• 3. Industry participation. Microsoft readily admits that it can’t establish end-to-end trust on its own. Of course, Microsoft won’t be shy about suggesting technologies for connectivity and standardization, but it really does need help here. It’s time that the security industry stop its outright mistrust of Microsoft and extend an olive branch.

• 2. A new identity model. Identity is no longer about user name and password alone. In today’s computing environment, you also have to consider device type (i.e., am I communicating via my PC, cell phone, or PDA?), location, and the user’s work and personal profile. Yes, this complicates things but there is no getting around the fact that I use the same laptop to do my job during the day and then bid on vintage Gretsch guitars at night.

In my view, Mundie’s keynote was effective in that it really got the industry’s attention. Many security professionals and vendors recognize the need for this End to End Trust model while organizations like the Computer Security Institute (CSI), the National Institute of Standards (NIST), and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) are already working on similar efforts.

In past years, Microsoft keynotes were full of product demonstrations and funny video montages. Its End to End Trust discussions demonstrate a new Microsoft focus–and the remaining problems associated with information security.

It’s been a few weeks since the RSA Conference 2008 and I’m now preparing for Interop. Nevertheless, I wanted to get in my two cents worth regarding Craig Mundie’s RSA keynote address on what Microsoft is calling “End to End Trust.”

End to End Trust? What about the often-discussed Trustworthy Computing initiative that Microsoft introduced in 2001? It’s still around but Microsoft realized that Trustworthy Computing alone may not be enough. So what else is needed? Craig Mundie mentioned:

Unlike in previous auctions, the FCC is not identifying the names of top bidders at the close of each round. Yet, a look at the full list of bidders does reveal a few interesting tidbits. Chevron was one company I didn’t expect to see. The idea of an oil company clamoring for wireless spectrum certainly seems a bit odd until you realize that one of the FCC’s Cellular Market Areas (PDF) covers the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe it’s because Chevron has a few oil rigs in the area that might need to communicate back to the mainland. Or on the other hand, it could be another reason entirely but it’s unlikely that Chevron would start its own wireless network. Like Google, I would guess it just wants to own some spectrum. As for the other bidders, it’s clear most are communications firms but a few cryptically named entrants caught me eye. There’s The World Company (only the world and not the universe too?), I-700 LLC (that sounds like an interstate highway), Continuum 700 LLC, and the 585 Consortium. Five individuals are also the bidding list. They include David Miller, Scott D. Reiter, Jack E. Robinson, Thomas K. Kurian, and Laurence B. Glass (perhaps related to George Glass?). What those folks plan to do with the spectrum if they indeed win is beyond me.

Much has been made about Google’s entry into the bidding process (as Google Airwaves), but the tech giant is hardly the only company onboard. As a review, the other big bidders include AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, U.S. Cellular, Leap Wireless, MetroPCS, Alltel, and Qualcomm. Also on the list is Vulcan Ventures, which is controlled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It’s also interesting to see who’s sitting out the auction. T-Mobile is not participating, perhaps because the carrier says it already has the spectrum it needs to launch its promised 3G network, nor are Sprint Nextel, Comcast, or Time Warner. Also, it appears that Apple is not bidding, even though it was suggested last autumn that the company was interested in joining the auction.

Some of these folks you’d expect to be heavily involved in wooing Yahoo’s investor base to their respective side, and others less so. Drum roll please…

In the Yahoo camp, directors Roy Bostock, chairman, and Gary Wilson, along with Ron Olson, an outside legal adviser to Yahoo’s independent directors, have been pushing hard to get past the bottleneck, sources said.

All three have been heavily involved in making repeated calls to more than half a dozen of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, sources said.

Wilson, for one, has experience in dealing with proxy fights and not-so-friendly takeovers, given he currently sits on a dissident board for The Children’s Investment Fund, which is embroiled in a proxy fight with railroad transportation company CSX. And years ago, he had a hand in other unsolicited buyouts from Chrysler to Northwest Airlines.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Olson isn’t just any old attorney issuing legal mumbo jumbo to a client; he has strong ties to the finance world, noted a source familiar with the haggling. Olson is a board member on Berkshire Hathaway and recently played a role in Mars’ $23 billion buyout of Wrigley announced earlier this week, the source added. Berkshire, as reported in Forbes, contributed some financing for the deal and is taking a minority stake in Wrigley.

Yahoo’s directors not only paid particularly keen attention to Olson’s advice, they also gave their full attention to Ken Moelis, who heads up an investment bank that bears his name, said another source. Remember the old E.F. Hutton tagline: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen…”

And as Yahoo’s tag-team reached out to its major shareholders, Microsoft was doing likewise, particularity CEO Steve Ballmer and investment bank adviser Alan Schwartz, chief executive of Bear Stearns, sources said.

“On Wednesday or Thursday, Microsoft was indicating (to investors) it was willing to contemplate a price of $32 or $33 a share,” said a source familiar with the negotiations. “Still, some investors wanted $35 to $37, so it seemed possible, after a series of phone calls, that a deal at $34 or $35 could happen.”

This source added there is a cautious sense of optimism a deal can happen this weekend, which would be greatly welcomed, given Microsoft’s initial cash-stock bid valued at $31 a share at the time it was proposed has languished for the past three months. Based on Microsoft’s closing price Friday, the deal is now worth $29.39.

In sizing up the potential catalyst for making headway on the deal and the why now factor, this source added: “The clock is ticking and shareholders are getting sick of waiting. My guess is Yahoo, internally, was facing some controversy in getting support for the AOL deal and was facing the possibility of Microsoft walking away. The surprising thing with this (buyout deal) is it’s taken a long time and there’s been mistakes on both sides.”

Comments around pricing Friday, nonetheless, were resonating with investors, with Yahoo asking them to convey that sentiment to Microsoft, sources said. And, on the flip side, as the software giant made headway with Yahoo investors, it too was making a similar request to express that sentiment to Yahoo.

“Investors play both sides against the middle,” said one proxy solicitor, noting it drives buyers to cough up more money than they initially planned and serves as a means to bring starry-eyed target companies down to reality.

We’ll see what’s in the stars this weekend…

Never mind freeze-dried ice cream and Tang–it seems modern-day astronauts are now taking a certain Apple gadget into outer space.

A recently released NASA photo of the space shuttle Endeavour shows an
iPod sitting in the window console.

Click here to view the News.com gallery: “Photos: iPod flies high with space shuttle.”

The round was led by Deep Fork Capital, which has invested recently in mobile networking start-up Moblyng and visual search site SearchMe. In addition to the well-moneyed jocks, existing investor FirstMark Capital contributed.

Weplay’s Series A round, announced earlier this year, was led by FirstMark and had participation from other current and former pro athletes like basketball player Tony Parker, soccer player Brandi Chastain, and swimmer Summer Sanders as well as Silicon Valley regular Ron Conway. The Creative Artists Agency and Major League Baseball Advanced Media have also invested.

The site itself is intended as a hub for youth athletes, their parents and coaches, and other enthusiasts where they can safely network, share photos, and keep track of their favorite teams as well as share their own on-the-field antics.

In talking to Mark Law, the new VP of product development for AOL’s MapQuest, I was surprised to learn how powerful the service still is. To my mind the formerly leading mapping system is a trailing contender against Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com, but apparently MapQuest is still in the game as a leading Web site, with 48 million monthly visitors to the site, not to mention the users of the service who see it embedded on partner sites.

The new MapQuest puts a map on the destination page, as well as a better address entry box.

Law walked me through updates to the service that will be rolling out as an optional beta test to the site’s users on Tuesday. In a nutshell, the changes are evolutionary and to my mind required if the app to stay relevant. But the MapQuest team has to be careful with its updates, since so many general users of the service are accustomed to its somewhat old-fashioned interface and market-trailing features. Of his users, Law says simply, “They don’t want to see a lot of change.”

The service is still moving forward, just not at the blistering Web 2.0 pace of the other start-ups we cover here. The biggest change, according to Law, is this: “The major thing we’re doing is actually adding a map. A novel concept, but we’re putting it on the home page.”

So when you go to MapQuest.com, instead of just seeing an address entry box, now you’ll see an actual map on the start page. You know, like on every other mapping site. But this is a necessary change for the service, so let’s give the team credit for the update.

Also in the no-longer-new-for-2008 category: The service now makes it easy for you to recall your recently-used destinations and routes. And it can send directions to e-mail and to mobiles, via SMS.

Other improvements in the user interface include and entry box that does a better job of letting the user enter just a single address to map, or a start and end point to create a route. The system can now also parse long address strings instead of requiring the user to enter in address, city, and ZIP code separately.

I’m more impressed by the new location-based content getting layered into the service, such as weather, traffic incident reports, and gas prices. All these relevant data chunks pop up over the MapQuest maps, where they are actually useful. “We’re transforming from just a maps utility to giving you what’s around you,” Law said.

Data blocks on items like gas prices and traffic now pop up over the map when you need them.

While the mobile “Navigator” version of the service ($49 a year) will give you walking directions in addition to the driving directions that are standard on the Web version, I was surprised that there’s no public transit routing available yet. (To be fair, though, Google Maps on the
iPhone doesn’t offer either walking or transit directions.) Law said that, “We are evaluating what users are asking us for,” but that some features–like transit–are difficult to launch while maintaining MapQuest’s consistent quality across the country. “People trust us for our accuracy,” he said. A quick survey at the CNET office reinforced this: Users here feel MapQuest is more reliable than Google, but Google is a lot easier and faster to work with.

As far as other, more Web 2.0 features, like support for community-edited maps, 3D views, street-level photography and the like, the advice I have for MapQuest fans is to not hold your breath. This service is squarely aimed at mainstream users and its 1,100 business partners (Law twice mentioned Dunkin Donuts as a user of the API).

I’m trying to find a positive lesson in MapQuest’s story, but to be honest it’s a reach. I can understand a company’s goal to iterate its interface and features at a measured pace, to not alienate a large and profitable user base. But old-fashioned is rarely a winning characteristic of a Web business. In MapQuest’s case I can’t help but wonder where the company would be if it had been more aggressive in adopting new technology and distribution methods, as Microsoft and Google did in the vacuum it left. I’ll take Law at his word that MapQuest is big. But it could have been much bigger.

In other words, there appears to be some red tape. Instead of immediately rolling out the Orkut platform, which it was originally scheduled to do right around now, Google will be conducting a “prelaunch testing period” for select applications. That will last about four weeks.

“We apologize for delaying the launch a few weeks,” Gandhi wrote. “We feel that this prelaunch testing period will ensure that users are introduced to apps in the best way possible.”

Avid followers of Google’s OpenSocial developer initiative have been eagerly anticipating the standard’s debut on Orkut. After all, this is the closest thing to an in-house Google developer platform, and if it works well, this could help Orkut emerge as a whole lot more than “that social network that’s big in Brazil and India.”

For those cranky pundits already hunting for the next Facebook, Orkut has been the subject of much scrutiny.

The Social Times notes that MySpace.com’s developer platform is also slated to go live next week, and it wonders whether it’s still on track because it also implements OpenSocial.

I’ve contacted MySpace representatives for comment and will update this post when I hear back.

“We will start to show you the next version of the search,” Chairman Bill Gates said in comments to reporters in Japan Wednesday, promising that Microsoft had some exciting things up its sleeve. The comments were included in a partial transcript provided by Microsoft.

The spring update is also expected to include new types of vertical search and improvements in overall relevance of search queries, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans. Specifically, Microsoft is expected to add to the shopping-specific search tools that debuted in its Fall 2007 release. Microsoft has also been working on a new look for its Live Search product, which went live this week.

The company has struggled to make headway in search, particularly in the area of being the place that consumers go for general Web queries.

Microsoft has been a distant third in search, accounting for 9.4 percent of core U.S. search queries in February, according to ComScore. Google, held a 59.8 percent share, while Yahoo was second, with 21.3 percent.

Many of Microsoft’s recent changes have centered around improving specific types of searches, such as image search, celebrity tracking, and medical searches. The company is also focusing a good deal of energy on trying to build “search experiences” into its various Web products.

Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall reiterated that’s Microsoft’s approach in a speech to investors on Tuesday. Hall echoed an oft-repeated line that search can be a lot better than 10 blue links, particularly if it is integrated into the task people are doing when they make the queries.

“We think we can do a lot more to drive contextual search,” he said. “We see a lot of opportunity to push the envelope there.”

Microsoft declined to offer detailed comments on what is due in the next iteration of its search product, which has been code-named “Rome.”

“Live Search is on a fall/spring release cycle, and we will gradually roll out updates at these intervals to improve the experience for both advertisers and consumers,” the company said in a statement. “The recent updates you’ve noticed are part of the latest release, and we will continue to test and implement various features and functionality over the next couple of weeks.”

In his comments in Japan, Gates pointed out that although Google has a high market share in search, it is also the kind of area in which Microsoft can use marketing to get people to try out its products, in due course.

He also played up the notion that Microsoft is an important counterweight to Google’s position in the market saying, Microsoft wants to “make sure that state of the art does get advanced and advertisers have good choices in terms of what they are doing with their interactive advertising.”

(Credit:
Toshiba)

With a lineup of perfectly serviceable, but not exactly standout mainstream laptops, Toshiba’s Satellite line has long played second-fiddle to the company’s excellent Qosmio multimedia laptops.

Aiming to correct this, Toshiba today unveiled an entirely redesigned Satellite line, with what is being called a new “Horizon” pattern in a “Fusion” finish. Toshiba describes it as, “gray pinstripes set upon a field of black.” We checked these out in person a few weeks ago, and they had a distinct metallic sheen, quite different from the current black-and-red flamed look.

The new models are the Satellite U400, the Satellite M300, the Satellite A300, and the Satellite P300, with 13.3-inch, 14.1-inch, 15.4-inch and 17-inch displays, respectively. Apart from the 13-inch U400, these new models include touch-sensitive media controls, a flush-mounted touch pad, and Harman Kardon speakers (which are already available on some higher-end Toshiba laptops).

Note the flush touch pad on the Toshiba Satellite A300.

(Credit:
Toshiba)

Perhaps the most interesting new development is something called Sleep-and-Charge, which means you can plug in and charge USB devices (iPods, mobile phones, and so forth) even if the laptop is in sleep or hibernate mode, or is totally powered off, as long as it’s plugged into an outlet. Most laptops provide power to USB ports only while they’re turned on.

All four are available today, starting from $826 to $999. Also new, but lacking most of these high-end upgrades, is the Satellite L350, positioned as a budget 17-inch AMD-powered desktop replacement, starting at $749.