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This is the most muted patent release yet. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that it’s China, and the intellectual property issue cannot seriously be a major driver. But perhaps it’s also because Novell may have finally persuaded Microsoft to downplay its IP fetish, which helps no one (including Microsoft).

Still, I give Novell credit here. Why?

As for whether this will have much of an impact on the Chinese market, I doubt it. Novell has been doing increasingly well in the U.S., but I just can’t see a Windows-plus-Linux interoperability message doing much in China, which already has a strong and growing domestic Linux market. China doesn’t need to curry favor with Microsoft.

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I bet! I suspect Nie Hua was crying himself to sleep at night before Microsoft and Novell approached him with this. You can just imagine his fretting: “How will I deal with the uncertainty of Linux’s intellectual property position unless Microsoft, which has attempted to introduce the uncertainty, blesses my Linux distribution?” Give me a break.

How much do you think that China cares about U.S. patents? It has been pirating Microsoft’s Windows for years (though at least, in theory, new PCs don’t ship with pirated Windows)–and now suddenly it’s concerned about making sure it has patent protection for Linux? My mirth runneth over.

I’ve heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons “royalty payments,” with an immediate, furious response back from Novell. Good. Perhaps Novell can teach Microsoft to play nicely with IP. Someone needs to do so.

It is almost certainly true, however, that both Microsoft and Novell need to curry favor with China. Microsoft, because Windows is already free (as in pirated) in China. And Novell, because Linux is, oddly enough, pirated in China and to the extent that it’s paid for, Red Flag Linux dominates the market.

“We are very pleased with the original approach by Microsoft and Novell to address our concerns about deploying and managing a complex high-performance computing infrastructure across two platforms. It is essential for our future competitiveness and success,” Nie Hua, vice president of Chinese company Dawning Information Industry, said in Microsoft and Novell’s Sunday night press release. “We fully understand the concerns surrounding intellectual property rights and feel reassured that these issues have been addressed by our vendors.”

I will admit, I am laughing as I type this. The news that Microsoft and Novell are taking their interoperability roadshow to China is hilarious on a number of different levels.

There are tons of Facebook apps, many that seem to be, well, silly and useless.

A new app that will help a nonprofit coordinate blood donation is really worthwhile and could make a significant direct impact on people’s lives.

I look forward to seeing more Facebook apps like this that enable people to do more on Facebook than just share photos and poke each other.

“Does TAT act as a confidential medium? Is contact information ever provided to third parties (blood banks, Dept. of Health, hospitals, etc.)? Suppose diseased blood enters (the) supply, and authorities know it is type AB+. Will TAT turn the data of all its AB+ users in a given area over to the CDC or legal authorities if required by court order? Or is there a purposeful level of anonymity built into the system to shield TAT from such responsibilities?”

“We were reacting to our sense that most of what was on Facebook was too academic or frivolous,” Ben Bergman, who created the program, told the newspaper.

The app from New York nonprofit Takes All Types sends Facebook alerts to people who opt in and will send reminders for regular donation, according to The New York Times.

However, one Facebook member who posted a comment on the Takes All Types Facebook page brought up some good privacy questions:

Yahoo is under financial pressure this year, but it’s shaking up management of its mobile phone group as part of a plan to make its phone and TV division profitable next year.

The company on Monday named David Ko to be senior vice president of the mobile group, which handles software, advertising, and partnerships in the mobile phone market. He reports to Marco Boerries, executive vice president of the Connected Life division, which is trying to extend Yahoo’s business to mobile phones and Internet-connected TV sets.

David Ko

(Credit:
Yahoo)

“I am very happy to introduce today Connected Life v3.0, which is designed to take our leadership in mobile to the next level,” Boerries said in a memo about the changes. Version 2.0 was about laying foundations with technology development and distribution deals, but 3.0 will be about money.

And it will be the phone group that’s carries the profit burden, he added: the TV effort is still in an earlier development and distribution stage so far.

“Our goal is to become a contributor to Yahoo’s bottom line in 2009,” Boerries said. In other words, to make Yahoo overall more profitable, not less.

That mobile revenue comes from text and display ads, and partnerships, Ko said in an interview. Though Ko sees competition from Google and others, he’s confident of Yahoo’s position in mobile Internet services: “We are absolutely leading in this.”

Google is aggressively expanding into the mobile market, though, with advertising, software, the Android operating system, and services. And the threat is real: earlier today, Cowen and Co. analysts said Google Maps will help lead it to dominance in mobile search.

The phone group will carry the Connected Life profit burden initially, Ko added: the TV work is still in an earlier development and distribution stage so far.

Ko replaces Steve Boom, who “after 10 years at Yahoo has decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities,” Boerries said. A Yahoo spokeswoman said Boom was leaving voluntarily. Ko was general manager of Yahoo’s mobile work in Asia, a post now held by Matthias Kunze.

Also leaving Yahoo are Geraldine Wilson, who handled Connected Life business operations in Europe–her work included ousting Google to become T-Mobile’s preferred search mobile search provider–and Bruce Stewart, who worked on business development in the United States.

Toshiba released the Portege R600 today, an amazingly thin and hopefully more durable version of the R500 ultraportable. We liked the R500 the two
times we reviewed it, but we had the system for only a few weeks at a stretch. If you look at the user comments on our reviews, you’ll soon notice a trend of readers questioning the R500’s build quality and complaining about its flimsy chassis. The Portege R600 looks very similar to the R500, weighing 2.4 pounds (with integrated DVD burner), and measuring 0.77 inch thick along its front edge. Toshiba states the R600 will arrive in a durable chassis; we can’t wait to get our hands on one to put it to the test.

The Portege R600 is a 12-inch ultraportable laptop that weighs 2.4 pounds and measures less than an inch thick.

Lastly, Toshiba released the Portege M750, an update to the M700 that moves Toshiba’s convertible tablet to the Centrino 2 platform. It features a 12.1-inch LED-backlit display, an integrated optical drive, and a $1,699 starting price.

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Toshiba)

Also announced today is the Portege A600, which is a 12.1-inch ultraportable that adds a little heft but trims the price of the R600. The A600 weighs 3.2 pounds, measures 1.2 inches thick, and starts at $1,399. You also lose out on the R600’s solid-state hard drive option and three-year warranty; the A600 is backed by one year of coverage.

The Portege R600 uses the Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage SU9300 or SU9400 CPU on the Intel GS45 chipset, up to 5GB of RAM, and either a 160GB (spinning) hard drive or a 128GB SSD. Toshiba promises 8 hours of running time from the system’s six-cell battery. Other features on the R600 include an LED-backlit transreflective display with a 1280×800, Toshiba’s USB Sleep-and-Charge technology, and an eSATA port. Also on board is Toshiba’s EasyGuard package, which monitors system components and includes hard drive protection, a spill-resistant keyboard, a fingerprint reader, and a Trusted Platform Module. Pricing starts at $2,099. Toshiba’s U.S. site has yet to be updated to include the R600, but our neighbors to the north have the goods.

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Google)

Check out the Google video on Friend Connect below.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Friend Connect Campfire event.

At this juncture, the salt is in short supply, but Google plans to make it broadly available to developers over the next few months. More on Friend Connect here.

Google’s third Campfire One event Monday night featured the debut of Friend Connect. David Glazer, Google director of engineering, has described Friend Connect as a “salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours.”

Techmeme

Web masters and developers can sign up to get on the Friend Connect waiting list here.

See also:

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TechCrunch)

The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing, provided by Google and other developers. Users copy gadget code snippets and paste them into their sites. The member gadget allows for sign-in with Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID accounts; invites and display of activities from existing friends on social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5 and Plaxo; browsing member profiles across social networks; and connecting with new friends on a site.

TechCrunch

Why does this matter? Consider:

I’m not paranoid but I’m with Nick Carr on this one: we’ll never know just what is being monitored, or how, or why.

Earlier this month President Bush signed a directive that gives the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies to monitor Internet traffic to protect all government computer systems. As the Washington Post reports, this is causing particular concern because the NSA’s focus has traditionally been on overseas activity, not domestic.

Allowing a spy agency to monitor domestic networks is worrisome, said James X. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “We’re concerned that the NSA is claiming such a large role over the security of unclassified systems,” he said. “They are a spy agency as well as a communications security agency. They operate in total secrecy. That’s not necessary and not the most effective way to protect unclassified systems.”

All we have right now is the fact that the authority has yet to be granted to monitor such networks. Again, I’m not a privacy freak but I’m a wee bit concerned once the government starts to spend an inordinate amount of time looking inward rather than outward.

That’s a bit worrisome.

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It’s partly of concern because it’s only a matter of time before the power is expanded to monitor all domestic networks. After all (and as the article points out), much of the most dangerous Internet activity would be against private enterprises. Bringing down or stealing data from Visa, American Express, and other such companies could do much more damage than launching a denial of service attack against the Environmental Protection Agency.

The letter follows earlier discussions between Atmel and Microchip.

“We appreciate your having taken the time to meet with (Microchip CEO) Steve Sanghi on September 5th to discuss Microchip’s potential acquisition of Atmel,” the letter says. “However, we were deeply disappointed to learn subsequently that the Atmel Board of Directors appears unwilling to consider a transaction at this time under any circumstances.”

Atmel designs and manufactures microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory, and radio frequency (RF) components.

Microchip Technology and On Semiconductor have made a $2.3 billion bid for semiconductor maker Atmel Corp., the companies announced Thursday.

Atmel also said that if the deal goes through, it intends to dispose of Atmel’s ASIC business upon completing the acquisition or shortly thereafter, and has spoken to an interested third party about the sale.

The plan calls for Microchip to lead the acquisition and then sell Atmel’s nonvolatile-memory and RF and automotive businesses to ON to partly finance the deal. ON said it would finance its purchase using a combination of existing cash resources, borrowings under its existing credit facility and additional financing.

In a statement, Atmel said its board of directors would “review and consider the proposal in due course.”

The two companies sent a letter to Atmel CEO Steven Laub proposing a $5 per share buyout, which represents a 52 percent premium over Atmel’s closing share price on October 1, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

Messy? Moi?

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

Of course, you can see what he means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: CC Psd/Flickr)

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

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

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

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

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BandBoston.com)

“I sent my MySpace page link to the Boston camp, and I also offered to sing my song at the tribute show, never thinking I’d get a reply,” DeCarlo says on Boston’s official Web site. “I did end up getting one about two weeks later thanking me for the offer, but at this point there were not going to be any additions to lineup.”

DeCarlo, who had never been in a band and whose recent singing experience consisted of performing for a couple of dozen bowlers in a bowling alley, wasn’t too confident.

One MySpace page gave the rock band Boston more than a feeling about an amateur singer. They ended up hiring the man as their new lead singer.

When Boston lead singer Brad Delp committed suicide last year, DeCarlo recorded his own karaoke versions of Boston songs and uploaded the MP3s to his MySpace page as a tribute. A friend who heard the recordings later encouraged him to contact the band.

And that was the end of DeCarlo’s rock ‘n’ roll fantasy–for a few weeks, anyway. Boston founder Tom Scholz’s wife was fiddling around on her PC when something caught her husband’s ear.

While it’s a rather unorthodox way to replace a band member after a tragedy, the practice of a Web audition could become more common. The band Journey recently hired a new lead singer based on a video clip posted to YouTube.

For Tommy DeCarlo, a credit manager at a Home Depot in North Carolina, it was literally a dream come true. DeCarlo, 43, had been a fan of the band since his childhood, often singing along with CDs or the radio when songs came on the air.

That was enough for Scholz. He dropped DeCarlo an e-mail and invited him to the tribute, where DeCarlo impressed the band with his covers (see a YouTube video clip of his performance below). He starts his new job on Friday when the band kicks off its summer tour in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Tommy DeCarlo lands singer gig with Boston, thanks to MySpace page.

“My wife was at her computer playing our tunes, and I asked whether it was us playing live,” Scholz told USA Today. “She said, ‘It’s some guy in North Carolina singing your songs.’ I said, ‘I know Brad’s voice, and that’s Brad.’”

Intel dominates computer advertising like no other hardware company and was the fifth most recognized brand name in the world in 2006. And at some point in the future, the lines between PC processors and graphics processors are expected to blur, which means the two companies could be in direct competition. Right now, Intel only makes low-end graphics that aren’t nearly as big a part of Nvidia’s business as the discrete graphics cards it sells to PC makers, but Nvidia is not a household name.

Nvidia is reportedly planning to drop upwards of $40 million on advertising as it tries to make sure everybody knows its name.

Ad Age reported yesterday that Nvidia is searching for an ad agency to launch a major ad campaign targeting regular consumers, not just the hard-core PC gamers who bleed green and black. The company is supposedly thinking about an ad budget between $30 million to $40 million for its first attempt to reach a widespread audience. (Thanks, Valleywag.)

In the report, Nvidia denied it was in the middle of a formal search, but it’s not hard to see the company embarking on this path sooner or later.

Advanced Micro Devices, which makes both PC processors and graphics hardware, likewise doesn’t do a whole lot of national or worldwide advertising, sticking to more focused ads in trade and gamer magazines. But AMD doesn’t exactly have the cash to go launch a national campaign at the moment, freeing up room for Nvidia to make its mark.