[WEB2] Flickr to use Picnik for online photo editing
[WEB2] Yahoo marketing chief to leave
The person in charge of marketing for Yahoo is the latest executive to leave the company, which is in transition. Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway is leaving the company at the end of this month, according to a Yahoo statement. Cammie Dunaway(Credit: Yahoo) "Since joining Yahoo in 2003, Cammie has built an award-winning direct-marketing team, improved the company's customer insights and found creative ways to improve our brand," the statement said. "Cammie has strengthened th...
[WEB2] AMD not delaying 45 nano manufacturing
Advanced Micro Devices is not delaying 45-nanometer manufacturing, according to the company, which is trying to correct an erroneous report on a blog. "We are still on track to produce the first (45-nanometer) products by mid-2008," said Gary Silcott, an AMD spokesman. The company will have "pretty good volumes" of 45-nanometer chips by the end of 2008, he added. (Credit: Advanced Micro Devices) The statement comes after a blog post on the Fabtech site. On its quarterly conference call,...
[WEB2] Let the fire sales on digital music begin
Two interesting pieces of news highlight the trouble online stores will face as the price of legal song downloads approaches the price of illegal downloads (which is zero). On Monday, Amazon.com announcedan extremely generous revenue-sharing program for affiliate sites to resell MP3s from the Amazon MP3 store. Amazon will give them 20 percent of the revenue from all sales until January 1, 2008, after which it will drop to 10 percent. Since Amazon sells some downloads for as low as 89 cents, t...
[WEB2] Viacom: 'Daily Show' clips just the beginning
SAN FRANCISCO--Earlier today, Viacom announced plans to put clips from its archive of The Daily Show--some 13,000 clips--on the Web. But speaking later at an industry conference here, the company's CEO said that's just a first step. "We invented fragmentation in the cable world," CEO Philippe Dauman said at the Web 2.0 Summit. "We are going to do that with a lot of our content going forward." "We believe in following the consumer. We've always done that in our history," he said. Mayb...
[WEB2] U.S. wants end to Allofmp3 spinoffs
WASHINGTON--Allofmp3.com, the controversial Russian online music store, may be effectively dead for now, especially if its sprawling mother country has any hopes of joining the World Trade Organization any time soon. In late August, controversial Russian music store Allofmp3.com vowed on its blog (screenshot shown here) to live again. U.S. authorities want to prevent that. But Russia's allegedly lackluster copyright enforcement and the rise of successor services like Alltunes.com c...
[WEB2] Designing a rocket ride into suborbit
SAN FRANCISCO--Before Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson hired him to design a futuristic tourist rocket ship, Richard Seymour's only experience in the market was dreaming up spacecraft for the movies. The U.K. industrial designer, for example, conceived of a spacecraft that could send people to the sun in the Fox Searchlight movie Sunshine. That exercise, although not technically possible, taught him to think about how hostile space is for humans, with the capability to "turn you into face c...
[WEB2] Canon has fix for high-end SLR autofocus
An adjustment to one mirror should fix an autofocus problem that has tarnished the debut of Canon's high-end EOS-1D Mark III camera, the company said Thursday. Canon's EOS-1D Mark III(Credit: Canon) "We're pretty confident this countermeasure will resolve the issue completely," said Chuck Westfall, a Canon spokesman and tech guru. "It feels nice to have a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel and know it's not another oncoming train." The $4,500 camera, geared chiefly for...
[WEB2] The VMware ecosystem
Old friend and East Coast VC bigwig Bob Davoli has long had a theory about successful technology companies that goes something like this. Success begins with strong products that establish a large customer-installed base. Once the product gains traction, users find the need for supporting technologies and tools. The product vendor will certainly provide these but the real success metric is when third parties see demand and join the fray. Finally, as the product scope grows, it also carries more ...
[WEB2] Reports: China 'hijacking' Google, Yahoo, Microsoft search sites
Ticked off that the United States gave the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal this week, China may be taking out its aggression by "hijacking" American search engines. There's speculation that the Dalai Lama's recent award from President Bush (their meeting, pictured above) has prompted Net users in China to be rerouted from U.S. search sites to Baidu.(Credit: White House) Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reports that numerous users trying to access Google...
[WEB2] YouTube-Viacom lawsuit looms over antipiracy plans
Three days after Google released its copyright-filtering technology for YouTube, the major studios have announced an alliance and guidelines of their own. It's all well and good, but things will remain in limbo until Google settles its copyright lawsuit with Viacom. Given that Google's YouTube is the most popular viral video site on the Internet, the absence of Google from the alliance is significant. Until that lawsuit is resolved and Google and all media companies are aligned, the solu...
[WEB2] Good use for hot cars
Since you're using the gas anyway, why not convert the heat from your car engine into useful electricity? That's the basic premise behind the work of Terry Tritt, professor and director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Center of Excellence in Thermoelectric Materials Research at Clemson University. Terry Tritt, director of the Department of Energy's Center of Excellence in Thermoelectric Materials Research(Credit: Clemson University) Thermoelectric generators are currently used to con...
[WEB2] Binaries are great, if you are a computer
Welcome. So what the heck is this Beyond Binary blog anyway? The idea is to give more space to some of the best parts of my job as a reporter for CNET News.com--helping to connect the dots, talking about where things are headed in the industry, and telling some of the stories behind the stories I write. As for the title, I wanted something to suggest that there's more to technology than just the code that underlies the products. What's really interesting is the way technology makes ou...
[WEB2] Green is the new black
SAN FRANCISCO--This year in design, green is the new black. That line has easily been trumpeted by everyone from design trade magazines to consumer media moguls like Oprah. But here at Connecting '07, the annual trade conference of the Industrial Designers Society of America, it's even more obvious. Headlining the opening day keynote Thursday was Martin Eberhard, co-founder of Tesla Motors, in a talk he called "sleek and green." Eberhard was accompanied by Barney Hatt, design...
[WEB2] What do 16,000 people do at Google?
I'm beginning to think that besides search advertising, hiring is the thing Google does best. On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good. The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the h...
[WEB2] Hakia launching new spin on social searching
Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate. For some idealized (yet realistic) types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info abou...
[WEB2] Web 2.0 Summit Twittercast
Josh and I are at the Web 2.0 Summit. Ironically, network connectivity is spotty here, but it looks like we can Twitter this conference pretty reliably. The conference started Wednesday with a series of workshops. Our coverage begins at 3 p.m. with the introduction of the main session by organizers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle. Update: It's Thursday, and we're kicking off the conference with a discussion between Steve Ballmer and conference organizer John Battelle. Click t...
[WEB2] At NYC Flickr party, you're always on candid camera
The scene at the studio space in West Chelsea.(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks) As a member of the press, I'm accustomed to being the token partygoer taking awkward photographs of the room. Not so much at Flickr's "24 Hours of Flickr" party in New York on Thursday night, where there were so many cameras being whipped out that you'd think it were Times Square. "I'm stuffing my face with cake, and then I look up and someone's taking a picture of me with chocolate all over my mouth," ...
[WEB2] Flickr getting a geography revamp
Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags--information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken--and now it's trying to let users get more out of them. At the Web 2.0 Summit Friday, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to demonstrate two new features, which are scheduled to debut in coming weeks. First is a revamped Flickr map page, an interface that lets people look at the photos taken at a specific location. Next is a new "places" feature that lets people...
[WEB2] Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload
Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web. With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add...