One way they often do this is by installing a system running Hadoop. This is the open source tool that evolved out of work done by Google and Yahoo, and basically takes big blocks of data and makes analyzing it a manageable process. The creation of a thriving business environment around Hadoop, which by itself is freely available, has attracted mountains of venture capital funding to start-ups such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Add another Hadoop player to the pile. Today, Mortar Data, a company devoted to making Hadoop easier to use, will announce a round of seed funding. Usually I don’t pay much attention to companies at the seed stage but in this case I made an exception, in part because the lineup of investors is so interesting. The lead investors are Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica who left his job at Hewlett-Packard last month, and TechStars, the noted start-up accelerator, which is also a customer.

Other investors are Atlas Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and Great Oaks Ventures as well as Brightcove founder and CTO Bob Mason, and Matt Turck, managing director of Bloomberg Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media concern. The precise amount of the funding hasn’t been disclosed.

As widely used as Hadoop is, it requires a lot of specialized knowledge, says K Young, Mortar’s CEO. Mortar’s secret is to use the Python programming language and Apache Pig, running on cloud infrastructure. The combination makes working with Hadoop a lot more accessible to people with more generalized programming knowledge. It’s not all that different from SQL. Easy enough that Vertica has said it will offer Mortar’s solution to its clients. That makes Mortar Data worth watching.

Although Yahoo isn’t generally in the business of creating developer tools, the company said it doesn’t want to see a world in which companies have to develop apps for every mobile device.

“The Web is under threat,” Yahoo Chief Platform Architect Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz said in an interview.

Some of the characteristics that the Web counts on — particularly a consistent, high-speed connection to the Internet — aren’t always present. Mojito tries to address this by providing a means for apps that can persist even when the connection doesn’t.

Yahoo has used Mojito and other of its “Cocktails” suite of tools to create several mobile apps, including its Livestand product, as well as a fantasy soccer program.

“It doesn’t make much sense for Yahoo to keep those technologies closed,” Fernandez-Ruiz said. “We want the Web to win.”

And since that is the goal, Yahoo can win even if developers ultimately find Web tools that are tastier than Mojito, he said.

“If the community doesn’t find it interesting, it is probably because something better emerges,” Fernandez-Ruiz said.

You never think about it, and yet every time you attach a photo or a Word document, or practically anything else to an email message, you’re using it.

It was created by Nathaniel Borenstein, a computer researcher who, 20 years ago, worked for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell telephone companies. At the time, no one really gave much thought to the idea that email could or even should comprise any more than basic text messages, and when attachments were involved, incompatible formats caused the kind of headaches that we would consider unacceptable today. Curiously obsessed with the evolution of email, Borenstein teamed up with Ned Freed, a fellow Internet pioneer, to write the MIME standard that is the backbone of email attachments today, supporting more than 1,300 types of files and enabling billions of email users to ignore any worries about compatibility among email programs.

The first message containing a MIME-encoded attachment was sent on March 11, 1992, and today the standard is used something like a trillion times a day. And no, he didn’t get rich (but he did once turn down a job offer from Steve Jobs). He’s now the chief scientist of Mimecast, a cloud-based email outsourcing company that just happens to riff on the name of the standard he helped create. I got a chance to talk to him by phone a few weeks ago. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

AllThingsD: Nathaniel, no one really thinks about MIME, but everyone uses it. Tell me how it happened. The story goes, you thought that one day you’d like to use email to receive photos of your grandkids. Is that true?

Borenstein: I can’t say it was my primary motivation, but it was an easy way to explain what I was thinking of. Email had been around since 1965 on time-sharing systems, and then moved to the fledgling Arpanet. Then more and more people outside the English-speaking world started to come up with a lot of incompatible ways to encode their email. At the same time, people wanted to send around files occasionally. The only way that was really safe to do it was to package up a file with a program called UUencode, which had multiple versions that weren’t always compatible. There were all these ad hoc things that people were doing for these complementary needs. In 1980, I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, and I was put in charge of maintaining an email program. It was just a job at first. Then we got some Unix machines. I thought I could do a better job by rewriting the email program. And I was also in charge of running an email system. It became sort of a hobby. Then, later, after I finished my dissertation, my adviser asked me to write what he described as the world’s best email programs. Suddenly my career was my hobby.

So what was it you were asked to work on?

It was Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew Project, which was intended to envision the next generation of computing environments for campuses. What was really interesting then was that it had very advanced — for that time — multimedia capabilities. And so we had a chance to make multimedia work. There were a few programs with multimedia that came before, but we had the chance to get it into people’s hands. And then something interesting happened. Steve Jobs came to visit. This was in the days that he was running NeXT. [Jobs founded NeXT after leaving Apple in 1985, and ran it until he sold it to Apple in 1996. -Ed.] He came to the campus, and a light went off in his mind when he saw the mail system. He had not completely gotten email until he saw what we could do with it, and so he tried to hire our entire team. And he got none of us. None of us wanted to go to work for NeXT.

Why was that? Was it about Steve, or about NeXT?

I’m not sure we all had the same reasons. In my case, it was that I had heard from other people that working for him was difficult. I have enormous respect for him, because he was one of the captains of our industry. But I had a feeling that if you went to work for him and you had a disagreement with him, you lost. It was that simple.

And let me guess: He built email into the NeXT operating system anyway?

His team built NeXTMail, which looked a lot like Andrew did. In fact, if you use Apple’s Mail.app on the Mac, you’re using something that looked a lot like Andrew did. But he did something interesting. He created a way for people to send files around. And so you had two communities of users on NeXT and on Andrew who couldn’t send files to each other. So after I left Carnegie Mellon, I went to work for Bellcore, which was the research arm of the Baby Bell phone companies. My job was as a researcher, and my mandate was to work on things that would encourage the use of bandwidth. I thought I was done working on mail. Then I started noticing these problems with compatibility, plus I had an idea for something I called active messages. And Bellcore was a very heterogeneous computing environment. There were all these Unix hackers, and each person had their favorite email program — I counted more than 20 in use. And I wanted them all to be able to read these active messages. So what I did was start patching them all. That led to something I called Metamail, which would be triggered by a header in the email that would then call on any one of a number of other programs. So if you received a JPG image in Atomic Mail, which was one of the programs in use at the time, it would display the JPG in Atomic Mail.

So this led to the MIME standard how?

Metamail was already in use when the work that led to MIME started up. I got involved with some efforts at IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force]. I got introduced to Einar Stefferud, and he became a mentor of mine, and introduced me to Ned Freed, who became my co-author on MIME. I was worried about email and multimedia compatibility, and Ned was working on email gateways — the problems of translating messages between different email realms — because we weren’t all running SMTP back then. Stef thought we should work together. Now, Bellcore had allowed me to take Metamail and contribute it to the public domain, or what we would now call open source, and so anyone was allowed to modify it. So every time there was a new draft of the MIME standard, I could update to support the new standard. So when the first public draft of the MIME standard was ready, I was ready with Metamail, and it was just picked up at an incredible rate. I wrote it for Unix, and three days after the release, someone had already adapted it for Microsoft DOS. That’s what told me I had a hit on my hands.

What about MIME made it flexible?

One of the reasons I think we were successful with it was the fact that we had an incomplete vision. Yes, I was thinking about pictures of grandchildren someday — I am a grandfather now, by the way — but I knew that there would be things coming that I couldn’t forsee, and I didn’t want the system we designed to have to be completely redesigned in order to accommodate the new things. That is why the MIME type system is so open. You just go to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and register a new MIME type. The original supported 16 MIME types, and when I checked a few years ago, we were up to 1,309 different supported file types. When I tried to explain why I wanted it to be open-ended, I tried to explain things that you could, at the time, just barely imagine. I had two examples — one was smell. I thought that one day you might be able to send files containing smells, and one day you might, but no one is really focused on it yet. The other was one I thought of almost as a joke. I proposed a MIME type for matter transport. I thought we could send matter around as an email attachment, and in a way, it came true. When you think about 3-D printing and the models for that, people are sending around schematics for 3-D objects that can then be printed. So open-ended is very good in a world where science fiction is quickly getting overtaken by reality.

You now work for a company called Mimecast. What do you do there?

The short tag line is that we do unified email services in the cloud. We take all the things that surround and administer your email, and everything except the basic core operation of it, we outsource to the core. We archive your email, we set policies about how and when it can be deleted. We do data-loss prevention. We do continuity and disaster recovery. Our BlackBerry users didn’t notice when the service went down last year. And I’m not the founder. A lot of people think I am, but I’m not. I just work for the company as its chief scientist. Once you get all those things in one place, there’s a lot of potential. You can do things that you couldn’t do before. I’ll give you just one example: Imagine you’re composing an email, and as you type, there’s a sidebar next to it. In the style of Google Instant, it becomes an implicit search query that searches both your email archive, but also, say, news stories. The point is that it might help you shape your message or change what you want to say in your email, who you want to say it to, or whether or not you want to say it at all. Having an email archive solves a very deep problem, which is organizational memory. Everyone wonders from time to time whether someone knows the answer to some question. The point is that the bigger an organization is, the more often it’s necessary to rediscover the same thing over and over. Having an email program that searches for things that might help you would go a long way toward solving this.

Here’s the Infographic on the history of MIME. Click to see it bigger:

This would be the second round of cuts in the webOS group. The first came in September and affected about 500 people, bringing the total to about 775 since former CEO Léo Apotheker announced HP’s intention to end production of webOS hardware, after sales at Best Buy and other retailers failed to gain traction.

The webOS business has been a particularly difficult subject at HP. The company acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010 under former CEO Mark Hurd. In a November filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, HP said about half of a $3.3 billion in write-down came in the webOS unit.

HP just issued the following statement on the subject and it appears that some will get a chance to be redeployed elsewhere within the company. But make no mistake, most of those affected are being laid off:

“As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term.

HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company.”

The cuts come after two key events in the webOS group’s recent history. One was the departure of former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, which was first reported by AllThingsD on Jan. 27.

Before that came the decision, announced in December by HP CEO Meg Whitman, to take the webOS software that Palm had developed and turn it into an open source project.

Hernacki had joined Palm in 2009 as its chief security architect, before it was acquired by HP in a $1.2 billion deal the following year. Previously, he’d spent nearly seven years at Symantec, where he was a researcher and architect.

His departure follows not only that of Rubinstein, but of Richard Kerris, the former head of webOS developer relations, who decamped for Nokia in October.

Coming as these moves do after HP’s decision to turn webOS into an open source project, one suspects they aren’t the last.

To start with, HP has released an updated, open source version of its Enyo developer tools and plans to deliver Open webOS by September. The company published a roadmap (see below) detailing its plans to release different components of the software, including key apps and its Linux kernel, over the coming months.

“This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform’s development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of Web applications,” newly minted Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a statement.

Of course, the big question now is how much interest there is outside HP in using the operating system.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

It’s the third board seat that Schwartz has taken since leaving Sun. He also sits on the board of Taleo, a cloud-based talent management software company, and has a seat on the board of SilverSpring Networks, a smart-grid outfit.

He’s also the CEO of Picture of Health, a start-up focused on applying technology to problems in the health care field.

So what is Moxie? It plays in the same space that Jive Software, Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter do. Its software not only connects employees internally, but with customers and partners as well. It’s the kind of “big theme” that Schwartz likes. “If you’re a company, you have to interact with the customer,” he said to me last night. “Now, do you want to dump a product spec on them, or do you want to captivate their interest over a long period of time? To me, it feels like an I.Q. test.”

Moxie’s software is used in 270 million individual social enterprise interactions per month, and its customers include the consumer electronics companies Epson and Sharp, as well as the Web retailers Newegg.com and Tupperware.

Schwartz, who is also on the board at SilverSpring, was approached for the Moxie board seat by Warren Weiss, a director and lead investor in Moxie and a general partner at Foundation Capital. Weiss and Schwartz are both alums of Next, the Steve Jobs-owned computer company that Apple acquired in 1996, beginning its legendary turnaround.

After Diaspora emailed its users to ask them to donate this week, having published an expense report that showed its $200,000 in Kickstarter money had all been spent, some assumed the end was near.

That wasn’t the impression I got when the Diaspora team recently invited me to lunch at their favorite Indian restaurant in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. They might be in over their heads, but they are most definitely not dead yet. (Though I feel like I might die if I ate that rich food every day.)

The Diaspora team is young, smart and, most of all, tiny, considering the scope of what they’re trying to do. They’re busy preparing for a mid-November launch, timed for a year after Diaspora went into alpha testing.

According to their view of the world, Diaspora has already had success because its ideas are turning up in other social networks, given that Google+ Circles resemble Diaspora Aspects, and Facebook has recently stepped up its sharing controls.

Diaspora counts more than 100,000 users on its own Diaspora pod (twice as many as a month ago), with hundreds of other installations around the world, including someone in Seattle who has 20,000 users on his own server. (If you want to sign up for Diaspora today, you can either request an invite on joindiaspora.com, install your own pod or join an existing independent pod.)

Team Diaspora now consists of three of its four co-founders (Raphael Sofaer still contributes but has returned to college at NYU) plus a few volunteers who help with strategy, tech and communications.

The crew at lunch were co-founders Ilya Zhitomirskiy (he does infrastructure and encryption), Daniel Grippi (he does design) and Maxwell Salzberg (jack of all trades); plus Yosem Companys (outreach) and Sarah Mei (an engineer at Pivotal Labs, which gives Diaspora free office space, who will be CTO once Diaspora has enough funding to pay her).

The Diaspora vision is expansive, but the way it expresses itself is in a social network that looks and feels like many others — with an extra dose of animated GIFs.

Silly GIFs have emerged as a favorite part of the Diaspora culture (as on other corners of the Internet), but they do serve a purpose. Though Team Diaspora talked about how much they love online sharing and want to encourage more of it by assuring people they control their own data, the biggest attraction of their service may ironically be heightened fear about online privacy. That’s part of why nurturing a fun community — even if it’s around silly GIFs — is so important.

In the spirit of the occasion, I made a GIF of Team Diaspora using the iPhone app Loopcam. I was going to post it here, but honestly, it will make you seasick, so watch it in this Diaspora post and check out some stills above.

Salzberg, who declined to go on the record about funding plans, maintained that the nonprofit Diaspora would figure out how to make money while respecting its users’ interests. He would say that he looks to Firefox as the prime example of an end-user open source project, and that Diaspora may try to make money by charging users to host pods.

Diaspora has support from a broader community of open source contributors, but the core team sets the tone for both the product and the larger project. They are goofy, idealistic and nerdy — just like the folks who work at Google or Facebook — but they maintain an outsider’s bent, chatting about the things they read on tech blogs rather than the Silicon Valley types they’ve actually met in person.

Grippi — who personally created Diaspora’s first app, a photo bookmarking tool called Cubbi.es, and had just redesigned the Diaspora mobile site himself — kept repeating at lunch that he’d heard Google had seven people assigned to designing the black bar at the top of Google+. He said he could only imagine what seven people working on Diaspora could do.

On Tuesday, Rubin highlighted the difference between something being released as open source code and a community project. Android is most definitely the former, Rubin said, but not as much the latter.

“Android is light on ‘community-driven’ and heavy on open source,” Rubin said, speaking to reporters after the Android keynote at Google’s I/O conference. “Everything that we do ends up in an open source repository.”

The challenge, he said, is that Google is building a platform rather than just an app. Open source projects for entire platforms don’t work so well, Rubin said, because it is hard to tell when anything is final.

“Typically, in my opinion, community processes don’t work, because you need to know when you’re done,” Rubin said. “If it’s a community process, someone could take an early version before (it is) locked down, and those devices would be incompatible.”

Although the company does accept submissions for Android code, it acts not only as its main creator but also as a shepherd to make sure that the same programming interfaces make their way to all Android devices (or at least all that claim full Android compatibility.)

Concern over Google’s tight control over Android has been heightened after the company said it was delaying the release of Honeycomb’s code. The company said that to get Honeycomb on tablets quickly, the company didn’t bring over the necessary software to make sure it worked well on phones.

On Tuesday, the company reiterated that the next release of Android–Ice Cream Sandwich–will work on all devices and it is that software that will be released as open source code after it is finalized later this year.

We’ve done a lot of onstage interviews at our D: All Things Digital conferences with the leaders of tech.

That includes Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google smartphone kingpin Andy Rubin, both of whom are now dealing with the fallout over a series of reports that iOS and Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to both companies.

The privacy implications are obvious.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote last week:

Questions about what location-based information Android makes use of followed reports that Apple’s iPhone and 3G-equipped iPads are storing a history of location information in an unencrypted database on the device. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday noted that both Android and Apple devices are sending certain location information back to the companies.

In addition to that issue, there are separate issues over the length of time such information is stored, both on the device and by Apple and Google. The iPhone (and 3G-equipped iPads) appear to be storing a long-term directory of where a device has been and keeping that information in an unencrypted database. Google keeps a small cache of such information, to allow mapping and search to work even if a device temporarily loses GPS signal. However, it doesn’t keep a long-term record on the device.

That’s why we cut this video of Jobs and Rubin talking about privacy, specifically and respectively at the eighth D: All Things Digital last summer and at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

“We take privacy extremely seriously,” said Jobs, who addressed the smartphone location data issue in particular. “A lot of people in [Silicon] Valley think we’re old-fashioned about this.”

And I pressed Rubin on Android being a “probe in your pocket,” and he said its mobile open source operating system did not collect data, although Google services did.

“I think this is a trust and verify,” Rubin noted.

Both Jobs and Rubin make some pretty strong privacy-related statements in these videos, so it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110426/a-probe-in-your-pocket-heres-apples-steve-jobs-and-googles-andy-rubin-talking-privacy-at-d8-and-dive/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110406/googles-andy-rubin-defends-androids-openness/ http://allthingsd.com/20110406/googles-andy-rubin-defends-androids-openness/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:30:18 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=6061 Amid criticisms that Google is grabbing tighter control over Android’s reins, the head of the mobile software effort said Wednesday that he and the company remain committed to keeping the effort an open source project.

The comments come in the wake of Google’s move to delay the release of Honeycomb into the open source until a version of the software that works on phones is ready. Honeycomb was introduced in February and is shipping on Motorola’s Xoom, but Google has said the company took shortcuts to get the tablet-optimized operating system to market.

“As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones,” Rubin said in a blog post. “As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy.”

Rubin also contradicted rumors that the company was putting in place new restrictions or had plans to limit the types of chips on which Android devices can run.

The Android chief did acknowledge that limitations are placed on partners that want to ship devices with Google applications or access to the Android Market in order to ensure compatibility. Those restrictions, he said, have been in place since Android began, however.

Rubin’s blog post was titled “I think I’m having a Gene Amdahl moment,” a reference to the “fear, uncertainty and doubt” that Amdahl said his rivals were spreading about him when he left IBM to found his own computer company.

Here’s the full text of Rubin’s post:

Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation in the press about Android and Google’s role in supporting the ecosystem. I’m writing in the spirit of transparency and in an attempt to set the record straight. The Android community has grown tremendously since the launch of the first Android device in October 2008, but throughout we’ve remained committed to fostering the development of an open platform for the mobile industry and beyond.

We don’t believe in a “one size fits all” solution. The Android platform has already spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices – many of which were not originally contemplated when the platform was first created. What amazes me is that the even though the quantity and breadth of Android products being built has grown tremendously, it’s clear that quality and consistency continue to be top priorities. Miraculously, we are seeing the platform take on new use cases, features and form factors as it’s being introduced in new categories and regions while still remaining consistent and compatible for third party applications.

As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices. This enables device makers to support the unique and differentiating functionality of their products. If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements. (After all, it would not be realistic to expect Google applications – or any applications for that matter – to operate flawlessly across incompatible devices). Our “anti-fragmentation” program has been in place since Android 1.0 and remains a priority for us to provide a great user experience for consumers and a consistent platform for developers. In fact, all of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance agreed not to fragment Android when we first announced it in 2007. Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.

Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.

The volume and variety of Android devices in the market continues to exceed even our most optimistic expectations. We will continue to work toward an open and healthy ecosystem because we truly believe this is best for the industry and best for consumers.

(Photo courtesy Flickr user asirap)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110406/googles-andy-rubin-defends-androids-openness/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110224/video-mozilla-ceo-gary-kovacs-talks-firefox-4-competition-with-googles-chrome-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110224/video-mozilla-ceo-gary-kovacs-talks-firefox-4-competition-with-googles-chrome-and-more/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:12:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41020

Yesterday, BoomTown paid a long overdue visit on the Mountain View, Calif., HQ of Mozilla, the unusual public-private company that makes the Firefox browser, to chat with its (relatively) new CEO Gary Kovacs (pictured here).

There is a lot to talk about with the new exec, especially the near-to-official launch of Firefox 4, the increasing coopetition with Google and its Chrome efforts and where Mozilla goes next (mobile).

Kovacs, in fact, has a deep mobile background, having arrived in the late fall of 2010 to take over from John Lilly, who moved on to a stint as a venture capitalist.

Before Mozilla, Kovacs worked on a range of products at Sybase–until after its purchase by SAP–and also on mobile and devices at Adobe. Before that, he played a key role at Zi Corporation, a company specializing in embedded software and services for mobile and consumer devices.

He’ll need all that expertise if Firefox is to do as well on mobile devices as it has in gaining market share on the desktop, an effort that has been challenged by a continual and intense effort at upgrade and improvement by No. 3 Google especially.

According to a recent poll, for example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds the dominant 56 percent share, with Mozilla’s Firefox at almost 23 percent and Google at just above 10 percent. Apple’s Safari and Opera follow.

Of course, Firefox has been playing nicer with Chrome cousin Android, which is beginning to dominate the smartphone market and is moving aggressively into the tablet arena. In fact, Mozilla just released a new beta in the marketplace for Google’s mobile operating system.

Still, some have fretted as Mozilla delayed its official release of Firefox 4 several times since last fall.

Nonetheless, by dislodging IE from its dominant market position, Firefox has proved not only that open-source projects can provide better software, but that it’s possible for a particularly well done one to become an everyday consumer application.

Despite its success, Mozilla still has to keep up its innovation and technical prowess. But given its unusual status as both a profit and nonprofit, it is hindered in that it is not likely to go public and shower its Silicon Valley employees with giant gobs of overhyped stock.

In the video below, Kovacs talks about Mozilla’s relationship with Google (not easy!), feature improvements in Firefox 4 (a new Chromish user interface!), how to hold onto talent in Silicon Valley (also not easy!) and what it’s like to deal with Apple (definitely not easy!).

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110224/video-mozilla-ceo-gary-kovacs-talks-firefox-4-competition-with-googles-chrome-and-more/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/exclusive-rackspace-to-acquire-anso-labs/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/exclusive-rackspace-to-acquire-anso-labs/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:05:48 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3021 Web-hosting and cloud services provider Rackspace is acquiring Anso Labs, a San Francisco-based outfit that provides cloud consulting and services, according to sources familiar with the deal, which is small enough that financial terms are not going to be disclosed.

Anso Labs is helmed by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock, the Web-browser company that was recently acquired by Zynga, and Soo Choi, a former exec at Booz Allen Hamilton. Anso Labs is best known for its work on the cloud computing front with NASA, the U.S. space agency.

The move takes place against the backdrop of a surge in consolidation in the cloud computing and data center business. Last week, Time Warner Cable dropped $230 million for NaviSite. And on Jan. 28, Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion. That one-two punch in data center deal-making has led to persistent speculation that other data center companies, Rackspace among them, will be rolled up by larger companies–like Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Cisco Systems–that are eager to add cloud services to their portfolio.

Ask Rackspace executives about this–and I have–and they’ll tell you they’re not thinking about that. Rather than being rolled up by someone else, they’re focused on rolling up the assets they want to grow, and to remain independent. Late last year Rackspace acquired Cloudkick, a start-up focused on building cloud monitoring tools.

Rackspace did $629 million in revenue in 2009, and is expected to show annual sales of about $775 million when it reports fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. It has 100,000 customers, and while many of them are small- and medium-size businesses, larger enterprise customers like Coca-Cola, Target and Vodaphone are tapping Rackspace for Web hosting and to run their cloud applications.

Rackspace wants Anso Labs for its expertise and devotion to OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing software project backed by Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Cisco and Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

Rackspace wants to create a bunch of inter-operable cloud services so that customers can move workload from one cloud service provider to another at will, giving them increased flexibility. It’s comparable in some ways to vCloud from VMware and Eucalyptus.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/exclusive-rackspace-to-acquire-anso-labs/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/google-joins-mozilla-with-opt-out-plug-in-for-chrome/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/google-joins-mozilla-with-opt-out-plug-in-for-chrome/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:04:40 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2211 Not to be outdone by its rivals at Mozilla, Google released an add-on for its Chrome Web browser that allows users to opt out from ad-tracking cookies.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/google-joins-mozilla-with-opt-out-plug-in-for-chrome/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:58:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=425 When you want to build an application that uses lots of data–say, a directory of auto-repair shops or hotels in the U.K.–one of the fundamental questions is this: Where does the data come from, and how do you get it into the application?

Gil Elbaz, the man who in 2003 sold a start-up called Applied Semantics (now known as AdSense) to Google, has what he thinks is the solution. His latest effort is Factual, and it attracted a $25 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures with SV Angel and former Disney president Michael Ovitz participating. Ben Horowitz and Danny Rimer are joining Factual’s board of directors.

I caught up with Elbaz by phone yesterday to talk about the vision of Factual and his plans to grow the company.

NewEnterprise: So at a high level, what is Factual and what do you intend to do?

Gil Elbaz: We see this as an emerging category. We think of it as a data platform that offers data and data services to all sorts of developers, to build cooler, more innovative applications more quickly, especially when it comes to apps that are data-driven. Finding the right vendor for that data, and then integrating it, then managing and maintaining that data is costly and expensive. Developers can move that much more quickly by tapping into our knowledge base. We’re marketing certain verticals where our data is really good. We’re putting some extra marketing muscle behind our places database.

NE: Give me a use case. How might someone use the platform?

GE: Our places database is a good example where we’re getting quite a bit of traction. What we’ve done is built one of the most comprehensive databases of business listings and points of interest. This data is easy to browse, and it’s complete. It contains address and phone and contact info and latitude and longitude. If you want to a build a new service like Yelp or Foursquare, or something that relies on knowing what’s in close proximity, a mobile app can make a simple API call, send over the current GPS coordinate and fulfill the request very quickly. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do, but it’s making serious waves because it is very hard to get that data, especially if you’re going mobile. It’s very hard to get that good data for locations around the world.

NE: Do you have other datasets?

GE: We’re being market driven and being focused on that because that’s what our customers have been asking for. But we do have others. We have data from other vertical segments like health and entertainment. In the area of education we built a database of high schools that Newsweek magazine uses in their fairly important annual ranking of high schools. They not only use the data that we were able to generate and build, but they were also able to benefit from our crowdsourcing API, so that their users get not only a more engaging experience but the great partnership comes back into our central database, so the information can be improved. That’s a nice virtuous circle that makes us confident that our data is going to keep getting better because of these partnerships.

NE: I’m trying to come up with a metaphor, and the closest thing I can think of is data–information–as a utility supplier of data. If I want to build an application that contains a lot of data, I can come to you for the data I want to use so I don’t have to go out and gather it myself. Is that fair?

GE: I think that’s a pretty good metaphor. It’s really the access that’s important. When you use our pipe you’re going to know that you’re getting good data, that’s up to date and that we stand behind it, and that other people are participating to make it better, and update it, and that you can get it quickly. Looking ahead, there’s going to be times when it’s not strictly our data. Sometimes it will be data that has been uploaded from other people or from people in the community who want to take advantage of the data platform. So it’s really the pipes and the platform that we’re building that make this kind of data and sharing possible.

NE: You sold your first company to Google. The issue came up that you don’t need the funds. You could fund this on your own. Explain why you sought funding.

GE: I did fund the company for a little while. But I knew that our mission is very audacious and in order to become the ubiquitous data layer for the Internet, to be the obvious place that a developer would go to first to get data into their application, it’s a huge, tall order, and something that’s going to take a lot of technology and marketing effort and strategic guidance. The types of people that we brought in on our angel round and then the people we’re bringing onto the board have a lot of operational experience. Also, you never know when an idea is so big that you want to raise money down the line. If you want to do that it makes sense to build bridges with the financial community as early as possible, in case it does become a more capital-intensive business. This is a new category and we feel like we have a good understanding of it, and things can change quickly, and if it does, we want to be positioned with a good team who can help us navigate the different opportunities that will certainly arise.

NE: So now that you’ve landed the funding, what’s the first order of business?

GE: The challenge is always scaling correctly and quickly. I think we’re positioned well for this. We have a humming machine here. The management team is in place and we’ve been working on this for a few years now. And we have a great culture in place with people who are really passionate about making data available. However, hiring the engineering talent is taking up a huge amount of time. That’s the number one thing on my priority list for the short term.

NE: How do you find the best engineers? Is there a trick to it?

GE: I’d have to say that having worked at Google for three and-a-half years was the perfect place to learn what a deep and strong engineering culture was all about. I also got a lot of hiring experience at Google’s Santa Monica office. I don’t think there’s one trick. I think there are signals that a person is not just looking for a job, but for an opportunity to make extremely important intellectual contributions. And also I’m looking for people who want to make contributions not just to a project but to the world. You look for quick thinking and passion, and a history of doing things beyond what the job requires. I love it when I see people who have contributed to open-source projects on their own time. That demonstrates that they’re trying to contribute to society but also that they like working on important tools that make a difference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/googles-andy-rubin-dives-into-android/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/googles-andy-rubin-dives-into-android/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:33:10 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=422

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.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/googles-andy-rubin-dives-into-android/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:08:31 +0000 Deborah Gage http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32520 How does a small Bay Area start-up whose business revolves around arcane coding compete for developers with the likes of Facebook and Google?

By making a rap video, of course.

CouchOne Inc., an Oakland, Calif-based company that makes a database built on open source software called CouchDB, produced the video partially on a whim and partially to bring attention to the start-up, which raised a $2 million Series A round last year from Redpoint Ventures and is in the process of raising a Series B.

The video, “I Use CouchDB,” stars CouchOne co-founder Chris Anderson and the company’s office manager, Claire McCabe, as a cool-looking pair whose stresses melt away when they replace their clunky SQL database with CouchDB. The video intersperses shots of the company’s product in use with scenes of Chris and Claire rolling through the streets of Oakland, Claire at one point riding on a car hood.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:31:38 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32156 When robots finally gain enough communal sentience to establish their own cultural holidays, this date might be one of them. Today is the third anniversary of the open-source Robot Operating System, born out of Stanford’s STAIR project, developed and nurtured by personal-robot maker Willow Garage, and now used in projects around the world. For a quick sampling of the work being done with this platform, here’s a video montage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:08:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36906

At the end of this video interview with BoomTown about RockMelt–a new social browser that debuted in beta last night via yet another broken news embargo (thus, I have just joined the army of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on this irksome issue)–the two founders politely tried to gloss over my calling it a “Facebook browser.”

Except, um, it is.

Sure, as Eric Vishria and Tim Howes correctly note, there are Twitter and other news apps present. And I even like the mantra for RockMelt, which “re-imagines the browser around friends, feeds, and sharing.”

But that would be–for the most part right now–friends on Facebook, feeds from Facebook and sharing with Facebook.

In fact, the whole shebang is essentially–as you can see from the screenshots below–a big wet kiss to Facebook.

Still, RockMelt certainly could cause a bang, since it is funded by Marc Andreessen, via his venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–along with a passel of Silicon Valley luminaries such as longtime exec and mentor to the tech stars, Bill Campbell.

Andreessen, of course, is the legendary entrepreneur who invented the browser and founded the first commercial Internet company–Netscape–16 years ago. (He is also, coincidentally or not, on the board of Facebook.)

Still, with all its pluses, the Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt could have a hard time breaking through the crowded browser software market to reach consumers.

Microsoft now dominates the market with its Internet Explorer, followed by other big players, such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

While not the first browser focused on social networking–that would be Flock, which is still around–RockMelt is trying to distinguish itself using these now-popular and innovative services.

You sign on to it using Facebook, natch, and the friends you choose are arrayed down one side vertically, while news and other apps are on the other.

It’s built on Google’s Chromium open source technology, which makes RockMelt a truly Silicon Valley creation.

It will be interesting to see how RockMelt does with its powerful and myriad social connections, but until we find out, here are Howes (who once worked at Netscape) and Vishria talking about their plans:

And here are the screenshots of RockMelt (click on the images to make them larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/google-exec-tweets-to-tell-jobs-what-open-is/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/google-exec-tweets-to-tell-jobs-what-open-is/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:00:27 +0000 Amir Efrati http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31279 A war of words between Google and Apple continued last night, shortly after Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly criticized Google’s mobile-device operating system, Android, which competes with Apple’s own software for the iPhone and iPad.

Jobs said Android was problematic because customers and app developers had to deal with a “mess” of numerous versions of the open-source software, which Google gives away for free to handset makers. He also said Google executives were “disingenuous” for calling Apple’s IOS operating system “closed.”

“Google loves to characterize Android as open and iOS and iPhone as closed,” he said during Apple’s third quarter earnings call. But that’s a “smokescreen to hide the real issue of what is best for the customer–integrated versus fragmented.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/google-exec-tweets-to-tell-jobs-what-open-is/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101005/google-answers-oracles-java-suit/ http://allthingsd.com/20101005/google-answers-oracles-java-suit/#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:50:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=50128
Silicon Valley’s latest Goliath versus Goliath battle is officially on.

Google today responded to Oracle’s (ORCL) claims that its Android OS infringes copyrights and patents related to Java, which Oracle acquired as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems earlier this year. This morning, the search sovereign filed an answer to Oracle’s suit, denying all seven of its patent-infringement charges, and asking that the company’s copyright-infringement claim be dismissed because Google (GOOG) feels it is “legally deficient.”

And, interestingly, the answer calls Oracle out as a hypocrite–a company that pushed for a fully open Java platform when the OS was owned by Sun, only to blatantly ignore the open source community’s requests to fully open source it after its acquisition of Sun closed.

“It’s disappointing that after years of supporting open source, Oracle turned around to attack not just Android, but the entire open source Java community with vague software patent claims,” the company said in a statement. “Open platforms like Android are essential to innovation, and we will continue to support the open source community to make the mobile experience better for consumers and developers alike.”

Google’s prayer for relief makes that disappointment quite clear. In it, the company asks not only for a judgment dismissing Oracle’s complaint against it with prejudice, but also for a judgment in favor of Google on all of its counterclaims; a declaration that Google has not infringed, contributed to the infringement of, or induced others to infringe, either directly or indirectly, any valid and enforceable claims of the Patents-in-Suit; a declaration that the Patents-in-Suit are invalid; a declaration that Oracle’s claims are barred by the doctrines of laches, equitable estoppel, and/or waiver; a declaration that the Oracle’s claims are barred by the doctrine of unclean hands; a declaration that this case is exceptional and an award to Google of its reasonable costs and expenses of litigation, including attorneys’ fees and expert witness fees; and such other and further relief as this Court may deem just and proper.

Here are three of the more pointed graphs from the answer, followed by a copy of the document in its entirety.

7. Sun came under significant criticism from members of the open source community, including Oracle Corp., for its refusal to fully open source Java. For example, in August of 2006, the Apache Software Foundation (“ASF”), a not-for-profit corporation that provides organizational, legal, and financial support for open source software projects, attempted to obtain a TCK from Sun to verify Apache Harmony’s compatibility with Java. Although Sun eventually offered to open source the TCK for Java SE, Sun included field of use (“FOU”) restrictions that limited the circumstances under which Apache Harmony users could use the software that the ASF created, such as preventing the TCK from being executed on mobile devices. In April of 2007, the ASF wrote an open letter to Sun asking for either a TCK license without FOU restrictions, or an explanation as to why Sun was “protect[ing] portions of Sun’s commercial Java business at the expense of ASF’s open software” and violating “Sun’s public promise that any Sun-led specification [such as Java] would be fully implementable and distributable as open source/free software.” However, Sun continued to refuse the ASF’s requests.

8. Oracle Corp., as a member of the Executive Committee (“EC”) of the Java Community Process (“JCP”), the organization tasked with managing Java standards, voiced the same concerns regarding Sun’s refusal to fully open source the Java platform. Later that year, in December of 2007, during a JCP EC meeting, Oracle Corp. proposed that the JCP should provide “a new, simplified IPR [intellectual property rights] Policy that permits the broadest number of implementations.” At that same meeting, BEA Systems – which at the time was in negotiations that resulted in Oracle Corp. purchasing BEA – proposed a resolution that TCK licenses would be “offered without field of use restrictions . . . enabling the TCK to be used by organizations including Apache.” Oracle Corp. voted in favor of the resolution.

9. Just over a year later, in February of 2009, Oracle Corp. reiterated its position on the open-source community’s expectation of a fully open Java platform when it supported a motion that “TCK licenses must not be used to discriminate against or restrict compatible implementations of Java specifications by including field of use restrictions on the tested implementations or otherwise. Licenses containing such limitations do not meet the requirements of the JSPA, the agreement under which the JCP operates, and violate the expectations of the Java community that JCP specs can be openly implemented.”

UPDATE: Oracle has issued this statement on Google’s answer.

“In developing Android, Google chose to use Java code without obtaining a license. Additionally, it modified the technology so it is not compliant with Java’s central design principle to ‘write once and run anywhere.’ Google’s infringement and fragmentation of Java code not only damages Oracle, it clearly harms consumers, developers and device manufacturers.”

UPDATE: Engadget’s Nilay Patel has a good analysis of Google’s strategy, here — as well as some potential holes in it.

2010.10.04 – Google Answer and Counterclaims _filed_ –

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101005/google-answers-oracles-java-suit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100922/fcc-to-rebuild-using-drupal/ http://allthingsd.com/20100922/fcc-to-rebuild-using-drupal/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:30:57 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30191 FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel announced today that–following in the footsteps of Whitehouse.gov, Commerce.gov and Ed.gov–the Federal Communications Commission will be rebuilding its Web site using the open source content management system Drupal. In the announcement, VanRoekel states that “This decision is a significant step towards modernizing our own underlying online infrastructure.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100922/fcc-to-rebuild-using-drupal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100903/wave-headed-for-googles-remainders-bin/ http://allthingsd.com/20100903/wave-headed-for-googles-remainders-bin/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:51:23 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=29241 If Google keeps this up, it’s going to find itself with a busy little bargain basement filled with engineers and developers poking around for deals on discontinued products. First it was the house brand Nexus One smartphone finding new life among Android developers after failing to grab the public. And soon the guts of Wave, the ambitious but amorphous and ultimately abandoned collaboration tool, will be made available as an open-source, client-server package, called Wave in a Box, to those interested in building on Google’s experiment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100903/wave-headed-for-googles-remainders-bin/feed/ 0