“Poor Mr. Elop. Has to make the big tech call not ever having written a line of mobile code or done system bring-up work,” Bray said in a tweet.

Bray later backpedaled, taking down the tweet and adding in subsequent postings (see below) that he has no inside info on Nokia, that he is not an executive at Google and that what he said is true of lots of executives, not just Elop.

But, of course, words aren’t the real issue for either Microsoft or Nokia. Apple and Android have already posted their real challenge, and it isn’t anything they have said on Twitter. Between them, they not only have most of the ultra-high-end smartphone business, but also the lion’s share of attention from developers, investors, advertisers and other key parts of the mobile world.

In going with Windows Phone, Elop is making a bold bet–both that Nokia will be able to stand out on someone else’s platform and, more importantly, that Windows Phone itself will be a winner.

Only time will answer that question. I would point out, though, that Nokia is not the first phone maker in a jam that made a bet on Microsoft. Some years back, Palm decided to start selling phones with Windows Mobile–the predecessor to Windows Phone. The venture was launched as a bringing together of two giants, with Bill Gates and Palm’s chief executive sharing a stage in San Francisco to tout the promise of the union. In the end, neither the Palm OS nor Windows Mobile were able to gain ground and the partnership fizzled.

We’ll get to hear directly from Elop on Friday when he addresses investors at a meeting in London. Mobilized will be there with live coverage starting at 11 am local time (3 am PT).

But it is a new day. Nokia is not Palm and Windows Phone is not Windows Mobile. The question now is whether this sequel will have a different ending.

Second, Amitabh Srivastava, head of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform business, announced that he’s leaving the company. Srivastava, who joined Microsoft in 1997, was widely considered to be a possible successor to Muglia, but lost out to Nadella.

One of the few ever to be named a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft–an honor now known as Technical Fellow–he was tapped, along with Brian Valentine, by then Windows chief Jim Allchin to take over the Windows engineering efforts in 2003 at a time when the operating system was being widely derided as plagued with security and other problems. Srivastava had his team draw up a map depicting how all the various pieces of the Windows source fit together. It was eight feet tall, 11 feet wide, and was described in a 2005 Wall Street Journal story as looking like a “haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other.”

Srivastava and Valentine are credited with the 2004 proposal to streamline how all those pieces functioned, a plan that would allow various features to be added or removed without disrupting the whole operating system. The idea was a partial response to the looming threat from Google, which that year had launched Gmail. The problem was their plan required throwing out a lot of legacy source code that had been in Windows for years, and starting fresh.

Srivastava’s changes included automating testing on features that had for years been done by hand. Code with too many bugs were sent to “code jail.” Over time, code flowing into what was to become Windows Vista improved.

We all know what happened with Vista–it too was widely panned. But the engineering processes put in place had a lot to do with the many improvements that appeared in Windows 7.

Srivastava then moved on to a new Microsoft project in 2006, code named Red Dog, now known as Azure, which launched in 2008. From this he pivoted to running the server and cloud division, overseeing Microsoft’s relationships with enterprise and data center customers.

People I’ve been talking to who tend to know a lot about the internal politics at Microsoft say this isn’t the last of the changes. Now that Muglia’s replacement has been announced, Nadella is going to want to name key members for his team, which means that those not tapped will probably choose to leave as well. The management shake-up at Microsoft is not over yet.

Srivastava has a Ph.D. in computer science from Penn State, and was invited to deliver the commencement address at the school’s College of Engineering in 2008, which is in the video below. Key quote: “In the end, it’s all about execution.”

Singly was founded by Jeremie Miller, who created the open-source instant messaging protocol XMPP. It won the O’Reilly Strata data conference‘s start-up competition this week, and has already raised some funding from individual investors. (I’d hoped to attend Strata in person, but got caught up in an endless stream of little news items this week.)

Giving users clearer ownership and better access to their data is a geeky topic but an increasingly relevant one, for privacy and other reasons.

Singly will reportedly offer a hosted version of the Locker Project, or just the code itself, for users to collect their participation on social media sites and even their click streams, financial records and heart-rate monitors. This concept is known as “exhaust data,” i.e., what users emit as they motor around the Web.

Then, Locker Project users can run yet-to-be-built apps to analyze their exhaust data in order to find patterns, make recommendations, set alerts and do whatever else they can imagine.

So many things we do these days can be recorded, and already are. Rather than just allowing behaviorally targeted advertisers, governments and credit card companies to stalk us, the thought behind projects like this is that we users can gain value out of stalking ourselves and analyzing our own data. I wrote a bit more about the justifications for this stuff during my old gig at GigaOM.

And to be sure, other companies and organizations are exploring the idea of personal archives too–for instance, the recent Y Combinator start-up Greplin is building a unified personal search tool that members can use on their email, calendar, storage and social Web accounts.

The move is a response to a call by the Federal Trade Commission for a “do not track” mechanism to let users decide not to allow advertising cookies to track their online movements for the purposes of personalizing the ads they see on the Web.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on installs easily enough in Chrome, though a few people who have installed it are complaining of problems with the Chrome browser in comments on the add-on’s Web site.

Given Chrome’s relatively small share of the browser market, on its face this is a marginal move. Google however says there will be more to come. It wants to make its add-on available for other browsers and will share the code with the rest of the world on an open-source basis.

The 3DS will be available in the U.S. on March 27 for a competitively priced $249.99. The handheld game player’s big selling point is that it offers 3-D without the need for special glasses. The device will come in Cosmo Black or Aqua Blue. Prices will vary outside the U.S.

At an event today in New York, Nintendo revealed more of the device’s capabilities, and many of them sound like features found on the iPhone and many other smartphones.

Apple’s ability to turn its MP3 players and phones into portable gaming devices has been a competitive threat to Nintendo, which with the 3DS release looks like it is willing to recognize.

For example, the new 3DS has an online store, called the eShop, where users will be able to download games. It also has three cameras and a built-in gyro, so the device can be tilted and turned to affect game play. It will also have location-based features, where users can elect to receive new content from Nintendo or other 3DS users as they travel around. The feature can connect to Wi-Fi hotspots when in sleep mode to collect this content or to function as a pedometer, which counts a user’s steps.

Additionally, users can take pictures with the camera, or listen to music and surf the Web on an Internet browser, which will come soon in a system upgrade. Users will also be able to play with one another by exchanging a simple code. About 30 games are expected to be available by June for the device.

It’s some of these more nuanced features that could make the device more competitive, but it’s the 3-D interactivity that Nintendo is really pushing, and so far consumers have not gravitated to 3-D as a reason to upgrade a TV, so it’s unclear whether it will be a draw for the 3DS.

Nintendo’s enthusiasm for 3-D also suffered a blow when it issued a warning that it is not healthy for kids under the age of 6 to view 3-D images. Nintendo says the impact from that should be minimal because the 3-D effect can be ratcheted up or down, and even turned off completely.

Bubble Ball, a physics simulator, was coded by Robert Nay, a 14-year-old from Spanish Fork, Utah. The game challenges players to use objects and gravity to guide a ball to its destination.

Nay spent the better part of a couple of months writing the game, which debuted in the App Store late last year and is also available for Android devices. In recent days, though, it has been rivaling Angry Birds Lite atop the list of most downloaded free games.

“I was pretty surprised by how well it was doing,” Nay told Mobilized. Nay said he plans to add more levels to the free game and then eventually add still more games as an in-app purchase. He also has some other ideas for games he’d like to write down the road.

Although it’s his first game, Nay has been into computers for some time, including Web programming and helping others with their computers. When he’s not at the computer (or school) he also likes reading, especially science fiction, and playing the piano and trumpet.

Some months back, a friend suggested that if Nay liked his iPod touch so much, perhaps he should try his hand at programming for it. At first he tried the standard Objective-C programming tools, but found the learning curve a little steep. He tried another tool called GameSalad, but didn’t like the results. In the end, he settled on the Corona tools from Ansca Mobile. Corona was easy to use, he said, and also let him write once and publish for both Apple and Android devices.

Bubble Ball showed up in the app store on Dec. 29 and had a million downloads in the first two weeks. Last Thursday, it topped the App Store free chart and had more than 400,000 downloads on that day alone.

Robert’s mom, Kari Nay, drew some of the levels of the game, though Robert did all the coding. Kari Nay also handles the business tasks, such as submitting the apps to the App Store and Android marketplaces.

“I do the grown-up stuff for him,” she said.

I can’t remember a year during which computer security stories jumped so readily from the tech and business pages to the front page.

The year 2010 was bookended by two such cases. It opened with Google’s disclosure that it had come under attack in China, an apparent attempt to penetrate the Gmail accounts of certain activists and journalists.

It ended with the WikiLeaks affair, which stemmed from the alleged theft by an Army private of classified documents stored on a government network.

And let’s not forget in mid-year came the story, as fascinating as it was sobering, of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by parties unknown–although the smart money is on Israel–that penetrated and ultimately damaged equipment used in the Iranian nuclear program.

Computer hacking–which has for too long evoked images in the public mind-set of teenagers in basements taking digital joyrides–has finally revealed itself to everyone for what it has long been for those in the know: The domain of espionage, sabotage and possibly warfare.

In Google’s case, the attacks upon its systems raised questions about where it draws the line with authorities in Beijing about such matters as freedom of speech. When the attack was first disclosed, Google publicly mulled shutting down its operations in China.

Then in protest, it stopped censoring its search results, giving mainland Chinese access to the same search results available to residents of Hong Kong. Beijing responded by blocking access to Google’s site.

Finally, Google and China came to a new agreement, and Google appeared the loser in the battle of wills.

Computer security is one of those things that companies and governments say they take seriously, but never really seem to get a grip on, judging by the results.

In any case, there is no firewall or software in existence that could have prevented Bradley Manning from stealing the documents that he is alleged to have given to WikiLeaks. As a low-level Army intelligence analyst, he was a trusted insider who had access to this material in the course of his day-to-day job.

So, it was not technology that failed. The failure was one of internal policies that allowed him access to data not relevant to his position.

Any employee of a midsize company can see how wrong that is. Human-resources documents are limited only to those who work in that department. The same is true of people who work in the legal office, business development department and so on.

But it apparently didn’t occur to anyone in government to limit the access to what became the WikiLeaks cache to people who worked only for or closely with the State Department.

If it turns out that thousands of companies are better at protecting their business secrets than the U.S. government is, then it’s not for nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency task force investigating the WikiLeaks affair bears the initials “WTF.”

Something similar was true of Stuxnet. One of the reasons the attackers, whoever they are, succeeded was that they used several so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities in Windows.

These are undocumented weaknesses that hackers save up for special occasions as a way to open a back door into a computer and then insert a troublemaking payload, like a worm. Zero day exploits are a fact of life, and once spotted in the world, they’re usually patched.

The Stuxnet attackers used as many as four zero day exploits as a way to get their worm into targeted computers. Microsoft, to its credit, made short work of fixing them once they came to light.

Even so, the Stuxnet worm burrowed its way from Windows machines into industrial control computers known as SCADA systems, which are widely used to run factories, power plants, pipelines and all sorts of other infrastructure essential to modern life.

The worm was designed to find a specific target: The systems controlling a set of as many as 1,000 centrifuges at the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, and make them spin faster than they were supposed to.

The ability to attack industrial computers and cause them to do things they’re not supposed to do has been a lingering fear among security experts for years. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy in 2007 looked at the potential for attacks on SCADA systems and proved that it was possible to seize control of an electrical generator and then make it destroy itself.

They also found that many of these systems are connected to the Internet for what seem like good reasons: Convenience and cost savings. But these connections have also opened them up to the same kind of attacks that rattled the Iranian facility in Natanz.

Another Stuxnet-like worm, the thinking goes, could be used to bring down a power grid, or poison drinking water, or shut down an oil or gas pipeline. The good news is that such an attack is expensive–Stuxnet, by one estimate, cost $10 million to create–and requires a lot of specialized insider knowledge.

The bad news is that the Stuxnet source code is circulating in the wild for anyone to study. And as the WikiLeaks case shows, there are often insiders willing to take part in criminal schemes.

The other bad news? Securing these systems won’t come cheap.

If history is any judge, there will likely be a barrage of computer security companies that try to spin these incidents into opportunities to make a sales pitch. That’s what security companies do, after all.

But they usually miss the point. How can you plan for a vulnerability you’ve never seen? How can you stop an otherwise trusted insider from abusing their access to sensitive information? Both are fundamentally difficult problems for which there are no easy answers.

Spending money on last year’s security vulnerabilities is like preparing to fight the last war: Circumstances inevitably change, and they certainly will in 2011. New kinds of attacks will arise, and they will catch their targets by surprise.

And the public, like the CIA, will reasonably ask, “WTF?”

The unvarnished fact is that the networked society to which we’ve become accustomed in the last several years has a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

And the more we rely upon it, the more people with a combination of advanced technical skills and repugnant motivations are going to look for ways to turn it against us.

Some will do so as a means of making a personal profit. Others may see it as a way of advancing a political or ideological agenda.

But others will want to use theirs skills to do serious harm to innocent people on a large scale.

And the events of 2010 point the way to a world where that’s a more realistic scenario than it ever was before.

Both showed technologies at D: Dive Into Mobile aimed at making the headsets useful for more than just making cellphone calls. And on Thursday, Plantronics plans to announce what sounds like another pretty nifty feature. Dubbed InstantMeeting, it is a piece of software that makes it possible to dial in to a meeting with the press of a button–instead of having to go through the usual process, which involves calling a number, entering a conference code and then maybe a password to boot.

For now, InstantMeeting is a program for the BlackBerry (see image) and Android, though Plantronics says that an iPhone version is in the works, as is a Skype version and one that can connect directly to Microsoft’s Outlook software–the place where that call-in data often is buried. Those other versions should come early next year.

As for the Android and BlackBerry programs, a free trial version allows 20 free dial-ins, while the premium version, which allows for unlimited dial-ins, will sell for $2.99. However, Plantronics says that those who download the free trial version on Thursday will get 1,000 free calls.

I’ll have to see it in action to believe it, but it sure sounds like a time-saver. Plus, if it works, when your phone drops the call, you can just press one button to dial back in. Of course, as with Jawbone’s Thoughts application for the iPhone, I don’t actually need a headset to use InstantMeeting.

Although Andy Rubin’s keynote at D: Dive into Mobile is scheduled for just before dinner, expect to hear a lot of talk about dessert. On the menu are Froyo, Gingerbread and perhaps even a hint of Honeycomb.

Google did release a couple of tasty treats already on Monday–announcing plans for the Samsung co-developed Nexus S as well as the release of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). But I hear the cookie jar isn’t quite empty yet.

In between sugary snacks, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg will pepper Rubin on the many issues facing Android and the wireless industry. Mobilized will have live coverage of the session at this spot beginning around 6:45 pm PT.

Liveblog

6:37 pm: The crowd is still settling into their seats here at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco, the swanky home to the inaugural D: Dive Into Mobile.

6:40 pm: Lights dim. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg take the stage. “My husband, Walt Mossberg, and I would like to welcome you to this intimate dinner,” Swisher quips.

6:42 pm: Ironically, the crowd was asked to silence their mobile devices, but Kara says they should just feel free to leave them on.

6:44 pm: It’s Rubin time (and he has brought a satchel of goodies with him).

Rubin is asked about the Nexus One and why it didn’t shake up the business model. “We bit off a little more than we can chew.” Rubin says that they were hoping for a model more like that in Europe, where people can pick a phone and then separately pick service, typically at retail stores like Carphone Warehouse. “We were trying to do that model in the U.S. and only do it online.”

6:46 pm: Kara: So have you given up on that business model?

Rubin: With Nexus S, which is the thing we announced today, we still have that notion of an unlocked phone. But we are not selling it ourselves, but through traditional channels, in this case Best Buy.

6:48 pm: Walt: How is Android doing?

Rubin: Android started as an eight-person start-up. “During that time at Google we obviously staffed up.” Now there are 172 different phone models using Android after the OS was launched two years ago with one, the T-Mobile G1.

Rubin credits the quality of the software and the open nature of it.

6:49 pm: Walt: I notice more and more they are taking on the personality of the carrier, not Google, not the handset maker. There are lots of what I would call craplets. Verizon, for example, swapped out Google for Bing. Is there a danger it is being taken over?

Rubin: That’s the nature of open. That’s actually a feature of Android.

He takes a swipe at Windows Mobile, saying that the alternative is a commoditized world where all the phones have to have a start menu in one place and all the icons have to be tiles.

6:54 pm: Kara: Do you consider yourself the Microsoft of phones in that regard?

Rubin: No. We’re probably more like the Linux of phones, and that’s a true statement.

Walt: You mean hard to get drivers for, only for geeks, no real consumer would buy it?

Rubin: No, I think we’ve already proven that wrong. Bad analogy.

6:55 pm: Discussion about all the crapware that comes on many phones.

Rubin: The consumers are voting and the consumers are voicing their opinions.

6:56 pm: Rubin has some relatively nice things to say about the iPhone.

“I think everybody is embracing the iPhone. They are pretty open.”

Rubin says that most developers actually are having a pretty easy time getting their apps approved by Apple.

6:57 pm: Kara: How do you consider Apple as a competitor?

Certainly they make great products, Rubin says–robust, solid, good user experiences. A lot of consistency across applications. More recently I see them getting involved in the other end of the spectrum–services like a bookstore, the app store.

6:59 pm: Walt: What about Apple’s massive data center? That’s another area of competition for you guys.

Rubin talks about the power of Google’s ad-based model, which allows the core advertising to fund all kinds of applications.

Walt: Do you think Apple has the DNA to do this?

Rubin: “My assumption is Apple is a company that learns from its mistakes.”

7:01 pm: Kara and Walt: Are you profitable? Is Android profitable? Does Android make any money?

Rubin: We’re making money on the advertising that’s generated through Android.

Walt: Are you profitable if it was broken out as a separate business?

Rubin: Yes. [Wow. I'm curious about the math, but maybe if you add all the searches on Android-based devices.]

There’s no way I would have ever been profitable as a start-up. I probably wouldn’t have made it as a separate company.

7:06 pm: Walt: How do you see the rest of the competition beyond Apple?

Rubin: I don’t think it’s ever going to be just two [Apple and Android]. There’s a lot of innovation and a lot of ideas out there.

Rubin says there is a fundamental advantage to Android and iPhone since they are new and designed from the ground up.

He notes even Windows Phone 7 has legacy code from the original Windows Mobile from way back when.

“You just have this package of stuff that was invented before the Internet,” Rubin says. “When the architects built that product, they didn’t have the Internet in mind.”

7:08 pm: Walt: Is there anything you do like about Windows Phone 7?

Rubin: It was a big bet. They struck upon that notion of the centerpiece of the main tiles. It’s a good 1.0 product. It does look different and it does look unique. It’s solid. I’m not the predictor of being successful.

He says if he were to give advice to Microsoft, he would suggest that it give more freedom to carriers and phone makers so the devices don’t look the same.

Kara: Have you gone to Finland to woo Nokia?

Rubin: I haven’t been to Finland.

Walt: Forget Finland, have you tried to convince Nokia?

Rubin just laughs (a-ha).

7:12 pm: Kara: The discussions with Nokia–talk about them in detail.

Rubin: The company has new leadership [referring to CEO Stephen Elop]. They are evaluating lots of alternatives. I’m open-minded and a big proponent of Android.

Rubin again declines to talk about any meetings he may have had.

7:14 pm: What about the challenge of iconic products like RIM?

Rubin: Talks about the challenge of legacy and points out Motorola had that problem when it became overly dependent on the Razr. Then, “they bet the company on Android,” he points out.

Rubin said RIM is doing the right things–acquiring assets like QNX and DataViz to build a more modern operating system.

7:16 pm: Walt points out that RIM will be here Tuesday–PlayBook tablet in hand.

7:16 pm: Back to the discussion about persuading companies to use Android.

Rubin: If it’s good–and we all believe that it’s good–everybody can use it.

“You don’t need to be a partner of Google to run Android.”

7:17 pm: Walt asks about tablets. Are they exciting to you? Are they important to you? Can they replace laptops for some people?

Rubin: I think what is going on in tablets is interesting. It’s fundamentally changing the model of computing interaction.

It is much more physical. You touch it. You feel it.

7:19 pm: What changes in the paradigm? It’s not a laptop. It’s not a phone.

Rubin points out that we used to have PDAs, but the cellphone eventually replaced it. The tablet is a sort of in-between device so the use case is less clear. You might definitely have it on the couch, but maybe not on the subway.

7:21 pm: Walt: What makes it more interesting and more immersive? There is something different there?

Rubin: If you do a good job, what you’ve done is make it a reflex. Like a car. You learn how to drive and you can drive almost any car. You don’t get distracted by things. That’s the result of many, many years of evolution. That’s true of any consumer product. They become almost like second nature for you.

7:24 pm: Kara and Walt ask about privacy.

Rubin: There is nothing in open source Android OS that sends keystrokes or what applications you use to Google.

He encourages people to look at the source code.

Walt: There are Google services that do collect certain things?

Rubin: Yes, like on other platforms. But he encourages people to read the company’s privacy policy.

7:27 pm: How do you overcome the perception that Google wants to collect more information than the others?

I think you just have to be transparent. You have open source–be inspectable. Any other interpretation is either FUD or just people who don’t understand.

7:28 pm: On to the goodie bag. Rubin pulls out a Nexus S. Says it is his personal device.

Kara: Oh good. She grabs it and pulls it close to her.

Now Rubin is showing the features, screen, etc. He’s talking about the Near Field Communications technology that is actually printed inside the back of the case. NFC allows a phone to scan specially printed tags.

Walt: Is that what sends all the information back to Google?

Rubin: Laughs. Goes back to demoing NFC and showing the Nexus S scanning a tag, which sends a URL for a video of the Nexus S to the phone, which then starts playing.

7:31 pm: Rubin talks about the applications: Buying coffee, getting coupons.

What we are hoping is third-party developers create a lot of cool apps. Devices can also use NFC to exchange contact info between two devices as well, kind of like beaming in the old Palm days.

7:32 pm: Rubin is talking abut the Nexus strategy.

To give a “Pure Google” phone. Google works with the hardware maker to take maximum advantage of Android’s features.

7:35 pm: What’s new with Gingerbread?

We added a garbage collector. Added broader voice over Internet Protocol support. Can cut, copy and paste without a trackball.

7:36 pm: Walt: What about video calling? I know there are third-party apps that do that. It seems like a natural thing that it belongs in the phone function.

Kara: FaceGoog or GoogleTime.

Rubin: There’s a whole bunch of software engineers hitting their keyboards back in Mountain View. If consumers want it, we’ll add it. [He strongly hints that it is coming, points out there already is Google video chat for PC.]

7:38 pm: Rubin reaches into his bag of tricks again. Pulls out a prototype Motorola tablet to show a forthcoming version of Google’s mobile map application.

7:38 pm: Shows the improved 3-D abilities and new panning and zooming options. What we are showing off here is some pretty cool performance.

“It will be available for cellphones in a matter of days,” Rubin says.

What allows the new presentation is that maps are no longer a series of tiles, but rather vector graphics.

7:40 pm: Vector data is smaller and more efficient, so users can load data in case they go offline. “You could load a whole state,” Rubin says.

This app runs on Android only for now, though it will work on tablets and phones.

Walt: What about PCs?

Rubin: That would be a natural extension.

7:41 pm: What version of Android is running on that tablet?

Rubin: Honeycomb [the next version of Android, due out some time next year]. There are no buttons on the Motorola tablet. He’s showing his personal email again.

7:43 pm: More on Honeycomb: We added new APIs to Honeycomb that allow an application to split its views to multiple views. On a a tablet they can be side by side, while on a phone they might be one after the other.

7:46 pm: On to Q&A.

7:46 pm: What about the Chrome OS team? What’s the delineation between the two?

Rubin: That’s a good question. Google was born on the Web. “I don’t think it would be doing its job unless it reinvested in the Web.”

But evolution of the Web had stagnated a bit, prompting Chrome. “It’s kind of slowed down a bit.”

Apps vs. Web?

There’s no need to argue. We’re doing both, Rubin says.

7:50 pm: What are the plans for the Android team to focus on the enterprise?

We did a little bit, Rubin says, but he likens it to baby steps. Support for VPN and some secure browsing. Gingerbread has some added features like remote wipe. Each release you will see more and more.

7:51 pm: App discovery. What are your plans?

Rubin: This is all evolving. The Android market is evolving as well. Gingerbread allows “related applications.” We are always adding features.

As a search company, if we can’t help you discover apps, I think we have a problem. We should be very easily able to organize a few hundred-thousand apps.

7:53 pm: Question about mobile payments; What is Andy Rubin’s vision? Groupon?

Rubin: I think there is a lot of opportunity. It is not an opportunity that is going to be seized by one company. Today Android does carrier billing integration, so you can put apps on your carrier bill. Creates an efficient micropayment option.

With Nexus S having added gyroscope capability, can see things from even within a store. Should help make, for example, better coupon apps.

7:57 pm: Android on TVs?

Rubin: That’s exactly what Google TV is. It is Android running on a set-top box. The first versions of that are running an Intel processor.

Have demonstrated the same app can run on both a three-inch screen or a flat-panel TV.

People are building all kinds of things. Refrigerators, ovens, automotive. Rubin says the nice thing about open source is that he and Google don’t have to be involved in every use. “We knew what to do to make it scale as widely as possible.”

7:58 pm: Question about carrier data plans and pricing.

Rubin: Average usage on an Android phone is 440MB a month. Rubin points out we are at a bandwidth crunch, but that it tends to be a cycle. New networks tend not to be overwhelmed by demand at first, but then the demands grow. Then new networks come along.

How should OEMs try to differentiate?

Rubin: I think HTC has done a really good job with Sense. Motorola has Blur. People are really differentiated.

Rubin says he often hears complaints about fragmentation. “Fragmentation” is the wrong word. Different phones do things differently, but that’s differentiation. Basically the apps are still compatible, Rubin says.

8:04 pm: Is Android too clunky? Will we see a sea change where Android really gets more user friendly?

Rubin: I would probably characterize Android today as an enthusiast product for early adopters–or wives of tech enthusiasts.

8:05 pm: Rubin says the company made some concessions that led to “geeking it out.” But then there are apps that offer easier customization and personalization.

8:07 pm: Walt points out places where it requires an extra step to do things like compose an email, while the iPhone does it in a single step.

Rubin: Yep. We get it. You will see the fruits of that investment in the tablets first and then in the phones. It’s going to get better. Honeycomb will be a good start

8:08 pm: Applause and they exit stage. ‘Night.

It’s not the first we’ve seen of the Android-based device. Engadget posted photos last month, though the new video (below) gives more of a feel for the device in action.

Why hadn’t someone already thought of putting a game controller on a phone? Oh, wait, Nokia tried that back with the N-Gage (pictured here, for those who never had the pleasure). Of course, it didn’t have Android and required developers to create all-new games that consumers had to then buy.

It will be interesting to see whether this phone, when and if it makes it to market, is compatible with any other Sony products and if existing Android games can take advantage of the phone’s controller without having to do a big rewrite of their code.

Thus spake Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz:

“There sure are a lot of folks writing about us. There are some pretty incredible stories out there. I’m not letting it distract me, and you shouldn’t either.”

That’s from her Friday note to Yahoo employees ast week, sent to me many times, in the wake of more rumors of a variety of takeover plots emerged and more folks writing–including the all-the-late-news-that’s-fit-to-print New York Times, who seems to have just realized the Internet giant might be “adrift.”

Wrote the Times:

“The board of Yahoo, the ailing Web portal, hired Carol A. Bartz as chief executive to apply a little shock therapy.

Now, nearly two years later, the patient is still suffering from many of the same symptoms: a stagnant business, shrinking market share and a shortage of innovation.”

BoomTown had no idea whatsoever until the Times declared it so!

In any case, I much preferred Bartz’s sassy note to employees, in which she called herself “your fearless leader,” rather than from another recent note in which she described herself as writing from a foxhole.

Plus, this one had some news nuggets, such as:

That “Microsoft should be powering paid search in the U.S. and Canada by the end of this month, right on schedule.”

And that, “on Monday, we’re going Alpha in four countries on a totally new platform for global News,” dumping nine different News code bases “with ‘new’ News we can bring a new site up in a month.”

Of course, Bartz had to do a significant pretzel to manage her sunny assessment of the Yahoo homepage outage last week as a good thing.

“Several outlets indicated their surprise at such a major issue with one of the world’s largest Websites, noting the importance of Yahoo! to the daily lives of users and the fact that Yahoo! is never down,” she wrote.

Except it, um, was down.

Water under the bridge, it seems, as multiple sources tell me Bartz has been spending a lot of time reaching out to many outside Yahoo in a much friendlier manner, perhaps to tamp down the negative chatter about her salty demeanor.

She’ll likely be doing more of that quite publicly tomorrow, after the markets close, when she presumably will lead the call with investors after the company’s third-quarter earnings are announced.

Wall Street consensus is that Yahoo’s net income will rise to 15 cents a share from 13 cents a year ago and and revenues will be a flattish $1.13 billion.

Investors are likely to react badly to any lesser results, especially after Google’s stellar performance last week and the likely terrific one by Apple today.

Most of all, analysts will be especially attuned to how Bartz positions the recent spate of top exec departures and her vision for growth at the Silicon Valley icon.

There might be a clue in her note to Yahoos, which she ended with a well-used metaphor: “Let’s all look out the windshield, not the back window. That’s how we move forward.”

Personally, when driving, I always look at both, since I find it safer to always be able to see exactly what’s coming and what’s going.

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Well, guess what Google (GOOG) has unwittingly been collecting these past three years?

That’s right, payload data. And it has been collecting them from Wi-Fi networks not protected by passwords–in the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s official blog Friday.

“So how did this happen?” he asks, quickly supply the answer: “Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software–although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

But they captured it just the same. And now Google is in the uniquely uncomfortable position of sitting on a pile of exactly the sort of customer data that privacy advocates worried that it was collecting. Until the company figures out what to do with the information, Google has temporarily grounded its Street View cars and promised to stop collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust–and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Eustace concluded. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

I’m sure the European privacy commission and regulators in the United States will make quite sure of that.

All Things Digital intern Drake Martinet spent a long, cold night in front of the Palo Alto, Calif., Apple store. He filed this dispatch:

What do you do when you’re 17, you’re visiting the United States from Russia, and you’ve created the Internet meme of the moment?

You spend your Friday night camped out in front of an Apple store, of course.

Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy is a really big deal right now, but he had to wait in line for his Apple (AAPL) iPad along with the rest of us. It was a long wait, so I got him to spend some of it telling me about changes in store for his site, which lets you talk to, gawk at or “next” random strangers.

Ternovskiy has made a subtle but important tweak already–specifically, changes to the “reporting people” function designed to cut down on the male genitalia that famously crop up throughout the site.

I had the honor of going on Chatroulette with its creator, and the changes seem to be working, as we were “nexted” by 30-plus people without seeing a single offense. In one case, we did encounter a couple middle fingers, which Ternovskiy said is an accepted greeting on Chatroulette.

Then Ternovskiy agreed to show me what developments he planning to release next.

First, he showed me something likely to be termed “Chessroulette,” in which a chessboard or other simple game shows up on the screen and users tap out messages. The idea is that they can play instead of type.

“People meet each other and don’t have anything to talk about,” Ternovskiy said. “This is kind of like an ice breaker.”

He also showed me a nearly completed version in which, instead of seeing a small image of yourself and another small image of your Chatroulette pal, “you open the window and you just have one big picture of your partner.”

One thing that Ternovskiy doesn’t have in the works: An iPad version of the site.

Why not? For starters, the iPad doesn’t come with a videocamera. But you could presumably resolve that if you wanted to.

The bigger problem is that Apple’s gadget does not support Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash, and that’s the code that makes Chatroulette possible.

Ternovskiy said it might be possible to rewrite the site in HTML5, which would fix the problem, but he has no plans to do so.

Maybe this will change now that he has his own iPad to play with.

Here’s the video, taken in front of the Apple store in Palo Alto:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100404/chatroulette-andrey-ternovskiy-gets-an-ipad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100330/sco-well-live-to-sue-another-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20100330/sco-well-live-to-sue-another-day/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:04:43 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=37745 SCO’s seemingly endless legal campaign over the copyrights to Unix may finally, thankfully, be over. On Tuesday afternoon, a federal jury found that Novell owns the rights to the operating system, foiling SCO’s plan to seek millions of dollars in licensing fees from companies it accused of illegally distributing its proprietary Unix code with the Linux OS.

Great news for the open-source community and for the long-suffering Novell (NOVL), which has been battling SCO for quite some time now.

“Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux,” the company said in a statement. “Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front.”

Which is great, because SCO, while obviously struck low by today’s verdict, evidently intends to forge on with its suit against IBM (IBM), which it also claims misappropriated Unix and built it into Linux. Former U.S. District Judge Edward Cahn, the trustee for SCO’s bankruptcy, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the jury decision will not dissuade it from pursuing its lawsuit against Big Blue. Said Cahn: “The copyright claims are gone, but we have other claims based on contracts.”

Astonishing. As I wrote of SCO back in 2004:

“There’s a scene at the end of Martin Scorsese’s remake of ‘Cape Fear’ in which villain Max Cady, having been shot, stabbed, burned and beaten, continues to threaten his victims even as he’s drowning, handcuffed to a sinking houseboat. I think of that scene every time I read that SCO has filed another motion in its ill-starred copyright infringement suits.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100330/sco-well-live-to-sue-another-day/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100315/windows-phone-7-series-even-more-impressive-than-previously-thought/ http://allthingsd.com/20100315/windows-phone-7-series-even-more-impressive-than-previously-thought/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:55:34 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=36411 Microsoft added a bit more to its Windows Phone 7 Series story at its MIX10 event this morning, revealing some of the mobile operating system’s features and detailing how developers can write software for it. While it’s obviously far too early to make any big declarations about it, the OS certainly seems competitive–and compelling. Consider this feature list:

• accelerometer support
• a Microsoft Location Service for the phones
• Microsoft Notification Service, known to other smartphone users as push notifications
• hardware-accelerated video playback with digital rights management
• internet information services smooth streaming for live video
• multitouch support
• camera and microphone support

Table stakes at this point, I suppose, but a robust feature list just the same. Announced along with it: A free suite of application development tools and a solid list of launch partners that includes the Associated Press, EA Mobile, Namco, Pandora and Sling Media, among others. One of the OS’s showcase apps: Netflix with “Watch It Now” 3G video streaming.

Impressive, no? Could this be the beginning of another application development gold rush? Microsoft (MSFT) clearly hopes so.

“More than half a million Silverlight and tens of thousands of XNA Framework developers are now Windows Phone developers,” Windows Phone 7 boss Charlie Kindel wrote in a post to The Windows Phone Developers Blog.

“Developers and designers can now build their code once and optimize it to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the phone, Web, PC or Xbox 360,” Kindel added. “Due to common shared libraries, controls and runtimes across these many screens and the cloud, developers now have the opportunity to reach over 1 billion customers.”

Still, it’s far too early to say what’s to come. It seems clear, however, that with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft could make the jump from mobile OS also-ran to contender fairly quickly–assuming the market’s willing, of course.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100315/windows-phone-7-series-even-more-impressive-than-previously-thought/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/twitters-new-security-strategy-rewriting-some-users-links/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/twitters-new-security-strategy-rewriting-some-users-links/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:04:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17204 Beset by phishing attacks and other scammy behavior, Twitter is taking a step I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else before: The social messaging service says it may change the text of its users’ messages in order to protect them.

Specifically, Twitter is going to rename links that users send to one another via direct messages, which allows the company to track them and shut them down if they turn out to be malicious. You’ll be able to identify the renamed links, because they’ll be shortened using a “twt.tl” prefix.

In typical Twitter fashion, the company has a blog post that explains the change, but in somewhat vague and hazy terms. As best I can tell, what Twitter is really doing is rewrapping some links that users send with its own code.

This doesn’t appear to change the core characteristics of the link–publishers and marketers who use the bit.ly link shortening service, for instance, will still be able to track the data generated by their links. But it does give Twitter the ability to track bad behavior.

If you want to view the move in a positive light, you can think of it as the tag an airline slaps on your luggage when you check it–the only changes to your message are superficial. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could shiver just a bit at the thought of a messaging service changing any part of your message, no matter how trivial.

Twitter only announced the change this evening, but the company appears to have been testing it for some time: Searching Twitter for “twt.tl” turns up shortened links going back several days. As best I can tell, this one–what appears to be the retweet of a direct message from a marketer–is the first one to show up in public:

There’s a good chance many or most Twitter users won’t see the shortened links–if you’re not sending or receiving direct messages, you may never see one, period. But Twitter seems to leave the door open to expanding the program to regular tweets as well: Its blog post says the company has “focused [its] initial efforts” on direct messages and email.

Just to be clear, I checked with Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett via email. Here’s our exchange:

Q: But to be clear: Do you reserve the right to change links in regular tweets?

A: This is our focus right now.

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