5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekickers saved, e-books slashed, PCmover revisited
Microsoft recovers T-Mobile customers from the Sidekick Apocalypse – A blog post from Roz Ho at Microsoft, head of the company’s Premium Mobile Experiences group, promises that “we have recovered most, if not all, customer data” that had disappeared last week in an embarrassingly public failure of Microsoft’s backup system for Sidekick customers’ data.
But it’s too late to undo a lot of the reputational damage. T-Mobile has stopped selling the phones, and lawsuits have already been filed. “We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible,” Ho wrote.
Some pundits, including SFGate blogger Yobie Benjamin, think the Great Sidekick Data Loss of 2009 will be a “teachable moment.” I say, get used to your photos disappearing.
Wal-mart goes after Amazon on e-book prices — The gang from Bentonville unveiled $10 prices on 10 new books Thursday morning, forcing Amazon to match its price. Wal-mart’s response: $9.
Stephen King’s Under the Dome and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue are two of the priced-to-move titles.
Advertisers and bigmouth blogger Mark Cuban challenge new FTC rules on blogger disclosure — The FTC’s strict new guidelines, which would require bloggers to disclose whether they were given free products or cash in exchange for online reviews, are seen as busybodying by many a blogger, plus the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Randall Rothenberg. “These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered,” Rothenberg wrote in an open letter to the FTC. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blogged about having his breakfast gifted to him by a grateful restaurant owner. I don’t think he’s kidding when he asks: What do I do?
Travel site traffic is consolidating — Hitwise’s monthly category report for travel sites says that 41% of all visits to online travel sites went to the top 10 sites. Can you name them? Here’s the list hot out of Hitwise’s hands:
Fired Twitter founder Jack Dorsey may be starting something in San Francisco — A meandering Valleywag post says: Dorsey, fired and replaced by Evan Williams a year ago, has something in the works. After claiming he would move back to his childhood home of St. Louis, Missouri, he has instead tweeted, “I think we just found awesome office space” in San Francisco.
Laplink PCmover still a valuable tool for Windows 7 migration — Katie Boehret, Walt Mossberg’s heir apparent at the Wall Street Journal, recommends the $15 Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant version of PCmover for PC users who need to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.
I’ll step in and add that if you’ve got disposable income and a new PC of any sort, consider blowing $70 on the premium version of PCmover, which comes with the correct 7-foot cable to connect two PCs side by side, should network file transfer attempts fail. PCmover transfers applications and their configuration data from the Windows registry, so your customizations for Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and any other apps can be transferred reliably from your old machine to a new one.
There are other such programs — the $50 CA Desktop DNA Migrator and the $50 Detto IntelliMover — but PCmover has an ongoing reputation. You’d think Microsoft would have created its own tools like this, but a big selling point of PCmover is that Microsoft doesn’t make it. Laplink CEO Thomas Koll, an old-school Windows programmer, still takes pride in getting your registry settings transferred properly, which Microsoft doesn’t even attempt to do for XP owners upgrading to Windows 7.
I interviewed Koll this afternoon, and we quickly detoured into boating stories and nodding along about how on a boat, you can’t afford to make mistakes, and how we wish Microsoft execs — see “lost Sidekick customer data” and “can’t upgrade from XP to Windows 7″ above — were better at managing their own software. We agreed they should have to use it on a boat.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.