karmadc.com

However, not all SugarSync managers have been created equally. The app is much more photocentric on Android phones, where being able to upload and download mobile photos to and from your SugarSync account is the only media format guarantee. Android Netbook users should be able to view the full range of supported file types.

(Credit:
Sharpcast)

On Wednesday, Sharpcast, SugarSync’s developer, released a version of the cross-platform multimedia syncing management software for Android phones and Netbooks. SugarSync for Android lets you view and download files on your Android Netbook or mobile phone, and upload local files to your free or premium SugarSync repository.

The SugarSync start screen on Android phones

SugarSync managers can also be found for the following desktop and mobile platforms:
SugarSync for Windows
SugarSync for Mac
SugarSync for Windows Mobile
SugarSync for iPhone
SugarSync for BlackBerry

One complaint is that SugarSync takes some initial setup time on a desktop computer, which is where the bulk of your saved files will probably originate. Android Netbook users should have an easier job getting started, though only time will tell.

SugarSync is available from the Android Market on your Android phone.

Since SugarSync’s applications are free (you just pay for the storage you use), you can use it as a makeshift remote access tool, and as online backup. Files you upload from multiple desktops, laptops, or mobile phones are accessible from other platforms or the Web. You’ll also be able to share files and folders from the phone.

Although Acer may be applying the brakes to its planned Android Netbook deployment, when the Google-y mini computers do hit the shelves, SugarSync will be ready.

SugarSync’s Android start screen has you tap one button to access your uploaded files remotely, and another button to open local files on your Android phone or Netbook. A word to the wise: uploading files from an Android phone requires a long hold, where you touch and hold the file until you see a pop-up menu and the option to upload to SugarSync.

A sign in Naidre’s expresses the owner’s emotions on the subject very clearly: “Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day…but people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit.”

One might wonder whether he’s just getting the slightly better end of this deal. I have never seen him eat there. Perhaps he orders one or two coffees. Which seems to indicate that he is renting business premises for around 7 dollars a day.

Some coffee shop owners in New York even cover up electric outlets, so that the enterprising, the impoverished students, the merely very lonely or the merely very brazen cannot boot up, sip java, and take up valuable table space all day.

Oh, go on. Talk to each other.

I think a scientific experiment is in order, don’t you?

(Credit: CC (e)Spry/Flickr)

Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, some coffee shop owners have decided to fight back against the laptop squatting fraternity.

There are a couple of coffee shops in San Francisco, for example–and I won’t name them only because I don’t want to encourage crowds–where there is silence because everyone is engrossed in their laptops. You can walk into these places and 30 or 40 pairs of eyes are illuminated by screen lighting. There is no conversation, not even recognition of other human life forms. Perhaps the most bizarre sight is a table for four, with four dedicated souls ignoring each other and having eyes only for their homework, gossip sites, or IM.

Is it possible that if Starbucks covered up its outlets, customers might find an outlet in each other? And, in finding an outlet with each other, might people stay longer, eat more, and drink more?

The post cites the example of Naidre’s, a coffee shop in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, that limits the hours in which patrons can ogle their laptops without, well, eating. You cannot just be typing and sipping between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekends.

In my local Starbucks, there’s a bald man who wears the same pristine white Prince tennis shoes every day. He is always perched on a stool, his PC open in front of him, typing away with the middle finger of each hand. He has one of those Bluetooth thingies in his ear and he’s often talking as he’s typing. This somewhat peculiar gentleman is, indeed, running his business from Starbucks.

Which leads one to wonder just how painful it would be if Starbucks took their lead and banned laptops throughout its vast network.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The update is said to fix issues related to compatibility and reliability when trying to connect a
Mac to an AirPort network, as well as restore Display System Preferences, and Bluetooth reliability. The latter will likely bring a sigh of relief to users who have complained of their Bluetooth keyboard or mouse periodically disconnecting from their Macs.

As always, let us know if you have any problems with this update.

Also included in the update: an upgrade to
Safari 4.0.2, with improved accuracy of search history; a fix for importing large photo and movie files from cameras; better iCal, iDisk, MobileMe, AFP, Managed Client, Sync Service reliability; more support for RAW images from third-party cameras; and improved compatibility for external USB drives.

Apple released an update to its operating system Wednesday, version 10.5.8.

My colleague Elinor Mills has a separate post on the security updates contained in 10.5.8.

Walling starts with a reprise of a classic Marten Mickos quote: “open-source software is free if your time is worth nothing.” It’s pithy and somewhat true, but it’s not as rich as Mickos’ commentary, which points to an opportunity in Walling’s accusation.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Save your users’ time. Ensure a painless installation process, top notch documentation, top notch support, and a minimal learning curve for getting started using your application.
Market hard. You have a marketing budget; odds are high your open source competitor does not. If you can position your product well and build a reputation for good documentation, support and usability, you will sell software.
Focus on features for your demographic. Your open-source competitor is going to win when it comes to college students, hobbyists, and other groups where time is worth a lot less than licensing cost. You will have an edge with business users since time is highly monetized for entrepreneurs and enterprises. Build features for people who are likely to buy your product.

commentary

In fact, Walling’s suggestions for proprietary competitors to open-source projects turn out to be great advice for commercial open-source projects, too:

There are two types of people, those who will spend money to save time, and those who will spend time to save money. Striking a balance is important for any open-source company getting into one of the new markets now emerging on line.

Mickos said:

Just look at how Acquia has boomed as it complements the Drupal community: 200 new customers in the past six months alone, including The Economist, Intuit, Sony Music, Adobe, and more.

With this in mind, Walling deprecates open source for failing to make software easy and intuitive for its users. While this may be true of community-led open source, it’s emphatically not true of commercial open source, which has arisen to fill the functional and procedural gaps Wallings points to as ways to beat open source.

In other words, provided that open-source companies can fill the revenue hole with premium features or some other value-added service that compels payment, then the other advantages of open source trump that of proprietary products.

Beyond this, and unfortunately for Walling, open-source products also have something that virtually every proprietary product will never have: free distribution and the flexibility and security that comes from source-code access.

Again, great advice, but unfortunately for Walling’s thesis, there’s already a breed of company that is actively following this advice, and it’s the commercial open-source projects like JBoss, MindTouch, Openbravo, Pentaho, etc., as well as foundation-led efforts like Eclipse and Mozilla. Such organizations already know how to add the polish, documentation, and features that an organic community may lack.

While TechDirt experiments with optimal configurations of digital media business models, Rob Walling has unwittingly landed on a sure-fire way to build billion-dollar open-source companies.

I say “unwittingly” because Walling’s post is all about “How to Compete Against Open Source Competition.” In the process, he does a fair job of describing how to build an exceptional open-source business.

Not so fast, Twitter: ‘Tweet’ isn’t yours

Nintendo: We killed the DS lookalike app

Sony PlayStation 3 Slim review

Facebook disables rogue phishing apps

Micro injections: Score 1 for needle-phobes

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Today’s stories:

Is it time to drop the Netbook label? CNET News reporter Erica Ogg thinks so, and she joins the podcast to talk about why. That, and other headlines of the day, on Thursday’s CNET News Daily Podcast.

Listen now:

Time to drop the Netbook label

America’s first Internet addiction detox program

This isn’t the first time Comcast has gone looking for a big media company. Five years ago, the company tried to acquire Walt Disney for about $66 billion. In the years since that failed attempt, the media and video distribution landscape has changed dramatically.

Combined, the new jointly owned media company would own more than two dozen TV networks, including NBC, along with several cable stations, such as USA Network. Comcast already operates some of its own cable networks, such as E!, the Style Network, and G4. The new joint venture would also own NBC Universal studios, plus 10 local NBC TV affiliates in cities such as New York and San Diego.

Individual TV channels have been putting their own TV content online for consumers to access for some time. This initially troubled cable operators such as Comcast; they saw the free delivery of video content for which they pay a hefty price as a threat to their business.

Television networks are struggling to keep advertising revenues up, and movie studios are under pressure to prevent digital piracy from eating into their profits. Meanwhile, Comcast, which is facing more competition from phone companies and satellite providers in its TV business, is also trying to figure out how best to use the Internet to deliver video content.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Comcast is hoping to form a privately held joint venture that would include NBC’s media content. Comcast would control the venture with a 51 percent stake, and GE would own 49 percent of the new company.

NBC and News Corp., the owner of Fox, have made a splash with online service Hulu, which offers TV shows and some movies on demand. Other media conglomerates, including CNET News publisher CBS, have made similar moves.

The Wall Street Journal said that talks between Comcast and GE could still fall apart. Comcast is looking to pay as little as it can up-front. And there is an issue about what to do with Vivendi, which has a 20 percent stake in NBC Universal.

Comcast, too, is starting to embrace online video, teaming up with media conglomerate Time Warner earlier this year to test a new service offered by Comcast called On Demand Online. The service allows Comcast cable customers to access some of Time Warner’s most popular TV shows from its TNT and TBS networks at no additional charge. Its plan is to provide TV networks and movie studios a secure way to distribute their movies and TV shows to a wider audience via the Internet.

Cable giant Comcast is reportedly in talks to gain a controlling stake in General Electric’s NBC Universal, in a deal that would help shape Comcast’s online-content strategy and help NBC Universal keep pace amid the shifting market.

You will perhaps experience a sense of stunned discomfort when I tell you that Goodrich has, indeed, been charged with aggravated menacing and causing fear of harm to an Apple employee.

Court papers do not seem to be specific as to what element might have been malfunctioning on his 115.5mm-long gadget. However, they do allege that Goodrich told an Apple store employee that he was “so mad, I could pop a 9mm at it.”

However, the allegation is not merely that Goodrich told the employee that he would, indeed, blast his iPhone. For he is accused of revealing that he happened to have the perfect little weapon behind the right side of his shirt. (Strangely, it was a black shirt.)

(Credit: CC Johan Larsson/Flickr)

If your iPhone is causing you difficulties, don’t smoke it, stroke it. Or take it to an Apple store where a genius will offer counseling.

Which makes one wonder what thoughts might have been brewing at the Kenwood Towne Centre Apple store in Cincinnati on Thursday.

Others smack their microwaves when, commanded to heat some old spaghetti bolognese, they get stuck with 45 seconds to go.

We all express frustration with our electronica in different ways.

This is not, to my knowledge, an iPhone that was already shot.

But few are those who threaten to blast their gadget and actually mean it.

Some shout at Comcast cable boxes that refuse to delete recorded shows, leaving no room for new ones.

I am not sure how many people are so intimidated by the Apple store’s graphic perfection and preternatural youthfulness that they actually take an extra 9mm with them.

According to WCPO9 (which is a Cincinnati TV station rather than C-3PO’s illicit lover), Donald Goodrich, 38, wafted into this very Apple store.
His cup appears not to have been overflowing with joy for his
iPhone.

Taking a gun to a gadget is like taking a blow-up doll to a dinner party. It doesn’t reflect well on you at all.

Oh, as well as something of a concealed weapons violation. You see, he had a concealed weapons permit, but omitted to mention to the arresting deputy that he actually had the gun on his person, according to WCPO9. A frustrating iPhone can sometimes affect one’s memory.

Microsoft has several tools for real-life law enforcement, including COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor), a USB key that can be used by cops to find information stored in the cache of a suspect’s computer.

Jacobson assured me that he’s just a fan of Microsoft, whose products he has used for the past 23 years, ever since switching from a
Mac Plus to a PC when he opened his chiropractic practice. From then on, he said, he has purchased every version of Word and Office, along with many other of the company’s products.

While nearly all the tech in the book is from Redmond, the main detective does spend lots of time on her BlackBerry (it seems Windows Mobile has a tough time getting market share in the fictional world too).

Jacobson said it makes sense that his characters turn to technology for help.

The Microsoft worker who helps Karen Vail is not a fictional character but rather Tomas Palmer, a real-life program manager in Microsoft’s security unit. Jacobson met Palmer through an executive at Microsoft. In part to thank him for his technical assistance, Jacobson decided to have Palmer play a part in the book.

“I really appreciate what Microsoft does,” Jacobson said. “They create incredibly complex software that is incredibly easy to use.”

“I asked if I could get a tour of the campus,” Jacobson said. The executive agreed and Jacobson flew back to Seattle last December and got an in-depth look at some of the latest products Microsoft is working on.

Like many who spend their days trapped inside a cubicle,
Microsoft Office probably dreams of living a more exciting life. Perhaps, when it was just a beta, it thought maybe it would grow up to be a policeman.

(Credit:
Alan Jacobson)

Well, in “Crush,” a new crime novel, the mundane piece of software gets its chance. Office, or at least one key Office document, ends up playing a central role in the pursuit of a serial killer.

Jacobson said that he was introduced to a Microsoft executive during a Seattle stop on his last book tour.

“I think that way, so some of them think that way too,” said Jacobson, who worked for years as a chiropractor before finding a new way to tingle spines.

“Technology is such a part of my life,” the book’s author, Alan Jacobson, said in an interview. “It’s part of the fabric of my life, so invariably it spills into my writing.”

I pointed out that it is usually Apple, and not Microsoft, that earns that kind of praise. Jacobson said he is aware but puzzled by that fact. “I am surprised at the animosity that exists on the blogs (toward Microsoft). They write a lot of nasty things.”

“It was fascinating,” he said. “I kept thinking Microsoft has such great technology and nobody knows about it.”

Crush, which went on sale this week, is the follow-up to “The 7th Victim,” another book where technology plays an important role. Both feature as the heroine Karen Vail, an FBI profiler who seems to have a knack for attracting murders.

Without giving away too much of the plot, it’s fair to say that a certain PowerPoint file becomes a key piece of evidence, with a worker at Microsoft finding central clues within the document’s metadata.

Gadgetry infuses the pages of Crush. While Office has the starring role, a number of products make cameos, including Windows Live, Surface, Outlook and even RoundTable, which Microsoft handed off last year to Polycom. In fact, there were so many Microsoft products, I thought perhaps it was some sort of paid placement.

The bank asked Google for information on the owner of the Gmail address, but Google said the bank had to get a court order to get access to that information. Last week, a judge in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., ordered Google to deactivate the Gmail account and Google complied, Pederson said.

Google spokesman Andrew Pederson declined to say exactly how the issue was resolved or to identify the owner of the Gmail account.

The problem began August 12 when a worker at Rocky Mountain Bank inadvertently sent an e-mail containing names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a random Gmail address. When the worker realized the mistake, a subsequent e-mail was sent to the address asking that the recipient contact the bank and destroy the data, but the bank heard no word, according to a MediaPost report.

“While we regret that the user has been locked out of their account through no fault of their own, we’re not legally able to reactivate the account until the court approves our motion to dismiss the case and vacate the TRO,” Pederson added. “We’re hopeful that the court will act quickly, and as soon as the motion is approved, we’ll reactivate the account.”

A bank that accidentally sent sensitive customer information to a Gmail address and persuaded a judge to order Google to deactivate the account has resolved the issue with Google and the companies have filed a motion to dismiss the case.

Calls to Rocky Mountain Bank and the court clerk were not immediately returned on Monday.

“After notifying the account owner, we complied with the court’s order. However, after working with Rocky Mountain Bank and the court, we resolved the issue around the bank’s error, and both sides have agreed to vacate the TRO and dismiss the case,” he said.

Update, September 29, 9:35 a.m. PDT: Google spokesman Pederson said the court granted the motion to dismiss the case on Monday, allowing the company to re-activate the Gmail account.

Maybe Ben Huh really could solve all of Gourmet magazine's problems.

Management consulting firm McKinsey had been enlisted earlier in the year to help Conde Nast handle its increasingly dire financial problems, so many people had been anticipating magazine closures (the fledgling business title Portfolio and home decor magazine Domino were silenced earlier this year).

The bittersweet jokes write themselves.

Media critic Rex Sorgatz offered his tongue-in-cheek take on the Conde Nast magazine shutterings.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

Ben Huh, the CEO of funny photo hub “I Can Has Cheezburger,” who has been known to show up at black-tie events with a giant hamburger hat on his head, on Monday offered via Twitter to purchase Gourmet, the seven-decade-old, high-end cooking magazine that will be ceasing publication in November as part of budget cuts at parent company Conde Nast.

The recent ax job at Conde Nast, long a symbol of print media’s most egregious of excesses and more recently the ultimate case of a postlapsarian publishing-industry crisis, received quite the reaction from the blogging and Twittering masses–a crowd that’s notoriously easy to ignite with debate and banter over the death of print and future of the media. Along with Gourmet, the company announced the closing of titles Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride on Monday.

“Gourmet probably took the $25 to stop writing about food,” one Twitter user quipped on Monday.

It’s sad to see such a long-lasting magazine disappear so quickly. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not surprising. Recipes are easy and convenient to put on the Web, not to mention searchable–and indeed, Gourmet recipes will live on at the Conde Nast-owned Epicurious.com. And food news has increasingly shifted to the Web with the growth of the food blogging craze, something that was exemplified in a snarky publicity stunt last week when restaurant industry blog Eater, which had just launched a “national” edition to go along with its regional sites, offered to pay any of the Web’s “about 1,000,000 cutesy food blogs” $25 to shut down.

Huh was probably kidding. We think.

But it was beloved industry mainstay Gourmet that really set off the blogosphere. Easy way to tell: the title became a “trending topic” on Twitter.

Twitter’s ubiquitous celebrity users weighed in, too; pop singer Michelle Branch tweeted “First Domino and now Gourmet. What the hell!!?? Let’s have a moment of silence.”

Reactions ranged from “Is it strange that Gourmet folding feels like losing an old friend?” to “So. I’ll never be Editor in Chief of Gourmet. Time to reassess my life goals” to “Wow. I guess I’ll be eating more TV dinners now.”

(Credit:
Twitter)