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The site just doesn’t inspire or engage and I have no reason to visit other than to answer requests - usually from perfect strangers–to become “linked in.” But reading about the rollout of the beta version of LinkedIn’s business directory and I’m intrigued by the idea. To wit:

Now there’s something in it for me, either as a prospective job hunter or simply as someone keen on searching out pertinent data on a company. The social network that specialized in boring users to tears finally makes a move worthy of notice. Good job, guys. More of this and who knows? Maybe one day your CEO–quick, anybody know the name off hand?–will become as much a household name as The Zuckerface.

“Over 150,000 companies and organizations are indexed in the directory, working it into a Hoovers-esque database that ties into LinkedIn’s social features.

Why? It’s as captivating as a sack of russet potatoes.

A LinkedIn Company Profiles page includes a number of basic statistics pulled from BusinessWeek’s database, such as company size and history. But for the most part, the rest of the business’ page consists of information from employees of that company who have LinkedIn profiles, like a list of “new hires” (LinkedIn members who have recently added a current affiliation with that company) and recent promotions, other businesses that have seen people hired from that company, and demographic tidbits like median age and education information.”

I’m one of the 20 million-plus members of LinkedIn but would be flummoxed for a good answer if you asked me why. The truth is that if I didn’t need to keep tabs on what’s new and groovy in the tech world, I very much doubt I’d bother.

(Credit:
Kent German/CNET Networks)

It’s always a good day at our house when the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly arrives in the mailbox. And when last week’s summer double issue arrived, an already good day was made even better. I love top 10 lists, but Entertainment Weekly managed to maximize my pleasure with an entire issue dedicated to “Celebrating the new classics: The 1,000 best movies, TV shows, albums, books, and more of the past 25 years.”

Poor little cell phones

Though it started out as a good read the last article forced me to put down the magazine in disgust–I even made it past Die Hard earning ninth place in the top 100 best films from 1983 to 2008. In the list of “The 25 gadgets and innovations with the biggest effect on pop culture since 1983″ I was aghast to find the cell phone nowhere on the list. How could a gadget that revolutionized Hollywood business deals, spawned a celebrity accessory culture and served as the main plot device in such cinematic achievements as Cellular get beaten out by the likes of the Amazon Kindle and stadium multiplex seating? To me, it’s completely unfathomable. Of course, the iPod and TiVo landed in the top five (how could TiVo not make it?) but satellite radio hardly deserves its ninth-place ranking. Here’s the tech that made the top ten.

The
iPod’s 2001 introduction also earned top honors in a readers’ poll on the top pop culture moment of the last 25 years. It managed to knock out Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Ellen DeGeneres’ “Coming Out” episode. Both Cobain and Jackson made it to the semifinals before a “late surge by Apple fans edged them out.” Never underestimate the power of fanboys.

The DVD player
Napster
TiVo
iPod
YouTube
Realistic CG characters
Digital video cameras for consumers
Flat panel TVs
Satellite radio stations
Stadium multiplex seating

So what do you think? Do you agree that the cell phone was robbed of its deserved place on the list? And tell me about any other tech that you think Entertainment Weekly overlooked.

AVADirect’s new slimtower GT3 custom gaming PC.

A chief benefit of the GT3 is that it offers a slim profile, but it also lets you add a full-size graphics card. Based on AVADirect’s high-end processor offerings, including Intel Core i7 Extreme chips, we don’t believe it’s using the GT3 to go after both a small footprint and power efficiency, making it more in keeping with the likes of Falcon Northwest’s FragBox 2 and Maingear’s X-Cube, as opposed to the HP Firebird and Maingear Pulse.

We can’t help but feel a little responsible for AVADirect’s newly announced GT3 Custom Gaming PCs.

The starting price for the AVADirect GT3 gaming system is $948.82 for the AMD version, and $1,239.92 for the Intel-based model. Based on the art featured on AVADirect’s Web page, at least, the company has also apparently addressed our chief complaint about the original GT3 case, swapping out the Miami Vice-blue lettering on the front for decidedly less-rad white.

A few months back, we linked to a blog post from Ed Borden highlighting GTR Tech’s seemingly ignored GT3 slim tower desktop case as a 2-year-old precursor to HP’s Firebird. Following that post, we heard from an enthusiastic Misha Troshin, CMO of AVADirect, informing us of his intention to sign up with GTR Tech for the GT3.

(Credit:
AVADirect)

Earlier this week, Dell said it will close its Austin, Texas, desktop manufacturing facility as it seeks to trim billions in costs.

The company is hosting a briefing with financial analysts at its Round Rock, Texas, headquarters on Thursday at which CEO Michael Dell discussed its layoff plans.

“We are not satisfied with the current state of affairs and are on a mission to fix it,” Reuters quoted Dell saying. “Every area of the company is being pursued” for cost cuts.

Dell plans to cut deeper into its workforce than the already announced layoffs of 8,800 people, according to news reports.

Last May, the company announced that 8,800 people would be cut from its workforce. On Thursday, it said that it has already eliminated 5,500 jobs, according to Reuters.

The game’s conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world clues and puzzles. Somehow, it will all be tied in to the Olympics. One clue on the game’s site says she offers up the “fact” that, after waking up, she spent a week in the hospital being treated for her very rare form of amnesia and that doctors there “say I’m an Olympic-caliber athlete.”

The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.

‘Find the Lost Ring,’ a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the Olympics in Beijing, went live Monday morning.

As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.

For the full list of clues that launched the game, see my blog entry from Sunday night, which includes photos and the text of the initial clues.

(Credit:
findthelostring.com)

To me, it’s all very Bourne Identity-ish, except probably without a lot of gun play and CIA involvement.

This agreement gives advertisers a new opportunity to bid for placement on an additional network that includes Yahoo inventory. They will bid for what they think this opportunity is worth at prices that produce positive ROI. That’s how pricing works today in this industry and this agreement won’t change that.

Since the deal’s announcement, Microsoft and the advertising community have been making the case against the Yahoo-Google agreement. The Association of National Advertisers, which represents over 400 companies, last month issued a public letter maintaining the arrangement would raise prices and limit choice. Google and Yahoo obviously see things differently. Yahoo president Sue Decker then responded with a blog refutation of the argument put forth by the ANA and other critics:

To be continued.

Of course, the government being the government, maybe it’ll do something supremely annoying and keep us in the dark beyond next Friday. But the calendar suggests that a decision is nigh. In June, when Google and Yahoo announced their accord, the companies voluntarily delayed implementing its terms for up to three and a half months to let the Justice Department review the deal.

If the antitrust division decides not to oppose the agreement, the big question is whether it will attach conditions. One source involved with the opponents of the partnership said there’s not much chance the trustbusters will allow the deal to be implemented without modification. Of course, nobody outside of the Justice Department really knows the answer yet–and they ain’t talking. True to form, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

So for now, we’re stuck in a he-said, she-said limbo, where the spinmeisters on both sides are slinging as much hash as possible. Despite their conflicting predictions of reality, the truth is that nobody will know whether this deal is pro- or anti-competitive until long after it goes into effect–assuming that Uncle Sam’s minions give it the green light.

The buzz around Washington is that the Justice Department will rule on whether to approve the Google-Yahoo advertising pact by late next week.

Get Microsoft’s Office Compatibility Pack
The greatest challenge in switching from Office 2003 to Office 2007 isn’t trying to find the ribbon equivalent of the old toolbar options, it’s remembering to save files in the .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats rather than their new XML equivalents. In a way it’s a shame not to be able to use the XML formats because they save storage space by allowing files to be much smaller, and they offer other advantages. But there will be people using Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 for many years to come, and not all of them will bother downloading Microsoft’s Office Compatibility Pack.

The week before that I had to resend a spreadsheet I had e-mailed to my brother because I inadvertently saved it in Excel 2007’s new .xlsx format, and he’s using an older version of Office.

Unfortunately, there’s no .rtf equivalent for spreadsheets. The simplest, most universal format for spreadsheet data is Comma-Separated Values (CSV), which all versions of Excel–and all other spreadsheet programs–accommodate without a problem. Excel also supports the old WK1 Lotus 1-2-3 format, which lets you perform calculations but is much simpler than Excel. Software developer Joel Spolsky offers an in-depth look at your Office-format options. Most of the information is from a programmer’s perspective, but it’s useful for your average, everyday user as well.

Last week I was working with a group of people on a Microsoft Word document when I noticed that the printout being used by one of the group failed to show the contents of the file’s tables. It turns out she uses OpenOffice.org rather than Office, and OpenOffice.org’s Writer app missed the table data.

Tomorrow: easy ways to find system information in Windows.

Some people would say these minor inconveniences are part of the price of technological innovation, but if you multiply these time-sinks a million-fold they add up to a major loss of productivity. True PC-software standards aren’t likely to arrive anytime soon, so it’s up to us to ensure that the files we share with others look and work the way we intend them to.

If you intend to share files using Office’s XML formats with people who don’t have Office 2007 installed on their systems, send them a link to the compatibility-pack download along with the files. Unfortunately, they’ll need to visit the Microsoft Update site before they install the pack, and if that entails downloading and installing an Office or Windows update, they may need to restart their system before they can install the compatibility pack and subsequently open the file. Talk about jumping through hoops!

Roll back the file-format clock
Now you see why it’s usually easier to use the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats. Nearly all modern PC programs accommodate these files, but that’s not to say the proprietary Microsoft formats are trouble-free. Microsoft owns another “standard” for word-processing documents that is supported by all versions of Word and designed for interoperability: the Rich Text Format (.rtf). One big advantage of .rtf files is that they can be opened in OpenOffice.org’s Writer word processor, as well as AbiWord, KWord, and other open-source word processors.

Save the file as a PDF
If the person you’re sharing a file with needs only to view and perhaps comment on it rather than editing or otherwise altering it, send them a PDF version of the file. I described how to add PDF-creation capability to any PC for free in a previous post. The upcoming version 3 of OpenOffice.org is expected to allow you to import PDF files, but I haven’t found a free program that lets you open and edit PDFs the way you can using Adobe’s Acrobat or other commercial PDF apps.

A new feature has to be tested to make sure it is better than the old way of doing things and that it doesn’t mess anything else up.

Microsoft is hoping a new tool can help make the testing process more methodical and, by doing so, speed things up. The company calls it the Experimentation Platform.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet had the scoop on this. Essentially, it is based on the longtime premise of A/B testing, that is giving one set of users one option and a second set another option and seeing which they like better.

One of the reasons that software development takes so darn long is the amount of testing it takes.

Leading the charge on this is Ronny Kohavi, who joined Microsoft from Amazon in 2005.

It is only by building such a layer of [service] abstraction that will enable IT’s focus to truly change from their traditional asset perspective (”what we have”), to the new value-oriented perspective (”what we deliver”). Furthermore, aggregating data at a service layer reveals far more potent information sources and the knowledge needed to drive service improvement and shift the culture and mindset of the IT organization.

Time to move on to the next century of software: software of the customer, by the customer, for the customer.

We’ve been talking about the phenomenon for some time, but it finally appears to be happening: Software is becoming a service, not a product. CIO.com picks up on this in a recent article, but people like Doc Searls have been talking about this in relation to open source since at least 2003.

commentary

Between open source and SaaS, the software industry has changed forever, as CIO.com notes:

Thinking of and delivering IT as a service allows IT to become part of the business, and not merely the dumb bits behind it. Open source and SaaS make it all happen. Savvy IT shops will invest in both.

P.S. One side effect of this shift is that the anomalous returns to software vendors - at the expense of customers - that software vendors have realized over the past few decades are gone forever. It makes no sense to continue fretting about whether proprietary software is more or less profitable than open source and SaaS-delivered (proprietary and open source) software. Who cares? That model is dying. Talking about whether it’s more or less profitable is like talking about eternal youth is positive or negative.

It’s not going to happen.

What do you sell in open source? Services around the software, whether those services are support, Networks (update service, etc.), etc. What do you sell if you’re a SaaS company? Software delivered as a service/utility.

“We don’t have the Microsoft patent promise that Novell provides. We can’t provide that with rPath Linux,” Marshall told this ZDNet blogger. “It takes a long time for people to overcome their historical biases. ”

Paula Rooney at ZDnet reported on today’s announcement that rPath has entered a pact with Novell that makes creating a virtual appliance easier for developers.

I have to think that Novell or Microsoft are going to make an investment or acquisition of rPath in the near future. Otherwise rPath sold out way too easily.

rPath’s Appliance Builder has been running its own Linux since the company’s inception but it doesn’t come with the legal peace-of-mind guarantee offered by Novell, he said.
Despite Linux’s widespread acceptance, potential legal issues still keep customers up at night, the former Red Hat sales exec said.

While I am not shocked that rPath is working with Novell instead of continuing with their own Linux flavor, I am completely shocked that Billy Marshall, rPath CEO and former Red Hat bigshot sales guy is citing the Microsoft patent protection as the reason why. Nothing is said about Suse being better in any way. Instead its about this unproven patent protection.