Mommy Blogger Heather Armstrong earned $1 million a year

O.K., then, I say, almost begging at this point, almost to the point of tears, is there anyone I can talk to who might see what I’ve been through and understand? And here’s where I say: “Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter. If I say something about my terrible experience on Twitter, do you think someone will help me?” And she says in the most condescending tone and hiss ever uttered: “Yes, I know what Twitter is. And no, that will not matter.” AUG. 28, 2009, Dooce.com

The washing machine at Heather Armstrong’s Salt Lake City home — as millions of her followers already know — is a Maytag. To be specific, it’s a Performance series 4.4-cubic-foot-I.E.C.-capacity front-load steam washer that retailed for $1,599 and that she and her husband, Jon, bought on sale for $1,300, plus the 10-year warranty. They made the purchase near the end of her second pregnancy, a pre-emptive strike against the mountain of soiled onesies that accumulate when a newborn joins the family.

As her followers also know, that machine stopped working a week after it was installed. Instead of washing clothes, it produced electronic error messages. By that time, the summer of 2009, the baby was home, the laundry was piling up and 10 days of waiting for a part turned into 10 more days of waiting for another part, and June became July which became August, which is when Armstrong threatened to bring the wrath of the Internet down on Maytag.

She is one of the few bloggers who wield that kind of clout. Typically, there are 100,000 visitors daily to her site, Dooce.com, where she writes about her kids, her husband, her pets, her treatment for depression and her life as a liberal ex-Mormon living in Utah. As she points out, a sizable number also follow her on Twitter (in the year and a half since she threatened Maytag, she has added a half-million more). She is the only blogger on the latest Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Media, coming in at No. 26, which is 25 slots behind Oprah, but just one slot behind Tina Brown. Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

By talking about poop and spit up. And stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

I lost my job today. My direct boss and the human-resources representative pulled me into one of three relatively tiny conference rooms and informed me that the company no longer had any use for me. Essentially, they explained, they didn’t like what I had expressed on my Web site. I got fired because of dooce.com. FEB. 26, 2002

Today the sleek headquarters of Blurbodoocery Inc. — the corporate identity of Heather and Jon Armstrong’s company — is on the 1,000-square-foot third floor of their sprawling six-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac in Salt Lake City, where they have lived since June.

In one corner is the glass-walled office of their newest employee, John LaCaze, who came aboard a few months before that move, and whose job description — everything from answering e-mail to ordering lunch to making sure that time is not wasted because, after all, it is money — has earned him the nickname “Tyrant” on Heather’s blog. Next to LaCaze’s office is the studio, equipped for audio and video. In the center are Jon and Heather’s work spaces, each dominated by two enormous computer monitors and an array of cartoons and kitsch.

Next to the door of the office is etched “Heather B. Armstrong, President,” but by her desk is a nameplate that reads “Heather Hamilton.” That was who she was in February 2001 when she wrote her very first Dooce post. She was 25, with a degree in English fromBrigham Young University and a job at a start-up in L.A. “In those days when you said you had a blog, people thought you had a venereal disease,” she says now.

Dooce was a nickname that grew out of an inside joke — a takeoff of “dude.” Unlike many bloggers (particularly women) whose initial goal was to update family living far away, her postings were never meant for her relatives. She wrote of the liberation she felt leaving her parents’ Mormonism behind, of sex and caffeine, of dating and work. In the summer of 2001, Armstrong’s site was receiving 58 hits a day. On a whim she e-mailed Jason Kottke, one of the earliest online aggregators (whose own site was still a hobby and had not yet become kottke.org) and asked him for technical advice. He linked to Dooce, and her readership leapt to 2,000 daily hits.

Kottke also warned Armstrong that her family would eventually find out. Despite her certainty that they were as likely to search the Net as they were to vote for a Democrat, her brother did wander onto her site on Sept. 13, 2001. The first post he saw was one she describes as “a martini-fueled diatribe against the Mormon Church” that she wrote in anger about the attacks on the World Trade Center, committed in the name of religion. Tears, screaming and weeks of silence followed, and for a time Armstrong thought her family would never speak to her again.

Soon she would be in trouble for something else. Venting about work, she nicknamed her co-workers (as she would later nickname Tyrant) — things like That One Co-worker Who Manages to Say Something Stupid Every Time He Opens His Mouth — and, in what she considered the safety of her blog, she dished amusingly (and disparagingly) about them. “I hate that the Tech Producer doesn’t know how to use e-mail,” she wrote one day. “He’s the goddamn TECH Producer, for crying out loud. I hate that one of the 10 vice presidents in this 30-person company wasn’t born with an ‘indoor’ voice but with a shrill, monotone, speaking-over-a-passing-F16 outdoor voice. And he loves to hear himself speak, even if just to himself.” (source: The New York Times)

Gartner Survey: Open Source Software have been adopted by more than 50% Organizations

STAMFORD, Conn., February 8, 2011— A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions. However, the survey revealed that only one-third of responding organizations had a formal OSS policy in place. Gartner conducted a primary research survey of 547 IT leaders in organizations in 11 countries from July 2010 through August 2010. The goal was to determine current and future OSS adoption and usage habits. "Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently — if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "As external service providers emerge to support commercial offerings, OSS is and will continue to be used in both non-mission-critical and mission-critical environments," Ms. Wurster said. "With greater in-depth understanding and access to the necessary skill sets, end-user organizations will continue to find new deployment of OSS. Although a search for reducing costs by adopting OSS continues to be a major driver, with this survey we see more respondents looking at OSS as having much-greater value than simply getting something for free." Gartner's survey indicated that just over one in every five responding organizations (22 percent) was adopting OSS consistently in all departments of the company. However, a much-higher number of respondents (46 percent) used OSS in specific departments and projects. In addition, 21 percent of respondents revealed that they were in the process of evaluating the advantages of OSS usage. The top corporatewide Gartner-defined key initiatives supported by the use of OSS were: data management and integration; and application development, integration, architecture, governance and/or overhaul. Other key initiatives supported by OSS werebusiness process improvement or re-engineering; security, risk and/or compliance; data center modernization and consolidation; and virtualization. "Based on these results, we see that OSS components and building blocks are utilized together with internally developed software to augment and enhance existing systems through integration and automation, as well as to improve business efficiencies and security," said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner. With each Gartner OSS survey taken in the past five years, the amount of OSS that makes up responding organizations' portfolio has increased, from less than 10 percent five years ago to more than an expected 30 percent within the next 18 months. In that same period, the rate of proprietary software has decreased at about the same rate as OSS usage has increased. However, internally developed software has also increased, suggesting that OSS is used most often in conjunction with internally built software rather than as a complete replacement for proprietary software. Additional information is available in the Gartner report 'Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software.' The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1528219.

After 50-years in exile, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned to Egypt

On the same day, other signs of a changing Egypt emerged. The military warned restive workers that it would stop what it declared were illegal strikes crippling Egypt’s economy, declaring “it will confront them and take the legal measures needed to protect the nation’s security.”

It also allowed two Iranian Navy ships to pass through the Suez Canal — a first since the 1979 Iranian revolution and a move that some Israeli officials called a provocation. Egyptian officials reportedly said the ships did not contain weapons.

Sheik Qaradawi, a popular television cleric whose program reaches an audience of tens of millions worldwide, addressed a rapt audience of more than a million Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to celebrate the uprising and honor those who died.

“Don’t fight history,” he urged his listeners in Egypt and across the Arab world, where his remarks were televised. “You can’t delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed.”

He spoke as the authorities in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were waging violent crackdowns on uprisings inspired in part by the Egyptian revolution. The sermon was the first public address here by Sheik Qaradawi, 84, since he fled Egypt for Qatar in 1961. An intellectual inspiration to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Qaradawi was jailed in Egypt three times for his ties to the group and spent most of his life abroad. His prominence exemplifies the peril and potential for the West as Egypt opens up. While he condemned the 9/11 attacks, he has supported suicide bombers against Israel and attacks on American forces in Iraq.

On Friday, he struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching. He began his sermon by saying that he was discarding the customary opening “Oh Muslims,” in favor of “Oh Muslims and Copts,” referring to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. He praised Muslims and Christians for standing together in Egypt’s revolution and even lauded the Coptic Christian “martyrs” who once fought the Romans and Byzantines. “I invite you to bow down in prayer together,” he said.

He urged the military officers governing Egypt to deliver on their promises of turning over power to “a civil government” founded on principles of pluralism, democracy and freedom. And he called on the army to immediately release all political prisoners and rid the cabinet of its dominance by officials of the old Mubarak government.

“We demand from the Egyptian Army to free us from the government that was appointed by Mubarak,” Sheik Qaradawi declared. “We want a new government without any of these faces whom people can no longer stand.” And he urged the young people who led the uprising to continue their revolution. “Protect it,” he said. “Don’t you dare let anyone steal it from you.”

As the uprising here intensified in recent weeks, Sheik Qaradawi had used his platform to urge Egyptians to rise up against Mr. Mubarak. His son, Abdul-Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is an Egyptian poet who supported the revolution, and, though Sheik Qaradawi is considered a religious traditionalist, three of his daughters hold doctoral degrees, including one in nuclear physics.

Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.

But he has made exceptions for violence against Israel or the American forces in Iraq. “You call it violence; I call it resistance,” said Prof. Emad Shahin of the University of Notre Dame, an Egyptian scholar who has studied Sheik Qaradawi’s work and was in Tahrir Square for his speech Friday.

“He is enormously influential,” Mr. Shahin added. “His presence in the square today cemented the resolve of the demonstrators to insist on their demands from the government.”

Egyptians streamed back into Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution, for a rally that was part prayer service, part celebration and part political protest. State television put attendance at two million.

A raucous spirit of flag-waving celebration prevailed. Women in full face veils painted their daughters’ faces in the colors of the Egyptian flag. Young men danced to thrumming drum beats on balconies, lampposts and trucks. There were many signs bearing the dual images of a crescent and cross, the symbol of Muslim-Christian unity.

(source; The New Tork Times)

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.(See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.(See the best inventions of 2010.)

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.(Comment on this story.)

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

(source: time.com)
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html#ixzz1EMNPE86F

Could Facebook replace Government Websites?

It’s all the rage for ministries and agencies to have a Facebook or even MySpace page these days. Governments are going where their citizens are. So why bother having a web site at all? The idea may seem farfetched. But as officials from Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Netherlands reveal in interviews with FutureGov, government web sites could disappear into the ‘social cloud’ sooner than we think.

“We can’t do community outreach programmes sitting inside Parliament House. The same applies online,” Craig Thomler (pictured), the Online Communications Director for the Australian Department of Health & Ageing, said at the FutureGov Forum Hong Kong this month. “If Facebook is where the audience is, we need to be there too. It’s about engaging sensitively in the right avenues.”

Government operates too many web sites, and most are difficult and expensive to maintain. Consolidating them makes sense, Thomler said. “You need to think carefully about what you’re trying to achieve with a web site, and how you’re trying to engage. There are lots of incidences where you need to engage community with community, and it is difficult for a web site to do this.”

Datuk Arpah bt Abdul Razak is the Director General of Local Government in Malaysia, where Facebook is the most popular social network. “Will Facebook pages replace our web sites? Nothing is impossible,” she told FutureGov. “Our leaders are blogging and using Facebook heavily, gaining friends and supporters. The more social media is used, the more likely it is to replace the traditional means with which government communicates online.”

But government web sites will not disappear altogether, reckons Mark Medwecki, the Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. While popular social platforms (Facebook ranks top in Hong Kong too) are useful for quickly disseminating information on crimes and giving relevant advice for citizens, Hong Kong police has given no consideration to replacing the structured web sites which give access to crime information online. “The use of social media is more likely to be a supplementary online activity, not a replacement,” he said.

The Netherlands is one of Europe’s largest consumers of social media, and the government has been a particularly active user. Matt Poelmans, the Director of Citizenlink at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, told FutureGov that a new engagement model is emerging which raises new challenges for government.

“The mixed model [using social media pages and official web sites] raises debate on a compelling issue: how to reconcile the requirements of accessibility with the innovative use of social media. Government web sites are strictly regulated. Private websites are not. Should one allow freer access to public information than the other?”

Another big issue concerning what observers are calling the ‘social cloud’ is information security. Security emerged as the overwhelming concern among Hong Kong government officials at the FutureGov Forum, and Sophos research released in February gives officials good reason to worry. Spam and malware on social networking sites increased by 70 per cent in 2009, with Facebook the worst effected site. (source: Robin Hicks)

Nokia's fate: Booming or Bust?

"Nokia and Symbian was the last of the European software business, it's gone overnight. That's depressing," an industry veteran told me on Friday afternoon.

As I wrote several years ago, Nokia was a company that could set global standards for consumer electronics, and do so from a cold and remote corner of Europe, using its own R&D. Americans thought this claim was either cute or hyperbolic - but with its central role in mobile communications, and its deep pockets, I didn't think it was far-fetched for Nokia to rival Sony across the home. With a Microsoft partnership, that's not impossible, but it's unlikely - and Nokia won't be putting its own vision to the market, but putting its badge on somebody else's.

For me, the most remarkable part of Nokia's decline is how deeply it thought about the future, for so long. Nokia had prepared for the shift away from commodity voice phones many years ago. In the late 1990s it handing out copies of The Innovator's Dilemma for its management to read. Anyone looking for a single scapegoat or a defining moment should be disappointed, however. What slowly strangled Nokia was its inability to execute its plans effectively.

Let's look at the problems Nokia was confronted with, and its responses.

The masterplan

As Charles Davies pointed out in our Symbian retrospective, the late Noughties were the first time that an outsider could break into the top tier of phone manufacturers. Packaged chipsets allowed new entrants to the make reasonable 2G (not yet 3G) phones by 2007. Nokia had pioneered high functionality consumer smartphones in 2002, starting with the 7650. This looked like great timing: GPRS networks were coming online and 3G not far behind. Every 18 months Nokia could produce smaller, more integrated electronics. From a producer's point of view, it was perfect. From the punter's point of view, all was not well, though.

Symbian smartphones became increasingly complex and buggy. They brimmed over with features, but users had to pay a premium to add a data plan to use them fully. The features were hard to find, too. So smartphones remained a niche for technology enthusiasts. (Symbian was turning a tidy profit by 2006).

Then Apple entered the market with a device that was a merely-OK phone, but offered something radically new: a new user interface that made much of the functionality manufacturers like Nokia had built into their devices quite usable. And Apple had a bundled data plan, so trying it all out was risk-free.

At last, here was an integrated mobile device that didn't suck. Pure-play PDAs had disappeared, but their replacements left a nasty taste. Both reading and writing about these were no fun.

"After years of writing about smartphones, I've seen the established players become lazy and complacent, go down blind alleys, or standardize on horrible designs and feature sets," I recall. "So the iPhone should focus minds wonderfully - it should raise the bar for everyone." Believe it or not, that was one of my more Unpopular Opinions.

Conventional wisdom decreed that this vanity exercise would be quietly snuffed out by the operators - possibly ending Apple's ambitions in the mobile business.

So Nokia wasn't alone in dismissing the iPhone, and its usability, as a gimmick. This gave Apple the time it needed to catch up. Demand was overwhelming, allowing Apple to relax its one-operator-per-market policy, and gradually work in the many missing features: an app store, 3G, and MMS for example. Nokia simply thought producer-power would crush the users' revolt. (source: The A Register)

RIM's Jim Balsillie: 'Our PlayBook shames the You Know What

MWC 2011 Never has anyone spent so much time talking about Apple without saying the ‘A’ word than RIM CEO Jim Balsillie as he showed off the company's upcoming PlayBook tablet at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Playing to the gallery of operators – a congregation that booed when the iPhone 4 won ‘best handset’ at last night’s GSMA awards – he talked about how the PlayBook does things the unmentionablepad doesn’t, and how those things will make money for networks.

Balsillie was on stage with fellow CEOs Stephen Elop of Nokia, Dr Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm, and Ryuji Yamada of NTT DoCoMo. The topic: “Connecting the Dots - A 360° View on Consumer Electronics”. Given that this was a pants thing to ask them, they all wisely gave a nod to it and then talked about what they wanted to talk about.

What Jim Balsillie wanted to say was: “Hey, you know that sexy new tablet? We can do that too. You know that sexy new handset/operator alliance aimed at operators? We can do that too.” But he was more subtle.

RIM is now a Consumer Electronics company because it has a tablet. Embracing the Consumer Electronics element, he talked of a “constructive alignment” of Consumer Electronics companies with carriers – an alignment that was the difference between going through the operators' billing systems and going over the top and disintermediating the carrier.

What makes the PlayBook great, he said, is that it supports real-time multitasking with symmetric multiprocessing. It’s also open – although everyone has different measurements of ‘open’ and no mention was made of OS openness.

Who pays the piper

What is open is the choice of dev systems: you can use HTML5, Dreamweaver, JavaScript, and CSS. This is what the CEOs of the carriers want. Support for various flavours of 4G will also make carriers salivate. In deference to the GSMA hosts, he didn’t mention WiMAX. But the PlayBook can do that.

Balsillie went on to look at mobile devices for payments. This starts with carrier billing for BlackBerry App World offerings, a brave thing to highlight because RIM only has agreements with a handful of carriers while Nokia has over 100 such agreements. But Stephen Elop was too much of a gentleman to point this out.

Carrier billing is ostensibly about a seamless experience for the user, buying your Angry Birds Mighty Eagle without having to type in a credit card number in the middle of the game. In truth, it’s about getting operators to buy your kit because there is ongoing money in it.

Treading delicately on the toes of financial regulation, Balsillie announced the ability to send operator credit from one BlackBerry to another with BlackBerry Messenger, gifting airtime and applications. He needs to be careful with this as it won’t be legal in some countries, and if there were ever any hint of turning that credit back into cash, the financial might of most financial regulators would descend on him.

He confirmed the rumours that there will be an NFC-enabled device, going further by saying that it is possible that all future BlackBerry devices will have NFC, mirroring an announcement Nokia made last November for all smartphones.

Is Facebook planning to have Fb SIM card and Facebook Phone?

Facebook wants to be everywhere. They’ve made this very clear. They want to be on you desktop, on your laptop, on your smartphone, on yourtablet, and on your dumbphone. The latter, they directly addressed today with a new SIM cardmade in conjunction with Gemalto which magically gives basically every dumbphone — aka “feature phone” — a simple entry point to use the social network: SMS. It’s a great idea, and very cool for emerging markets. In fact, you could make a case for it sort of being a “Facebook Phone”. But it’s obviously not the mythical one which Facebook absolutely wants you to believe doesn’t exist.

Nor are the phones that HTC may be releasing tomorrow at Mobile World Congress.PocketNow was apparently able to snag some images of these Android-powered HTC devices that carry a special Facebook button at the bottom. Again, potentially cool and useful, but not the Facebook Phone. And that INQ-built Facebook phone? Also cool, but also not the Facebook Phone.

Now, the only thing we know for absolute certain is that Facebook hates talking about the concept of a “Facebook Phone”. We’ve had this argument with them in the past. They seem to think that a Facebook Phone with a capital “P” would only be a device with both hardware and software designed and developed by them. Or, at the very least, an OS written by them from the ground up. They’ve stated time and time again that they’re not working on such a project. At least not yet. And we buy that. What we don’t buy is that they don’t have some sort of project to take Google’s open source Android OS and inject it with Facebook DNA. That’s what we believe the Facebook Phone is going to be. And from what we’re hearing, it’s still coming.

Ever since we wrote the first Facebook Phone story last September, whispers have not stopped about what Facebook is doing. In particular, we had heard that two key employees, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, were working on the project. But we’ve since heard that Facebook’s head of mobile, Erick Tseng, has taken command of the project. And that yes, it continues to be a project to customize Android to make it, and the apps that run on it, more social at their cores. “Instant personalization” and all that. You may remember Tseng as the senior Android manager who jumped over to Facebook last May.

We’re also hearing that Tseng is pushing Facebook’s Platmobile team to be ready to have something to show off at Facebook’s f8 conference later this year. Judging from previous years, this should take place in April. You may recall that the Platmobile team is the onethat was hard at work on eliminating the need for mobile password entry. Clearly, any Android Facebook Phone project would feature this as a hallmark.

You may recall the rumors that Facebook was working with Apple to bring this deep level of social to the iPhone last year. That project was apparently very real and may have been codenamed “Spork”. But apparently, that project was scrapped — perhaps after Facebook and Apple could not come to an agreement on terms for such features. Whatever the reason, work began on the Android project shortly thereafter (which was around the time we first heard about it).

So, Facebook apparently continues to not work on a phone in the same way that Google was not working on a phone for all those years. Will we see the fruits of such non-labor at f8 this year? Perhaps. Will it be a physical phone? Unlikely. A totally new OS made by Facebook? Probably not. But instead, we may see a version of Android with very deep Facebook integration. One that phone-makers would be welcome to use. A Trojan Horse for Facebook to make smartphones truly social.

(source: techcrunch.com)

Nokia is standing on a burning Mobile Platform

An explosive memo purportedly penned by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has left the internet ablaze with speculation that Nokia may adopt a platform developed by rivals such as Microsoft or Android.

The memo, which was allegedly leaked to Engadget, describes Nokia as “standing on a burning platform.”

The plaintive missive describes Nokia's market woes as Apple encroaches on its business at the high-end, Android in the mid-range and cut-price Chinese handset makers at the low-end.

It states that Nokia is years behind these rivals, and that if Nokia continues with its strategies for MeeGo and Symbian it will only fall further behind.

“Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem,” it says.

Partly as a result of the memo, there has been intense speculation that Nokia might embrace a new operating system at its strategy day on Friday. The most likely candidate is Windows Phone 7, but some analysts have urged the Finnish giant to back the winning horse, Android.

But according to reports, several large operators have called on Nokia not to adopt Android. Many cellcos may be happy to sell Android phones to eager consumers, but do not want Google to gain any more power over the mobile web agenda.

According to the Financial Times, major cellcos such as Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange have stated that they hope Nokia will rule out adopting Android, when CEO Stephen Elop outlines his new strategy this week. Instead, they are urging him to build up MeeGo as an alternative to Android and iOS.

The three cited carriers are also leading lights, along with T-Mobile and Telecom Italia, in a shadowy group of European mobile players, which have reportedly created an informal group to 'keep an eye on' Google and Apple, their business practices and their ability to shift the mobile model.

These carriers have expressed the view that Android and iOS are "Trojan horses" to make Google and Apple the direct point of contact for mobile users, relegating the cellcos to dumb pipes.

TeliaSonera's CEO was the latest to warn against the rising power of Google and Apple in the wireless market. Lars Nyberg told the Financial Times that his firm had benefited from the boom in smartphones and mobile data, but he was increasingly worried that alternatives to Android and iOS would be eclipsed, leaving a duopoly that could dictate terms to the whole industry.

Saying that smartphones now account for 90% of the handsets Telia sells in Sweden – one of the highest figures in the world - he called on Nordic consumers to support Nokia and Sony Ericsson against US-based rivals like Apple (though, of course, Sony Ericsson has recently moved away from Symbian to focus only on Android).

Nyberg commented on Nokia: “I would not count them out. It looks like Android and Apple right now, but things can change very fast in this industry.” (source: telecomasia.net)

Indosat mulling spin off of CDMA unit

Indosat, the nation’s second largest telecommunications company, is considering spinning off its CDMA (code division multiple access) unit, StarOne, to make the company more competitive.

President director Harry Sasongko said on Tuesday that Indosat was currently conducting an internal assessment to gain momentum as the sector has shown an upward trend with most of the nation’s 230 million people having access to a mobile phone.

“The spin-off is just an assessment. This is part of an ongoing process in the company’s internal activity for StarOne,” he told reporters at his office in Jakarta.

“We continually assess and see profitable opportunities, such product marketing strategies to win a place for our products in the market,” Harry added, as quoted by Antara news agency.

The telecommunications sector led the nation’s sectoral economy in 2010, growing by 13.5 percent, higher than Indonesia’s overall 6.1 percent economic growth in 2010.

A constant slide of subscribers from StarOne has reportedly hampered Indosat’s overall growth, which was dominated by its cellular business. The telecommunications giant’s plan to spin-off its StarOne business unit has been under consideration since 2008.

“We will finalize a decision as soon as the assessment is done,” Harry said, adding he expected the best possible result after the assessment.

Indosat’s net profits plunged 63 percent to Rp 531 billion as of September from Rp 1.45 trillion a year earlier as a stronger rupiah increased the costs of hedging.

Indosat, listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Indonesian Stock Exchange, is 65 percent owned by the Qatari state-controlled Qatar Telecommunications (QTEL).

On Tuesday, an extraordinary Indosat shareholders meeting agreed to appoint a new commissioner: State-Owned Enterprises Ministry deputy for business services Parikesit Suprapto.

Hanz C. Motiz was also appointed the new director for the telephone company, and was expected to replace Stephen Edward Hobbs as of April 30.

— JP/Esther Samboh

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange on Extradiction Trial

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has today begun his fight against extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault.

The leader of the whistle-blowing website, which hit the headlines late last year after publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables, has been held under house arrest in the UK after being bailed at an earlier hearing in London.

Assange denies assaulting two women in Sweden, claiming the charges are a backlash from the revelations made in the leaked cables.

Lawyers are fighting the extradition to Sweden on the ground that it may then send Assange to the US, where he is regarded as a potential terrorist threat, the BBCreports.

They also argue the extradition would breach Assange’s human rights the news site said.

Separately, the Anonymous ‘hacktivist’ group last week began targeting sites in Egypt, following anti-government riots in the country.

Anonymous mounted a series of distributed denial of service attacks on firms including Amazon, MasterCard and Visa after the firms withdrew support for Wikileaks in the wake of the cable row. (source: telecomasia.net)