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Update 3:50 p.m.: Microsoft confirmed that the Puget Sound area cuts on Thursday accounted for 872 of the 1,400 jobs that were cut.

The software maker indicated it is not cutting any specific products, though it is re-evaluating its priorities in some areas. It is still hiring in some businesses, such as search, CEO Steve Ballmer noted on a conference call with analysts.

Hardest hit in those initial cuts, according to the source, were Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit, followed by the Server and Tools unit and the Microsoft Business Division, which houses Office and Microsoft’s Dynamics products.

Microsoft declined to go into detail on its job cuts, though it said in its press release that it was thinning everything from product research and development to support functions such as HR, finance, and information technology. As would be expected, Microsoft said the vast majority of its cuts to be in the greater Seattle area where most of the company’s workers are based.

Microsoft spread the 1,400 immediate layoffs broadly across the company’s units, according to a source familiar with the cuts.

Anyone who wants to share more detail should feel free to drop me a line.

The software maker announced plans early Thursday to cut up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, with the first round coming right away.

“Mobile devices are expected to continue to become more powerful and communicate at higher speeds, eventually giving people the power and functionality of a full desktop,” the National Institute of Standards and Technology says in its draft of Guidelines on Cell Phone and PDA Security. “Besides increasing productivity, such improvements are rapidly turning cell phones into extensive data reservoirs capable of holding a broad range of personal and organizational information.”

Mobile devices today are far more capable, and capacious, than the analog bricks of decades past. That also creates new security risks, which the feds are asking the public to address in comments due Friday.

Comments on the draft document can be submitted via email to 800-124comments@nist.gov with “Comments SP 800-124″ in the subject line.

The document cites the range of technology now available for handheld devices, including Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, reduced-sized removable-media card slots, and wireless interfaces. The ubiquitous gadgets that most people are literally attached to the hip to are vulnerable to theft, spam, and eavesdropping, among other problems listed in the guidelines.

“An increasing amount of mobile malware has been reported over the past several years, which raises concerns for the future, particularly when coupled with the recent trend towards establishing a more open system environment for cellular handheld devices,” the draft says. It also cites a study that estimated that 85,619 cell phones and 21,460 PDAs were left behind in one Chicago taxi firm’s vehicles during a six-month period.

The draft includes guidelines for both organizations and individuals using cell phones and PDAs. It suggests organizations deploying cell phones address security issues in advance, disable unnecessary services and providing central management and oversight of the devices. Individual users are encouraged to take steps such as using pin numbers or passwords and installing malware prevention software.

The increasing capabilities of handheld devices create risks that regular consumers–not just corporate customers or government employees–should be watching out for. Prepared for federal agencies but available for anyone to use, the draft guidelines from NIST are open for public comment through Friday.

“We know we have some challenges with the brand and perception,” Burk said. “Simple awareness is still a challenge for us.”

The latest project doesn’t just require one to use Microsoft’s search engine, however. At least for now, it also requires Microsoft’s browser (Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher) as well as a Windows PC. Microsoft said those latter restrictions are not necessarily permanent.

In an interview, Live Search Senior Director Frederick Savoye said that the new business models, as Microsoft likes to refer to these programs, are just one part of a three-prong strategy that includes continued improvements in core search as well as in vertical search, or “simplifying key tasks” in Microsoft parlance.

“At this time, SearchPerks is a limited promotion, though we remain open to expending availability of the promotion to different browsers and operating systems based on consumer interest,” Microsoft said.

On the broader goal of boosting Microsoft’s share of the commercial search business, Savoye said, Cashback has yet to make a meaningful shift in share. “We haven’t seen it move significantly yet,” Savoye said.

“Over the long-term these programs have changed people’s behavior,” he said.

It’s the latest in a series of financial incentive-related projects from Redmond, joining such efforts as Live Search Club, Search and Give, and Live Search Cashback, a program Microsoft introduced in May.

PR Director Whitney Burk said that programs such as SearchPerks are still needed to introduce people to Microsoft’s search product.

Microsoft’s latest effort to get people to use its search service is something called SearchPerks, which gives people points for using the search engine that can later be redeemed for prizes.

People can sign up for SearchPerks through the end of the year, or until Microsoft reaches its target of 250,000 participants. Rewards can be earned through April, though Microsoft may decide to extend or expand the program.

There’s also the broader question of what it says about Live Search overall that Microsoft has to keep coming up with gimmicks to get people to try it. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft has continued to struggle to make inroads on Google in overall share, promotions notwithstanding. According to figures recently released by ComScore, Google increased its share of the U.S. search market in August–it’s at 63 percent–while Yahoo and Microsoft both slipped a bit, to 19.6 percent and 8.3 percent respectively.

Users who agree to download a small program to track their usage get one “ticket” per day for every Live Search query, up to 25 per day. The program runs through April, at which point users can “cash in” the tickets that they get and trade them in for prizes or donate them to a charity.

In pilot testing, Microsoft said it saw those in the program perform three times the number of searches they had been doing. Savoye noted that in the airline industry, for example, loyalty programs have become a standard part of doing business.

Microsoft has seen mixed results with its incentive programs. Live Search Club, for example, gave Microsoft an initial boost, but its gains appear to be directly tied to its level of incentives. With Live Search Cashback, Microsoft said it has seen some advertisers boost their Live Search spend. eBay, in particular, is spending 50 percent more on Live Search thanks to Cashback, which Microsoft says offers significantly higher conversion rates than traditional search.

KBB's new Web site optimized for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Kelley Blue Book (KBB), the popular Web site that rates and provides information on motor vehicles, launched on Wednesday its new version that’s optimized for
iPhone’s display (both the original and the iPhone 3G). The new site also works with
iPod Touch.

I tried out the site with my iPhone 3G and really liked the way it’s organized. In many ways I thought it was even better than the regular full version KBB site that you access from a computer: very straight forward and there was no clutter. The new site responded fast with the 3G connection, when I turned off the 3G, it was slower, as expected, but still acceptable.

(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

iPhone users now can easily access KBB’s new and used vehicle information on their device anywhere they go. The site appears as a Web application that looks and feels very much like an independent application that you buy from Apple’s Apps Store. In addition, iPhone users also have the ability to view the Web site’s videos, images, new
car reviews and can submit free dealer price quotes.

To access the new site, all you have to do is type www.kbb.com on the phone’s Safari browser, and you will be directed to the optimized Web site automatically. You will also have the option of accessing the full version of the site on the phone.

See also: Palringo.

Although all iPhone communication apps remain hobbled until background processing is available, Fring does appear to be the most capable voice and text chat app there is for the device, and it’s well worth installing.

(Credit:
Fring)

On the iPhone, Fring can read both your IM and Skype buddy lists, as well as the contacts in your phone’s address book. And when you select a contact, you get the option of calling him or her by SIP call, Skype, or standard cellular. VoIP calls obviously don’t count against your cellular minutes, but you do need to have a Wi-Fi connection to make the calls.

The
iPhone app Fring–which acts as a VoIP client for Skype and other Internet phone networks, as well as a voice and chat interface into IM networks like AIM and Yahoo–is now available for free to everyone.

Fring is also available for several other mobile platforms.

Previously, it only ran on “jailbroken” iPhones, severely limiting its audience.

The biggest challenge for Fring users is that when the app is not actively running in the foreground on your phone, it can’t notify you of incoming calls or chats or indicate your presence to buddies. Apple has yet to provide background notification capability to iPhone developers, although we keep hearing it will be in an upcoming release.

Fring places calls on cellular or VoIP networks.

Flickr's home page now features a 'recent activity' tab that lets people interact more quickly with others on the photo-sharing site.

“This is not about adding new features, it’s about reducing the number of clicks of many of our most important core features,” she said. As long as a user has a fast network, the new pages load faster, though those with a slow dial-up connection might be constrained since more photos show on the home page, she added.

The redesigned Flickr shows more photos and, through a 'recent activity' tab, more social interactions. (Click to enlarge.)

“It’s definitely on our roadmap to improve that page,” she said.

Update 4:30 p.m. PDT: Yahoo has gradually added various features to Flickr, including video. But this change is about improving basic parts of Flickr that haven’t been changed in a much longer time, Srivastava said.

The redesigned page displays more photos, both from the Flickr member and from his or her contacts. And it adds photos from Flickr groups to which the member belongs, said Matthew Rothenberg, director of product management.

Flickr currently has more than 30 million registered users, 3 billion page views per month, and 60 million unique users per month, she said.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Many people just use Flickr to store and share their own photos, but the site also has social features including groups where like-minded people can share photos, a contacts list to share with particular friends, and comments that can lead to a discussion thread. Much of the redesign aims to spotlight these social features, making them more visible and easier to use, said Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s new general manager.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

The change is available now to people who opt for it, but it will become standard for all users in coming weeks, Srivastava said.

It doesn’t change another core part of Flickr, though, the pages that house each photograph. That will be changed in a future update, she added.

Yahoo on Wednesday started offering Flickr users a new home page for the photo-sharing site that’s designed to show off more images and make it easier for people to use the site’s social features.

“What we wanted to be able to do is make the home page more engaging, useful, and efficient for advanced users who have hundreds and sometimes thousands of contacts and who upload and log into Flickr several times a day (and for) our newest members who are trying to figure out how to engage with Flickr,” Srivastava said. The change also is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is geared in part to “light up” Yahoo users’ online social activity.

Another big change is a “recent activity” tab that displays new comments on a member’s photos, notices that others have made the member a contact, and other social events.

Yahoo described the change on its Flickr blog–which, by the way, is now featured on the new home page to spotlight news regarding the site.

In a world where we expect results on-demand, online video’s slow crawl to maturity has left many frustrated, especially now that both the venture dollars and ad dollars are drying up. There continue to be plenty of dead ends and bad ideas. “We just landed on Plymouth Rock and we’re on the way to L.A.,” Hirschhorn joked. “Nobody knows anything.”

In a panel called “A Hard Reset for Hollywood” at the beachfront WebbyConnect conference, Hirschhorn, the former chief digital officer at MTV Networks, talked about Sling.com, a video hub that’s is currently in private beta and promises to deliver a huge library of TV and Web video content. (Hirschhorn said later that while making it the biggest is a general goal, the company isn’t comparing catalogs and keeping statistics at this point.)

But Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment Group, also said it’s been worth it. Sling is getting ready to roll out some big new projects that he hopes will make it more than the company that made the Slingbox.

Most of this has been announced before, and in some cases it’s coming out belatedly–”Clip-and-sling” was first previewed at the 2007 CES trade show nearly two years ago. Hirschhorn said, not surprisingly, that the industry has faced serious difficulties when it comes to online video: securing rights, getting people to keep watching, and figuring out models for making money. These issues are “choking Hollywood,” as he described it.

“I love television, but television is probably a finite world,” he said. “You as the creator, especially when your model is different and smaller, the idea is that you need to go as wide as possible.”

He showed a preview. It looks a lot like Hulu, but with more video (that’s what it looks like from a preview, as Sling has not said whether there physically is more) and more social-networking tie-ins–and eventually owners of Slingbox devices will be able to watch streams from their own TVs on it as well. That’s key, because it will eliminate the need to install any desktop software, but Hirschhorn couldn’t demonstrate the TV streaming because the company has not finished building the Web-based Sling Player for
Mac.

DANA POINT, Calif.–Jason Hirschhorn said negotiating with Hollywood has been “a soul-killing, ego-destroying experience.”

Also key? It’ll be free. “Free is the name of the game,” he said, adding that Sling.com is “playing with some ad networks.” As for its hardware business, Sling’s SlingCatcher device will soon have “clip-and-sling” capability to take clips from their televisions and send it to their friends.

Above all, he reiterated that media companies and content producers shouldn’t be afraid of distribution, and suggested that exclusive deals are a bad idea–whether it’s a network TV show that’s not available on the Web or a Web series that’s limited to a single site.

Hirschhorn elaborated after the panel that future releases of Sling.com–not the initial one–will be able to stream that content directly to SlingCatcher devices, something that has been rumored but not confirmed by the company. That means, yes, you’ll be able to watch Hulu or any of Sling’s other content partners on your TV. He is not announcing dates yet, but said that the press tour for Sling.com starts in very early November.

This post was updated at 3:56 p.m. PT with clarification from Jason Hirschhorn.

I like the concept, and I like how easy it is for site managers to implement the system: They don’t have to do anything. Plista does the lifting.

I still like the concept here. Plista lets you rate products and content, gives you a lot in return for your rating activity, and it makes all your rating data yours; it doesn’t lock it away deep in some secret database on the sites you visit.

Unfortunately, I don’t get how this service is going win wide adoption. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem, for one: Getting a site Plista-enabled is a manual process, and while Plista can create the scripts for major sites, it can’t reach into the long tail to code them all. Plista will need site owners to do some work themselves. And there’s the egg: You can’t use Plista unless you have Greasemonkey installed. While it’s a popular engine for browser modification scripts, it’s not a mainstream add-on, so the potential audience is limited. And who wants to bother coding a site for such a small number of users?

Plista isn’t available yet, but you can sign up for the beta on the site.

Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meets Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine (review).

(Credit:
Plista)

Plista adds rating features and feedback to several sites.

Worse, many of the most important sites that Plista would work on–blogs, commerce sites, and databases–already have their own rating systems that Plista would compete with. I don’t see Amazon or Netflix adopting this system, for example.

Plista does have a fighting chance, I believe, if it drops the Greasemonkey tactic and instead focuses on developing a way for retailers and content managers to port their rating data to the service, in return for cross-site recommendations and the affiliate revenues that would come with them.

Plista currently uses a Greasemonkey script. Once you install it, when you go to a site in the Plista system–CEO Dominik Matyka told me there are about 30 so far–you’ll find the page has new Plista pieces on it: A rating box on each element at the least, and possibly more content additions too.

Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon sun on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites.

By way of example, Matyka showed me Plista working with IMDB. I could rate movies on the site, and once I did, the service would show me other things it thought I would like based on the preferences of other people who liked what I did. What’s cool about Plista is that the recommendation engine works across sites, so it’ll recommend (in theory) books on Amazon based on movies you’ve rated on IMDB. And–also cool–it shows you your ad-hoc network of Plista members who have compatible tastes, so you can explore their recommendations.

Voice-transcription service Vlingo has launched a really fantastic new iPhone application (download) that lets users talk into their phones to search the Web, dial contacts, and update their status on Twitter and Facebook. Much like Google’s
iPhone app which was released early last month, users are able to do all this without ever having to use their keyboard.

Vlingo is free and should be available in the iTunes app store in the next few hours. Below are some screenshots of its interface. We’ll have a video of it in action shortly.

Going forward the one thing that would really push this app over the top is a built-in browser, giving you option to open up search results within the app itself. Currently it jettisons you out to
Safari, which you must then exit and re-open the Vlingo app if you intend on doing another voice-powered search.

I’ve been using the app over the past week and found it to be far more useful than Google’s offering. It may be missing the really great (though iPhone SDK rule breaking) option to raise the handset to your head to begin a search, but it makes up for it with quite a bit more utility right from the get-go. The voice dialing is also exceptionally cool. Early on in the iPhone’s lifetime there were a handful of jailbroken applications that let you do this, and they were genuinely useful before the inclusion of contact search. The added benefit of using Vlingo’s system is that it cooks up a special voice recognition profile for your phone book since you initially have to send it in for processing.

The Twitter and Facebook update tool is also really well done, offering you a preview of the text before you send it, as well as a text counter to show you how many characters you have left. You’re able to make any edits in case the transcription flubbed your words too. After having used TwitterFon and having its mistakes set in stone, this is a godsend.

The big difference between Google’s efforts and Vlingo’s is the addition of Yahoo search, meaning users can pick the search engine of their choice. You’re also able to auto-dial contacts by speaking their name. This, along with speech-to-text search of Google Maps, and the social network status updates gives users the utility of TwitterFone and the SayWho iPhone application in one piece of software.

Update: I’ve embedded the video below, and the app is now live.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Vlingo lets you update your Twitter and Facebook status, look up and call phone contacts, and search the Web–all with just your voice. (click to enlarge)

Let’s hope Yahoo has finally learned that the maxim “If you build it, they will come” simply does not apply to a social network.

Even still, they have to differentiate themselves: Bebo, which has been acquired by AOL, touts its library of original video programming. Hi5 recently launched a mobile site that it hopes will make it appealing to consumers who don’t regularly use a personal computer.

Mash was cute, with a slick interface, and Yahoo already had the advantage of millions of registered users to roll right into it. But its failure to catch on is indicative of a bigger truth in the social-networking world: a new player in this saturated market has to offer something legitimately new and useful.

Look at Google: its social network, Orkut, is big in Brazil and India but not globally. Instead of trying to push Orkut into markets that are already saturated by competing social networks, Google has quietly been tying together existing properties into a more social experience.

In the days of AOL People Connection, the novelty factor of creating a profile and giving yourself an identity online was enough. But a decade later, filling out an online profile is about as interesting as filing tax forms.

To be fair, Google has had its share of social-networking blunders: it acquired mobile where-you-at service Dodgeball and failed to find a niche for it within the company, instead letting it wither on the vine. It’s also still unclear as to what Google will do with Jaiku, the Twitter-like start-up that it acquired last year, and the likes of OpenSocial and Friend Connect are still too early-stage to deem them surefire successes.

And, goodness knows, it doesn’t need any more of that.

There are plenty of compelling properties at Yahoo’s fingertips: imagine if a feed on Yahoo’s home page told you which of your contacts were uploading Flickr photos, RSVPing to events on Upcoming, or voting up news stories on Yahoo Buzz.

Here’s a thought: Yahoo would’ve done better in the social-networking market to introduce a friends list and news feed option to its members’ Yahoo.com home pages rather than attempting to create a standalone service. That way, it wouldn’t have to change existing members’ browsing habits one bit.

Critics of social networks say they’re nothing but gimmicky fads, pointing to the popularity of silly Facebook applications and the flashy glitter text that adorns many teenagers’ MySpace profiles. That just isn’t true: if you look at the two biggest social-networking success stories, Facebook and MySpace, each one has served a distinct utility since its debut.

It’s the latest social-networking failure for Yahoo, which was unable to get its earlier “Yahoo 360″ network off the ground, and once attempted to purchase Facebook, only to have its billion-dollar offer turned down.

If Yahoo, or any other aspiring Facebook rival, wants to take social networking seriously, it has to give its millions of users a reason to create profiles and connect with friends. Virtual pets that your friends can “snorgle” are not a reason. Neither are drag-and-drop widgets–that’s something that could draw people to a personal home page service, not a social network.

Just this week, Google announced the addition of a “following” feature to blog platform Blogger, and it invited users to import the list of Blogger-hosted blogs they subscribe into its Google Reader RSS software so that they can read them alongside other blogs. Google Calendar’s collaborative datebooks have been tied into the Gmail client. And when developer applications became the craze du jour, Google developed standards like OpenSocial and the forthcoming Friend Connect for other social networks to deploy.

Other broad-reaching social networks that have seen decent growth have either targeted a large demographic–Bebo and under-25s, for example–or have achieved localized success in regions of the world that hadn’t yet caught the social-networking bug, like Hi5 in Latin America.

The Silicon Valley mainstay and onetime Microsoft shopping-spree target is quietly shutting down Yahoo Mash, its latest foray into creating a general-interest social network like a Facebook or MySpace.

People initially signed up for MySpace because it offered unprecedented tools for independent bands to spread the word about their music–and ways for fans to keep track of those bands. Facebook gained popularity because, in its infancy, it was the digital version of a college directory.

Yes, really. And let it be a lesson to any other would-be Facebook killers.

Regardless, what’s important is that Google seems to understand that there isn’t room in the market to debut and promote a mass-appeal social network. With the demise of Mash, perhaps Yahoo gets the point now too. But while Mash likely wasn’t a resource or cash drain in the end, Yahoo is now on the PR defensive.