nptech.info

By Beth Callaghan

Sure, the Kindle is available at Target and Staples, but with the addition of Amazon’s popular device to its lineup this fall, Best Buy will be the only retailer to sell all three leading e-readers. Consumers will be able to handle and compare Sony’s Reader devices, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle side by side, and the store will support its expanded lineup with prominent in-store displays.

Internet censorship isn’t just a barrier to free expression–it’s a barrier to free trade as well. And Google (GOOG) Chief Legal Officer David Drummond says we need to start treating it like one because it limits access to foreign markets.

“If this were happening with physical trade, we’d all be saying this violates trade agreements,” Drummond said. “If you want to be part of the community of free trade, you have to let the Internet be open.”

So what’s to be done? Drummond says the U.S. government needs to respond to foreign nations who censor the Internet in the same way it would to those that restrict free trade. “We have great opportunities now with pending trade agreements to start putting some pressure on countries to recognize that internet freedom not only is a core value–that we should be holding them to account from a human rights standpoint,” he said. “But also that if you want to be part of the community of free trade, you are going to have to find a way to allow the internet to be open.”

A wonderful idea in theory, but one that’s certainly not going to go over well in places like China, where an “open Internet” is by defininition a restricted one.

Apple wants app developers to know that it has been listening to their grousing, and that it takes their complaints seriously. How seriously? Enough to make some changes in the way its development process works.

Just as important: Apple (AAPL) appears to have opened the door for programs originally created using Adobe’s Flash. And it seems to have given the go-ahead to Google’s AdMob mobile ad network, which it looked ready to block earlier this year.

Apple says it will finally publish guidelines for app approval at its iTunes store “to help developers understand how we review submitted apps.” That may mollify developers’ long-standing complaint about seemingly arbitrary rejections at the store.

But Apple’s other changes seem aimed at making peace–or at least establishing a détente–with corporate rivals Google and Adobe. And perhaps mollifying federal regulators asking antitrust questions.

Some tech observers, like Hank Williams, believe that Apple’s statement regarding 3.3.1 and “developer tools” means that the company will now allow developers to port applications originally designed in Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash over to the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform. If so, that’s a big deal, and investors believe that’s the case–Adobe is up 7 percent this morning.  But it’d be nice to confirm that with Apple, too, so I’ve asked.

Meanwhile, note that section 3.3.9 of the agreement is the one that dealt with mobile app data, which made Google’s (GOOG) AdMob and other advertising and analytic companies upset earlier this year. Based on the changes Apple has made, it appears to have finally given Google the all clear to sell ads on its apps, by removing a caveat that only allowed “independent” ad networks to collect performance data. But third-party analytics companies like Flurry, and perhaps Comscore (SCOR), still appear to be shut out.

UPDATE: Here’s the text of the three changes Apple has made to its developer’s license:

3.3.1 OLD:
3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

3.3.1 NEW:
3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

3.3.2 OLD:
3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application.

3.3.2 NEW:
3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.

3.3.9 OLD:
3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent, You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

- The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving
mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.

3.3.9 NEW:
3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising. You may not use analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party.

Release below:

The App Store℠ has revolutionized the way mobile applications are developed and distributed. With over 250,000 apps and 6.5 billion downloads, the App Store has become the world’s largest mobile application platform and App Store developers have earned over one billion dollars from the sales of their apps.

We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

The App Store is perhaps the most important milestone in the history of mobile software. Working together with our developers, we will continue to surprise and delight our users with innovative mobile apps.

QOTD [Digital Daily]

“I do think with respect to apps, it would be nice to adopt some kind of URL conventions, so that even content within apps is in fact searchable, and I think that it would be nice to adopt some kind of standard in that respect, and that would benefit all search engines and all users.”

– Google co-founder Sergey Brin says apps should be searchable

It was certainly high time that BoomTown made a reservation–oh, I had to make that pun–to check in with OpenTable (OPEN) CEO Jeff Jordan.

The well-liked and voluble Silicon Valley exec–who had worked in a top job at eBay (EBAY) before moving over to the online restaurant reservation service and taking it public last year–has actually been up to a lot recently.

That includes a discount-coupon program that was just rolled out called Spotlight, which Jordan doesn’t even try to pretend is not a copycat move to take advantage of all the excitement around Groupon.

And there has been more, from adding restaurant reviews to a cloud computing offering to, most importantly, a big push for its mobile apps, which have been growing wildly.

Jordan also discussed how leading a public company has been going, especially since many Internet outfits have been avoiding the prospect.

So far, the company’s post-IPO life has been going well. OpenTable stock has been performing strongly this year, up 118 percent in the year to date, compared to many more lackluster performances in the sector.

Jordan, who had been in consideration for many big Internet CEO jobs, talks about all this and more in the video interview below:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mobile search has long been additive to PC search–away-from-home queries heaped atop the innumerable others conducted from our desks. But that’s changing, and rapidly, too. Consider this metric, offered by Nick Fox, Google’s director of product management, at the 2010 Citi Technology Conference Wednesday: Mobile queries from fully featured mobile browsers have increased by a factor of four in the past year.

Fourfold growth in a single year. An astonishing increase, though inevitable given the rapidity of growth we’ve seen in mobile recently. And great news for Google (GOOG), for which mobile search is already big business. By Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s estimate, Google Mobile revenue will exit 2010 at a $500MM net revenue run rate.

Here’s a very funny video, caught by a concertgoer at a recent stop on the Lady Gaga extravaganza, “The Monster Ball Tour,” in Washington, D.C.

In it, she stops her antics cold to end a fight in the audience during her performance of “Just Dance,” using it for maximum entertainment.

In other words, turning people acting like monsters into her little monsters.

Enjoy:

By Don Clark, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Paul Otellini is making acquisitions to compete beyond PCs.

Mr. Otellini pulled off three deals this summer aimed at building Intel’s business outside computing, where its microprocessor chips dominate. The urgency to do so became clearer late last month, when turbulent conditions in the personal computer market made Intel trim its third-quarter projections.

Intel’s revised guidance still calls for revenue growth of 15% to 19% over the year-earlier period. But even a healthy PC market won’t provide enough growth to satisfy Intel and its shareholders, Mr. Otellini says. So he has pushed to broaden the Silicon Valley giant’s business to chips for smartphones, consumer electronics devices, cars and other products.

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By John Ellis, Contributing Writer, SearchEngineLand

From a paid search perspective, the first impression of Google Instant is alarming.

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By Adam Jackson, Contributing Writer, TheAppleBlog

Apple’s recent media event solidified what we all knew was coming: Rentals and non-local storage is the future of our digital content.

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By Stephanie Clifford, Reporter, New York Times

Doug Herrington’s office at Amazon.com suggests that he is particularly bad at getting items out of their packages.

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By Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor, Ars Technica

Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, after its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, had rocked the PC market with a hero who liked kicking ass, hanging out with strippers, and murdering alien police officers that were, literally, pigs. It was inappropriate, raunchy, and amazing.

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By Matt Drance, Editor, Apple Outsider

When I was in elementary school, kids walked around the schoolyard with their miniature boomboxes blasting whatever they could get their hands on.

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Another significant departure from Yahoo: Steve Schultz (pictured here), who was GM of its important and powerful Yahoo Finance unit, has left the company to become COO of Pageonce, an online personal-finance “assistant.”

Yesterday, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo’s Shine women’s site, Brandon Holley, left Yahoo to run Lucky magazine for Condé Nast.

Also recently gone from Yahoo (YHOO): Social platforms head Neal Sample to eBay (EBAY) and Jason Titus, who ran its communications products unit and whose next job is unknown.

Schultz, though, is landing at a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up that has raised $8 million in venture funding. Pageonce collects online financial information and displays it on a unified and personalized page.

Schultz, who has been at Yahoo five years, was, according to his company bio, “responsible for business and content strategy and oversees business development, partnerships, marketing and sales. Prior to this role, Steve led product efforts in Yahoo!’s personalization products group, where he launched Yahoo!’s unified user profiling platform and managed personalization strategy and implementation efforts for Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!”

In the interests of fairness, BoomTown lobbed an email into PR at Yahoo tonight for the name of the person taking over for Schultz and also a list of major execs the Silicon Valley Internet giant is hiring.

Yahoo said no one has been named yet to replace Schultz.

Here is the press release on his new job:

Pageonce Names Steve Schultz New Chief Operating Officer

Company Strengthens Executive Team with Recognized Leader in Consumer Finance

Palo Alto, Calif.–September 9, 2010–Pageonce, the award-winning personal finance assistant, today announced that the company has named Steve Schultz, as its new chief operating officer. Schultz is a demonstrated leader in the consumer finance category, and brings a wealth of experience in product development, strategic partnerships, and business strategy.

In this role, Schultz will lead Pageonce’s business and sales strategy, distribution partnerships, business development and help guide the company’s strategic development into mobile personal finance. Schultz joins Pageonce from Yahoo! where he was the head of Yahoo! Finance, the #1 financial news website, and Yahoo! Real Estate businesses.

“Steve’s leadership and experience will be an invaluable asset to Pageonce as we continue to develop products and increase market share within the personal finance category,” said Guy Goldstein, Pageonce CEO and Founder.

During his tenure at Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance doubled its market share attracting more than 40 million unique visitors according to Comscore. He led its business and content strategy, business development and strategic partnerships which included relationships with Intuit, Fidelity Investments, Dow Jones, ScottTrade, Bankrate and Bloomberg.com. He was also responsible for Yahoo! Finance’s original content strategy, oversaw the site’s push into mobile applications, and entered partnerships with dozens of new content providers. With Yahoo! Real Estate, Schultz helped lead the site from the #10 to the #2 real estate destination on the Web, was named one of the 100 most influential leaders in the real estate industry by Inman News in 2009, and architected a strategic partnership with Zillow.com in 2010.

“Pageonce shares my focus on developing and delivering forward-thinking personal finance products that fit the needs of today’s on-the-go consumers. Today that means focusing first on mobile,” said Schultz. “We have a very promising future and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.”

Taking photos is fun. Sorting and editing them is not.

I’ve got 54,220 photos on my computer, including a few would-be National Geographic covers but far more out-of-focus portraits and poorly exposed sunsets that I’ve never bothered to fix or delete.

Thanks to plummeting prices on digital SLR cameras, amateurs like myself can now experiment freely with artistic shots, taking hundreds of photos without spending a small fortune in film. But those experiments generate a lot of homework by way of virtual stacks of photos in need of processing.

Lightroom’s dense panels of options.

Adobe Systems Inc.’s (ADBE) Photoshop is famous for helping photographers extract the most out of their shots in a digital darkroom. But at $699, Photoshop costs as much as a new camera and takes a graduate course to master. Moreover, Photoshop was designed to edit a single photo at a time, not for sorting through a collection.

A new generation of software from Adobe and Apple Inc. (AAPL) has emerged to fill the gap between Photoshop and entry-level photo-management software like Apple Inc.’s iPhoto and Google Inc.’s (GOOG) Picasa. For people who have graduated from point-and-shoot cameras, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299) and Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199) offer tools to organize large collections and tackle the nitty-gritty of digital developing and re-touching.

I’ve been testing Lightroom (for Mac and PC) and Aperture (for Mac only) to organize, process and share photos I took at my friends’ recent wedding. While both programs were designed with professional photographers in mind, I found they were effective at helping a hobbyist like myself whittle 400 photos to just 40 in less than an hour.

The programs also let me edit photos far beyond the basics of brightness and contrast. One shot moved from the reject to the favorites pile after Lightroom let me take advantage of my Canon camera’s advanced image format to boost the exposure of an image taken during a dimly lit reception.

Many professional photographers have a strong preference for one of the two programs. I preferred the overall aesthetic and photo-editing tools in Lightroom for extracting the best from my photos. Nonetheless, Aperture’s strengths lie in some nifty organizational tricks, and I would recommend it for people interested in three specific uses: upgrading from a large iPhoto collection; taking video with an SLR; or tagging photos with locations.

At their core, both Lightroom and Aperture are databases, but don’t let that scare away your inner Ansel Adams.

Lightroom’s database gives you tools to organize your photos into folders on your computer, create collections from across folders, and tag photos with keywords, star ratings, and other features. For people like me who are lazy about applying tags to describe photos, Lightroom offers a spray-can tool to virtually “paint” keywords on bunches of photos at one time.

Aperture’s approach to cataloging is borrowed from iPhoto. You put your photos into “projects” (known as “events” in iPhoto), which the software will suggest when you import images from your camera based on groups that were taken around the same time. You can also add keywords, ratings and other tags.

But Aperture has two more tricks up its sleeve. You can tag photos based on the people in them, using the same technology Apple built into iPhoto to recognize faces. While that’s a good idea, I found that Aperture (like iPhoto) didn’t do an ideal job at distinguishing faces, especially in profile.

Apple says the face-recognition function works best if you identify both a couple of front-on and profile photos for any person, and also let it finish going through your whole collection before using it.

More useful is Aperture’s ability to tag photos geographically. Some new cameras collect GPS data with each shot and Aperture charts that info with pins on a giant world map, making it fun to track a journey or search for all the photos taken in one place.

Unfortunately, the majority of cameras don’t capture GPS data, but Aperture does offer some tools for adding in location data after the fact, such as importing it from a photo taken by an iPhone at the same site. Lightroom can also record GPS data for photos, but you have to work with third-party plug-ins to get the same functionality as in Aperture.

It’s in the digital darkroom that both programs earn their keep. The biggest reason an SLR-owner should upgrade beyond a basic photo editor is so he or she can work with so-called RAW files, sort of digital negatives that use extra data from the camera’s sensor to give you artistic control over factors like exposure long after you’ve shot the photo. Both programs work well with RAW, and moreover, editing photos on both programs is nondestructive, which means you can undo any changes you make—all the way back to your original photo—even after the photo has been saved. Sometimes the sky really can be too blue.

I found Lightroom’s editing features to be the most intuitive. It uses a three-paned screen clearly showing all of the available adjustments, your photo, and a history of the changes made to the image. I felt Aperture made me hunt for some of those features, but some users may prefer its optional floating palettes to Lightroom’s dense panels of options, and also its elegant system for brushing changes onto an image.

Lightroom boasts some cutting-edge editing features, such as the ability to adjust photos based on profiles of the lenses used to take them. That’s especially useful if you are working with a wide-angle lens that can distort images. With the click of a button, a warped wall at the edge of a wide-angle photo is made vertical again. The lens profiling wasn’t automatic with my older-model Canon SLR, but still worked.

To be sure, there are well-known Photoshop tricks that neither of these programs can do, such as stitching two or more photos together. They also can’t digitally cut your ex’s head out of photos. But if you really need to do that, finding the right photo-editing software is the least of your problems.

And to my disappointment, both programs are missing an increasingly popular service called HDR, or high dynamic range, where you merge photos taken at different levels of exposure into a new photo that takes the best aspects of them all. To make these sorts of images, you have to download external plugins. That’s the occasion I most missed Photoshop.

Finally, the programs both offer tools to showcase shots in professional-looking books and prints as well as on websites like Facebook and Flickr. Lightroom has the most options for producing Web galleries.

Aperture will appeal to users with cameras that do the newest trick in digtial SLR photography: take video. Such videos, which can feature beautiful photographic characteristics like short depth of field, can be imported and edited right in Aperture. The videos can be included in the software’s handsome mixed-media slideshows without the need for a separate video-editing program.

Either Lightroom or Aperture is a worthy upgrade for any semi-serious photographer. Both are available to download for free limited trials and I’d suggest testing the workflow of both before committing your photo collection.

Walter S. Mossberg and the Mossberg’s Mailbox will return Sept. 16. Email Geoffrey Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com.

Hewlett-Packard’s search for a CEO to replace Mark Hurd is going better than expected. That’s the word from interim CEO Cathie Lesjak, who says the company’s executive search committee is knee-deep in a good pool of applicants. “We’ve been very pleased with the selection of candidates,” she said at the 2010 Citi Technology Conference today. “There was some worry that there wouldn’t be that many. That certainly hasn’t been the issue.”

A well-timed bit of reassurance for addled HP (HPQ) investors who can’t be feeling too good about Hurd’s new gig with HP partner and rival Oracle (ORCL).

Asked about the state of HP’s relationship with Oracle, Lesjak conceded that it was “strained,” but said she expects the two companies to patch things up sooner of later. “At the end of the day business will prevail,” she said. “Ultimately we’ll go back to being good partners.”

Hard to imagine, given the words the two companies have exchanged recently and their developing rivalry in the servers and storage systems market. We’ll see, I suppose.

So says the Mexican investor’s spokesman. I’m sure the New York Times would say the same thing, too, but it usually doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation, etc.

But it doesn’t matter: Someone, somewhere, is buying up New York Times shares, and someone tells the press that the spike is based on speculation that Slim wants to buy the paper outright.

Happened in March, too, though it may have seemed more convincing then, because the (supposed?) rumor pushed the stock up to $12 a share. Today, the story only goosed NYT to $8.44.

Chart via Yahoo Finance:

Of course, one day, one of these stories could turn out to be true. But that doesn’t make it likely: Slim owns a seven percent stake in the company, and has lent it a big pile of money, at very steep rates. But the Sulzberger family still controls the company via ownership of the B stock, so it will take something extraordinary for that to change.

By Nathan Becker, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Netflix Inc. reached an agreement to license first-run theatrical movies distributed by Nu Image/Millennium Films for online streaming during the “pay TV window,” when they’re usually available on premium-TV channels.

Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed. The film company said they would supply the monthly-fee movie-rental company with five to 10 films a year, generally a few months after their release on DVD. The film industry has employed a strategy of delaying releases to online platforms in order to protect its traditional theatrical and DVD revenue streams.

Nu Image/Millennium is best known for action and thriller films including “The Expendables” and “Brooklyn’s Finest.”

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As expected, Apple today released iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Announced at the company’s special music event last week, this latest point release of iOS addresses issues with Bluetooth connectivity and proximity sensor accuracy, and adds Game Center–Apple’s social gaming service–along with support for HDR photos and TV show rentals in iTunes.

Google’s Instant is very fast, but the digerati are almost as quick: The search giant just rolled out its new real-time search feature (see John Paczkowski’s excellent liveblog), but Twitter’s shoutier members have already assessed it.

Conclusions: It’s really cool! And also, it’s totally, definitely, going to kill someone!

Exactly who that will be is unclear: Maybe it will be Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing! Maybe it will be Twitter, which is supposed to be “real time,” too! Or maybe it will be the dark arts of search-engine optimization!

Maybe! Or maybe it will be more like Apple’s (AAPL) Ping, which was declared a MySpace Music killer before Steve Jobs finished presenting it last week. Now that people have actually used Ping, though, it seems less homicidal and more benign/inept.

In any case, one thing Google Instant won’t do is make any significant impact on Google’s P&L. So says J.P. Morgan’s (JPM) Imran Khan, in a note he just published (almost instantly!). His big takeaways:

It won’t make Google (GOOG)  any more money, in the near-term:

We think this new product will have little to no impact on monetization rates. We see this product as an improvement to user functionality and think that its impact on advertisers will be limited. All of the ads typically associated with the suggested search appear as normal as the query is being entered. No changes have been made to serving or ranking. Although the constant updates to the results page may result in more ads served as a person types a query, this should only impact CTRs not the number of clicks as a user will not likely click on an ad until the appropriate results appear.

But it won’t cost Google anything, either:

Management expects the impact on costs to be in line with their existing search cost growth curve. Engineers adjusted the product to have as minimal an impact on servers and data centers as possible. Management expects the impact to be in line with the existing search cost growth curve.

But! If people like it (it really is cool), and that prompts them to search more, then that’s a good thing for Google, long-term.

OK! Back to the killing fields!