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“One thing that bothers me is that (mobile) apps don’t work offline,” he says when prodded.

Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google, shows off the new user interface of Google Web apps for the iPhone being unveiled at Macworld on Monday.

The iPhone revolutionized the industry by making it easy and affordable to use the Web on a cell phone, he says. Google is offering Web apps written for the iPhone browser that bring the PC experience to the mobile device, he says.

(This post has been updated to reflect Google’s announcement on Monday.)

Now, new e-mail messages automatically show up so you don’t need to hit refresh, messages can arrive in 25 seconds or less and auto-complete makes composing an e-mail faster. Calendar offers a month-at-a-glance view that isn’t yet offered on the desktop. Your favorite apps are in tabs at the top of the screen and they can be switched around.

On Christmas Day thousands of people opened up boxes with something cool and functional inside and wasted no time logging onto Google.com through their brand new iPhones.

Given that Google launched Google Gears, which allows people to work on their Web apps even when they are not connected to the Internet, last May it’s likely they’ll have something similar for mobile soon.

“It’s about usage, not just units,” Vic Gundotra, vice president of mobile and developer at Google, said in a recent interview with CNET News.com. “The data proves that people are using the browser on the iPhone.”

Gundotra smiles mischievously.

As a result of those gifts, the number of global queries to Google’s search site from iPhones surpassed the number of queries from people using market-leading Symbian-based phones for the first time. Google calls it the “Christmas cross-over.”

On Monday–the first day of Macworld–Google unveiled a new user interface for its iPhone Web apps that make Gmail, search, Reader, Calendar, Picasa and other services faster to use and more customizable. It also has optimized iGoogle for the iPhone.

That is huge given the fact that the number of
iPhone units shipped is tiny compared to the number of Symbian-based phones out there. The cross-over only lasted a few days or so, but it shows the impact the iPhone is having on the telecommunications industry and provides a glimpse into its future market potential for the Web.

(Credit:
Google)

What’s next? Will more Google apps join YouTube and Google Maps on the iPhone’s home screen that shows up when the device is first turned on?

“This app will work great on Android,” Google’s mobile software platform launched in November, says Gundotra.

While it is difficult to leave people you’ve been in the foxhole with for the past 3.5 years, my departure actually comes at a good time.

The JBoss model has been successfully flipped and aligned with the Red Hat model. And while there are still kinks to work out, there is solid momentum…both from a development release cycle as well as from the business perspective.

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The signs are positive that Red Hat has finally digested JBoss and is on track to reap the rewards from that acquisition. There’s still much to do, but the critical dependency on people like Shaun is arguably diminished somewhat. Good for Shaun, then, for getting a little of his life back for at least a few months. I’m sure his family will appreciate it.

JBoss World Orlando was a success on many fronts…blowing away the attendance numbers we had at JBoss World Vegas.

Shaun, conscientious guy that he is, leaves Red Hat in good shape, as he notes:

All of this leads me to feel very comfortable leaving Red Hat and taking some time to find my next challenge.

The middleware business continues its string of solid quarter over quarter growth. I can’t share specifics, of course, but I am very happy with the quarterly numbers and trend curves for the past fiscal year.

But I want some of his time when he re-enters the open-source world. There’s still lots for you to do, Shaun. I’ve got my shopping list ready.

It might be nice to ascribe Shaun’s departure to some nefarious plot at Red Hat or to some other negative factor, but I talked with Shaun and it’s none of the above. As Shaun told me, he’s off to “get reacquainted with [his] family, as well as do some side jobs for a while.”

Shaun Connolly has been one of the few JBoss executives to stay with Red Hat post-acquisition. Today, however, is Shaun’s last day with Red Hat.

If side jobs leads him to do something like Bob Bickel’s Ringside Networks, then I’m all for it. Just don’t stay out of the game as long as Bob did, Shaun. The open-source world needs more people like you reinvesting their experience in other open-source companies.

Barely a week after Virgin Mobile launched its new Arc, the prepaid carrier is now showing the new TNT! handset on a Beta page on its Web site. Though it is billed as a “dynamite flip phone,” the TNT! hardly packs an explosion. In fact, it is as basic a cell phone comes. Inside the simple design you’ll find a color display, text messaging, a Web browser, and a speakerphone. The TNT! (is the exclamation point really necessary?) is made by Kyocera and is a variant of the company’s Adreno S2400, though with a stripped-down feature set. It will be just $19.99 when it goes on sale in August.

Virgin Mobile TNT!

(Credit:
Virgin Mobile)

Read all about it on Jonathan’s blog.

MySQL’s Kaj Arno gives the community perspective here.

Wow. Sun is acquiring MySQL for about $1 billion. I think it’s a huge win for both companies–and while it would have been nice to see another open source IPO this is a great outcome for a great company.

So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We’ll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace - to accelerate the industry’s phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platforms.

As more of my friends become wealthy, my bitterness and jealousy only grows :> Congrats to Marten and the team!

Update: Here’s the video.

One thing that’s missing from this version of Photosynth is a way to synth pre-existing photo collections, or sets of photos taken from community sites. This is the most useful for things like common landmarks, and is clearly something that can be done with the right photo database–something we saw in that really nifty video from Siggraph last week. In the case of Photosynth, once you’ve uploaded a batch of photos you can’t simply upload more to it later. Gary Flake, who heads up Microsoft’s Live Labs, says this is something that’s coming later on down the road. For now, you’ll just have to plan ahead.

Update 3: Site’s back up.

I spent the past few days building my own Photosynths and finally managed to get the knack for how to shoot correctly by the third one. While Microsoft has largely pushed it as a way to build jaw-dropping 3D-like environments, I’d argue to say it’s a far simpler way to take super detailed shots of a wall or single room without breaking the bank on a high megapixel SLR. That said, Photosynth will take any resolution of photos you throw at it.

This synth I created uses close to 300 photos, although you can make ones with many less. Part of the creation process involves learning how to take photos for it to recognize how objects relate to one another.

Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its “ooh, that’s pretty” status to being a viable Web service for consumers.

Note: We’ve got a video coming up soon with Flake chatting about the technology behind Photosynth. In the meantime, if you want to explore my synth of the outside of the CBS Interactive offices in downtown San Francisco, go here.

The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you’ve taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload your photos.

Update 2: Photosynth has been up and down since early Thursday morning. You can check for the status of it on the Live Labs blog.

One of the most impressive parts of Photosynth is how damn fast it is. Over a decent broadband connection you’ll immediately see large thumbnails that quickly begin to sharpen as data fills in the missing pixels. You can continue to zoom into these areas and they’ll sharpen up even more on some of the super high-resolution shots.

The streaming and rendering technology behind Photosynth is Seadragon, another project from the Microsoft Live Labs universe. Users have always had to download a special Seadragon-based plug-in to view other people’s synths. The new twist with the latest plug-in now comes with a desktop uploader that can be used to add your own collection to the Photosynth universe. This runs with complete autonomy from your browser, so you don’t have to worry about it stopping if you close out your browser. It also works in both IE 7 and
Firefox 3, making it cross-platform–at least for Microsoft. If you’re a
Mac user looking to get your hands on some Photosynth action you’ll have to keep waiting. The focus on Photosynth will remain on the PC for the time being.

Microsoft is giving users 20GB of online storage for their Photosynth collections. Photosynth product manager Joshua Edwards tells me this can easily fit 60 or more “synths” made up of around 150 to 200 photographs apiece–the higher end of what’s recommended for what Edwards calls an optimum or “synthy” experience. Users who are making really neat collections will be granted additional space.

(Credit:
CNET Networks/Josh Lowensohn)

Might want to get busy building something to repel the ACLU lawyers who are on their way.

Weighing in at around 300 pounds, the robo enforcer stands 4 feet and is remote controlled by two joysticks. It comes with an intimidating arsenal of spotlight and walkie-talkie/PA system and a SuperSoaker-type squirt gun that can go as high as 200 psi.

“What happens at night is they have prostitution,” Terrill of O’Terrill’s Pub & Restaurant said in an interview with Information Week. “They’ve been throwing condoms on the playground, crack pipes, needles… there’s just all sorts of garbage around here. And these kids just don’t need to be exposed to this stuff.”

While the government spends millions on nonlethal crowd control and redirect programs for urban based winos, an Atlanta tavern owner has fielded a high-pressure water gun equipped, remote-controlled chicken smoker that takes care of both jobs at once.

The Bum Bot was developed by Rufus Terrill to clear drug dealers, vagrants and prostitutes away from around the neighborhood day care center.

“It took me about three months,” Terrill told Information Week. “I did some drawings and tried to decide what I wanted to build. Then I went out to see what kind of junk I had to build it out of. I found an old three-wheel scooter that was not working, one of those Hoveround scooters that you see for the elderly. And I had an old chicken smoker that I don’t use for the restaurant anymore. And I had a couple of old wheelchairs that I picked out of the garbage. It’s really just a bunch of garbage that I put together and painted black and put a water gun on it.”

The fact that Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon suggests that the site’s mess is one we humans not only recognize, but even appreciate.

Messy? Moi?

It’s ugly. It’s not proactive. It turns a deaf ear, a blind eye, and a snubby nose to investors. And it looks upon advertising as if it were as appropriate as an anchor tattoo on the Pope’s forehead.

Of course, you can see what he means.

How many people are fortunate to live and work without having to compromise their principles, even their very personalities?

We live in the forging, gorging West. We need things to be large and shiny. We need the surface of everything to be attractive, clean and bright, so that the mirage can somehow compensate for a reality that might not be quite so perfect.

At least, that’s what so many of those who manage brands seem to believe.

The fact that the site and its way of doing business also happen to rhyme rather well with Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s view of the world might not be cause for criticism, but rather envy.

So Craigslist is surely not alone in cradling its utilitarianism, while steering clear of glamour.
Wolf makes much of Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster being slightly odd types who fancy themselves as libertarian, but rather wealthy, Robin Hoods.

It’s commercial psychotherapy of a very different sort than, say, Gucci.com.

However, shouldn’t we really be thinking about ourselves as the odd types?

In sum, suggests Gary Wolf in the latest issue of Wired, Craigslist is a mess. A horrible mess. An embarrassing mess. A willful mess in which its principals rake in money while its principles seem to revolve around some weirdly benign view of human goodness.

If Craigslist is such an embarrassing mess, why has no handsome eligible competitor come along and swiped it from the Web, like a nerdy, pimpled boy being removed from the pretty people’s party?

Yes, Craigslist is messy, annoying, contrarian, contradictory, arbitrary and just occasionally totally maddening. Somehow, people like that. Could it be because Craigslist is a little like us?

Stripped of the glitter associated with conventional advertising and conventional business, Craigslist looks at you openly and benignly and says: “What annoying little burden can we take away for you, today?”

And yet there’s Google, whose sense of design might most politely be described as workmanlike. Although I have heard phrases such as “naive” or even “dull.”

Somehow, Google has never really made too much of an effort to sex up the look of its search and it has done really quite well. Microsoft’s Bing sees this as one of Google’s potential weaknesses and has made at least some attempts to look just a little cooler than its monolithic competitor.

(Credit: CC Psd/Flickr)

Its utter lack of pretension, its acknowledgment of life as difficult, wayward, and, yes, messy, somehow serves to help people accept it as the place to go for real, everyday, sometimes very cumbersome needs.

Could it be that for all the ugliness, for all the bizarre bazaar-like quality of the site, people feel a certain recognition within its pages? Even a certain trust?

Translation: In a ‘Web-ified’ world, the proprietary approach which propelled Microsoft to fame and fabulous riches is in need of a radical revamp. I’m sure the Wizard of Oz(zie) would put a more ambiguous touch on my interpretation. But as he acknowledged to Malik, Microsoft designed Windows to work on local area networks, not the Internet.

“Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that’s cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we’ve had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time now, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.”

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Ray Ozzie: Compared with Microsoft, Lotus was a cinch

If he could wave his magic wand, what might Ozzie do? The company can go only so far without jeopardizing a profitable, recurring revenue stream. But again, that’s looking backward. The more interesting software work is taking place on the Web, not at the operating system level. In part, that’s where the software-plus-services approach can help. Pushing out applications as services over the Internet–perhaps on a lease or rental model–is an idea whose time has come. (If you want proof, just look at what Marc Beniof has built at Salesforce.com.)

So when the man speaks, it pays to listen. Ozzie piqued my attention recently when he offered a provocative rumination on the suitability of current operating systems and client machines during a recent interview with Om Malik.

Where is he heading with all this? Microsoft’s not saying much but my colleague Dan Farber wrote after Ozzie’s speech that Microsoft’s likely “working on the plumbing required to create a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub.”

In his keynote earlier in the month at the Mix ‘08 event in Las Vegas, Ozzie teased the crowd with hints of a “seamless mesh” or “syncromesh,” seemingly reflecting his long research in synchronization and collaboration.

Ray Ozzie is one of the most well-respected computer scientists around. He pioneered innovations in groupware software during previous stints at Lotus and Groove and now is working to bring Microsoft’s technology strategy more in step with the demands of the Internet age as its chief software architect.

Sounds plausible but what an irony that a decade ago, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy were talking about a not all too different scenario. At the time, those two were barnstorming around the country to promote the then-foreign concept of the network computer. Of course, their aim was to sink Microsoft by obviating the need for a rich proprietary operating system. But at a basic level, the network computer idea revolved around what today we would call cloud computing. Unfortunately for Sun Microsystems and Oracle, it would take another decade before the industry would create fast enough connections and enough storage to make it feasible.

“A student today or a Web start-up, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the Web, they start building Web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?”

Update: I’ve added some comments from Scott Adams that came in by email after this posted.

I do wonder, however, how users will employ the interactive features. Surely, most will do so in the most benign ways, but there are always going to be people who take advantage of such systems.

To me, it’s great that everyone will be able to get free access to the Dilbert archives, but I have to say that the interactive part of this news is what has me more excited.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

“Anyone can already modify a Dilbert strip to make it offensive,” Adams told me by email, “and email it to friends–it happens often. Our mashup system has some profanity filters, and users can flag content they find offensive. There will be leakage, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Dilbert.com will also be offering animated Dilbert cartoons.

The most interesting of these is a three-pronged approach to what is being called “mashups”: giving readers the ability to create their own versions of Dilbert strips.

That’s why I predict a lot of rather obscene or objectionable Dilbert cartoons are going to begin floating around the Web in the near future. After all, it is oh-so simple to throw in your own text and distribute it to anyone you want. That means that if you write something libelous or racist or sexist you can distribute it as a Dilbert comic, and I’m not sure what can be done to stop you.

I asked Adams why he and United Media are opening up the Dilbert intellectual property like this, and he sent me a response by email: “We’re accepting the realities of IP on the Internet, and trying to get ahead of the curve. People already alter Dilbert strips and distribute them. If we make it easy and legal to do so, and drive more traffic to Dilbert.com in the process, everyone wins. Plus it’s a lot of fun to see what people come up with in the mashups.”

Adams and United Media are now inviting Dilbert fans to the site for a series of new interactive features.

The answer may well be the direction that Dilbert creator Scott Adams and his distributor, United Media, have chosen with a relaunch of the iconic strip’s Web site, Dilbert.com.

Still, that’s a danger with much of what goes on under the Web 2.0 rubric, so I suppose Adams and the suits behind Dilbert probably figured they were protected by the law and wouldn’t face any recriminations if someone in, say, a presidential campaign, uses Dilbert.com to make an unauthorized strip slamming their opponent.

(Credit:
United Media/Scott Adams)

And also coming in May, I’m told, will be a feature which will allow fans to write the dialogue for a single panel of a Dilbert strip and then share it with others, who will then write for the remaining panels. Adams himself is expected to randomly write dialogue for strips.

How does a comic strip upgrade to Web 2.0?

For his part, Adams doesn’t see much danger.

A second feature coming in May will allow readers to add their own words to an entire strip. So, they’ll be presented with a fully drawn Dilbert comic, but will be tasked with writing the dialogue.

It’s not like enterprising Dilbert fans–read: people who know how to use Photoshop–couldn’t already effectively do what is now on offer on Dilbert.com, but for the rest of the world, it’s pretty cool that the site is now going to make it fairly simple.

Dilbert.com has relaunched and now allows readers to write their own punch lines for strips, as well as a series of other new features.

There are three ways this works. The first, known as “punch line,” will allow readers to write their own ending to an original Dilbert comic, adding new words to the drawing for the last frame of the strip. This is a lot like the New Yorker magazine’s cartoon caption contest, except in the case of Dilbert.com, it’s not a contest but rather a way for readers to share their wit with the Internet.

(Credit:
United Media/Scott Adams)

But we shall see, won’t we?

Because anyone can add any text they want to a Dilbert cartoon using the Dilbert.com site, it’s almost certain there will soon be a flood of objectionable Dilbert strips on the Web.

This is the bulk of the Web 2.0-ish elements of the relaunched site, according to United Media. There will also be access to animated versions of existing Dilbert strips, as well as free access to the Dilbert archives, for now just back to 2001, and later, to the cartoon’s entire history. That’s nice since, as I understand it, the archives have traditionally only stretched back 30 days.

But, Sun also announced a partnership with Microsoft on virtualization, which leaves Red Hat and VMware without an MS relationship. Dare to dream that all the vendors will figure out a way to make virtualization consumable and portable across operating systems?

I can’t see any production scenario where you would possibly want to go through all those layers of abstraction and performance degradation. As one commenter stated “Linux running in a VM on top of a MS host platform..because everyone wants to put their Corvette on top of a skateboard.”

Now that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is free it will be widely adopted. Which means that Windows won’t be displaced at companies that are going down a virtualized path. Portability and interop have been an after-thought for all of the vendors. It’s about time they started making things work together.

Microsoft and Novell announced that they will jointly support a virtualization scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization.

As Suse Linux fades further from any relevance outside of Microsoft, and Red Hat and Sun make huge strides in virtualization, Novell plans to offer support for Suse running on Windows. Is there meaning here or is Novell just becoming more of a Microsoft puppet?