Google announced today that it is reducing the cost of its Google App Engine storage from $0.24/GB/month to $0.18 per gigabyte. App Engine operations pricing is also going down: Google is dropping database writes from $0.10 to $0.09 per 100,000 operations and reads from $0.07 to $0.06.

Google App Engine is a relative newcomer to the cloud market, having just recently started to get serious about supporting non-Google-used languages such as PHP – the programming language that runs 75 percent of the web.

But it’s already in massive use, with 4.5 trillion monthly transactions at 99.95 percent uptime.

Google is in bitter competition with Amazon Web Services, which reduced prices by about 28 percent a month ago, and Microsoft’s Azure, which just entered full public availability but is already a billion-dollar business and also just reduced prices by 21 to 33 percent. Rackspace, also a big cloud competitor, recently chopped its prices as well.

This new price decrease appears to match those from Amazon and Microsoft. The challenge, however, when evaluating cloud costs from multiple providers is that each vendor calculates costs somewhat differently, so it’s hard to get an apples to apples comparison.

Google last cut prices in November 2012, also in an attempt to compete with Amazon. And the price war looks like it will continue for some time to come.

Essentially, it’s become fairly obvious that cloud is a commodity, and the cheapest provider will win. The question is, can companies maintain excellent service levels while cutting pricing to the bone.

photo credit: Hugo90 via photopin cc

Apparently the financial analysts and institutional buyers who have driven Apple stock down hundreds of billions of dollars over the last half year have not taken the value of the iconic company’s stock into account. According to the latest BrandZ ratings, Apple is once again the most valuable brand in the world, with a calculated value of over $185 billion.

Tech companies did well in general. Counting telecoms, technology companies made up 29 of the top 100 brands in the world.

Those multicolored letters in Google’s logo are not cheap, coming in at number two with a value of $113.7 billion. And though much older, another tech company with letters for a logo ranked number three: IBM’s brand was valued at $112.5 billion. The only other technology company in the top 10 was Microsoft, with an overall brand value of $69.8 billion.

“Despite a more competitive marketplace and other challengers nipping at its heels, Apple’s ability to maintain its no.1 position demonstrates the value that having a strong brand brings to business,” Nick Cooper, a director for the company behind the BrandZ rankings, Millward Brown Optimor, said in a statement. “People still love the brand regardless of its stock price.”

Apple should watch out, though. Its brand value grew just one percent, compared to mobile rival Samsung’s massive 51 percent growth to number 30 in the global rankings at $21 billion.

How did it grow so quickly?

“Samsung fueled its huge increase in brand value by balancing a remarkable period of innovation with growing market share – it spent $1.6 billion more on advertising in the last year,” Cooper said.

The top 100 brands in the world are now worth $2.6 trillion, according to Millward Brown Optimor. The ranking and awards, of course, were created by a brand research company, which might give it some incentive to be generous with the valuations.

The top 10 brands globally:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. IBM
4. McDonald’s
5. Coca-Cola
6. AT&T
7. Microsoft
8. Marlboro
9. Visa
10. China Mobile

See all the data in visual form in this infographic. Open the image in a new window to see more detail.

photo credit: albyantoniazzi via photopin cc

Which is precisely why Leap Motion released this video showcasing its impressive Windows 7 and Windows 8 integration:

With Leap Motion, you can now do everything available in Windows for multitouch functionality — without actually touching anything. The company promises that operating system-level functionality and web browsing capabilities will work out of the box, no software or driver installations required, and will be simple to use.

“We want our users to have a magical experience, with easy and natural movements in the air leading to amazing interactions,” co-founder David Holz said in a statement. “Leap Motion’s mission is to break down the barriers between people and technology.”

The demo shows a user navigating Windows 8′s home screen tiles via in-air gestures, selecting and rearranging tiles, opening a web browser, and surfing sites while zooming sections for a closer look, all without touching a mouse or a touch-sensitive screen. In addition, previewing one of Leap Motion’s intended uses as a controller in the media room or kitchen, the demo shows how simple it is to scroll through Netflix, select a movie, and begin watching. Or to draw a scene in one of the Leap Motion apps, then rotate it in 3D.

The Leap Motion device is tiny, about the size of a pack of gum. It senses both of your hands and all 10 of your fingers with 200 times the sensitivity of the Xbox 360 Kinect. The company recently announced OEM bundling with select computers from ASUS, and an even more interesting deal with HP that will see the hardware melt away into the computer itself, embedding Leap Motion’s functionality into laptops to make them gesture-enabled right out of the box, without any hardware components to plug in.

And there’s more to come:

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Leap Motion’s COO Andy Miller told me a couple of weeks ago.

All I want to know is: Where’s the Mac OS X demo?

Image credits: Leap Motion

According to a test by Ars Technica, Microsoft is intercepting, decrypting, and reading at least some Skype messages — to the point where URLs embedded in Skype chat are being visited by machines at IP addresses belonging to Microsoft … most likely a bot, but potentially a human being.

“And this can only happen,” Ars’ security expert Dan Goodin writes, “If Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.”

Skype currently uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure communications between users, which is considered very secure. Secure, perhaps, but not necessarily private. When Ars sent messages via Skype containing four web links created specifically for this experiment, two of them were accessed by a Microsoft-controlled machine.

Skype’s privacy policy openly states that Skype may check instant messages and SMS texts for spam, fraud, or phishing attempts, and, in some cases, have a human being check them. Ergo, we can decrypt our own encryptions and can know what you say and know what you send.

Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links. In limited instances, Skype may capture and manually review instant messages or SMS in connection with Spam prevention efforts. Skype may, in its sole discretion, block or prevent delivery of suspected Spam, and remove suspicious links from messages.

That’s not good if you have an expectation of and desire for privacy. And now that it’s obvious that Microsoft itself can read your private messages, the question is, who else has that ability?

Almost a year ago, the FBI requested private backdoor access into multiple communication and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Skype. Wiretaps are increasingly useless, the FBI realized, and modern communications were defeating the bureau’s attempts at surveillance. Whether the requested access was ever granted is unclear, but Microsoft has a patent on ways to make it happen.

And Skype’s terms of use also say the company can route your communications to law enforcement agencies:

Skype may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims, to protect Skype’s interests, fight against fraud and to enforce our policies or to protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety.

However, if you want more security — and privacy — on Skype, you can have it. You simply have to pre-encrpt any messages (as a Polish professor discovered) and then decrypt them on the receiving end.

I won’t do that, and most Skype users won’t do that, probably because we’re not discussing matters of national security or engaging in nefarious behavior. But it’s disappointing, if only the cold slap of reality in a dangerous and violent world, that private isn’t really private any more.

And it would be nice to know the exact limits of Skype privacy and security.

I have talked to a Microsoft representative about this story and am awaiting a statement or comment from the company.

That lasted a few months, at least.

Nokia and Intel had decided in 2010 that they needed an answer to Apple’s iPhone juggernaut which was taking high-end smartphone sales away from Helsinki and making it completely obvious that the king of chips had no chips in the mobile processor poker game. Meego was the answer, and Meego would be the operating system that would lead the then-still-powerful Nokia back to the forefront of the mobile market, and would make Intel relevant in small, low-powered, and battery-life-efficient phone CPUs.

Unfortunately, one loser plus another loser often just equals two losers. And, unfortunately for Nokia and Intel, Google and Samsung took their lunch and ate it, too, as Android began to reign uber alles. So Nokia turned to Microsoft for salvation — and a very painful process it has been — and Meego lost its way.

But not entirely.

Jolla, a new and independent smartphone vendor which almost no-one but mobile wonks has ever heard of, took the core of Meego and built Sailfish, a new mobile operating system that is built on an open-source project named Mer that is the new incarnation of Meego, and is just now teasing the coming-soon release of its very first device, the oddly named and oddly designed but also oddly attractive “The Other Half.”

Surprise, surprise, Jolla is based in Helsinki, Finland, where there just happens to be a surplus of top-notch mobile talent available lately (shocking, isn’t it). And surprise, surprise, all of the top Jolla leaders are ex-Nokia employees. Almost two years ago, Jolla announced its intentions of bringing a new smartphone to market. The biggest surprise is that they seem to be succeeding.

We are Jolla. We are Unlike

Jolla appears to be a two-part device, consisting of a 4.5-inch screen, a buttonless main phone handset, and various colorful plastic cases, or “other halves.”

Snap one on, and your phone OS changes.

Source: Jolla

The Sailfish OS almost reminds you of Windows Phone tiles.

Changes color, changes battery life, perhaps, changes content such as apps and media, and changes in other ways yet to be invented, based on the creativity of Jolla and partners.

Actual devices have yet to be released, and the details are fewer than might be desired, but the key point is that the Jolla is Android app compatible. Which, frankly, is probably essential for any new smartphone platform entering the market today. The smartphone market is an ecosystem battle, not a device battle primarily, and any new entrants with any real aspirations for success have to plug into what is already available and — largely — a global standard.

Interestingly, the main Sailfish operating system screen appears to draw from Windows Phone design elements, with titles on the home screen that aggregate information that you might be interested in.

According to Engadget, the phone will have a dual-core processor (type unknown), LTE, an 8MP rear camera and a front-facing camera, and have 16GB onboard storage plus micro-SD expansion.

At the very least, it’s an interesting take on mobile that enables users to participate in some — if not all — of the benefits of the world’s leading smartphone operating system, while still having some unique and differentiating factors. Jolla says it will offer the world’s best multitasking experience, and will be so intuitive that you can operate your favorite features “without even looking at the device.”

Main navigation on the phone is buttonless, with the four main icons appearing to be Phone, Messages, Browser, and Apps. The Sailfish operating system will also support gesture control, the company said.

I’m assuming that full Google integration and access to Google services such as music would not be included, and syncing contacts and other core data would not be as simple as on a straight Android phone.

However, Jolla seems to be competing on differentiation. And while the jury will be out on how successfully they’ve achieved it until we have actual devices in our hands, at first glance, they’ve succeeded.

Image credits: Jolla

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

“Enterprises’ need for public cloud is much different than startups,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday. “Azure is exactly the perfect extension of the data center.”

Newvem is well-known for its Amazon Web Services offerings, offering startups optimization services, security checking, and overall cloud management — including the first-ever iPhone app for managing your cloud services. Now, Laderman said, the company is returning to its roots in enterprise with a similar offering for Azure. It’s the fruit of an 8-month effort, and it’s a signal that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are hitting a needed an lucrative market niche in a way that Amazon is not.

“Azure is a billion-dollar business,” Laderman says. “Azure is Microsoft’s best-kept secret in the enterprise.”

Newvem’s new offerings on Azure include visualization of your cloud costs, inventory, and usage trends, methods to create dynamic views of your cloud usage and align them to business objectives for very granular optimization recommendations, and pattern-recognizing tools that identify and highlight consumption patterns, such as regular peaks, bursts, and trends.

Private beta participant Linkury agrees, saying that Newvem for Azure gave the company “visibility into specific Windows Azure inventory that we use,” and that “it’s a great time-saver and has helped us to better plan and forecast our usage.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud dashboard.

The lure of Azure, according to Newvem, is that Microsoft is already huge in the enterprise, and corporations can seamlessly move workloads between owned servers and cloud servers as required. So a company that begins a speculative new project can start serving its computing needs on Azure and then, once workloads stabilize, move the workload into the corporate data center.

That helps enterprises be as nimble and quick to market as startups, since projects can begin immediately without the need for purchase, installation, and configuration of owned hardware and software solutions. But it also enables enterprises to manage costs effectively. If the project isn’t successful, there’s no unused hardware left lying around. If it is, and if via Newvem’s optimization offerings IT management determines that costs could be lower in the data center, projects can easily be moved back inside the four walls.

To Laderman, that’s a key differentiator between Amazon and Azure.

“That’s important for Microsoft,” he says. “They win both ways, because they’re both in the cloud and in the enterprise.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud utlization heatmap.

Microsoft is very “partner-centric” and has been a key supporter during the 8-month project, Laderman says, especially Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Newvem in its enterprise marketing channels, will put Newvem’s solution in the Azure store, and will help Newvem go to market via joint sales efforts … all indicators of Microsoft’s commitment to deploying its cloud solutions in the enterprise, and partnering with companies who have complementary services.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has asked Microsoft to remove its homebrew YouTube app from the Windows Store immediately, and the search giant requested that it delete the app from Windows Phone users who have already downloaded it.

Essentially, Microsoft built a YouTube app for Windows Phone because Google refused to permit Windows Phone users to connect to YouTube. As Microsoft’s Dave Heiner posted, “Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube … Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do.”

In response, Microsoft created its own YouTube app.

The problems with that, according to Google, are three: the app enables users to download YouTube videos, prevents ads from being shown, and plays videos whose owners have set to only play on certain platforms. Microsoft’s app, Google says, violates the YouTube terms of service, and uses the YouTube logo in a way that contravenes the company’s branding guidelines.

Source: Microsoft

The YouTube app, by Microsoft

This is an ongoing battle that has been slowly heating up since well before January of this year.

The solution would seem to be fairly clear: Google should make a compelling YouTube app for Windows Phone, just as it already does for another smartphone competitor, Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Why it chooses not to is not exactly clear, although it may just have something to do with the fact that, via patent licensing agreements with Samsung, LG, Acer, and others, Microsoft makes perhaps $5 per Android device sold. And it can’t help that Microsoft has hit Google where it hurts on Android and privacy, which, up until a couple of weeks ago, truly sucked.

Microsoft has since released an official statement, basically saying they’d be happy to work with Google to resolve any issues, as long as Google will reciprocate.

“YouTube is consistently one of the top apps downloaded by smartphone users on all platforms, but Google has refused to work with us to develop an app on par with other platforms. Since we updated the YouTube app to ensure our mutual customers a similar YouTube experience, ratings and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.  We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.”

Surely, we can all get along here?

Google is in no danger of losing its mobile operating system hegemony … as the company announced today, it recently hit 900 million Android device activations.

Trulia buys Market Leader for $355 million

Yes, that’s actually a company named Market Leader, the phrase is not just a hopeful description. Trulia, the real-estate marketplace, announced the deal today.

Market Leader provides a suite of software solutions that real estate professionals use to manage their business online. Products include a website-builder, tools for lead generation tools and marketing, and contact management. The combined marketplace will have 46,000 premium subscribers, which the company said is more than any other online real estate marketplace. This deal means Trulia can provide an “end-to-end solution” for these professionals.

More details here.

Microsoft offering $1B for Nook?

This deal is not yet a deal, but a rumor: Microsoft may be attempting to buy Nook’s digital media and tablet business. More details …

NowThisNews raises $4.8M

NowThisNews, a video-news startup from the brains of former Huddington Post execs, has just raised a healthy round of institutional funding. The $4.8 million round (out of a total $6 million in equity the startup is attempting to raise, according to SEC documents) comes from Oak Investment, Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket, and new investor SoftBank Capital.

Here’s the full story.

HealthTap Secures $24 Million Series B

Health Q&A startup HealthTap has raised $24 million in its second round of funding and added former Square COO Keith Rabois to its board of directors, the company said today.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HealthTap offers a popular service for doctors to answer questions from everyday folks. More than 38,000 accredited doctors in the U.S. are on the platform and more than 8 million unique visitors connect with those doctors each month via apps for smartphones, tablets, and the web.

Full details here.

Octopus leads £2m funding round into TrialReach

Octopus today announced that it has led a £2 million ($3.1 million U.S.) investment round into TrialReach, an online platform that is transforming clinical trials by connecting patients with healthcare companies and research organisations to make new treatments available more quickly and efficiently. Octopus is investing alongside existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, which first invested in TrialReach in 2011.

Axiologix announces $7.5 Million preferred equity investment

Axiologix, Inc., a technology services company focused on delivering cloud-based products and services announced today that it has entered into a $7.5 million Preferred Equity Investment with Ironridge Technology Co. The company plans to use the proceeds from this investment to fund operational growth, make strategic and immediately accretive acquisitions, and to pay down remaining debt over time.

JumpStart invests $250,000 in eFuneral

End-of-life planning startup eFuneral has received a $250,000 investment to help people find resources online for funeral planning including funeral home reviews, estate planning, and cemetery information.

“This industry is completely antiquated,” Belsito told VentureBeat. “We saw a big gap and decided to make a better solution.”

More details here.

photo credit: DerrickT via photopin cc

Microsoft already owns a piece of Nook, having invested $300 million into the business in April 2012. According to the report, Microsoft would buy the digital operation, which includes e-books, movies, TV, comics, apps, and more.

The interesting wrinkle is that Nook is built on Android — which Microsoft makes money charging licenses for – and just opened up its business to Google, signing an agreement with Google to get Google Play and inviting the entire Google mobile stack — Gmail, Chrome, YouTube, and Google Maps — onto the platform. In addition, Nook offers apps on mobile platforms that compete with Microsoft: Android and iOS.

Which would put Microsoft in the awkward position of owning an Android-based tablet that, while not extremely successful, has sold more devices than Microsoft has sold of its own Windows 8-based tablets.

About ten million Nook devices have been sold to date.

But Nook may be phasing out hardware and moving simply to delivering content via apps on other company’s hardware platforms as both revenue and device sales have slowed in recent quarters. In which case, Microsoft would be buying digital content and licenses to digital content that could be valuable assets for both Windows 8-based tablets and its Xbox living-room-entertainment-hub ambitions.

Whether that’s worth a billion dollars, however, is anyone’s guess.

Which means that the bigger question is whether buying a declining device and content distributor from an ailing company that is failing to successfully compete with Amazon is a smart business idea. With Nook division revenue declining more than $100 million in 2013 and a projected loss of $360 million, it could just be the case of Microsoft adopting yet another expensive albatross for its cash cow office, operating system, and business software divisions to support.

Notable this year is Apple, with its whopping $156 billion in 2012 sales, jumping into the top 10 for the first time in its 37-year history. And Google, with its big $50 billion year, bulled its way up almost 20 spots to hit No. 55. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Facebook, which with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 made the list for the very first time at 487.

Ranking companies by income is a fairly arbitrary measure, since it reveals little about how much companies actually earn, but it does show scope and scale. A grain of salt is definitely indicated, however, as Google’s profits, for instance, are many multiples of Dell’s despite that Dell is ranked No. 51 and Google is No. 55.

Here are the 41 technology companies that Fortune included on its list.

• 6: Apple
• 15: HP
• 20: IBM
• 35: Microsoft
• 49: Amazon
• 51: Dell
• 54: Intel
• 55: Google
• 60: Cisco Systems
• 80: Oracle
• 131: Xerox
• 133: EMC
• 176: Computer Sciences
• 163: Jabil Circuit
• 194: Qualcomm
• 196: eBay
• 218: Texas Instruments
• 222: Western Digital
• 240: SAIC
• 267: CDW
• 270: Liberty Interactive
• 302: Applied Materials
• 304: Motorola Solutions
• 318: Micron Technology
• 326: Corning
• 327: Broadcom
• 352: Congnizant Technology Solutions
• 379: Symantec
• 408: NetApp
• 420: Sanmina
• 429: Harris
• 436: Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
• 441: NCR
• 473: Priceline.com
• 464: AMD
• 477: Avaya
• 482: Facebook
• 487: SanDisk
• 489: Pitney Bowes
• 494: Yahoo
• 499: CA Technologies

A couple of caveats:

I have not included telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, although a good argument can be made that they are now, primarily, technology companies, simply because Fortune did not classify them in any recognizable technology category. And I have included retailers like CDW and companies like Pitney Bowes, which Fortune classifies in categories like Computers, Office Equipment, and Information Technology Services.

One interesting note: While Facebook has the Fortune 500′s youngest CEO, Dole Food’s David Murdock, at 90 years old, is the Fortune 500′s oldest CEO.

photo credit: mikesolita via photopin cc

Apple’s saving $9.2 billion in potential taxes by financing a chunk of its recently-announced $50 billion stock buyback via debt, Bloomberg says.

With the $10 billion share repurchase announcement made last year, the entire $60 billion stock buyback is the largest share repurchase plan in history, and will take until 2015. The problem is that most of Apple’s cash — some $100 billion U.S. — is overseas. And bringing that loot home would result in taxation at a 35 percent rate.

$35 billion extra in government coffers probably gives Washington hot flashes and sweaty palms, but it keeps Apple accountants awake at night. So the company is borrowing the cash it needs by issuing a record $17 billion bond offering with interest yields slightly higher than U.S. treasuries.

Borrowing money, paradoxically, is saving Apple money.

In addition, Bloomberg notes, interest Apple pays on the $17 billion debt financing will be tax-deductible, saving an additional $100 million a year.

This raises all kinds of issues about the ethics and morality of not repatriating cash and thereby avoiding taxes. Apple is not the only tech company that uses creative methods to reduce income tax payments — Google has a surprising $10 billion worth of revenue in tiny Bermuda, thanks to shell companies and wily sales of intellectual property. As a result, the search giant’s effective tax rate on overseas income is a ridiculous 3.2 percent.

And 50 other tech companies, including Microsoft, have collectively dodged $225 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their assets overseas.

The bigger question, at least for Apple investors, is whether propping up its own share price is a good use of Apple’s massive $150 billion in cash reserves. Other options, of course, include accelerating innovation — the company won’t release a significant new product in two quarters — or acquiring companies that could help it grow faster.

Share buybacks are typically done by companies who feel undervalued by the market. Perhaps Apple should be making moves to address that problem, rather than treating the symptom.

photo credit: TheeErin via photopin cc

Microsoft stock, which is down a penny today, jumped from under $30 to over $31 almost immediately overnight, and has climbed almost 11 percent over the last month. That’s part of a fairly steady rise over the last quarter which has added over $30 billion in value to the company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ubben said that Microsoft “is a dominant software company … and in the long term it will win out,” and that in five years, Microsoft’s investments in web and cloud could transform the company into the largest cloud company in the world. Just five days ago, Microsoft announced general availability of its Windows Azure Infrastructure Cloud — a cheaper cloud than Amazon and Rackspace. 

The company has had challenges with Windows 8 adoption which some have blamed for historically slow PC sales in the last quarter, although it is investing more in Windows 8 for tablets and smaller touch devices.

In any case, Microsoft appears to be doing something right. At least, if you can trust Wall Street.

Shapiro’s talking about videoconferencing pioneers Cisco and PolyCom. He’s talking about Innovator’s Dilemma-style growth. And he’s talking about $17 million in new funding the company is announcing this morning to expand even faster, building its total venture capital raised to $116 million.

Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google’s Google+ Hangouts and Nintendo Wii’s videoconferencing, is disrupting the fast-growing video communications world on at least three levels, Shapiro said.

One is technology: moving from the big, expensive telepresence rooms to simple, cheap, built-in components. Another is moving from on-premises solutions to the cloud, and the third is Vidyo’s business model: revshare partnerships with carriers and other partners, like NTT Telecommunications in Japan, Google, and 24 other new telecom partnerships inked recently.

The technology transitions are key, the company says.

“PolyCom and Microsoft say they’re doing it, but not well,” Shapiro states. “We are by far the leader here.”

And his model, he says, is also much more competitive than innovative upstarts like Blue Jeans Network, because he’s betting on a lower price point and higher numbers. Blue Jeans Network, which offers in-browser video conferencing that connects to legacy systems as well as integrations with partners like Salesforce, charges $.30 per minute per leg of the call, Shapiro said, meaning that a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

“I believe the price point is just starting to erode,” Shapiro says.

Which is why Vidyo’s sales model is partners, who then leverage the power of their own networks for Vidyo and grow its sales without Vidyo having to maintain a large sales staff. The strategy seems to be working: Vidyo partners like Arizona State University, which is using Vidyo on its Internet2 deployment, are increasing their usage of videoconferencing by an average 18 percent per quarter. And CERN, the European science facility with the world’s largest particle collider, uses Vidyo so intensively Shapiro told me it has 15X Blue Jeans call volume alone.

“We want to price equivalent to a voice call,” Shapiro says. “Our competitors offer an inferior product for more money: Blue Jeans 15 time more, and other competitors 300 times more.”

I’m sure his competitors would have something to say about that, and it’s certainly the case that Blue Jeans and others offer features that Vidyo does not. But with $17 million new cash in his pockets, Shapiro is focused on the future.

“Things are going great, but we always find ourselves working on many things,” he said. “We want to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of the opportunities we see … it’s almost a land grab in the industry.”

The $17 million is almost all from existing investors, including in some cases general partners’ own money. Two-thirds of it is from Triangle Peak Partners. With the new cash, Vidyo will grow headcount from 285 to about 320, CFO David Kaminsky said.

photo credit: courosa via photopin cc

Update: This story originally featured an image that we used without proper attribution. We have removed it and apologize to the artist.

Microsoft game director Adam Orth, who insulted fans on Twitter when they voiced concerns about rumors the next Xbox will require an always-on Internet connection, has left the company.

Apparently, he said the wrong things on Twitter and it spiraled out of control, resulting in a major embarassment for Microsoft. We hear that he voluntarily resigned and deeply regrets what happened. His comments set off a storm of criticism about Microsoft and what its intentions on its next game console might be.

“Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console,” Orth wrote on Twitter. “Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in.”

Orth was reportedly in the midst of a discussion with a friend of his, Manveer Heir, a senior game designer at BioWare, when he made the public comments. Orth and Manveer are close friends who were evidently making fun of each, but the observers didn’t catch on that the conversation had a lot of sarcasm in it. Orth then got in a flame war with gamers over his opinion and dissed small towns such as Janesville, WI and Blacksburg, VA, asking “why on earth would I live there?”

We don’t know what conversations took place after that with his employer, but Orth is no longer with Microsoft. Orth was a game director at Microsoft Game Studios, but he was not working on the next-generation Xbox, according to our sources.

“We do not comment on private personnel matters,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat when we reached out on this issue.

Microsoft issued a statement last week about the comments, which referred to him rather coldly as “this person.”

“We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.”

Orth may have commented on this development on Twitter, but it’s impossible to tell unless you’re a confirmed follower of his: He has locked the account, and it is no longer available. In the same breath, apparently, he deleted his LinkedIn account. We hear that he had to do this because he received numerous death threats. That part is quite regretable.

I guess he has learned the value of discretion on social media. But, as it often is, the lesson appears to have been learned the hard way.

Dean Takahashi contributed to the reporting for this report.

That might sound a little melodramatic, given that the recorded history of PC shipments only goes back to 1994. But with a drop of 13.9 percent — almost double the expected 7.7 percent — to only 76.3 million units, the first quarter of 2013 has been a disaster for traditional PC manufacturers.

Even a new version of Windows, once a guaranteed shot in the arm for PC shipments, failed to stimulate demand. Quite the opposite.

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,” Bob O’Donnell, an IDC vice-president, said in a statement.

O’Donnell says that with its radical user interface changes, subtraction of the familiar Start button, and extra costs that come with Windows 8-equipped PCs that take advantage of its touch capabilities “have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices.”

Ouch.

In the U.S., this marks the tenth consecutive quarter of year-on-year declines, and quarterly shipments reached their lowest level since early 2006. Europe was down as well, and even growing China and the rest of the Asia Pacific region dropped 12.7 percent, the first double-digit decline in PC shipments there.

HP remains the top PC vendor globally, IDC said, but its shipments fell 23 percent year-over-year, and it was almost surpassed by Lenovo, which astonishingly had double-digit growth in a sinking market. Dell dropped 10 percent as well, and Acer, Asus, and Toshiba also dropped somewhat.

Even Apple, which has seen strong growth in recent years, particularly in laptops, had shipments decline 7.5 percent to 1.4 million.

IDC seems interested in blaming Windows 8, but the more likely culprit is surging sales of tablets, which some analysts are including in “PC” shipment numbers. In fact, some analysts believe that this year is the year tablet sales will outpace traditional PC sales, with quarterly sales of 55-60 million.

Given this quarter’s numbers, it looks like the crossover point could be as soon as the next three months. But whether that happens or not, big changes are in store for PC vendors:

“The industry is going through a critical crossroads, and strategic choices will have to be made as to how to compete with the proliferation of alternative devices and remain relevant to the consumer,” David Daoud, IDC Research Director, said in a statement. “Vendors will have to revisit their organizational structures and go-to-market strategies, as well as their supply chain, distribution, and product portfolios in the face of shrinking demand and looming consolidation.”

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That’s an 11 percent increase in downloads from the end of 2012, according to Canalys’s latest App Interrogator Report, and a 9 percent jump in revenues. Which makes sense, given that we spend 80 percent of our time on mobile phones in apps. And while North America is seeing fairly healthy growth, with an 8 percent increase in downloads and an 6 percent increase in revenue, it’s not the most happening place for mobile.

“Some of the strongest growth was seen in emerging markets, such as South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia, helped not least by the growing base of smart device users in those countries,” the company said in a statement.

Asia, of course, is a mobile powerhouse, with China purchasing more new smartphones than the U.S., but Indonesia has a fast-growing population of 250 million and is seeing increasing smartphone penetration.

So what about non-Google and non-Apple apps markets?

‘The Apple-Google duopoly creates certain challenges for app publishers, carriers, investors, and device vendors, so there is intense interest in the possible emergence of a third ecosystem,’ said Adam Daum, Canalys’s chief analyst in a very tactfully worded statement.

BlackBerry has now hit 100,000 apps for its latest operating system, and Windows Phone has made good progress as well, Canalys says. But both are still challenged by a relative lack of market penetration that will drive the kind of developer interesting that has resulted in “there’s an app for that” being true on both Android and iOS.

“Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored,” said Tim Shepherd, Canalys Senior Analyst.

photo credit: Rick McCharles via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Whenever you install an app on your Android phone from Google Play, the app developer gets your name, email address, and neighborhood. Microsoft thinks that’s an egregious breach of consumer privacy, and it published a new video today on Scroogled that hits Google hard.

“Most app makers are trustworthy,” the ad says. “However, in the wrong hands, who knows what they’ll do with your info?”

The question is a valid one, and Microsoft is quick to mention that downloading and installing apps on Windows Phone does not result in personal information being shared. Apple’s app store handles purchases and downloads the same way, with purchasers’ names, email addresses, and detailed locations remaining private.

The difference appears to be that Google views its Play store as a marketplace rather than a store, in which you are purchasing from the developer, not specifically from Google. In other words, it’s eBay, not Amazon. I’ve asked Google for additional comment.

There’s no question that Microsoft’s attack is a little over the top, paired with a big scary question: “If you can’t trust Google’s app store, how can you trust them for anything?”

But there’s also no question that this is a privacy concern Google should address.

I’ve downloaded many apps from Google Play, and I’ve never once seen or noticed any notification that my personal information would be passed along to the app developers (which could entirely be due to my own lack of attention, or general click-through warnings behavior).

Consumer Watchdog has complained to the FTC about Google’s practice, saying:

“To no one’s surprise … Google has violated the Buzz Order yet again – and this time in a most substantive and egregious manner, by giving personal and closely held information from tens (if not hundreds) of millions of Android users to independent and unrestrained application developers, in contravention of Google’s own stated privacy policy … This represents the fifth significant misuse of confidential user data by Google in the last three years (previously, the “Wi-Spy” scandal, the Google Buzz fiasco, Google’s improper combining and use of personal data, and the Safari Hacking episode).”

I’ll update with Google’s response as I receive it.

Rob Isaac is a New Zealand-based developer, technical analyst, and consultant. After the news that Google would be creating its own, Chrome-specific version of the Webkit browser rendering engine, called Blink, Isaac created this “translation” of Google’s developer FAQ for Blink. This FAQ was originally published on his website.

1 Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine?

The WebKit maintainers wouldn’t let us attack Apple directly, by changing WebKit in ways that would make it perform badly on OS X and iOS.

Because they share a rendering engine, developer effort to ensure Chrome compatibility currently benefits Apple platforms for free. To prevent this, we must make Chrome and WebKit behave differently.

1.1 What sorts of things should I expect from Chrome?

Nothing yet. This is a political move, not a technical one.

However, while the Chrome user interface will not change in any significant way, we will be silently overwriting all existing installations of Chrome with our new rendering engine without your knowledge or consent.

1.2 Is this new browser engine going to fragment the web platform’s compatibility more?

Yes.

We intend to distract people from this obvious problem by continually implying that our as-yet unwritten replacement is somehow much better and more sophisticated than the rendering engine that until yesterday was more than good enough to permit us to achieve total dominance of the Windows desktop browsing market in less than two years.

This strategy has worked extremely well for Netscape, Microsoft, Apple and us in previous iterations of the browser wars, and we firmly believe that everyone in this industry was born yesterday and they will not recognise this for the total bullshit it so clearly is.

1.3 Hold up, isn’t more browsers sharing WebKit better for compatibility?

Yes. See 1.

1.4 How does this affect web standards?

We have sufficient market share on the desktop that a few months from now, we will be in a position to unilaterally dictate them.

We hope to leverage this control to achieve the same dominance in mobile eventually.

1.5 Will we see a -chrome vendor prefix now?

No. See 1.4.

1.6 So we have an even more fragmented mobile WebKit story?

Yes.

We encourage you to adopt Chrome on Android for your mobile browsing needs.

1.7 What’s stopping Chrome from shipping proprietary features?

Nothing.

1.8 Is this just a ruse to land the Dart VM or Native Client?

We’ve decided to avoid discussing unpopular topics like those for the time being.

1.9 What should we expect to see from Chrome and Blink in the next 12 months? What about the long term?

We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

1.10 Is this going to be open source?

Not really.

While you can certainly read the source code, we’re fully aware that actually tracking and understanding a modern HTML renderer is extremely difficult. In addition, the first changes we will make are intended specifically to break compatibility with WebKit, so the only organisation with sufficient resources to track our changes will no longer be able to do so.

In practice, this allows us to call the project “open” while simultaneously ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink source now and in the future. We’ve had enormous success co-opting the language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we aim to continue with that strategy.

1.11 Opera recently announced they adopted Chromium for their browsers. What’s their plan?

Opera have such a tiny market share that they have no choice other than to follow whatever strategy Chromium adopts. In this case, it means they will adopt the Blink renderer as quickly as possible.

1.12 Why is this is good for me as a web developer?

It isn’t. Our primary goal is to use your development efforts as leverage against our competitors. See 1.9.

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Why?

Google says that using WebKit is slowing down innovation, because “Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects.”

The solution is Blink, Chromium’s new rendering engine. It’s a fork of WebKit that will use largely the same codebase, minus a significant amount of no-longer-needed code: 7,000 files and 4.5 million lines of code. That will make the codebase slimmer — obviously — as well as more stable, more secure, and less buggy, according to Google.

WebKit emerged from the KHTML browser when Apple took KHTML code as the basis for its Safari browser in 2001, and it currently powers the vast majority of web browser share. Forking the codebase will fracture the browser rendering space between WebKit, Gecko (which powers Firefox), Trident (Microsoft’s rendering engine), and now, of course, Blink.

That’s a concern for web developers who have to build websites that render properly in all browsers, but Google says that won’t be a problem:

“In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers,” Google engineer Adam Barth wrote.

The question, of course, is the long term.

Interestingly, Opera has very swiftly said that it would use the new Google fork of WebKit for the new Opera rendering engine.

(Oh, and if you’re wondering what the dongle joke is about, here’s the answer.)

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The mobile operating system market share numbers are in for Kantar Worldpanel’s last quarter, and the numbers are shocking.

Not the Android and iOS numbers: Steady but unspectacular growth for Android and gradual but not catastrophic drops for Apple are pretty much in line with expectations.

But the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are dramatic changes from the same quarter a year ago. Windows Phone looks to be finally taking off, with 52 percent growth in December, January, and February of this year compared to the same three months in 2012. And BlackBerry is falling of a sales cliff, with an 81 percent plunge in sales.

Source: Kantar WorldPanel

Smartphone sales by operating system – U.S.

The big kahuna, of course, is Android.

Google’s Android now owns more than half of U.S. smartphone sales, with 51.2 percent market share. That’s up from 45.4 percent in the quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS is holding fairly steady at number two, with 43.5 percent, down slightly from last year’s 47 percent.

What’s interesting about the Windows numbers, even though they are on a much smaller installed base, is that Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile phone platform. At 4.1 percent of mobile operating system market share, Microsoft still has a very long ways to go, and growth rates could start to slow as it piles up share. But the numbers have to be encouraging for Redmond as it is finally gaining traction in a market that it once appeared to have completely lost.

And the international numbers contain pockets of even more good news, such as Italy, where Windows Phone now makes up 13.1 percent of new phone sales.

Apple’s mobile offerings are strongest with the two largest U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Both sell a majority of iOS smartphones, with AT&T selling 68.4 percent iOS versus 20.8 percent Android, and Verizon selling 55.1 percent iOS versus 43.4 percent Android.

Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to expand its Android leadership, taking away market share from competitors LG and HTC:

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 percent had previously owned a Samsung feature phone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG feature phone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone, and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry,” said Kantar Worldpanel analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists.”

Kantar Worldpanel is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel in the world, and conducts more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone to determine what consumers are buying and using.

Do you believe in coincidences?

The genesis of Microsoft’s patent tracker is the company’s desire to improve the patent system without completely destroying it, a Microsoft lawyer that I spoke to today told me. Three problems the company sees in the current system are knowing who actually owns or controls a patent, litigation abuse by non-practicing entities (lawyerese for patent trolls who don’t actually make anything with the patents they control), and poor patent quality.

The new tracker is designed to fix the first problem, while making patent abuse more difficult. And it’s built around Microsoft’s goal of working within the patent system, while seeking to improve it. As Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith said, roughly translated: “Fix what’s broken, not break what’s working.”

The two initiatives show a different approach to patents, at least on the surface, from the two software giants.

Google’s initiative today showcases a kind of patents-are-a-necessary-evil mentality. Google doesn’t want to be left defenseless in a patent nuclear war, so it has loaded up on patents by acquiring Motorola, by buying them from IBM, and by joining a consortium to purchase them from a bankrupt Kodak. But it also wants to be seen as a friend of open systems and open software — after all, Android is built on an open-source foundation — so donating patents to open source is kind of motherhood and apple pie.

But it’s also a pretty easy step: ten patents on fairly obscure data analysis technologies are not going to make many in the patent industry think that Christmas has arrived early.

Microsoft’s initiative showcases a new openness, stripping away the cloak of corporate secrecy, while embracing the existing patent system. The company has gone so far as to provide a downloadable data file of all Microsoft patents: all 40,786 of them as of March 25. The list is massive and extensive, from ZL201020107444.8, a kidney disease detection method which it acquired from Zhongshan Baoyuan Biotechnology Engineering Co., Ltd., to 314229, a media player technology that Microsoft developed internally.

That’s unprecedented, and it would be a major benefit to business and technology executives if all companies did that … or if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Organization made patent information that easily — and transparently — available. While the USPTO makes all patents searchable, it’s not always clear who owns or controls a patent. And that’s a scenario that lends itself to patent trolls, who thrive on the gamesmanship that opacity allows.

It’s a move that Microsoft invites other companies to follow, the company lawyer I spoke to made clear.

The question is: Will companies follow Microsoft’s model or Google’s? Will they start offering patents for free open-source use, or focus on offering greater transparency around the patents they do own? And of course, there are multiple other alternatives, such as eliminating the patent system entirely, revamping it, or determining simple standard licensing terms.

As in many other scenarios, I’m sure that where companies stand will be greatly determined by what they currently own, and how powerful they feel they are currently within the existing situation.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Smoked by Windows is Microsoft’s fun, social, and viral YouTube campaign targeting iPhone and Android users. But now it’s moving offline and going to network TV — ESPN and CBS — just in time for March Madness.

And Microsoft is taking specific aim at Samsung:

The ads feature Microsoft’s top Windows Phone marketing manager, Ben Rudolph, who told us that he has the best job in Microsoft when we chatted a couple of months ago. It’s his job as director of Windows Phone evangelism to convince hundreds of millions of Android and iPhone users to switch to Windows phone … and he’s pretty persuasive.

But this particular tactic won’t work for long — the new Samsung Galaxy S IV sports a 13-megapixel camera which is bound to be better than the S III’s eight megapixel effort. And likely to best the Nokia 920′s 8.7 megapixel camera too, in spite of the built-in image stabilization that does give the 920 great night-time photos.

Microsoft owes the Danish treasury 5.8 billion kroner, or about $1 billion U.S., in unpaid taxes relating to its purchase of financial software vendor Navision in 2002, says the Denmark treasury.

Most tech companies avoid taxes by leaving foreign income overseas or by routing it through Irish or other low-taxation districts, and that’s happening in this case as well. But this case is not primarily, or at least initially about earnings. Rather, this is about Microsoft’s acquisition and transfer of the fundamental assets of Navision to low-corporate-tax regions.

VentureBeat is seeking a comment from Microsoft.

Microsoft bought the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion. So far, all well and good.

The tricky part, according to Denmark, is that Microsoft then transferred its rights in what used to be Navision  – the money-making assets — to an Irish subsidiary. And Denmark says that was done at a vastly unfair market value, which is illegal according to taxation rules, says local press agency Nyheder.

On top of this, revenues from the software that former Navision and current Microsoft Business Solutions sells is on the order of a billion dollars a year. (It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s business software unit consists of more than just a renamed Navision.) That revenue has been routed through Ireland via a Microsoft subsidiary which is in turned owned by companies in Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, according to Nyheder.

All three of those countries are well-known low-corporate income tax regions.

Governments in Europe and the U.S. are increasingly aware of the complex and obscure ways that international corporations, often U.S.-based, are using to avoid paying tax. This is just one of the first cases in which a European government is attempting to claim and obtain that lost tax.

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Essentially, interoperability is beating closed systems.

Previously, while anyone with a $10 webcam in a cheap laptop could start or join a conference via their browser and be a first-class client at the video-conferencing table, Microsoft’s Lync users could only join conferences. They could not share their desktops to users of other videoconferencing systems as they could with other Lync systems.

Now, Lync users will be first-class citizens in heterogenous technology environments too.

“Tens of thousands of Lync endpoints have already participated in Blue Jeans meetings,” Stu Aaron, Blue Jeans Network’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “With this new bi-directional HD desktop sharing feature, Lync users can now also share their own desktop content, including presentations and other documents, the way they are used to, in high definition with other meeting participants.”

In other words, the world of video conferencing and desktop sharing is far bigger than the Lync userbase, but now Lync users can use their investment to broadcast and receive from anyone, anywhere, on virtually any system.

Blue Jeans Network, whose corporate goal is flipping the annual 100 billion minutes businesses spend on audio conferencing into video, is not a stranger to first-evers. The company also was the first to integrate video-conferencing tools into Salesforce.com.

Now the company’s technology is often serving as the glue that ties together disparate video-conference systems.

According to one system integrator, Blue Jeans helps businesses integrate room-based conferencing systems with Microsoft Office 365, Lync with Cisco or Polycom hardware, or simple browser-based technology with any of the high-end solutions.

“Blue Jeans acts as a simple, reliable, and scalable solution to allow businesses large and small to benefit from interoperable video conferencing without the headaches of on-premise solutions,” Neil Setchell, CEO of systems integrator and consulting firm ExtraTeam, said.

The new technology is fully implemented in the Blue Jeans cloud, requires no software or hardware, and is included with every Blue Jeans subscription, the company said.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Which essentially means that everyone is using WebKit except for Microsoft and Firefox. And that the fat lady is not singing for the end of Opera’s improbable browser journey.

In fact, far from it.

Those 300 million users count people on traditional PCs, smartphones, TVs, and tablets. They probably also count me, as I open up Opera once a week or so to manage a corporate Twitter account. Stat Counter’s global browser stats say that people using Opera drive about two percent of internet usage, and, according to Opera, its users are growing faster than ever.

“On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen,” Opera CEO Lars Boilesen said in a statement. “Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.”

Opera just recently shipped Ice, a new mobile browser that loses buttons, menus, and tabs, and relies entirely on touch gestures. Ice uses WebKit, which was unique for Opera browsers at the time, but not for long.

Over the course of the next year, most of Opera’s browsers will transition to the new engine, Opera’s chief technical officer, Håkon Wium Lie, said.

“It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”

Once that transition is complete, a majority of people will be using WebKit-based browsers — about 55 percent, according to W3 numbers. And presumably, that Opera will now be able to focus more on what makes its particular user experience different, rather than on building the foundations of its technology.

Which, as unlikely UNIX vendor Apple would be happy to tell you, is often a very smart way to go.

photo credit: cole007 via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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One of the juiciest: Surface Pro is able to run other operating systems than the default Windows 8.

Reddit user Nygmatic asked the question:

For the Surface Pro….is the boot loader unlocked? Can I do what I want with my (potential) property? Or am I locked in to Windows 8?

Which means that a memo on the status of storm relief efforts can now contain live updates to weather conditions, emergency response units’ actions, and news coverage of the disaster. In other words, documents are becoming more like web pages.

The five new apps Microsoft is releasing today are designed to integrated with 365′s big capital-A applications: Excel and Word. One, Bing Maps for Office allows you to plot people on a map with a data visualization tool that integrates right into Excel. People and locations show up on a live map, embedded in your spreadsheet, that can be zoomed and switched to Bing’s bird’s-eye view.

Another, also for Excel, allows you to build a live finance portfolio which includes current pricing data showing you how much richer — or poorer — you are every day:

Source: Microsoft

Bing Finance for Office

For Word, Microsoft is releasing three apps that allow you to search for related news and videos right inside a document, search for and insert images into your document directly from the web — no copyright issue here, naturally — and access the most up-to-date online dictionary and grammatical information.

Source: Microsoft

Bing News Search for Office

You have to think that the addition of apps to Office 365 is the continuation of the evolution of documents from static entities that only change when you change them, to living creations that that can update themselves. And by giving documents apps, Microsoft essentially is transforming documents into apps … all the while and not incidentally giving you, me, and any Joe Blow Nonprogrammer the ability to build things that only short years ago would have required extensive development.

Not only is Microsoft is making office productivity tools more like the web, it’s giving us the ability to create mashups of data and analysis and visualization on the fly.

Expect more apps for Office in the near future.

photo credit: Microsoft Sweden via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The unveiling of Office 365 Home Premium may be a giant step for Microsoft, but analysts say Redmond still has a long road ahead in its effort to regain consumer confidence.

The new Office 365, which became available yesterday, is a subscription-based version of Microsoft’s venerable, profitable productivity suite, with the addition of copious cloud-based features.

Microsoft had to make this overhaul of Office due to increasing competition from online productivity services such as Apple iWork and Google Drive.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer called it “Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service.” The cloud-based approach means that Microsoft can release updates more regularly rather than being stuck in a three-year release cycle.

For $100 per year, consumers and small businesses can access all the Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, and Access — from up to five devices, including tablets, Macs, and PCs.

There’s also a subscription aimed at college students, called Office 365 University, which gives four years of access for up to two devices for $80.

In addition, Office 365 adds in the company’s InfoPath and Lync Online tools for instant messaging. Vanessa Thompson, research manager for analyst firm IDC, said those additions are minor but important updates, and bring the new offering in line with Google Apps.

But by adapting its product to how we work now — in the cloud and across multiple devices — Microsoft wants to recapture the consumer and small business market.

But will it succeed?

Will consumers bite?

Analysts we contacted agreed that the low annual subscription fee and bonus extras (such as 60 minutes of free Skype calling, and an upgrade in SkyDrive storage from 7GB to 20GB) will appeal to consumers.

Still, Redmond needs to push its marketing efforts into high gear.

“Microsoft will need to go to great lengths to convince users that its online offering has feature parity with its desktop software,” said Phil Black, a program manager at the Urban Business Initiative, a group that instructs small businesses about new technology.

Black stressed the importance of offering “specific examples” for how users will be able to take advantage of the cloud-based features in the new release. He predicts that consumer adoption will be slow at first but will pick up as Microsoft learns to navigate the “tricky pathway” from desktop to cloud.

It’s also a smart move to offer a version of Office 365 aimed squarely at college students. It comes at a better overall price and lets students install the software twice. Microsoft will be able to build loyalty with a tech-savvy demographic that might otherwise experiment with Adobe, which is also jumping onto the cloud bandwagon.

Lincoln Murphy, managing director of cloud consulting firm Sixteen Ventures, sees another potential benefit: the reduction of “rampant piracy.” He said the low annual price point will deter people from illegally downloading popular apps like Word and Excel.

The verdict? The low price will put downward pressure on competitors to offer equally high-quality services at an even cheaper rate.  Murphy said Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud is a “win” for consumers — “in many ways, Office 365 could be the rising tide that lifts all boats,” he said.

How about small and medium-sized businesses?

Analysts view this release as a means for Microsoft to get a “legitimate foot back in the door” with small businesses.

“Small and medium-sized businesses view the cloud as the future but were probably wondering where one of their most trusted vendors was when looking at options,” Murphy explained.

Thompson makes the case that the software as a service (SaaS) model and Lync integration puts the new Office 365 in line with Google Apps. However, “incentivising users away from a freemium competitor product that meets up to 80 percent of their needs is a consistent challenge for Microsoft,” she said. “Expect them to continually iterate on pricing and packaging.”

Black warns that widespread corporate adoption (as Microsoft moves up-market) won’t be immediate.

“IT departments know that Microsoft releases the first version of any software before performance and stability testing is truly complete,” he said, adding that Redmond will need to prove it is “truly committed to a hosted model of its Office software.”

The verdict? Microsoft has emphasized in messaging that the cloud-based Office is intended for consumers. As the company shifts focus, expect to see highly-targeted efforts to reach small businesses, who view cloud-based business technology as the future.