By Jacqui Cheng
July 1, 2009 6:00 PM CT

Microsoft's Bing made gains on Google and Yahoo during the month of June, according to stats from StatCounter. Though the increase is only one percentage point, the trend is definitely a positive one for Microsoft. Microsoft's recently relaunched search engine, Bing, has managed to win the company some market share during its first month of operation.

According to numbers gathered by StatCounter, Microsoft gained a full percentage point during the month of June, stealing bits and pieces from both Yahoo and Google. The firm says that Microsoft's share of the search market increased from 7.21 percent in April of this year to 8.23 percent in June. Comparatively, Google's share was at 79.07 percent in April and 78.48 percent in June—a drop of just over a half a percentage point.

Yahoo had 11.04 percent of the market in June. The Bing spike isn't entirely due to people checking out the new and improved search engine, either. StatCounter says the search engine's market share peaked at 9.21 percent during the week of June 1 through 7. The search engine dipped back down into the high 7s for a couple weeks before coming back to 8.45 percent during the last week of the month, showing that new users are sticking around.

"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said in a statement. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date." Bing was recently rolled out for public consumption at the end of May after months of rumors that Live Search would be undergoing a major makeover.

By Gregg Keizer
June 30, 2009 07:30 PM ET

Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 browser had been downloaded more than 2 million times by late afternoon, Pacific time, according to a company counter. The new browser, which was released earlier today, was being downloaded between 30 and 63 times per second worldwide at about 3:35 p.m. Pacific.

At about noon Pacific, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that a million copies of Firefox 3.5 had already been downloaded, and that the download rate was close to 80 per second. "We didn't do as much outreach this time," said Beltzner, comparing the low-key approach Mozilla took in the days preceding today's launch to last summer's promotion for the then-new Firefox 3.0. "But it looks like we're not too far off Download Day's numbers," Beltzner said.

Last year, Mozilla said that more than 8.3 million copies of Firefox 3.0 had been downloaded in the first 24 hours of its availability, in part because of the aggressively promoted Download Day, an attempt by Mozilla to set a single-day download record that it hoped would be sanctioned by the Guinness World Records organization. In October 2006, Mozilla said it recorded 1.6 million downloads of Firefox 2.0 on that version's launch day.

Today, the U.S. led all countries on Mozilla's real-time download counter, with nearly 600,000 by 3:35 p.m. Pacific, followed by Germany with more than 260,000, France with 110,000, and the U.K. with nearly 90,000. Internet metrics firm Net Applications may be able to confirm Firefox 3.5's growth, if not its numbers, tomorrow. The California-based company releases its monthly browser market share numbers on the first of every month.

by Jason Hiner
June 30th, 2009 @ 11:00 pm

Comcast will partner with Clearwire to offer a new Internet package that will bundle Clearwire’s WiMAX mobile broadband with Comcast’s cable Internet, according to a report from CNET’s Maggie Reardon. This isn’t a surprise.

Last year, Comcast was part of the consortium of companies that invested in the big Sprint-Clearwire WiMAX deal, so lots of commentators (including this one) have assumed that part of Comcast’s deal would be to help bring WiMAX to market in bundled Internet deals. Clearwire has launched WiMAX in four markets: Portland (OR), Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Baltimore (which originally launched under the Sprint Xohm brand). Comcast will launch its WiMAX bundle in Portland first and then in the other three cities by the end of the year.

Reardon explains how Comcast will be selling the bundles: Comcast will be selling 4G [WiMAX] wireless access as part of an Internet bundle to Comcast subscribers. To entice new subscribers, Comcast is offering the new 4G wireless with its 12 Mbps download cable modem service, plus a free 802.11g router for $50 a month for the first 12 months. The data card used for the 4G wireless, which fits into a laptop, costs $99. But subscribers who sign up for the package with a two-year commitment get the data card for free.

After the first 12 months, subscribers will then pay $43 per month for the 12 Mbps broadband service and $30 extra per month for 4G wireless service. The 4G wireless service is only available in Comcast’s cable territory, but subscribers who travel to other cities where Clearwire’s network is operational will be able to access the network at no additional cost. New customers signing up for Comcast’s triple play bundle of TV, phone, and Internet can add the 4G wireless component for $30 extra a month. .....

by Tom Krazit
June 30, 2009 12:28 PM PDT

Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets. Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo.

The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent. Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day.

Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency. As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.

Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.

By John Timmer
June 30, 2009 6:29 AM CT

A study making the rounds suggests that Wikipedians may feel at home online, in part because they're grumpy introverts. But the results need to be interpreted very cautiously, as they were based on only 69 contributors from a single nation, a tiny drop in the Wikipedian ocean.

Behavioral studies of specific populations are extremely challenging things, as recruiting a set of participants that represent a true cross-section of the larger population is never easy. The mere willingness to participate in a study involves a necessary degree of self-selection within this population, which can seriously complicate behavioral studies—after all, it's entirely possible that a willingness to take surveys is the product of one of the behavioral traits under examination.

That's why, even though a small survey can produce results with a high statistical confidence, it still may represent nothing more than a robust result within a non-representative group. All of that should serve as a precautionary background on a new survey of Wikipedia participants. The short publication that describes these results is entitled, "Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members," and the news isn't especially good.

Those contributing online feel that their true personality comes across better in the virtual environment; they also scored lower on a measure of agreeableness, and aren't especially open to new ideas. It's easy to rationalize the first of these findings: if someone is more comfortable online, they're more likely to contribute to an online community. The other two, however, require a bit more in the way of mental gymnastics, given Wikipedia's relative newness and its focus on building a consensus about what constitutes relevant, unbiased information. In one press report on the findings, an author suggests that Wikipedia might provide a way for these individuals to compensate for real world inadequacies.

By Paul Taylor
Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 13:05

MOTHERBOARDS.ORG has a go at the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer mobo. It supports Core i7 or Xeon (Bloomfield) processors and has seven (!) PCIe x16 slots. Octo-or-more-core GPU processing is possible with this monster, as is SAS storage. This is a $500 motherboard, after all.

Tech Gage is testing the Asus Eee PC 1008HA “Seashell” netbook. Glossy and sleek, the Seashell attempts to make the netbook as clean looking as possible, and nails it. As a mate of mine would put it “frickin’ cool”. Driver Heaven tests MSI’s GX 723 gaming notebook. Slightly underpowered compared to some gaming notebooks out there, the GX 723 is a 17-incher (1680x1050) with a P8600 Core 2 Duo processor 4GB or DDR2-800 and 500GB of storage.

It’s driven by a Geforce 130M mobile GPU… *cough*. Rucksack and gaming mouse included. As Ion-based devices start flooding the market, Benchmark Reviews takes the time to test the Zotac IONITX-A-U Atom N330 WiFi N Motherboard. 100% passively cooled, this DIY kit will get you started on your HTPC project. Earphone Audio Processors are a bit new to us, but Thrusted Reviews, well got a Tension Labs EAP 03 Earphone Audio Processor to test.

This is essentially a headphone amp that plugs in the middle that costs an arm and a leg. Hot Hardware got some (video) hands-on time with a load of Nvidia kit, namely Lenovo’s S12 Atom+Ion netbook. Tegra also makes a showing in case you just can’t help yourself… Yes, Core 2 Quad is going the way of the dodo, but in the meantime some nice chaps at Tom’s Hardware found the time to do some memory scaling tests on the processors.

by John Morris @ 2:06 pm
June 30th, 2009

Laptops have long since overtaken their desk-bound brethren in terms of revenues, and more recently unit sales. In the first quarter, desktop unit sales dropped 23 percent, while notebook sales actually increased 10 percent compared with the same period last year, according to iSuppli.

Gizmodo even penned an obituary for the desktop this week. But rumors of the desktop’s demise are premature. Take a closer look at iSuppli’s numbers: Desktops still accounted for 47 percent of all PCs sold worldwide–more than 30 million units–in the first quarter. Desktops are still big business. Over the past week or so, PC makers have been rolling out their Back to School boxes.

The laptops and netbooks get more coverage, but these new desktops are still worth a look, especially to see the sort of features you can get in systems ranging from $300 to $900. HP has announced several new models. As usual, all of the HP-branded desktops have an AMD-based configuration at the low-end as well as slightly high-priced configurations with Intel processors.

The Slimline s5000 is a small form factor desktop that currently starts at $290 (s5100z) with a 2.8GHz AMD Athlon LE-1660 single-core processor, 2GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce 6150 integrated graphics, and a 320GB hard drive. The $370 s5110t has a 2.50GHz Pentium E5200 dual-core processor, 3GB, and a 320GB hard drive; the $450 s5150t has a 2.60GHz Pentium E5300, 4GB, and a 500GB hard drive.

by Stephen Shankland
June 30, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

A funny thing to happened to Firefox on the way to vanquishing Internet Explorer: the Mozilla browser's success opened the door for a host of its other competitors.

Even as Internet Explorer's market share has slipped--down a dramatic 8 percentage points to 65.5 percent in about the last year--Firefox programmers face a surprising question: should they be more worried about the programmers in Redmond, Wash., or about those working on Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera?

Firefox has gained about 3 percentage points to 22.5 percent in market share, according to Net Applications' statistics since July 2008, and Firefox backer Mozilla doubtless hopes for more gains with Tuesday's release of Firefox 3.5. But Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome each gained 2 percentage points, to 8.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, indicating a growing appetite for alternatives to Internet Explorer that's not completely met by Firefox.

Opera stayed flat at about 0.7 percent. In short, Firefox isn't the only scrappy underdog in town, and Firefox fans' easy us-versus-them polarization is transforming into a more complicated multilateral equation. Having other IE challengers helps legitimize Firefox, because the idea of straying from the IE fold appears more legitimate, but the alternatives also collect some of the new users venturing farther afield.

By John Timmer
June 30, 2009 7:12 PM CT

The head of the Oxford University Press says that while the Google book settlement is imperfect, it may be the best way to prevent nearly a century's worth of knowledge from effectively vanishing. The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice.

Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it's both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge.

As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public's access to knowledge. Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts it off with a telling anecdote: a professor at Columbia, when grading an essay assignment, found that most of the class cited a work that had been published in 1900, which had largely been forgotten since.

Why so many citations? It was in Google Book Search. More recent and relevant work isn't. Given that his company's mission includes the dissemination of knowledge within the academic world and beyond, it's not surprising that Barton views this as indicative of a serious problem. If a relevant academic publication is effectively invisible to the OUP's target audience, then the Press isn't doing its job.

By Nick Farrell
Monday, 29 June 2009, 11:44

RUMOURS HAVE IT that Microsoft will offer Windows 7 on USB thumb drives. The report surfaced at Cnet, which heard the news from one of its sources close to the Vole, apparently, who may or may not have heard it from a bloke down the pub. The thought is that doing so will enable netbook owners to upgrade their machines, but it will break the tradition that only allowed Voleware to be distributed on DVDs or through downloads.

Since netbooks don't come with optical drives and downloading Microsoft's bloated Windows 7 upgrade would take punters a very long time, the only other option the Vole has is to bung it onto USB sticks. Apparently the Vole is also worried that netbook users will not want to download its latest Vista service pack because, at 2.8GB, it might take a big chunk out of most people's broadband caps. Microsoft executives have said that they recognise that upgrading netbooks poses a challenge and are exploring ways that the company can make it easier. Cnet's hacks spoke to Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte who said that the Vole had nothing to announce on the subject yet.

By Gavin Clarke
30th June 2009 01:11 GMT

Microsoft has clarified the rules on who can upgrade to Windows 7, and how many free copies of the forthcoming operating system you'll be entitled to. The company has also dismissed a suggestion from mega-analyst Gartner that it's limiting the number of PCs that an organization can upgrade to Windows 7 in order to bump prospective customers onto its volume purchasing and Software Assurance (SA) programs.

Microsoft was speaking after Gartner analyst Michael Silver launched his latest broadside against the company's plans on Windows 7 upgrades. The background to this chapter in what has become a long-playing drama is the Windows 7 Upgrade Option (WUO). This was rolled out last week with a range of promotional campaigns to jump start sales by taking pre-orders for Windows 7 ahead of its planned October 22 launch.

Promotions include discounts, and there are reports of pre-orders already being sold out. It turns out that WUO targets consumers and small businesses - a fact Microsoft didn't detail during last week's announcement. Microsoft said WUO was open to "anyone" who buys a PC. And under the WUO, Microsoft has increased the pre-existing limit on the number of free upgrades individuals and businesses can request, boosting it from five to 25 PCs that already have Windows pre-installed.

Gartner's Silver said enterprises should push Microsoft to also offer them WUO. Otherwise, enterprises will have to enroll in Microsoft's SA program. SA is only available to customers on Microsoft's volume-purchasing programs, for organizations with 250 or more PCs running Windows. But SA isn't a requisite of Microsoft's volume programs. According to Silver: "Organizations without client Windows Software Assurance that are purchasing more than 25 new PCs between now and 22 October would have to enroll these PCs in Software Assurance at an additional cost to get the right to upgrade them to Windows 7."

By Gregg Keizer
June 29, 2009 01:08 PM ET

Mozilla will ship Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday, bringing the long-awaited upgrade in under its own deadline wire, the company announced last Friday. According to a Mozilla spokeswoman, the final version of Firefox 3.5 will be posted for download tomorrow morning, Pacific time.

The news was not a surprise. Last Thursday, Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox strongly hinted that Firefox 3.5 would meet the ship deadline of the first half of the year. "Everyone's pretty happy with the release, and while we haven't picked a date yet, we're still tracking to our latest schedule," Beltzner said in an e-mail. Mozilla made its deadline by running an unusual, accelerated set of release candidates (RC) that were issued primarily to the 800,000 users running earlier previews of the new browser.

In early June, it pushed an interim "Preview" build it described as a nearly-finished RC and last week it wrapped up the process with several quick RCs. The release comes just over a year after Firefox 3.0 debuted. Firefox 3.5 was originally slated to be called Firefox 3.1, but the company decided in March that it had added enough new features to justify the larger bump in number from last summer's Firefox 3.0.

Among the features to debut in Firefox 3.5 are a new, faster JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey; a privacy mode, which some call "porn mode" for one of its more obvious applications; and location-aware browsing. Mozilla has also touted numerous under-the-hood performance improvements, ranging from support for new video and audio HTML5 tags to support for Web worker threads -- enhanced scripting that lets site developers shift JavaScript computations to a background thread.

by Tom Foremski
June 29th, 2009 @ 8:10 pm

I’ve noticed that many people have abandoned their blogs in favor of real-time blogging on Twitter or on Friendfeed. Their argument is that they can’t do both. And it’s understandable because it all takes time, lots of it. But it might be worth revisiting that strategy and doing more blogging. Here’s a cautionary tale . . .

Robert Scoble, who grew to fame as one of the first tech bloggers while at Microsoft, publishes Scobleizer. But he has been very enthusiastic about Twitter and Friendfeed, so much so that he started to neglect Scobleizer. [Please see: Is Twitter (and Friendfeed) Killing Blogging? Scobleizer Hasn't Posted In 12 Days!!!] Mr Scoble became a tireless advocate for the real-time web and has scolded others for not taking part in Twitter and Friendfeed.

However, he just had a change of heart and says he is staying away from Twitter and Friendfeed and is back to his blog because those services are “hurting long-time knowledge.” What hey are hurting is his traffic. Compete.com shows that in just a two month period, April to May, 2009, the number of unique visitors to Scobleizer plunged by nearly 50%!!! That can’t be good news for his employer, Rackspace, which runs Scobleizer. There’s not much room on Twitter and Friendfeed to run Rackspace ads.

Also, Google doesn’t pay as much attention to Twitter and Friendfeed as it does to online sites. If you don’t exist on Google, you just don’t exist. It’s not surprising that Mr Scoble made this surprising u-turn.

by Marguerite Reardon
June 29, 2009 3:25 PM PDT

Dell is developing a pocket-size Internet device using Google's Android operating system that could take on Apple's iPod Touch, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Monday. Two people who have seen early prototypes of the device told the newspaper it looks like Apple's iPod Touch but slightly larger.

And like the iPod Touch, the device isn't expected to include a cellular phone. The device is considered part of a new category of gadgets called mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fit into the market between a mobile phone and a laptop or Netbook computer. The device could go on sale as early as the second half of 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources.

Dell supposedly started working on the new device about a year ago as a way to compete against Apple's iPod business. The Journal also cited an unnamed source who said that Dell has considered selling the new Internet device through a cell phone carrier. Dell and other computer makers such as Hewlett-Packard already sell their Netbooks through cell phone operators.

Dell has long been rumored to be making a smartphone. And the company has also been rumored to be testing the Android software for its smartphone and possible for its Netbooks. With these developments in the works, it probably wouldn't take much to also develop a portable Internet device using the same operating system without the phone. That's what Apple did with the iPod Touch.

By Chris Mellor
29th June 2009 15:35 GMT

HP is automating the provisioning and virtualisation of its storage arrays with Citrix and Microsoft server virtualisation. It's supporting Citrix's StorageLink interface to enable its EVA, MSA and LeftHand arrays to be used to better effect in Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Virtual server, desktop and storage environments can be managed simultaneously by a single administrator with StorageLink.

That should save time and operational cost. HP is also working with VMware and its vStorage API. Dave Roberson, HP's GM and SVP for its StorageWorks operation, said: "HP is working closely with VMware to make our comprehensive storage portfolio ‘virtualization-aware,’ enabling businesses to cost-effectively deploy and manage storage so their data centers achieve maximum efficiency.”