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I imagine something like this Danger Service renamed under Windows Live for Mobile brand, with more connections to relatively new services like Windows Live Photos, and perhaps new client pieces as well. Music will be part of the picture, but this is more about mobile than Zune.

Recall that Danger–the company Microsoft acquired last February–has some expertise in services. The company’s Danger Service automatically backs up e-mail and photos in an online repository, pushes e-mails out to the device, offers remote storage for games and other apps, and synchronizes everything between the mobile device and a PC. In other words, everything Microsoft’s been saying under the “software plus services” rubric for the last couple years.

As one of my colleagues put it the other day, Microsoft killed the rumors that it’s building a
Zune phone, but it didn’t drive a silver stake through their heart and bury them at a crossroads at midnight. In other words, until Microsoft makes some kind of phone-related announcement, misinformed analysts and news outlets will continue to speculate that there’s going to be a Microsoft-built Zune phone, and Microsoft spokespeople will continue going on the record with vehement denials.

So let’s assume the rumors are based in fact and that Microsoft is going to make some sort of phone-related announcements at CES. (I haven’t been briefed on any such announcements, so this is all speculation on my part.) Befitting Microsoft’s new self-image as a software plus services company, I would expect the company to announce new and refreshed software and services for mobile phones. Specifically, a Zune client that connects to the Zune Marketplace, plus a revamp of the historically lame MSN/Windows Live services for mobile.

That said, Microsoft might not announce any of this at CES, but might wait for a more mobile-specific conference.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Windows Mobile may have stalled in the water while the iPhone and RIM phones have continued to take market share, but to Microsoft, 11% global market share and 16 million units a year isn’t unsuccessful enough to kill the platform and change strategy completely.

Why? Because Microsoft–unlike Apple, and Research in Motion, and Nokia–isn’t a hardware company at its core. Microsoft only builds hardware when it can’t get a partner to do so (Xbox–who’d take the per-console loss?), or when it feels that partner products aren’t getting enough traction and thereby letting a competitor build a threat to Windows. It built Zune because the
iPod was slaughtering all the Windows Media-based players, revitalizing Apple and getting consumers to take another look at the
Mac. (Sure enough, Apple’s now the fastest-growing computer manufactuer in the U.S. and has taken a couple points of market share away from Windows-based PCs.) Microsoft briefly built wireless home routers because it felt partners weren’t making them easy enough to set up on Windows, especially compared with Apple’s Airport. And way back when, the company originally built keyboards and mice to promote Windows, and found that it was a profitable little business.

Danger built the Sidekick, but Microsoft was mostly interested in the company for its services expertise.

This is getting silly. I’ve been saying since February that the most likely course of action for Microsoft to take is to build a Zune client for Windows Mobile. Not a Zune phone.

“Introductory” pricing for the Intel 160GB solid-state drives is $945 for less than 1,000 units, Intel said.

Additional comments:: Note that the only first-tier PC vendor to publicly say it is using Intel SSDs is Hewlett-Packard. This is a significant customer for Intel since HP is the largest PC vendor in the world. HP offers Intel SSDs in all of its EliteBook notebooks.

Solid-state drives are generally faster at getting data than hard-disk drives (and in some cases, much faster) but pricing is a big hurdle for consumers. Toshiba indicated last week that sample quantities of its new solid-state will range in price from $220 for the 64GB drive to $1,652 for the 512GB drive.

Adding a 128GB solid-state drive to an Apple MacBook Air ups the price by about $500.

Larger-capacity drives from other SSD suppliers are also on the way. In November, Samsung said it had begun mass production of 256GB SSDs. And Toshiba recently said it would show a 512GB drive at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that would ship in the second quarter of 2009.

Updated at 1:40 p.m. PST with pricing information.

Intel said Monday that it will add 160GB versions of its X25-M and X18-M Serial ATA (SATA) solid-state drive. To date, Intel has limited shipments to its 80GB versions. Laptop-size 2.5-inch versions of the 160GB drive are shipping now; 1.8-inch models for ultraportable laptops will ship next month, Intel said.

Intel is now shipping 160GB solid-state drives as it vies with Samsung and Toshiba to deliver high-capacity SSDs that rival hard-disk drives in capacity. Price, however, remains a big obstacle for many consumers.

Currently, adding an Intel 80GB solid-state drive option to an HP EliteBook 2530p ultraportable laptop adds $659 over the cost of a 5400RPM 1.8-inch 120GB hard disk drive.

That kind of pricing–even if it’s for pricey sample drives–is hard to swallow when a laptop-class 500GB hard-disk drive sells for well under $200.

(Credit:
Intel)

I haven't seen that poster since high school.

From Nielsen Soundscan by way of the LA Weekly and Rolling Stone, here are the top 10 vinyl sellers in 2008. I’ve added the years they were originally released, and what I imagine was going through the mind of vinylphiles when they bought it.

Overall, vinyl accounted for a whopping 0.1 of all music sales last year! How long before preloaded microSD cards surpass vinyl to become the third-most-popular music format?

10. Radiohead, OK Computer, 1997. Great production, trippy artwork looks great under the lava lamp.

9. Metallica, Death Magnetic, 2008. Maybe the vinyl version won’t be overcompressed to death.

8. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes, 2008. Pitchfork likes it, it must be good.

7. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973. Remember those posters?
6. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 1998. With the LP, I can pretend I was hip to this record when it originally came out.

5. Portishead, Third, 2008. See number 8.

4. B-52s, Funplex, 2008. Remember that all-night dance party we had back in ‘82?
3. Guns ‘n’ Roses, Chinese Democracy, 2008. This will be a collectors’ item someday.

2. The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969. Now I can replace the copy my daughter stole when she went off to college.
1. Radiohead, In Rainbows, 2008. I feel kind of guilty about paying one cent for the download.

Ability to run Windows Vista Home Premium
1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
Popular games including Spore, Call of Duty 4, and Sim City 4 *
DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
Accelerated video enhancement and transcoding using Nvidia CUDA technology

Acer launched a PC Tuesday that attempts to bring PC-class performance to Atom-processor-based PCs.

Pricing information was not immediately available. Generally speaking, Ion-based desktops are expected to be priced under $300.

(Credit:
Acer)

The AspireRevo’s marquee external feature is the diminutive size: the desktop is comparable in size to a laptop (though slightly thicker, about the size of a typical hardcover book). Internally, the device will test Nvidia’s thesis that devices, such as Netbooks, that pair the Atom processor with Nvidia graphics offer much better performance than Intel-only (i.e., Atom-with-Intel-chipset) platforms.

The Acer AspireRevo, about the size of a hardcover book, combines Nvidia graphics with the Intel Atom processor.

Nvidia listed the following capabilities for the Ion-based AspireRevo:

(* Correction: originally listed as “Sim City 5″ )

By design, Atom is a more power frugal and, concomitantly, slower processor than Intel’s mainstream Core 2 chip architecture.

“The AspireRevo…is perfectly suited for the living room, because Nvidia Ion provides a brilliant graphics experience with digital photos, watching video, and playing family-friendly games,” said Gianpiero Morbello, corporate vice president of marketing for Acer, in a statement.

This won’t be quite the slam dunk that it was before, however. Intel recently started shipping the Atom N280 and the accompanying GN40 chipset, which for the first time on an Intel Netbook platform delivers 1080p HD playback.

Updated at 3:50 p.m. PST: correcting for Intel GN40 graphics support and adding pricing information for target market.

The Acer AspireRevo is the first Atom-based PC from a major PC supplier to use Nvidia’s Ion chipset that packs GeForce 9400M graphics, the same graphics used in the Apple 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Air.

Erich Clementi

(Credit:
IBM)

Clementi will take his official bow at IBM’s annual CIO conference, which this year is being held this week in China. Among the other announcements at the conference to note, IBM will announce Tivoli Storage as a Service. The idea here will be to allow customers to pay for metered use of the product’s data protection technologies via a cloud.

Clementi’s official title is general manager of Enterprise Initiatives. But GM or czar, he is being catapulted into a high-profile position where he’ll be making the case to customers why they should sign with IBM instead of one of its rivals. In the last 18 months, IBM has built more than a dozen cloud centers around the world. But Clementi’s job now is to speed that effort with an eye toward “making cloud technology work for and with corporations and governments.”

With IT budgets under pressure because of the economy, cloud computing has emerged as a favorite concept among the digerati because of the potential savings it offers clients. (It doesn’t hurt that IDC is projecting that cloud computing will evolve into a $42 billion market within the next three years.)

On Tuesday, IBM put Erich Clementi in charge of all its cloud-computing work. His appointment was part of a multitime zone announcement that also featured the company’s latest cloud-computing clients–Elizabeth Arden, Nexxera, and the United States Golf Association–who intend to test Big Blue’s cloud applications in their own businesses.

With so much buzz in the corporate computing world around the (sometimes ambiguous) concept of “cloud computing,” it was only a matter of time before one large company or another appointed a cyber computing czar.

That said, Ginx is a very strong new interface for Twitter. See also TweetDeck, recently updated (and open to everyone), which offers several of the same features in an information-dense, yet still readable multi-column view that Twitter junkies are likely to find more valuable. The well-established Twhirl does a nicer job for users who are also on FriendFeed.

What’s not clear from a surface examination is how Ginx is a business. In a TechCrunch interview, Ginx co-founder Randy Ching says monetization may come from helping publishers spread their messages out via Twitter and other services that Ginx may eventually support. Frankly, if I were looking to build a new business right now, serving online publishers would not be my first choice.

Ginx’s big improvements over Twitter.com are in two areas: First, it handles links better. Shortened links (via TinyURL, Bitly, etc.) in Twitter messages are expanded to their full URLs right in front of you, with the page’s headline as well, so you can see what you’re clicking through to. This is a very big usability and security improvement. Ginx will auto-shorten URLs when you post, too, but that’s not a unique feature for a Twitter client.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

Ginx does a great job tracking conversations on Twitter. It also expands short URLs.

The product also does a much better job at displaying conversations than Twitter.com. If you see that a message is “in reply to” another, you can click on it to see the whole thread. Likewise, if you want to see what people are saying to a person in general, you can see a “with friends” view. And if you click on a hash tag in a message (a de facto way Twitter users create message categories), Ginx will display everything using the tag.

Ginx, a buzzy new start-up co-founded by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, has begun to release its Twitter front-end into a limited private “pre-alpha.” The upshot is this: If you’re a Twitter.com user and you got one of the of the coveted beta invites, use Ginx. It’s better than Twitter.com for accessing your Twitter feeds. Ginx is competitive with Twitter desktop apps, like Tweetdeck and Twhirl, although there are things that the clients do that Ginx does not.

The honeymoon period for proprietary software is over. It remains a struggle for many executives to even begin to justify their investment in IT…Ten years ago, I believed that there were reasonable exceptions for when to use proprietary software. I have since come to believe that proprietary software has no advantage, even for the most specific applications.

We are now living in a moment where claims of reputation are not sufficient to ensure delivery. We are using source code instead of reputation as a means to grade who is doing what.

A few days ago, I was visiting several banks in Canary Wharf and the city. On television the entire day was one apology after another from banks whose fundamental business was trust and reputation.

It used to be believed (by myself and others) that open source couldn’t tackle niche applications, as there wouldn’t be a financial incentive or sufficient expertise in a given field to mount an open-source approach. But that thinking was wrong. We just didn’t know it yet.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

In the midst of an engaging Times UK article on the rise of open source, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and a Red Hat executive, declares that proprietary software has outstayed its welcome:

commentary

It’s very likely that open-source vendors will increasingly intermingle proprietary code with open-source code in order to improve their top and bottom lines, but I agree with Tiemann: the era of top-to-bottom proprietary lock-in is over. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says so.

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point. The federal government could improve security, lead the industry, and lower costs by embracing self-encrypting drives for all new systems. This should be plenty of motivation for federal agencies such as the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense, and others in the Beltway to get busy.

The federal government has programs and people in place. The Department of Defense and General Services Administration have already established a “Data at rest Tiger Team” to address this problem in the defense community. It is safe to assume that this team knows what’s out there, which systems are still vulnerable, and which ones are up for replacement. Adding systems with self-encrypting drives could provide this team with a new tool to accelerate this effort.

To me, this conversion is inevitable since hardware-based cryptographic processing tends to lead to superior security and performance while eliminating the muss and fuss around software procurement, installation, and maintenance.

Given these benefits, I believe that the U.S. federal government should make self-encrypting drives a new standard for all federal system purchases. This would not only enhance the security of private data on federal systems but also help jump-start this tech industry transition. This is a perfect opportunity for the federal government to take the lead because:

I’ve recently written about a new standard published by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) for self-encrypting drives. With this standard, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital are shipping or will soon ship self-encrypting hard drives for laptop computers. This in turn should prompt a transition, where users will opt for systems with self-encrypting drives rather than install encryption software utilities.

Demand for encryption remains high. In 2006, the Office of Management and Budget instructed civilian agencies to put a plan together for laptop security within 45 days. Subsequent to this plan, agencies were supposed to encrypt all laptops. According to several estimates, somewhere between 50 percent and 60 percent of these laptops remain unprotected. If all new systems contain self-encrypting drives, federal agencies can focus their attention on a stop-gap plan for aging systems in the field.

The Defense Department is slim on procurement people. Just last week, a team of experts told a Senate committee that the Defense Department is constrained by a lack of procurement people. OK, so here’s a thought. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to purchase systems with self-encrypting drives once rather than purchase systems and then purchase software? Oh, and self-encrypting drives would also eliminate the systems integration burden as well.

Self-encrypting drives could help secure the new Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC). To improve security, federal officials are in the process of defining a set of FDCC guidelines for laptops and desktops. With self-encrypting drives, these systems will be secure upon delivery.

Here’s a little something for business users: PDF Converter can turn any PDF into a Word document while keeping all text, images, and formatting intact. Normally, it sells for $59.95, but it’s available free on Monday from Giveaway of the Day.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Make sure that you check out the “readme” file in the download and follow the instructions; otherwise you might have trouble activating the program.

(Credit:
Rick Broida)

The catch? You must download and install the program today, March 2. That’s how Giveaway of the Day works: The site offers a new commercial-software freebie each day of the week, with the only requisite being that you act on it within that 24-hour window. Hardly a catch at all, in my book.

If you miss out on the deal, there’s a new Web service that offers similar capabilities: PDF-to-Word Converter. It’s in closed beta right now, but I know where you can score an invite.

PDF Converter retains all formatting when converting PDFs to Word documents.

In addition to Word, PDF Converter supports output to HTML, JPEG, TIFF, and even plain text. It offers batch conversion, drag-and-drop file selection, and a command-line mode. The program runs on Windows 95 and later.