These days, thinking different means eschewing the ever-so-common iPod, says the U.K.'s T3, a gadget magazine. For those who don't want to follow the crowd, the magazine offers five iPod alternatives, each with its own charms. Topping T3's list is the Meizu miniPlayer, which the Browser wrote about in May, and features "a stunning screen and pint-sized proportions."

Creative, which has struggled to gain traction in the MP3 player market it pioneered, has a potential winner in the Zen V Plus, which includes an FM radio and voice recorder. The iRiver T10's battery lasts for 53 hours, a good thing for those who don't want to keep recharging. Sony Ericsson's V630i music phone can play MP3s and also does Internet radio over its cell-phone data connection. And the MobiBlu US2 is even thinner than a Nano.

The downside to all of these iPod alternatives? None of them work with the iTunes Music Store, so if you've bought a lot of music there, you'll have to kiss those tracks goodbye along with your iPod.

Is there life after Windows Vista? Microsoft is already looking past the Windows XP successor that took five years to hatch to a radically different version of the Windows operating system. New "multicore" chips from Intel and AMD, which include multiple processors on a single piece of silicon, could require a substantial revamp of Windows, says Bryan Barnett, a program manager in Microsoft's research operation. While Windows Vista will run on multicore chips, it doesn't take full advantage of their processing power.

Of course, the biggest holdup to starting work on the replacement to Vista may be getting Vista out the door. The much-delayed operating system may not reach consumers until the second quarter of 2007, says Citigroup analyst Brent Thill.

How do startups die? There's the MySpace cease-and-desist letter, a reliable death knell. There's a crushing surfeit of competition. And now, there's the really stupid way to go: accidentally deleting yourself. TechCrunch looks into the boneheaded, utterly avoidable end of CouchSurfing. The two-and-a-half-year-old startup was revolutionizing the travel industry through the peer-to-peer provision of lodging -- er, that is, letting strangers meet online and make arrangements to sleep on each others' couches. On Friday, though, the website suffered a fatal hard drive crash and its operators found that they didn't have the needed backups. Founder Casey Fenton left a long, rambling message on the website explaining how "This crash is like a sign from the universe" that he should abandon the project. A lesson to entrepreneurs: If you're going to pour three years of your life into a project, invest in some decent backup software.

With an SEC stock-options investigation roiling the tech industry, Apple made a smart PR move and announced it was investigating itself -- before the SEC got around to it. In a statement late Thursday, the company said that it was investigating "irregularities" in stock options granted between 1997 and 2001, including one grant made to CEO Steve Jobs. Jobs's option, however, was cancelled in 2003 before he exercised it, so he didn't gain anything from the grant in question, according to Apple.

Perhaps Apple should be investigating Jobs's business acumen instead. If he'd held onto those options and exercised them instead of trading them in for a restricted stock grant, the shares would now be worth more than $3 billion. But even the visionary Jobs couldn't have predicted Apple's iPod-fueled stock rise. And for Jobs, who's already a billionaire from selling Next Software to Apple, and then Pixar to Disney, his reputation may be more valuable than whatever profit he might have made from exercising possibly tainted options.

Google wants to save users the trouble of remembering multiple usernames and passwords by letting other websites use its login system, the Identity 2.0 blog reports. For websites, the motivation is two-fold: They won't have to spend time coding their own login system, and they can tap into Google's growing user base. For users, the appeal seems simple -- they won't have to remember yet another username and password. (Only Google will see the user's password; the website will just get an "authentication token" meant to prove the user's identity.)

But Google's new Account Authentication system poses some troubling issues -- largely the same ones Microsoft faced five years ago when it tried to introduce Passport, a similar master password for the Internet. The debate back then was fierce, but boiled down to this question: Can we trust a single company with all of our online identities?

Digital ID World notes an irony here: Microsoft, bruised by its past experience, is relaunching Passport as Live ID, which lets websites use any online ID directory, not just the one Microsoft currently uses to let people log into Hotmail and other MSN websites. Google's system, by contrast, only works with Google usernames and passwords. And of course, it makes Google the sole guardian of our digital identities. So: Are you ready to hand over your ID?

As it delves deeper into software, Apple has already found itself competing with Adobe, Google, and Yahoo. Now rumor has it that it's taking on Skype, too. AppleInsider reports that the upcoming "Leopard" version of Mac OS X, set for a preview in August, will include VOIP features in Apple's iChat software to allow Mac users to call regular phone lines, not just other iChat users. With AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google all including VOIP in their instant-messenger software programs, the feature seems like a competitive must-have. But it may also be a defensive move on Apple's part to keep Mac users happy, since some of the most popular IM programs aren't available on the Mac, or don't include VOIP in their Mac versions.

Who's on Craig's list? Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Google, and Yahoo, for starters. The five Internet giants signed an amicus brief in a housing-discrimination case filed against Craigslist in Chicago, Law.com reports. Craigslist, a classifieds-listing site founded by software programmer Craig Newmark, has been accused of discrimination because of listings posted by users on its site looking for, among other characteristics, "gay Latino" or "Christian" roommates. A variety of local and federal housing laws prohibit most kinds of discrimination in housing ads. But the federal Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, Craigslist's online allies argue, protect websites from liability for content posted by their users.

For Craigslist's allies, the issue goes way beyond roommate-wanted ads. Amazon and eBay et al. don't want to be liable for users' postings, since that would put a major crimp on their plans to rely on user-generated content for more and more of their Web traffic. It's no wonder that online publishers want to protect this legal privilege, since they enjoy an enviable position compared with other media. While newspapers might get sued for publishing such ads, Craigslist is in a different legal position thanks to the 1996 law, notes Eric Goldman in his Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

At a remote satellite-transmission facility in Cornwall, BT is opening what's billed as the world's fastest Internet cafe. BT's Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, which attracts 80,000 visitors a year to the site on a remote peninsula in the southwest of England, is hooked directly into the British telecom firm's high-speed Internet backbone. By tapping right into the backbone rather than going through a series of local network links, the cafe's computers will let users surf at speeds of 100 megabits per second, which is 20 to 60 times faster than the typical home broadband connection. The cafe's not just an opportunity for BT to demonstrate its networking prowess: Apple and Cisco are also using it as a showcase for their technology. Then again, that's assuming anyone will travel to a remote peninsula in the U.K. just to surf the Net at 100 megabits per second.

Prepare for a next-generation smartphone duel this fall: Palm is prepping two new Treo models for October, while Research In Motion has a new BlackBerry due in November, according to leaked documents provided to Engadget Mobile. The new "BlackBerry Stealth" looks similar to RIM's 7130C model, and Engadget dings it for lacking a built-in camera and support for high-speed 3G networks. The Palm Infocenter blog is more excited about the Palm models, noting that the two new smartphones round out Palm's promise to release four new models this year, including the earlier Treo 700w and 700p. The larger Treo Lennon will run Windows Mobile, support 3G networks, and includes BlackBerry-like software that pushes emails to the device. The smaller Treo Nitro runs the Palm OS, and could be priced under $300, according to Palm Infocenter.

Which would you buy -- RIM's latest, or one of Palm's upcoming models?

At Cambridge University, computer-security researcher Richard Clayton has found a way to defeat the fearsome Great Firewall of China: Just ignore it. The Great Firewall, a system of routers and other network equipment that lets China's rulers censor the Internet, blocks Web pages with objectionable terms like "Falun Gong" and "democracy." China's online censorship regime has had a massive impact on the Internet, forcing Google to compromise its principles to gain access to the Chinese market.

But Clayton has found that the Great Firewall may not be any more successful than the real Great Wall in keeping out foreign influences. In order to efficiently censor the entire Internet, the Firewall's routers don't actually block Internet traffic. That would require many more machines than China has installed, and slow down Internet access for the entire country. Instead, China's routers, when they detect an objectionable word or phrase, send a signal to the Internet user's computer that makes it think the original Web server has stopped responding to the request to download a page. Clayton found that these fake requests are easy to distinguish from real ones, and that by updating their Internet software to ignore them, Chinese Internet users can surf any page they want.

Last year, some shareholders criticized Cisco for its involvement in building China's censorship systems. Maybe they should be scolding Cisco for building shoddy, easily defeated software instead.

What do you think? Will China's Great Firewall withstand this crafty assault from abroad?

Avast, ye mateys: Windows Vista will eliminate a licensing loophole that has proven popular with Windows software pirates since the introduction of Windows 1995. Microsoft technically requires every copy of Windows to have a unique licensing key entered in at installation, to prove that the software was paid for. But for more than a decade, Microsoft has given large corporate customers so-called "volume licensing keys" that let them install Windows on all of their employees' PCs with a single key. Forcing corporations to track thousands of keys was too cumbersome, so Microsoft just performed occasional audits, mostly trusting its largest customers not to abuse the system. But naturally, pirates have latched onto these corporate keys as a way to churn out illegal copies of Windows.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft is putting the honor system to an end, writes tech trade CRN. Vista will include "key management" features to track Windows installations. For corporate customers, that has pluses and minuses. Key management may mean paying more for software in the short term. But for companies that are trying to stay honest, it will cut down on in-house expenditures to track copies of Windows. And for pirates? Maybe it's time to raise the white flag.
Will Vista's key-management features cut down on piracy? Tell us below.

Online publishing blog PaidContent.org is reporting that ThePlatform, a startup that builds customized, YouTube-like video-sharing websites for corporate customers, has been purchased by Comcast for more than $80 million. PaidContent's Rafat Ali -- who also got a big check of his own recently -- reports that he heard Comcast and ThePlatform were in acquisition talks late last year. The cable provider already uses ThePlatform to power TheFan, its online-video website that's used by traditional video providers like ABC, CBS and ESPN. For now, Comcast plans to let ThePlatform keep running sites for its other customers, like ABCNews.com and CourtTV. The upshot? Expect Comcast to get serious about online video, now that it has an in-house technology platform.

The Deal's Tech Confidential blog reports that former AT&T Broadband CEO Leo Hindery is predicting the demise or acquisition of four out of the five major portals today -- AOL, eBay, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. That's a gutsy call for a group whose combined market capitalization is $225 billion. But Hindery argues that much of that market cap rightfully belongs to content providers like CBS, Disney, and NBC Universal, and distributors like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, and that over time much of the portals' market value will shift to them.

That's big talk coming from a guy responsible for several bubble-era flops, writes Techdirt. At AT&T Broadband, Hindery helped seal the fate of Excite@Home, the Web portal and cable-broadband provider that went bankrupt after bickering between AT&T and its other cable partners. And his stint at Web-hosting provider GlobalCenter during the bursting of the telecom bubble was similarly undistinguished. Hindery's arguments today are as wrongheaded as his management moves back then, argues Techdirt: "People aren't going online to get Disney or Time Warner content -- but to email with people, to instant message with people, to read and post to blogs."

Do you think Hindery has a point?

Ready for another Steve Jobs keynote? The most foaming of the Mac faithful are still fanning themselves from this January's speech at Macworld Expo, where Jobs stunned the crowd with the announcement that Intel Macs were available months ahead of schedule. Now comes word that Jobs will again headline the lineup at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, set to take place in San Francisco August 7-11, and his hardcore fans are frothing at the prospect of seeing their idol once more.

The main topic of discussion at the conference? Apple's new "Leopard" operating system, the latest version of Mac OS X. The Technology Chronicles points out that Leopard is the first OS designed specifically for Intel chips, so this is an upgrade especially worth watching. Paul Thurrott is hotly anticipating Leopard, too, saying that the new release should be packed with features to "deflect pressure" from Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system.

Do you plan to upgrade to Leopard?

At the Convergence 2.0 conference in New York on Monday, an NBC executive said that the network plans to market its new fall lineup of shows by broadcasting user-created "mashups" of NBC video clips as on-air promos. Gillian Lusins, vice president for intellectual property at NBC Universal, said the company plans to provide an online video-editing tool that lets users modify and remix video clips from its shows to create their own in-house promotional spots. eWeek's Steve Bryant speculates that NBC will use Flash, since the popular Adobe Web-video format is harder to copy (and therefore pirate) than other formats.

In a related development, NBC and web video outfit YouTube announced a partnership today where NBC will provide official promotional clips to YouTube, and YouTube would host a make-your-own promo contest for NBC's "The Office." While that seems like a halfway step to Lusins' vision of hosting video tools on NBC's own websites, "The Office" contest, as well as NBC's plans to broadcast user-generated mashups, should delight Todd Copilevitz of the Advertising Ourselves to Death blog, since he asked in May when NBC would start broadcasting user-generated content over the air, not just on its websites.

Do you think many people will bother putting together videos for a broadcast network?

Ah, college -- those sweet, innocent years when we made idiots of ourselves in public. These days, college administrators are worried that the Internet is making student follies a bit too public, however, which is why Kent State has banned its student athletes from Facebook, giving them until August 1 to remove their profiles. Kent State administrators say they're concerned for the students' safety, but the Columbus Dispatch suggests that they're more worried about the school's image. One Kent State athlete showed a photo of himself shirtless with a can of Miller Lite, while another belonged to the "My cell phone is my best friend when I'm drunk at Kent" group on Facebook.

On Ars Technica, Peter Pollack argues that despite free-speech issues, Kent State is wise to protect its image. But a ban, it says, is the wrong way to go. "Outright bans are probably less likely to produce the desired effect than simply educating the students about what is expected of them and potential issues they may face," writes Pollack. "Education, after all, is what going to college is all about, isn't it?"

Microsoft is famed for its strategy of burying competitors' products with "fear, uncertainty, and doubt," or FUD. But lately, it seems to be applying the FUD most liberally to its own offerings.

Take the fate of WinFS, a new, database-driven file system that was once supposed to be a key feature of Windows Vista -- and forever change how we do computing, according to Microsoft. Now, in a curiously oblique blog post, Microsoft's Quentin Clark announced that a planned beta release of WinFS wouldn't be forthcoming, and that components of WinFS would instead find their way into Microsoft's SQL Server database software and other less widely used products.

What does that mean? Programmer Charles Miller quickly decoded the post's "marketing-speak": "WinFS is dead." Since the database file system was one of Bill Gates's pet projects, bloggers like Robert Scoble were quick to point out that WinFS's disappearance as a standalone product had "interesting timing." Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo says that killing WinFS was the right thing to do, but that the decision came two years too late: "It's sad to think about the projects that got killed or disrupted because of WinFS only for this to happen." Sure sounds like there's a lot of fear, uncertainy, and doubt inside Microsoft these days.

What do you make of Microsoft's WinFS maneuvering?

For Google, a dispute over student information found online via Google has turned into a legal fight. On Friday, North Carolina Superior Court judge Richard D. Boner (yes, that's his name) issued a temporary injunction ordering the search engine to remove information about the Catawba County Schools Board of Education. The dispute began last week when the Hickory Daily Record reported that a student's parent had found the names and Social Security numbers of 619 middle-school students in a Google search. The school claimed that Google had broken through the password protection on the school's website to access the page; a Google spokesman said that was impossible.

Techdirt feels that the school should get its own injunction against stupidity. "It certainly sounds like the school district left the information open, and doesn't want to admit it," observes Techdirt, and the injunction seems pointless, given that a lawsuit is "bound to fail." SearchEngineWatch doesn't buy the school's story, either: "Someone at the school must have left an opening for Google."

What do you think? Did the school system do enough to protect its students' personal data? Leave a comment below.

ContentNext Media, a website operator best known for online-media blog PaidContent.org, has taken a first round of funding from Greycroft Partners, the latest investing vehicle for private equity biggie Alan Patricof. ContentNext founder Rafat Ali describes the funding as the "next big step" since his site's launch in 2003. A gaggle of bloggers logged comments on his post to bask in the reflected warmth of the infusion of capital: "This is not only a good day for you and your team but also a great day for blogging and all of the bloggers," writes one.

Ali's new backer, Patricof, is the celebrated investor known for putting money behind Apple, AOL, New York magazine, and Office Depot, among others. Patricof also backed Wolff New Media, the ill-fated startup of journalist-turned-entrepreneur-turned-journalist Michael Wolff, who later penned the book Burn Rate, a bemused reflection on his own dealings with Patricof, media revolutions, and liquidity events.

The Business Roundtable, a high-powered, invitation-only group of 160 of the nation's top CEOs, issued a report Friday saying that the U.S. is "ill-prepared for a cyber catastrophe." The report suggests that a major blow to the Internet -- from a natural disaster or terrorist attack -- could bring the U.S. economy to a halt, writes Ars Technica. There are three key problem areas: The lack of an early warning mechanism for problems, ambiguous and overlapping responsibilities for Internet management, and insufficient resources in the hands of recovery organizations. Hurricane Katrina, according to Ars, was a wakeup call for the group.

Indeed, Roundtable president John Castellani told the press, "If our nation is hit by a cyber-Katrina that wipes out large parts of the Internet, there is no coordinated plan in place to restart and restore the Internet." Ars readers, for their part, greeted the news with black humor. No worries, writes one, "just send an email out to everyone when there's an Internet attack." To which another responds, "And when you get that email, make sure that you click 'Reply All' so everyone knows you got it."

Seriously though, what should the government and the business sector being doing to prepare for a massive Internet outage?

MySpace has a message for startups: It's our space, not yours. The social networking site has forced the shutdown of DatingAnyone.com, a site that alerted its users to changes in the "relationship status" of designated MySpace members. TechCrunch notes that this is the second startup MySpace has killed in as many weeks. Last week a similar site called SingleStat.us shut down due to MySpace's legal threats after less than two weeks in existence.

In MySpace's "cease-and-desist" letter -- which DatingAnyone founder Jared Chandler posted on his shuttered site -- MySpace ticks of several concerns, notably that Chandler's "automated script" would put an undue burden on its servers, and that its terms of service expressly ban the commercial use of user information. All valid points, but, as Chandler writes, "it's unfortunate that there is no avenue for outside improvement of MySpace." He even suggests that allowing a broader community of developers to create enhancements for the service might help solve the problem of sexual predators, and TechCrunch readers seem to side with him. Writes one: "Pathetic! MySpace is destroying the innovation here! Their reasoning is ridiculous. People should be aware of this evil approach of MySpace!"

MySpace is shooting themselves in the foot. Certainly, the issues are complex, but opening up its site as a "platform" would allow third-party programmers to expand MySpace's features -- and lock in its status as the top social-networking site. Look at how Google made Google Maps so popular by opening it up to outside programmers.

Are we missing something? Should MySpace open up? Leave a comment below.

Gizmodo reports that Samsung appears to be backpedaling on plans for a next-generation DVD player that can handle both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs. The move was brash for Samsung, a member of the Blu-Ray Disc Association, which is promoting the Blu-Ray format for high-definition videodiscs. Blu-Ray, favored by Sony, which is including it in its PlayStation 3 videogame console and is releasing movies in the format, is also supported by the Universal, Disney, and Fox studios. HD-DVD, meanwhile, has support from the tech industry, including Toshiba, Microsoft, NEC, and Intel. Warner Bros., Universal and Paramount are also officially HD-DVD backers, but they're releasing movies in both formats.

Samsung had been trying to stay above the fray by producing a player that reads both formats. But, if Gizmodo is correct in reading the tea leaves, Samsung's Blu-Ray buddies may be pressuring the electronics giant to stay true to the cause. Not that consumers hoping for a universal player should worry, says Gizmodo's Charlie White: "There’s still LG, which publicly announced it would manufacture a player that goes both ways, and those in the know are saying other companies are sniffing around the possibility, too."

What's the biggest photo site around? It's not Flickr, Yahoo Photos, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, or any other site you've likely heard of. Instead, research firm Hitwise reports, it's PhotoBucket, a free service favored by MySpace users. PhotoBucket accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. Web traffic to photo websites, according to Hitwise's analysis. Yahoo Photos ran a distant second at 18 percent, and Flickr ranked sixth with 6 percent. MySpace provided 56 percent of PhotoBucket's traffic, which accounted for its rapid rise this year. "Amazing," says Om Malik at GigaOm, noting that Flickr's vaunted Ajax programming techniques didn't win it more traffic. "Success has nothing to do with Ajax or cool stuff. It has everything to do with simplicity and giving users what they want."

Which photo site do you prefer?

Despite widespread rumors, Sun didn't announce expected mass layoffs of as many as 5,000 employees on Thursday. A company spokesperson said that the layoffs have actually been ongoing, in smaller waves, since a May 31 restructuring announcement, and that only about 400 got pink slips. But CEO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking at the Supernova conference, gave a pretty big clue as to where his slow-motion ax would fall in the future. "The era of custom hardware is on its way out," Schwartz told the crowd. That spells bad news, presumably, for anyone working on Sun's high-end Sparc servers, which use a special chip that's incompatible with the much more common Intel processor. Whose jobs are safest? Anyone working on Sun's Solaris and Java software, which Schwartz appears to favor.

Do you work for Sun, or know someone who does? What do you hear about the cuts?

We can't help but admire San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus. While a tad overserious, the high-tech consumer crusader is at his best when catching corporate PR people in the act of contradicting themselves.

Take his ruthless dissection of AT&T's new privacy policy, for example. "We don't see this as anything new," AT&T spokesman John Britton told Lazarus. That was Britton's first mistake. Lazarus then proceeds to lay out how the privacy policy now informs customers that AT&T, not the customer, owns the personal information like calling records that AT&T stores, and that the new policy lacks an acknowledgement found in the old policy that "privacy is an important issue for our customers and members." AT&T's new policy also says that it will track what customers watch on AT&T's satellite and Internet TV services -- a practice seemingly barred by a 1984 federal law that forbids cable and satellite TV providers from collecting or disclosing information about viewing habits.

AT&T spokesman Britton then went on to suggest that AT&T customers ought to hone their mind-reading skills. "There were many things that were implied in the last policy," Britton told Lazarus. "We're just clarifying the last policy." AT&T customers, in other words, were supposed to deduce from a privacy policy that explicitly told customers that privacy was important that, in fact, it didn't matter after all. If so, Britton's claim that the new policy is "easier to read" may be the only straightforward thing he said.

Real Tech News says that the change in privacy policies is really a response to the controversy over AT&T's "alleged participation in [National Security Agency] wiretapping." The new policy includes language that appears to cover any disclosure of records in a government investigation.

What do you think? Is AT&T's privacy policy something to worry about? Leave a comment below.

According to videogame news site TeamXBox, Major League Gaming -- the first professional sporting league for videogamers -- has signed a four-man Halo 2 team to a $1 million contract. Described as "by far the largest" deal ever for professional videogamers, news of the multi-year exclusive deal came as MLG also announced that Red Bull would become the league's official drink. All this has, not surprisingly, provoked discussion on Digg about whether gamers should be considered athletes. Commented one wag, "Gamers are not athletes. Try and have an ounce of respect for the people who wear that title. Except baseball players." Foul ball!

Should gamers be considered athletes? Tell us what you think.

There's a new ringtone in town, and the older you are, the less likely you are to hear it. Agence France Presse reports that a ringtone known as "Teen Buzz," originally developed by a British security firm to discourage loitering by youths has "invaded U.S. classrooms." At a frequency of 17 Khz, the tone apparently "falls within the highest of pitches noticeable to humans." But as we age, we lose the ability to hear high-pitched tones. Students can thus delight themselves by text-messaging each other without arousing their aging teacher's suspicions. Of course, the downward glances and furious thumb-typing might still give them away.

New Yorker writer Louis Menand, inspired to a comical rant, writes that the main news of the story "is not that students are fooling their teachers, which was never news, even in ancient Greece, or that technology is rapidly unraveling the fabric of trust and respect on which civil society depends, which everyone already knows. It is that one more way for middle-aged people to feel that they're losing it has been discovered."

One block away from each other on Chicago's luxe Michigan Avenue shopping district stand dueling cell-phone flagships. First came Motorola's Destination Q, and now comes Nokia's flagship store, set to open this Saturday. Motorola's store is a single-purpose pop-up store meant to promote its Q smartphone, the cell-phone maker's answer to RIM's BlackBerry. Engadget Mobile found the store a bit too Q-centric: "Perhaps we didn't realize how focused it would be."

Nokia's, by contrast, is a considerably more substantial store, Engadget reports after an exclusive pre-opening walkthrough, featuring high-tech displays and LCD price tags below the phones. When the store opens this Saturday, Chicago residents and visitors will be able to see displays for Nokia's 8801 slider phone, the Vertu luxury phone line, and the N91 media-player phone, among others. "Nokia's effort wallops Destination Q soundly in every category," concludes Engadget.

Tell us which phone you find most appealing -- Motorola's Q or Nokia's new slider phone.

The numbers are in, and ABC's trial of streaming TV shows online appears to be a success, with 11 million viewers clicking to watch free, ad-supported shows like "Lost" and "Alias" on their PCs in the month of May. ABC plans to keep running the site through the end of June and then close it down for a fall relaunch. Random Culture says that this shows there's a role for free TV on the Web, pointing out that Disney, ABC's parent company, only sold 6 million TV shows for $1.99 apiece on Apple's iTunes store in nine months. Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo is more skeptical, however: Crunching the numbers, he finds that there were only 91,667 viewers per show per day, which doesn't even add up to a single Nielsen rating point.

What do you think about watching TV shows online? Does the idea appeal to you?

A 14-year old Texas teen has sued MySpace for $30 million, saying she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year old who contacted her through the site, masquerading as a high-school senior who played football. This is, of course, just the latest in a long stream of sexual-predator charges afflicting the social network, and Valleywag, for one, has started to lose its patience: "Look, kid, just because your dream boy turned out to not be a high-school football hottie doesn't mean MySpace will cut you a $30 million check," writes the acid-tongued Silicon Valley gossip site. Maybe so, but Publishing 2.0 thinks Mr. Murdoch's fast-growing Internet play is a "ticking time bomb" because of cases like this.

Meanwhile, MySpace has announced plans to go global, no doubt hoping that there will be fewer sexual predators -- or less litigious victims -- overseas. In an interview yesterday with the Financial Times, co-founder Chris DeWolfe went public with the social network's imminent plans to expand into 11 countries, specifically naming France, Germany, China and India. But the real shocker here is that DeWolfe and crew have made it to upwards of 75 million registered users, without even getting around to offering foreign-language versions of the service. Mon dieu!

The ongoing battle surrounding digital rights management (DRM) -- the software that prevents unauthorized copying of music and video files -- is raging in full view today. You may recall DefectivebyDesign, the activist pranksters who showed up at a Microsoft conference last month in Hazmat suits to protest file formats that restrict users from sharing songs or movies. They're now asking volunteers to telephone executives at the Recording Industry Association of America to register their displeasure with these "crippled" files.

Meanwhile, fellow DRM foe Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing amps up the buzz surrounding a biting ad taken out by the Consumer Electronics Association in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. The ad features comically technophobic quotes from radio and television industry executives over the last century, making the point that the industry has a long history of knee-jerk opposition to technology change. Radio, for example, was once said to spell an end to the public purchase of music, while videotapes were nothing less than a threat to the American economy, according to the Motion Picture Association of America in 1982: "Now we are faced with a new and very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the videocassette recorder." Note to the MPAA: It looks like the economy has survived quite nicely, which is to say nothing of all the profits Hollywood studios rake in from DVDs.

Who says Microsoft's a slow-moving, lumbering giant? When it comes to eighty-sixing executives, Microsoft can move surprisingly fast. Take the unexpected exit of Martin Taylor, a longtime lieutenant to CEO Steve Ballmer who had recently been put in charge of the company's strategy to take on Google. Mere minutes after reports of his departure hit the Bloomberg wires late on Tuesday, Microsoft had already updated its website to note that the corporate vice president was no longer with the company.

Taylor, who at 36 had already been tapped as a potential successor to Bill Gates, had led Microsoft's anti-Linux push and in March had been promoted to head up marketing for Microsoft's Windows Live push, a response to Google's free, advertising-supported Web software. He even did a Q&A on Monday about the launch of Windows Live Messenger, one of Microsoft's first new Web-integrated software products.

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox noted on the Microsoft Monitor blog that the departure was "sudden -- and unexpected." A company spokesperson told Bloomberg, "We've made the difficult decision to part ways with Martin." The company wouldn't give further details, but given the usual way Microsoft announces executive departures, that suggests that Microsoft, not Taylor, made the decision for him leave. And the abrupt departure of a longtime Ballmer protege does suggest that the CEO's power at the company is waning.

All five "American Idol" winners hail from Southern states. Is that a coincidence -- or a result of "Idol"'s sponsorship arrangement with Cingular Wireless? The deal gives the wireless carrier's subscribers the exclusive privilege of voting by text message instead of calling into "Idol"'s oft-clogged phone lines. According to research firm NPD Group, half of Cingular's 18 million text-messaging users come from the South, a result of Atlanta-based Cingular's formation from the merger of SBC and BellSouth's wireless divisions in 2001. In theory, that means that Cingular text-message users in the South may well be able to swing the vote.

There's a problem with the theory, though, RCR Wireless News points out -- Cingular took over as an "American Idol" sponsor after it acquired AT&T Wireless, based in Redmond, Wash., in 2004. AT&T Wireless, the original sponsor of American Idol, didn't have Cingular's demographic skew. That means Southerners Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard won in the first two seasons on their own charms, not regional bias.

Meanwhile, some fans of Chris Daughtry actually believe that it was a technical problem with "Idol"'s conventional phone lines, not text-messaging demographics, that was to blame for his loss.

Did voting technology influence the show's outcome? Tell us what you think.

According to Forbes Magazine, 50 Cent, the rapper and hip-hop impresario, has been in talks with Apple's Steve Jobs about launching "an affordable line of personal computers for the inner city." It doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Why shouldn't the inner city have easy-to-use, affordable computers, and why shouldn't 50 Cent, the hardcore gangsta rapper who last year brought us the autobiographical movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin," be the person to help make it happen? As he said to Forbes about his rap career, "I never got into it for the music. I got into it for the business." Apple's personal computer business has more momentum now than it has in years, but it still remains tiny relative to the WinTel monopoly. And while it isn't clear just how much a partnership with 50 Cent would actually boost Apple's market share, courting a new audience by going "old school" couldn't hurt.

But this will require lower-cost machines which may put pressure on Apple's margins. Steve Jobs, known for his exacting design standards, may balk at the inevitable design compromises, which could also alienate the vocal Mac faithful. Moreover, "Fitty," with his history of gunplay and explicit lyrics, might prove a problematic partner for the progressive, family-friendly computer company.

Still, the man born as Curtis Jackson earned $41 million last year from a panoply of product lines -- including his G-Unit clothing, sneakers, videos and even mineral water -- has proven to be a shrewd businessman. And Steve Jobs has always been the Mac Daddy when it comes to marketing. If nothing else, we'd love to see Jobs and 50 Cent on stage at the next Macworld Expo talking trash about Windows machines.

Things are heating up in competition for instant messaging market share. Monday saw the release of Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger, and on the same day Yahoo delivered an upgraded version of its IM client, while also providing tools to third party developers to write "plug-ins," or add-on tools, for the software. Clearly, Yahoo hopes that opening up its IM tool will help it stay ahead in the IM arms race.

Elinor Mills at ZDNet reports that the web portal and its partners have already released upwards of 20 plug-ins for the client that allow users to monitor eBay auctions, share calendars, and listen to music while chatting, among other things. With messeging tools taking on more functionality, notably adding voice messaging (or VoIP) capability, the IM client may now have usurped the web browser as the Internet's most contested turf. For some, however, piling all of these new features into chat software is too much. "I don't know about you, but I'd prefer my core Web services in my Web browser," writes John Paczkowski at Good Morning Silicon Valley. "Adding them to an instant messaging client just seems to be needlessly mucking things up."

With its utter domination of the U.S. Web search market nearly complete, it's natural for Google to look abroad for growth. Already, the company's mobile division is based in London, headed up by Nikesh Arora, a former T-Mobile executive who is now vice president for European operations, the Times of London says. And the company is desperately trying to hire someone to head up efforts to "localize," or translate, all of its Web products for the 112 countries where Google has registered its domain name, IDG News reports. Google executives have asked Reinhard Schaler, a localization expert at the University of Limerick, to help find candidates. Already, Google's Dublin staff hails from 40 different countries and together speak 30 languages, but apparently, that's not enough.

What do you think? Is Google better off seeking growth overseas? Leave a comment below.

Note to Massachusetts politicians: Bill Gates may be on his way out, but his lobbying juggernaut isn't going anywhere. A case in point is the struggle in the Bay State over the Open Document Format, an open standard for saving documents that competes with Microsoft Office's proprietary file formats. The state government's policy favors ODF, but Microsoft is using both public philanthropy and behind-the-scenes lobbying to undermine it.

The software giant made headlines and raised eyebrows last week by donating $30 million in software to Massachusetts schools. It was a seemingly generous gift, worth some $800 per student according to Standards Blog, but one that may have come with strings attached. Since Word and other Microsoft software don't support ODF, accepting the gift would mean a blow to the state's plans for ODF.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is continuing an invidious lobbying campaign against Massachusetts's controversial CIO. Although an amendment that would have limited the CIO's power to mandate ODF was recently defeated, the Standards Blog reports that the fight isn't over: "I am told by an informed source that the amendment lives on." The Microsoft-friendly proposal will be voted on separately, according to the blog. Slashdot users are already conducting a vigorous debate. Some see Microsoft's software gift as a good thing regardless of motive, while others are a bit more cynical: "Microsoft offered $30 million in software licenses. That's not money. That's advertising."

What do you think? Is Microsoft's supposed charity really a move to quash competition? Leave a comment below.

Believe it or not, the Recording Industry Association of America does something besides sue music fans. Most recently, it's extended its gold- and platinum-album awards to cell-phone ringtones. The Associated Press dubs the first-ever awards -- which substitute a gold or platinum cell phone for the customary precious-metal disc -- "blingtones." In total, 84 musicians received golden cell phones for sales of 500,000 or more ringtones, 40 received platinum ones for sales above a million, and 4 received multiplatinum awards for sales that topped 2 million.

About 10 percent of music-industry revenues now come from ringtones, making hot-selling blingtones an increasingly important part of the business. Even Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took notice, wondering if the industry would need to invent a level above multiplatinum, since the audience for ringtones consists of more than a billion cell-phone users worldwide.

Olli and Najib, meet Craig. PaidContent.org reports that the quasi-socialist online classifieds service has added another 100 cities to its lineup. "The U.S. expansion covers 72 new markets from Akron/Canton, Ohio to Yakima, Wash.., including nine in Texas," -- as well as 28 international sites including Beirut and Helsinki.

According to the Wall Street Journal's Brian Carney, who broke the news in a weekend interview with Craisglist CEO Jim Buckmaster, the expansion represents a doubling of Craislist's U.S. market presence. "Since its founding," writes Carney in his best line, "Craigslist has been aggressively passive (newspapermen might say passively aggressive) about monetizing its huge audience and user base."

That passive aggression -- Craigslist's longstanding reluctance to splash advertising all over the website or charge fees for anything but a few listing categories -- is about to hit the good folks at the once highly profitable Akron Beacon Journal, who were no doubt just getting back to work after getting sold off by erstwhile parent Knight Ridder. Things could be worse: They could be working at Beirut's Daily Star. Compared to the prospect of Syrian meddling in the newsroom, a little competition from Craigslist might not look so bad.

The New York Times has finally deigned to discover the movement toward customer-designed goods -- a trend previously documented by Business 2.0, among other outlets. The Times, however, does illustrate that the idea of letting customers use the Web drive new products is spreading into unexpected new areas, like shoes. Designer John Fluevog solicits designs from loyal "Fluevogers" online, calling it "open source footwear." Threadless, a T-shirt store, has contests for the best customer designs.

Consultant Rex Hammock finds the notion familiar, saying that it echoes themes found in a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which proclaims that online communication will undermine the traditional approach to marketing. It's unlikely that shoe fans read that geeky tome, however. Fluevog, according to the Times, just sees the move to selling customer-created shoes as a natural outgrowth of his customers' enthusiasm.

What's Apple up to? Lately, we haven't seen much innovation from the maker of computers and music players, save for swapping out IBM chips for Intel processors in its desktop and notebook lineup. But the latest rumors indicate that the company may be set to release a new wave of breakthrough products. For one, it may have an ultraportable PC in the works, similar to Microsoft's indifferently received Origami designs. Apple's ultraportable would use flash memory -- the same kind of memory used in the iPod Nano, which could give Apple a substantial price advantage over competitors, since it purchases the component in very high volumes. The new computer could come as soon as the next Macworld Expo in January 2007.

Meanwhile, Taiwan's China Post reports that Hon Hai Precision Industries, a major contract manufacturer for Apple, is planning to sell $1.8 billion in shares to fund expansion plans. Chairman Terry Gou told the paper that he expects demand to pick up in the second half of the year as Apple unveils a next-generation iPod. The new music player uses a "none-touch" interface, Gou claimed, without elaborating. While it's not clear what Gou meant by "none-touch," Apple has registered a number of patents for devices with touch-sensitive screens.

Is the New York City cocktail party circuit is a leading indicator of media-industry influence? If so, this week's calendar suggests that once-scruffy and disreputable bloggers are networking their way to mainstream power. On Monday, a well-lubricated launch party at the 21 Club for DealBreaker.com, a Wall Street gossip blog, managed to haul in the likes of television host Charlie Rose, Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, and a gaggle of investment bankers. Gawker Media founder Nick Denton arrived with his photographer to cover the affair.

On Thursday it was Denton who played host in his SoHo loft (downstairs from Miramax cofounder Harvey Weinstein), to welcome Michael Jackson to the Internet fold. Jackson -- the recently named president of programming for Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, not the controversial pop star -- summarized the current NYC zeitgeist by saying he'd made the leap from producing TV series like Battlestar Galactica to join Diller online because television had become a stagnant, "homogeneous" business.

Among others nodding in approval were the Zelig-like Jason Calacanis, fresh from his relaunch of Netscape.com as well as a beaming Arianna Huffington, the activist turned political blog operator.

A Treo-toting, sleep-deprived Blaise Zerega, Managing Editor of the yet-to-be-launched Conde Nast Portfolio magazine was also in the room, fresh from posting the first original content to the nascent www.cnportfolio.com: a long interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which the CEO laments declining professionalism in media.

Are you really leaving, Bill? We only ask because it seems like some people are going to miss you. Take software entrepreneur and former Microsoft employee Joel Spolsky, for example, who reminisces about the first time Bill Gates reviewed one of his products. Back in 1992, Gates was Microsoft's CEO and still reviewed every feature of every product. Spolsky had given Gates's office an inch-thick spec for Gates, then Microsoft's CEO, to read. "There were notes in all the margins," Spolsky recalls. "On every page of the spec. He had read the whole goddamned thing." Fourteen years later, it's hard to imagine Gates -- or anyone, for that matter -- giving Microsoft products that kind of detailed scrutiny. But it was that kind of attention to detail that made Gates an effective software-company CEO back in the day. "Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf," concludes Spolsky.

Even Mini-Microsoft, the anonymous renegade-employee blog which has often criticized the company's management, says that Gates will leave a hard-to-fill hole at the company. "We're going to need a Bill Gates action figure for those future program reviews, one that has the recorded line, 'That's the stupidest f'ing thing I've ever heard!'" Hopefully Gates will cut down on the swearing as he moves into the more genteel nonprofit world.

The New York Times may be the paper of record in print -- but it wasn't getting its due from search engines until recently. That's changed since Marshall Simmonds came on board as part of the newspaper publisher's purchase of About.com last year. In an interview, Search Engine Watch gets Simmonds to lay out how he made the Times easier to search. Some basic steps Simmonds took: Giving Yahoo, Google, and other search engines unfettered access to the website, whose registration requirements previously blocked them from indexing its pages. "Yahoo had indexed our registration page 20 million times," said Simmonds.

He's also trained writers and editors to write clearer headlines, a push that was skeptically documented by Times reporter Steve Lohr in April. Simmonds's revolutionary idea? Keep headlines simple and use the words that readers are likely to search with. The search push seems to be working: Simmonds says search-engine traffic to NYTimes.com is up 59 percent.

The news that AOL is poised to relaunch Netscape.com as an experiment in community-filtered journalism is topping most tech outlets this morning. "The site is a journalist- and community-driven news aggregation site, much in the vein of Digg and other sites," writes PaidContent.org basing its analysis on a "beta" version of the site that was released late Wednesday night. "This [goes] beyond just technology, and covers other culture/business/news/social areas." PaidContent is among many who see the new site as a credible attempt by AOL to become a leading online destination for general interest news. It aims to bring mass-market traffic to the kind of "social" news mechanism that had previously been the reserve of geek sites like Slashdot and Digg.

The relaunched Netscape is unlikely to match the traffic enjoyed by Yahoo or Google's news sites anytime soon. But the threat to Digg, which only yesterday announced that it would expand into non-tech news, seems real. "According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views -- far more than Digg today," writes Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, who notes also that Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis is heading up the new operation. On Digg, readers had already begun to circle the wagons against the challenger. Comments like "I love Digg, I won't switch," and "Long live Digg" led off an emotional discussion, in which at least a few downplayed the threat. "There's nothing to worry about here. Digg is made up of a large group of people who share very similar interests, ideas, and the like."

Meanwhile, some intrepid Diggers also appeared to have registered their disapproval on the new Netscape beta site itself by "voting up" to the top position on the site the headline "AOL copies Digg," and filling the related comment thread with bitter criticism: "How very Microsoft of you," began one visiting Digger. "Isn't this the same thing Microsoft did to the Navigator [Web browser]? Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." The news has certainly gotten people talking -- and isn't that the point?

Watch out, Judson Laipply wannabes: The Recording Industry Association of America seems to be taking its cues from Footloose character Reverend Shaw Moore these days: Users dancing to copyrighted music on YouTube are its latest legal target, according to Techdirt. In the comments, Techdirt reader DittoBox asks, "How is getting free product placement bad?" The answer: Now that Apple is selling music videos on iTunes for $1.99, and big companies like Yahoo and AOL are paying fees to license them for Internet video channels, the labels have a commercial market to defend.

Project Opus reports that Universal Music Group is taking particularly aggressive action against amateur video using copyrighted songs, but notes that it and other music labels are in a tough legal spot: "If the RIAA doesn't pursue it, they set a nasty precedent that will haunt every other case moving forward." What's the answer? One solution: Make your own music and then dance to that.

What do you think? Should Internet users be allowed to post videos of themselves dancing to copyrighted music? Leave a comment below.