Quadtechint.com

Following Google’s announcement of its music product this morning, Facebook is officiallyenhancing its Gift Shop with a redesign and new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers. The changes will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks. On Facebook’s Gift Shop, you need to purchase credits on the site (via credit card), that cost 10 cents in U.S. currency are are available in 15 different countries. With the enhanced version of the gift shop, you will be able to purchase songs as gifts for your friends. Powered by Lala.com, the gift shop will offer over 8 million songs from a vast variety of artists ranging from Mozart to Beyonce. Web songs cost 1 credit (or 10 cents) each, while full, downloadable, and digital rights management-free (DRM) MP3s are 9 credits each. Some of this money goes to Facebook but Lala takes a cut of every transaction. But you don’t have to have a Lala account to play or receive a song.

So how do Facebook users play their songs form the social network? You can play songs from your news feed or from Lala.com’s platform, which they can connect to via Facebook Connect. If you buy an MP3, you can also download the songs you can play the tracks on iTunes or other music players. Facebook users who can see the music gift on other friend’s feeds can play the song in full once, after which they will be able to play a 30-second clip. Facebook is also getting a little more sports-friendly by adding branded virtual gifts from professional and college teams. Officially licensed gifts from the U.S. National Basketball Association and U.S. Major League Soccer are now available in the Gift Shop, as well as school-themed gifts from a number of major U.S. colleges ranging from Oklahoma State to Stanford University.
While you can currently purchase gifts from non-profits, like Kiva, Project Red, TOMS Shoes, Charity Water and the World Wildlife Fund, Facebook is now also including gifts via the Causes application. So you can make donations to a cause as a gift for your friends for pretty much any cause supported through the app.

The concept of Facebook as an e-commerce platform seems to be lifting off. PayPal is partnering with Payvment to help any Facebook user set up a retail storefront. Not to mention the immense popularity of virtual gifts on the platform. And with this new announcement, it seems that not only if Facebook opening up a revenue stream, but the network is creating a totally new way for users to socially engage with the platform: through music.

Microsoft will announce the integration of real time status updates from both Twitter and Facebook into Bing at the Web 2.0 Summit today, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deals. The announcement will be made by Qi Lu , President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, later this morning. The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information. Similar deals with Google have been rumored for some time, and we’ve confirmed that at least Twitter has been in discussions with Google around a data deal for months. But Bing is going to be first to announce these deals. It will be weeks before the new features are live on Bing, we’ve heard from our source. Facebook swamps Twitter in the number of status updates, with some 45 million of the short emotional grunts by users daily. However, Twitter updates are by default public. Facebook, in contrast, is default private and the vast majority of updates are currently protected from search engines.

Twitter has recently been criticized for exposing messages from users that have turned their accounts private – previously public messages remain indexable by search engines even after privacy settings have changed. Facebook is creating privacy controls, we’ve learned, that will allow users to set even previously public status updates to private, meaning search engines will be prohibited from indexing the content. It won’t be perfect, since anything published on the Internet is often spread far and wide. But it may allow users to hide previously public data to some extent. There are two big questions that remain unanswered at this point. First, what will Google’s response to the Bing announcements be? And second, is Bing paying for this data? Twitter is clearly counting on data streams as a revenue source, but our position has been that the data is simply too valuable to give to competitors. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free and all that.

You know the Google Maps upside-down teardrop shaped markers? It looks like they’re starting to appear in the real world, at various locations around the globe. You can see the locations that have them on this Google Maps Favorite Places page. For example, there are apparently a bunch of these markers in San Francisco already. One (which happens to be in my neighborhood) has been caught on camera. As you can see, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has his own Google Maps marker indicating that he likes La Boulange de Polk, a restaurant in the area. Newsom’s marker features a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, other famous people have their own markers. The statue is listed as being for “Summer 2009? which seems to indicate that it will expire in a few months, and Google may remove it. But for now, this looks like a very smart way for Google to promote Maps. It’s also a good way to ensure that businesses list themselves on Maps, for the possibility that they’ll receive one of these markers, which are basically a (presumably) free endorsement of the establishment. There are plenty of other famous people participating in this program including a lot of famous chefs endorsing restaurants they like, Kevin Rose (the co-founder of Digg), musicians (Moby, the guitarist of the Decemberists), and a whole host of others around the world. Perhaps these things showing up is like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it signals a shift in evolution.

IBM is enhancing its VMControl software for managing data centers to give enterprise users a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. Combined with IBM’s Tivoli software, VMControl allows for combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity, called “system pooling.” IBM says this approach optimizes virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as CPU, memory and storage. Having centralized control over virtualized environments lets companies manage large amounts of information and processing resources and then parcel them out to applications when and where they’re needed. And this efficiency also brings with it lower capital, operational and energy costs for businesses. IBM also claims that the new and improved VMControl will help with the deployment of cloud computing applications. To compliment VMControl, there’s a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that is being released that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices. The combination of Tivoli and VMControl allows for speedier deployments, gives users the ability to downsize management tools into an efficient platform, and provides for additional monitoring and management features. IBM’s vice president of technical sales for systems and technology group, David Gelardi, tells us that the upgrade of these software represents the company’s larger strategy of investment on systems software for the enterprise vs. hardware. In fact, IBM’s recent strong earnings reflects this shift in focus.

During Apple’s Q4 earnings call today, a question was asked about how Apple viewed its increased competition for the iPhone in the coming holiday season. In particular, it was asked how Apple views all the new Android phones coming out. Apple COO Tim Cook made Apple’s stance very clear: They’re still catching up with the first iPhone. Yes, Apple views the smartphone market as still being behind the first phone they released over two years ago. “We’ve moved beyond that,” Cook noted. Certainly, compared to some smartphones out there, the first iPhone still compares very well. The iPhone 3G compares even better — as we’ve written before, it’s kind of like James Bond, while a lot of others at the same price are Joe Schmoe. But to say the original iPhone is ahead of phones like the Palm Pre and the myTouch 3G seems a bit disingenuous. That said, the iPhone 3GS is, in my view, still absolutely ahead of the competiton, including the aforementioned phones. By many accounts, the upcoming Verizon Droid phone could be first real challenger to the current leading iPhone. Verizon obviously feels the same way, given its advertising campaign.

Microsoft is making a significant announcement for developers today, upgrading and adding functionality to Visual Studio 2010 to make the product more cloud-friendly in anticipation of Microsoft’s release of its commercial cloud platform Azure. Visual Studio is Microsoft’s a development environment that can be used to develop web applications, sites and services based on Microsoft’s technology platforms. Visual Studio 2010 will have additional testing options for developers to ensure quality code. Microsoft has included built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the first time that Microsoft has offered specific tools for building applications off of SharePoint. And with Visual Studio, developers can also build applications that cut across both Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure and on-premises databases. Microsoft is making it much easier for developers to build on the Azure cloud with these new tools. The specific Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio let developers build ASP.NET web applications and services that are hosted in Azure’s cloud services operating system. The tools also includes a SDK environment, and a simulated cloud environment that runs on the developer’s machine, so developers can test and debug their applications locally. Microsoft is also upgrading its .NET Framework 4, which will let developers experience smaller deployments with an 81 percent reduction in the framework size when using the Client Profile. Other benefits include additional support for industry standards, inclusion of the Dynamic Language Runtime for more language choice, new support for high-performance middle-tier applications (including parallel programming, workflow and service-oriented applications) and backward compatibility through side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5. Visual Studio is being restructured in terms of the product lineup, with customers now being able to choose from three main versions of Visual Studio 2010: Professional (which includes essential tools), Premium, and Ultimate (a comprehensive package of life-cycle management tools). Microsoft has also redesigned the UI of the MSDN developer website, including a faster version of the MSDN Library and additional community resources for programmers and developers. Although we all know that Microsoft has strong ambitions in the cloud, it appears that part of its strategy involves providing developers with the best tools possible to build high-class applications off of Azure. Microsoft knows it must engage developers to help build momentum for the much-hyped Azure.

Google is going to make a lot of frequent flyers, and Virgin America, happy this holiday season. As a gift to people who fly on Virgin America’s WiFi-equipped planes, Google will be footing the bill for everybody on board between November 10, 2009, and January 15, 2010. For Google, this is a smart marketing move because it generates tons of good will among everyone who flies Virgin America. But Google is really giving a gift to Virgin America in the form of yet one more incentive to fly its planes over competitors’. Will American Airlines and others with WiFi on board have to respond with their own freebie giveaways? I hope so. Not that I mind paying the $13 per flight to use WiFi on Virgin America flights. In fact, I go out of my way to try to fly on Virgin America, just so that I don’t waste 6 hours going from coast to coast. But giving it away free makes it even more appealing. In fact, as I’ve suggested in the past, I wonder if Virgin America would be better off giving the WiFi away for “free” to everyone on board regularly, but charging more per flight. I’d certainly be willing to pay $25 to $50 more per flight if I knew there was WiFi. But that’s just me. The only thing that worries me is whether the in-flight WiFi system can handle everyone on board surfing the Web at the same time. At least with the $13 fee, there is a natural cap to how many people use it at once.

YouTube is on the path to profitability in the “not-too-distant future,” Google reiterated today during its third quarter earnings call. And while that may sounds all well and good, they actually had some more specific impressive numbers to back it up. One is that YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views. The company also noted that 90% of the top 50 advertisers according to AdAge have now run ads on YouTube. And of its homepage ad inventory, 90% of it sold out for the quarter in the U.S., with lower, but still impressive sale rates for the rest of the world. Google also noted that YouTube was just starting to unleash its pre-roll inventory and let its salesforce have a go at selling that to advertisers, which should bring in more money. And with Warner Music Group back in the mix, they now have the four major music labels playing ball again. As a one-stop shop for many music videos, YouTube will also be able to sell ads against those, as well as make some money off of affiliate sales from iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. Earlier this month, CNET uncovered that Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted under oath that the company paid a $1 billion premium when it bought YouTube in 2006 (for $1.65 billion). The thought was always that the site was growing so quickly that they would scoop it up and figure out how to monetize it later. It would appear that they’re getting close to doing just that — albeit three years later.