note: You may not see the feature yet, as it is just now rolling out.)

This is part of Facebook's larger "instant personalization" initiative that has already been implemented at Rotten Tomatoes, Pandora and Yelp.

Privacy
The privacy angle isn't too tricky here: Bing is using information that you and your friends have publicly liked. Said the execs: "Bing can see no more about you than anyone who goes to your Facebook page can see," and, additionally, "What you search on Bing doesn't get sent to Facebook."

I've said in the past that I would love to see a Facebook search engine: Why try to rely on more and more intricately coded computer algorithms (a la Google) when you can just ask people? And, though I'd have to double check with my statistician wife, 500 millon people probably produce a decent sample population. Crowd sourcing restaurant and movie reviews isn't necessarily new or compelling, but what about applying the "like" concept to other searches. If I want am hunting for information on penguins, or lawn fertilizer, or Tina Fey, I think I'd prefer getting results that are already streamlined by a jury of my peers.

It's obvious that Facebook would prefer Bing over Google, which is potentially more of a social-media competitor, but will Facebook ever outgrow Bing's usefulness and, say, launch its own proprietary search engine? I guess it depends on how much it gets out of this little relationship.

Read more at Facebook

Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com

BEIJING—Big Chinese electronic-commerce company Alibaba Group has joined with Microsoft Corp. to create a new Web-search site—a move that could challenge Baidu Inc. and Google Inc.'s dominance of China's search market.

Alibaba Group, of which Yahoo Inc. owns a roughly 40% stake, launched a beta version of a website called Etao on Saturday, aimed at driving traffic to Alibaba's retail website, Taobao.com.

Search results on Etao are displayed in several groups. Taobao listings, including images and product prices, appear first. Those are followed by links to related online forums. Next come informational websites and Web search results provided by Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Alibaba and Microsoft confirmed that Etao is in public, or beta, testing, but declined to comment further.

Baidu's dominance of China's search market has grown in the wake of Google's decision to stop cooperating with Beijing's censorship regulations and to move Google's Chinese website to Hong Kong, where the regulations don't apply. Google's search sites are still accessible from within China, but like other overseas sites, its services are sometimes interrupted by the government's firewall technology. Baidu and Google declined to comment on Etao.

Besides Alibaba Group, other Chinese companies, such as Tencent Holdings Ltd., have moved to enter the Web-search market, as well. But their presences are minimal and it is likely to be some time before even strongly supported rivals like Etao can catch up with Baidu.

Revenue in China's fast-growing online search market was valued at 4.62 billion yuan ($692 million) in the first half, up 45% from a year earlier, according to Beijing research firm Analysys International.

Taobao is the biggest e-commerce website in China, with a consumer-to-consumer platform and a business-to-consumer website called Taobao Mall. The company expects to double the value of transactions done through its website to 400 billion yuan this year. Taobao had 75% of e-commerce transactions as of the second quarter, according to Analysys International.

The operation of Etao further marginalizes Yahoo's Chinese website, which is operated by Alibaba Group and has seen its market share drop to less than 1%, from 21% in 2005, under Alibaba's supervision. It was unclear whether any search technology from Yahoo is powering Etao's search services. A Yahoo spokeswoman couldn't be reached.

Alibaba Group, which is based in Hangzhou, China, has agreed to purchase a stake in Sohu.com Inc.'s Sogou search business. Sohu Chief Technology Officer Wang Xiaochuan said Sohu is talking with Alibaba about providing search technology for Etao.

According to Analysys International, Baidu had 70% and Google had 24.2% of search-market revenue in China as of the second quarter.

David Wolf, chief executive of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based marketing-strategy firm, said it will take time for Etao to gain traction. "I don't think they're in a position to displace Baidu anytime soon," he said.

Still, Mr. Wolf said the deal is "a coup for Microsoft," which is still testing its Chinese search website and doesn't yet have a significant share of market revenue. Big players such as Alibaba and Microsoft "can make it work," he said. It is only a matter of time before Baidu faces more competitors, he said. "Alibaba is simply the first one to step into the fray."

Microsoft doesn't sell advertisements on the Chinese version of its Bing search site, instead displaying ads sold by Baidu in exchange for a share of the revenue the ads generate. Bing search results on Etao for keywords such as "sneakers" and "computer desk" in Chinese didn't display those ads as of Tuesday.

In 2007, Baidu announced that it would introduce its own e-commerce platform called Youa to compete with Taobao. Baidu's chief executive, Robin Li, said at the time that search engines were the foundation of online shopping and that about half of Chinese online shoppers would conduct a general Web search before looking for goods on websites such as Taobao. Taobao responded by blocking Baidu from searching goods on its website.

Source: http://online.wsj.com

Advertisements on Yahoo search will start being surfaced by Microsoft's adCenter platform starting Monday, the companies said today, marking the final major stage in transitioning Yahoo to the Bing platform.

Microsoft and Yahoo have been coaching U.S. and Canadian search advertisers on the switch, which involves advertisers moving their operations from Yahoo's outgoing Search Marketing platform to Microsoft's adCenter. As more and more ads are surfaced on Yahoo via advertisers' adCenter accounts, advertisers should notice fewer and fewer ad-clicks via their Yahoo accounts, the companies said.

The transition is expected to last from Monday until the end of October. The transition team said advertisers should make sure they've opened adCenter accounts to replace their Yahoo Search Marketing accounts no later than Oct. 25.

Beta testing for the ad-serving transition began in July, during which 7 to 10 percent of ads on Yahoo were surfaced via the Bing platform, a Yahoo spokesperson said.

The Microsoft Bing algorithms started powering Yahoo organic search results in the U.S. and Canada on Aug. 18, the spokesperson said, and the transition reportedly was complete on Aug. 24.

For more on the specifics of the Microsoft and Yahoo's revenue-sharing search deal, check out post from July 2009. Full seattlepi.com coverage of the alliance is here.

Source: http://blog.seattlepi.com