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Virgin Mobile

(Credit:
Samsung Slash)

For much of its life Virgin Mobile USA has been the exclusive domain of Kyocera and UTStarcom cell phones. Yet that began to change last year when LG offered the new LG Aloha LX140. And now just a couple of weeks after LG added its second Virgin Mobile phone, the LG Flare LX175, it appears Samsung is joining the carrier’s family. On its Web site, Virgin Mobile is promising that the Samsung Slash is coming soon. The slider phone sports a slick design and a functional feature set that includes Bluetooth, voice dialing, a speakerphone, messaging, a camera, MP3 ringtones, and a wireless Wen browser. We don’t know pricing or exact availability, but we’ll keep you posted.

Source: Engadget

(Credit:
Nintendo)

If you’re one of the seven people who still do not own a Nintendo DS lite, this Sunday is your big chance to be one of the first to own a brand new color scheme being released.

The black and blue DS lite (or Cobalt/Black as Nintendo has dubbed it) features a black base, blue folding top, and black stylus. It joins the current available colors Polar White, Onyx Black, Coral Pink, and Red/Black.

Not sure what to play with your new DS lite? Check out our top games list.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $129.95 - $129.99
View the latest prices for Nintendo DS Lite (polar cobalt blue)

Stamen Design’s previous project with Trulia was HindSight, a tool that shows you what’s happened to certain areas of the world historically. While neat to look at, unless you lived in one of the places that was coded in, it wasn’t very useful. This new tool is far better for people who want to use their eyes to look for a new place to live.

While I don’t think this system will ever replace an advanced search that can narrow down homes you’re looking for by how many bathrooms and closets each house has, Snapshot is a great way to re-create the feeling of exploration you can get by driving around neighborhoods and looking at what’s for sale.

That’s not to say it’s without use though. You can sort out houses in your area by price tag, or simply when they were listed. Each house has a little photo thumbnail, and you can click on any item to take you right to its Trulia page. You can also just sit back and watch the tool scroll through houses automatically, which pop up and give you bits of information.

Check out housing listings in a really slick timeline of money and availability.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Real estate search and resource service Trulia has a new tool built by the guys at Stamen Design called Snapshot. It’s built off of Microsoft Virtual Earth and shows off little clusters of homes all over a 2D map. It’s been pitched as an “alternate” view of the Trulia real estate listings, but a better way to describe it is pure, unadulterated eye candy.

Capital Research Global Investors employs Gordon Crawford, a portfolio manager who has been critical of Yahoo. It’s one of two parts of Capital Research and Management; the other part, Capital World Investors, owns 9.85 percent of Yahoo shares.

The percentage of Yahoo shareholders who withheld votes for Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock dropped from 2007 to 2008, Yahoo said after the meeting, apparently signifying a lesser level of disapproval. But Capital Research Global Investors, which at last count owns 6.2 percent of Yahoo stock, has requested that the company that transmitted its votes to Yahoo, Broadridge Financial Solutions, check its work.

Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Maybe Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang didn’t escape criticism from Friday’s shareholder meeting so easily after all.

It’s not clear what happens if there was a disconnect between investment firms’ voting wishes and the way the votes were actually recorded. Because the withhold vote is largely a symbolic act of communication, it’s not likely that any change in the withhold would, for example, force Yang or Bostock to step down.

But it could change Yahoo’s estimation of how satisfied its shareholders are with the company’s turnaround plan.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

“We asked Broadridge Financial to doublecheck the votes it transmitted to Yahoo on our behalf,” said Capital Research Global Investors spokesman Chuck Freadhoff.

Yahoo believes nothing is amiss with the vote. “The independent inspector of elections certified the results of the election and Yahoo accurately announced those results,” the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said in a statement.

That indicates the possibility that some “withhold” votes may not in fact have been withheld. In Yahoo’s official tally, 14.6 percent of votes for Yang and 20.5 percent for Bostock were withheld.

A representative for Broadridge wasn’t immediately available for comment.

But Yahoo left the door open for the possibility that something might have gone wrong before the votes were received. “Yahoo did not participate in the execution of the votes and was not a party to any errors which may have been made either by a voting institution or a proxy processing intermediary acting on behalf of banks, brokers and institutions.”

I also believe that Web-based applications are the future of software. So drop in on Thursday and let’s talk about it.

Reminder: I’ll be live from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time, today.

Ask the Editors is a live text show. You ask, and I answer (or fake it). Tune in on Thursday to ask me about Web applications. I’ll field how-to questions, make product suggestions, discuss new business models, anything. In the course of my too-long technology journalism career, I have reviewed and used more products than I can count. I have interviewed more than 1,000 start-up CEOs and evaluated their business prospects. One could say that I have some perspective.

I had so much fun reporting in real time from the Demo 2008 conference (see my liveblog), that I thought it would be fun to do the same thing again, but more free-form, and as a two-way conversation. So I’m doing a CNET Ask the Editors show on Thursday from 11:00 AM to noon, Pacific time.

That evaluation led to the Allied Defense Ministers report in October, which recommended the establishment of a NATO cyberdefense policy and a number of new measures to improve the countries’ cyberattack defense. The allied nations agreed to the policy earlier this year.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Slovakia signed the agreement, while the United States signed aboard as an observer of the effort.

Seven NATO allies signed an agreement Wednesday to open a cyberdefense center in Estonia, according to the Associated Press.

Last spring, Estonia’s public and private institutions were hit with a major denial of service attack over a two-month period. That, in turn, prompted NATO to re-evaluate its cyberdefense strategy.

The center, which is scheduled to become operational in August, is designed to offer training and research on cyberterrorism and simulate cyberwar games, the report states. The NATO allies will kick in funding and a staff of 30 cyberexperts to operate the center.

Microsoft is a smart company, and has obviously thought about these issues. I still wonder if the company will find that its partners don’t like having to compete with their old friend.

After all, Microsoft’s new partner initiatives rely heavily on concepts devised and delivered by these companies:

Microsoft is smart: Why reinvent the business model wheel when others have pioneered successful ways to deliver software value? Of course, Microsoft has never been the most innovative of companies - it has become the market behemoth that it is by out-executing its competitors, not by out-thinking them.

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But this may be one area in which Microsoft needs to think a bit more. As The Motley Fool notes,

By tangling with its partners in accounts of all sizes, Microsoft may have finally proved to be too big for its own good. Since it got into the applications business, it has had a competitive relationship with its software partners. But now it will also be competing with its channel delivery partners.

Tech watchers will see lots of familiar concepts in software behemoth Microsoft’s revamped go-to-market strategy….[Microsoft] proclaimed its newfound focus on delivering software and services to customers via “the cloud,” using a subscription-based model popularized by companies like Red Hat, Websense and Salesforce.com.

If you attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, you can be excused for thinking you showed up at the partner event for Red Hat, Google, or Salesforce.

Although partners will get a 12% cut of the first year’s subscription, and 6% thereafter, they will now be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for delivering value-added services. This marks a dramatic departure from the way Microsoft has worked with partners in the past. Mr. Softy formerly provided direct support and services only to the largest enterprise clients, while channel partners handled the rest.

Silverlight is now available on Windows or
Mac browser but Microsoft said that it intends to have versions for Linux desktops and mobile devices.

“Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer/designer work flow and integration when building Silverlight applications,” he wrote.

Microsoft hopes to exploit its strengths and developer tools as it battles Adobe and others for developer attention. Developers can use standard Ajax toolkits or Adobe’s Flex, which is now open source, to write AIR applications.

Guthrie said that Silverlight 2 has a stripped-down version of the .Net Framework that lets people use many different languages to write for the Web. These applications can run in Internet Explorer,
Firefox, and Apple’s
Safari browser.

In addition to Adobe AIR, there is Google Gears for offline access as well as JavaFX and the Mozilla Foundation’s Prism project.

Silverlight 2 is a significant upgrade to the existing edition because it’s designed to let programmers write rich Internet applications for Windows and Macintosh browsers using Microsoft’s popular .Net tools.

Microsoft will release the first beta of Silverlight 2 “shortly,” said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in Microsoft’s developer division in charge of Web development, in his blog on Friday. Next week, the company is hosting its Mix ‘08 Web development and design conference in Las Vegas.

Adobe on Monday released the long-awaited AIR download for running Web applications offline, but Microsoft is readying an update to its Silverlight platform that it hopes will keep Web developers in its camp.

There a handful of emerging platforms that look to bring the features associated with desktop applications, such as offline access to data, to the Web.

The area of rich Internet applications is fast becoming one of the most hotly contested among infrastructure software providers.

Hyperic says it plans to add the capability to monitor other cloud computing services later this summer.

Click here to see more stories on cloud computing.

Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It’s launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.

Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.

But when things break, it isn’t always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?

CloudStatus works with Amazon Web Services now. Hyperic plans to support additional cloud service providers later this year.

The company says that CloudStatus will report on service availability, latency, and data throughput.

The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Flexible Payment Service.

I’ve suggested before that the company that owns the heart of open-source monetization would be sitting on a massive opportunity. Yes, there are alternative ways to monetize open source (e.g., Google’s advertising model), but for many years to come vendors will make money by distributing software, not merely advertising around that software.

To achieve this more effectively, however, Red Hat needs to reach out to the commercial open-source ecosystem and evangelize the benefits of building on Project Spacewalk, rather than creating silo’d “Red Hat Network-esque” offerings. To date, Red Hat seems to have taken an “If we build it, they might come” approach to Spacewalk. It needs to be a bit more proactive.

spacewalk-list@redhat.com : currently has over 250 members…
spacewalk-devel-list@redhat.com: currently has about 120 members…
The first patch from inside Red Hat came within three days of the opening of the mailing list.
The first patch from the community came within eight days.

In the nine weeks or so since the debut of Spacewalk, we’ve been blown away by the level of interest, the contributions, and the excitement generated by the project…

Back in early 2007 Red Hat let slip that it was planning to release its Red Hat Network code as an open-source project. In June of 2008, Red Hat officially announced that Red Hat Network Satellite would be open sourced.

Last week, Red Hat posted an update on the project, now called Project Spacewalk.

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As such, a community effort around a network service, such as Red Hat’s Project Spacewalk, is hugely important. It’s important because it provides Red Hat a way to corral the growing commercial open-source ecosystem.