It’s been a busy week around here for the big tech companies. At Xconomy, we don’t usually report on things like product releases from Microsoft or sales figures from Amazon—our main focus is on new ideas, models, and companies—but readers need to understand where the big players are heading so they can see the gaps and opportunities for new businesses. So, for each of these pieces of mainstream tech news, I’ll tell you why savvy innovators and business leaders should care.

—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) demonstrated its Web-based Chrome operating system for the first time in public yesterday. It won’t be available for another year, but the tech community is scrambling to understand all the implications. (Google’s Seattle engineers have contributed technology to the Chrome Web browser, helping to boost security—one potential advantage of a cloud-based operating system).

Sure, a fully cloud-based OS is a direct threat to Microsoft’s business model and the ecosystem of companies that support Windows. But more than that, it could reshape the landscape of online advertising by providing a new platform for launching ads on mobile devices, video channels (YouTube), and Internet TV. Perhaps the only thing that can slow down Google’s dominance on the Web is the federal government. In other words, this could get ugly.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide info about your business contacts within Outlook e-mail. It’s all part of Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector, an add-in that feeds you data from your social networks. Integrating e-mail with social networks and search is a fast-growing area, with startups like Gist in Seattle (backed by Paul Allen and Foundry Group) helping lead the way. Gist’s CEO T.A. McCann told TechFlash that he’s known about Microsoft’s effort for a while and doesn’t see it as a direct challenge. Gist’s offering is more advanced, he said, and it includes features like integrating with Salesforce.com and the iPhone. But startups and investors beware: if you’re in this crowded space, you better have a product that cuts through the noise and has a way to attract customers fast.

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) is in discussions with Viacom’s MTV Networks to sell off at least some of its stake in the Rhapsody music service, as first reported by PaidContent. In a regulatory filing, prompted by a tender offer to issue new stock, Real said it is in talks to reorganize the management structure and/or corporate governance of the division, which might mean giving up its majority ownership stake (51 percent) in Rhapsody. Back in September, digital-media guru Bill Baxter (now at Seattle-based Cozi) wrote in Xconomy about Rhapsody’s fierce competition with Pandora, iTunes, and piracy. Message to startups: the world of digital music services is probably not where you want to be.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been busy ramping up operations ahead of the holiday shopping season. Its billion-dollar acquisition of Zappos is helping it expand into shoes and apparel, and its Kindle sales look poised to take off, especially now that Barnes & Noble’s competing e-book reader, the Nook, has sold out until January. Amazon has really become the business and technology model to follow in online retail and product search. While there is still room for e-commerce startups to compete in various niches, they would be wise to study how Amazon built its brand and customer relationships before branching out to the wider world of retail.

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Here’s an iPhone application that could actually help people save lives. Zoll Medical, a maker of cardiac defibrillators and other products for the critical care market, says this morning that it has released a CPR training app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This isn’t the first iPhone app of this sort that I’ve seen—but it’s certainly the most advanced. Chelmsford, MA-based Zoll’s (NASDAQ:ZOLL) “PocketCPR” training app gives users visual and audio instructions on proper CPR technique, and the software makes use of the accelerometer built into iPhones to measure the rate of a person’s hand movements when he or she is performing simulated compressions on manikins. The app is selling for $5.99. (For free, iPhone users can download an app called iCPR, but it doesn’t make use of the accelerometer to provide real-time feedback on how well the user is performing CPR.)

There are way too many iPhone apps for us to cover each individual launch, but the CPR training apps are an important category because they address a major health problem. The American Heart Association estimates that about 294,851 Americans per year receive emergency medical treatment for heart attacks, and multiple sources estimate that there are more than 300,000 deaths from cardiac arrest in the U.S. each year. According to Zoll, 70 percent of people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest when they are with family members or acquaintances. It’s too bad most Americans aren’t properly trained to perform the potentially lifesaving measure.

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In case you missed it yesterday, the New York Times ran a sweeping review of Microsoft’s position in the tech world on the eve of its Windows 7 rollout this week. That’s the latest version of Microsoft’s iconic operating system for personal computers. But the article smartly goes beyond the company’s strategy for PCs, and examines its near-term prospects in areas like search, mobile, entertainment, and cloud computing.

It’s arguably the most challenging time in Microsoft’s 34-year history. The Times piece points out the company’s revenue declined for the first time ever in its 2009 fiscal year, and it faces increasing competition from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. Nevertheless, top Microsoft execs like CEO Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie continue to defend the company’s position in the market, reiterating its focus on phones, PCs, and TVs—the idea of “three screens and a cloud” that Ozzie talked about back in May. Microsoft also has earmarked nearly $10 billion for R&D spending over the next year, according to the piece.

The conclusion? The Times calls the overall forecast for Microsoft “partly cloudy.” It’s a bit of a letdown, but the story does cover a lot of ground in terms of different technology areas, and competitors coming from different angles.

The story also includes critical comments from a couple of former Microsoft veterans who have strong ties to the Seattle tech scene. Bruce Chizen, the former CEO of Adobe Systems—and now a venture partner with Seattle-based Voyager Capital—is quoted as saying about Microsoft, “They are not the company they once were in terms of market position…They no longer have a monopoly that is critical to the future of computing.”

And Bryan Trussel, the former head of Xbox Live Arcade and now CEO of Glympse, a Seattle-area mobile startup focused on location sharing, is quoted in the context of Microsoft’s recent efforts to work with developers, students, and cloud-computing startups— crucial audiences that company execs have worried about losing touch with. “They got scared,” Trussel says in the piece. “I think they get it now, but the question is how far behind they are.”

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Seattle-based Amazon has started a mobile payments service that allows consumers to make purchases from their mobile devices using their Amazon accounts, according to a statement released today. More significantly, the service also gives developers, retailers, and distributors of mobile applications a way to process mobile payments from customers using Amazon’s online checkout system—without having to ask for their credit card numbers, which Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) already has.

It’s a bold strategic move for the e-commerce giant, which has been relatively quiet in the mobile space up to this point. It also puts Amazon directly up against big competitors like PayPal, Apple’s iTunes store, and Google’s Checkout service. One of the first mobile content distributors to use Amazon’s Mobile Payments Service is Kansas City, MO-based Handmark, which sells mobile games, applications, ringtones, and the like. By forming partnerships with other online stores like Handmark, Amazon could potentially reach a very broad mobile market since its payment service should work on many different types of devices and carrier networks.

Amazon has been diversifying across Internet retail lately. In recent months, it has made strong thrusts into shoes and clothing (with its acquisition of Zappos), electronics, and, of course, digital books with new variations of the Kindle. It would seem well-positioned to open, or buy, its own mobile app store in the future. Perhaps today’s announcement is a first step in exploring such a strategy.

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In the mid 1990s, three on-ramps led us on to the information superhighway: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. For a monthly fee, users were served up a customized version of the Web offered by one of these network providers. They took a walled garden approach, offering applications only through their services and limiting e-mails within their networks. For a while, it worked. But soon, consumers and application developers alike were clamoring for more—and, fortunately, the walls around the World Wide Web came tumbling down. Untethered from these artificial constraints, developers created innovative Web-based applications, sites and services available to all—regardless of their provider—and consumers began logging onto the Web in droves.

The subsequent Internet boom that took place is well known. It’s hard to imagine where we would be now if those walls had remained. The Web 1.0 movement showed us that technological innovation flourishes when markets are open. Yet despite the lessons learned, we find ourselves repeating history in the U.S. mobile marketplace. With so much hype about the “mobile Internet,” did you ever wonder why we have yet to see a mobile start-up grow to the scale of an Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Facebook?

Clearly, the innovation and growth of Wireless 1.0 was led by Europe and Asia. The question is whether the U.S. will lead the Wireless 2.0 era. While our European and Asian counterparts understood and embraced open mobile networks early on, closed markets here in the U.S. constrain progress. Consumers here can’t buy just any mobile device with any software and use it on any network. The carriers argue that this level of control is necessary to ensure network “quality.” AT&T made the same argument about the quality of the landline network before the 1982 divestiture. But as of this writing I’m still unaware of anyone who bought a landline phone at Target, plugged it in at home and thereby brought down the AT&T landline network.

From 1999-2007, we saw an explosion of wireless innovation in Europe and Asia, where mobile devices weren’t limited to one network and developers could build and distribute wireless applications to virtually any mobile consumer. Japan had wireless Internet through NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode as early as 1999. Meanwhile, in Europe, the introduction of the open GSM standard created an environment where early interoperability and network openness were standard.

During this same time period, U.S. mobile innovation was largely sluggish, stuck in the walled garden model. While you could argue this was acceptable during that time period because our technology had not caught up yet, we only need to look at the iPhone and BlackBerry app stores to know that we are now capable of more. Apple—and the ecosystem that has surrounded it—has shown the world that an innovative company can create a great product with a direct-to-consumer path to market.

Smart phones (such as BlackBerry phones and the iPhone) are built on open technology by default, and carriers cannot block access to these devices. Apple has proven that a friction-free ecosystem can be built to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) to address this market. But alas, smart phones account for less than 25 percent of the market, and won’t exceed 50 percent for several years—an eternity in high tech. So for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of the U.S. mobile market will be comprised of feature phones, which only run software approved by the wireless carrier.

Herein lies the problem and the solution. What kind of innovations would emerge in the U.S. market if we could replicate for the 200 million feature phone users what Apple has created for the iPhone? I’m not talking about the iPhone’s elegant form factor or usability. Rather, I mean …Next Page »

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Boston-based uLocate, maker of the “Where” platform for location-based applications on mobile devices, today announced the launch of a new iPhone application called Traffic.com. Using maps and data from Navteq’s website of the same name, the application detects the user’s location and shows which local roads and highways are congested. The app, which appeared in Apple’s iTunes App Store last week and is already the store’s top traffic application, also allows users to get accident reports and other traffic data create for a customized set of frequently traveled routes.

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It’s a banner day for the Boston-area gaming industry. In what’s either a bizarre coincidence, a piece of arcane marketing numerology, or just a sign that the enormous PAX gaming conference in Seattle has ended, three local companies in the console and online gaming markets picked 09/09/09 to take the lid off big new products.

There’s Turbine, which is smashing down the old subscription wall around its Dungeons & Dragons Online title; Quick Hit, which is kicking off its online football simulation; and Harmonix Music Systems, which will take console gamers on a magical mystery tour with The Beatles: Rock Band. And oh yeah, there’s a little company out west that’s mounting a big media event today around a gadget called the iPod.

Here’s the full scoop:

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited

As we reported last month, Westwood, MA-based Turbine has decided to take a big gamble with one of its premier titles, Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). Formerly available only to subscribers who paid $14.99 per month, DDO today becomes the first major online fantasy game from an American game publisher to go “free-to-play.” It’s been a successful model for many Asian game publishers such as South Korea’s Nexon, whose free virtual world Maple Story has 15 million users. But for Turbine to avoid losing money on the changeover, which has been in the works for almost two years, it will need to entice users of the role-playing game to engage in microtransactions at the new DDO Store, where they can equip their avatars with everything from armor to healing potions to—in the company’s words—”massive cans of kick-ass.”

The currency at the DDO Store is Turbine Points, which players can obtain by putting in time online or by paying real cash. For the benefit of users who prefer the old model, the revamped game world, called Eberron, includes new areas or “adventure packs” that are open only to subscribers; these “VIPs” get a monthly cache of free Turbine Points to spend at the store.

Fernando Paiz, the executive producer of Eberron Unlimited, told me that Turbine hopes that the free-to-play model will draw more casual users into the DDO world. “One of the top barriers to any massively multiplayer online game today is the subscription,” he says. “People will say, ‘I like role-playing games or online games but I just don’t play enough to sign up for a $15 monthly subscription.’ We didn’t want that to be a barrier.”

The company is hoping, of course, that some free players will end up spending $15 or more per month on Turbine Points. Behavioral economists might call this a good bet: experiments have shown that consumers are more averse to losing money, even if it’s on something intangible like an unused game subscription, than they are to spending the same amount for a more visible and immediate reward.

“The DDO Unlimited Beta program has been a huge success and the initial response to the game from both press and players has been nothing short of phenomenal,” Turbine CEO Jim Crowley said in a press announcement today. “In response, we have already more than doubled our capacity to handle the increased demand.”

Quick Hit

[Delay of game! -- Quick Hit (see comment below) has just let us know it is putting off opening the site to the public while it works on last-minute adjustments. No word on the new kickoff time as of yet.] My sports-fan friends inform me that the official NFL season gets underway tomorrow night with a game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Tennessee Titans. But if you just can’t wait another day, you can try Quick Hit, an online football game that melds elements of fantasy sports, role-playing games, and console games into a …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Redfin announced today its iPhone app has been approved by Apple and is now available for download. The software lets you search for real estate information, driven by Google Maps. It also lets you take photos and notes if you’re on a house tour, and automatically uploads the data to your Redfin.com account to help you keep track of it.

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It’s been quite a summer here in Seattle, with record droughts and a heat wave that left us all panting in line for an iced coffee. But despite a cool economic climate, Microsoft managed to stay as hot as the temperature outside its Redmond, WA, headquarters, with a series of big deals and other announcements that kept everyone sweating to keep up.

Here’s a rundown of the most important news from the software giant’s eventful summer:

—Microsoft started the season off with a bang, or rather a Bing, when it launched its new search engine at the end of May. Bing didn’t stop making headlines with its launch, forming a partnership with salary comparison technology startup PayScale in June and adding a limited Twitter search feature in early July. As Bing clambered up the search engine ladder, Greg spoke with Harry Shum, the vice president who runs the engineering team that created Bing, about why Bing is already doing so well.

—Bing’s debut had even stronger echoes than might have been expected. It appeared to help close a long-rumored deal with Yahoo in July that puts Bing technology behind Yahoo search for at least a decade. Microsoft had already hired away three search executives from Yahoo at the end of June before the partnership, which leaves Yahoo in charge of sales and distribution of advertising for both websites, as well as receiving a fair chunk of change.

—Microsoft expanded further into a new area this summer: life sciences, with the purchase of the Seattle-based assets of Rosetta Biosoftware from Merck, integrating it into its new Amalga Life Sciences platform. Rosetta’s technology analyzes how genes turn on and off, and will be added to Amalga’s genomic data analysis program. This represents Microsoft’s first real push into biotechnology after years of looking for ways into the market, as Luke reported. In another research-related move, Microsoft unveiled Trident, a scientific analysis tool to help researchers and businesses sort through and make sense of massive amounts of information quickly.

—In a deal as big as any launch this summer, Microsoft sold its digital advertising company Razorfish to French advertising firm Publicis just a few weeks ago for about $530 million, and signed a five-year strategic alliance with Publicis. Razorfish executives are looking forward to the more global reach that Publicis assures them, while Publicis gets a huge leg up in the digital marketing arena since Razorfish is already the largest company of its kind in the world. Online strategy expert Warren Gouk told Greg that the partnership could help out Microsoft a lot too, pushing up its advertising business.

—Microsoft made another European friend this summer, teaming up with Finland-based Nokia to adapt Microsoft programs to Nokia’s smartphones. The Symbian operating system created by Nokia has been a rival to Microsoft’s mobile OS, but putting its programs on Nokia’s phones helps Microsoft compete against Google, whose own mobile productivity programs have been chipping away at Microsoft’s market share.

—On a lighter note, Microsoft generated a lot of excitement at this year’s E3 expo with the demonstration of Natal, a new motion-capture system for the Xbox 360 that works without needing any goggles or other special equipment. There was also an announcement and demonstration of how players can use Facebook and Twitter on their consoles to communicate with friends while they play.

And looking ahead, Microsoft seems to be just warming up, with the upcoming October launch of Windows 7, which promises to fix Vista’s woes and improve upon its good qualities. It remains to be seen how well the new OS will be received, especially considering the chilly dismissal of Windows 7 as a rival by Apple in its announcement of its own new OS, Snow Leopard, set to launch just a month before Windows.

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As a device for managing your e-mail, the Apple iPhone isn’t bad, but it does have a few quirks and limitations. This week, I want to write about two brand-new applications that work around those failings, making the iPhone into a far more powerful tool for staying connected.

The first app grabbed my attention because of my recent brush with almost-literal highway robbery. My drive to Michigan last week to visit my parents took me through southern Ontario. Soon after I crossed over Buffalo’s Peace Bridge into Fort Erie, this astonishing little SMS message popped up on my iPhone: “AT&T Free Message: International data rate of $15.00/MB applies. Unlimited domestic data rate plan does NOT apply outside the U.S.”

I immediately put my phone into airplane mode, fearful of receiving any more SMS messages or e-mails, which, at $15 per megabyte, would have cost me more than the gas I was burning. That meant I was effectively off the grid during the four hours it took to cross this little corner of Canada. I survived the hardship—but the experience did highlight the problem that outrageous roaming charges can pose for travelers who use mobile e-mail a lot.

As it happens, a new app called reMail can take some of the sting out of this dilemma. It went live in the iTunes App Store yesterday, and I learned about it from Jessica Livingston at Y Combinator, the California venture incubator where reMail got its start. ReMail stores your entire e-mail archive on your iPhone, which means you can read your messages without ever having to go online. You can’t do that with the iPhone’s built-in mail application, which only keeps the last 50 messages. ReMail also lets you search the full text of all your messages—which, again, the built-in mail app can’t do. (In a recent update, Apple added a search function to the mail app that can scan older messages stored in the cloud, but it’s limited to the subject line and the sender and recipient addresses.)

“I live in e-mail while I’m traveling—all my meetings are scheduled via e-mail,” says Gabore Cselle, the founder of San Francisco-based NextMail, the one-man startup behind reMail. “So I need access to my e-mails, all the time. Building an app which would let me take all my e-mail with me seemed like a good idea. And it’s saving me money.”

I’ve been testing reMail, and so far it’s working exactly as advertised. The app connects to your Web-based e-mail account—it works with Gmail and any IMAP-enabled e-mail service—and sucks down your entire e-mail archive. That process can take a while (reMail spent about eight hours downloading the 78,000 messages in my Gmail archive) but the upside is that you only have to do it once. After that, each time you start the app, it just grabs your most recent messages.

What’s amazing about reMail is that it uses a relatively small amount of your iPhone’s memory. My 78,000 Gmail messages are taking up about 4.3 gigabytes of space on Google’s servers. But the reMail database on my iPhone is about one-tenth that size: 432 megabytes. “Compressing your e-mails down to a size that people would find acceptable” was one of the three biggest technical hurdles to making reMail work, Cselle says. Exactly how he pulled that off is “a state secret,” he jokes, but part of the solution was to grab just the text of each message, not attachments, which take up about 70 percent of the storage space at Gmail, according to Cselle.

“We ‘lazy load’ attachments,” he says, adding, “We download them to your iPhone when you first click on them, and then keep it there permanently. Once open, you can be confident that you’ll have that PDF or JPG with you wherever you go.” Of course, the more attachments you download, the more space reMail will take up on your phone.

The only problem I’ve experienced with reMail is that it sometimes fails to connect with Gmail, but I suspect the problem is on Google’s side—lately I’ve been seeing all sorts of server errors and delays with Gmail on the Web, too. (What’s up with that, Google?)

Cselle says he got the idea for reMail because his parents live in Switzerland, and every time he visits them, he gets the same AT&T text message about …Next Page »

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In a press conference in New York this morning, Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop and Nokia’s executive vice president for devices Kai Öistämö announced that Redmond, WA-based Microsoft and Finland-based Nokia have formed an alliance that will create adaptations of Microsoft programs for Nokia’s smartphones.

Microsoft and Nokia will begin immediate development of Microsoft Office Mobile, a version of Office for use on Nokia’s Symbian devices. Other programs for productivity, communication and device-management will follow, and will be available for many types of Nokia smartphones. The deal extends beyond just development of the programs—the companies will jointly market the products they create together.

This is the second major recent alliance for Microsoft with a competitor, after making a major search and advertising deal with Yahoo just a couple of weeks ago. Similar to that deal, Nokia has been an important rival to Microsoft with its Symbian mobile OS competing with the Windows Mobile platform. This is the first time Office will be adapted for any mobile system besides Microsoft’s. And both deals help Microsoft compete with Google, whose free productivity applications have been chipping away at Microsoft’s Office dominance. Office is one of the most profitable products for Microsoft, so expanding the customer base seems like a good move for the company.

Nokia is the world’s largest producer of smartphones, but is facing intense competition from products like Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s Blackberry. Putting Microsoft applications on its phones will help Nokia in “addressing the significant opportunity in mobile enterprise productivity,” according to Öistämö in the press release.

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Boston-based Apperian, founded by Apple veterans as a development shop for enterprise-oriented iPhone applications, has closed a $1 million Series A venture round led by CommonAngels of Lexington, MA, according to an announcement circulated today. “We have been incredibly impressed by the team as well as their customers’ vision and passion for the possibilities on this platform and beyond,” CommonAngels managing director James Geshwiler said in the announcement. We profiled Apperian in March.

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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced today it has opened its Windows Mobile marketplace for developer submissions from 29 countries. The Redmond, WA, firm is also running a “race to market challenge” in which mobile app developers will receive prizes for categories like most free downloads, most valuable app, and most useful app. The contest will officially begin when the store opens for consumers this fall, and will run until Dec. 31, 2009. The move is seen as an effort to compete with Apple’s iPhone app store.

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Being neither heterosexual nor much of a sports fan, I’ve never quite understood the annual excitement generated by the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But lots of folks out there will no doubt be glad to hear that the swimsuit models, like everything else these days, are now available as an iPhone app.

Azuki Systems, the Acton, MA, mobile developer that raised $6 million back in May, created the application for Sports Illustrated. The SI Swimsuit app, which sells for $2.99 and is rated “17+” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity,” appeared in the iTunes App Store today. The news hounds over at TechCrunch broke the story.

Naturally, the app includes “spectacular high-quality pictures” of the swimsuit models from the print magazine. But it isn’t just about skin. “SI Swimsuit 2009 not only provides pictures and videos of nearly two dozen gorgeous models from the 2009 ‘Bikinis or Nothing’ issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, but also a feature-rich sports calendar,” the app’s description in the iTunes App Store reads. “It’s a convenient way to keep track of schedules and scores for up to six of your favorite American pro and college sports teams and lets you choose a different girl to feature for every month of the year.”

Rotating the iPhone to landscape mode starts a full-screen slideshow. But I’m sure users will be too busy trying the team-tracking feature to notice that.

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Microsoft’s Macintosh division announced a new service pack for the Mac version of Microsoft Office.  The update is designed to fix several old issues with the program as well as add new features like document sharing online. Although Microsoft and Apple are fierce rivals with contending operating systems, Microsoft produces Mac versions of many programs including schedulers and media players.

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For a long time, watching video on the Apple iPhone meant YouTube or nothing—and it only worked if you were within range of a Wi-Fi network. But now Cambridge, MA-based content distribution firm Akamai is helping many of its customers optimize live and recorded video for direct delivery to iPhones. Which, in effect, turns Apple’s devices into mobile televisions: if you’re at the bus stop and have a craving for Fox Business News, for example, it’s now there for you, even if you don’t have a strong Wi-Fi or 3G signal.

It’s all part of the iPhone 3.0 changeover. When Apple released the update for the iPhone’s operating system on June 17, it offered an improvement especially designed to help people on the go watch video on their phones even when they’re in areas with flaky broadband wireless access. Called “variable bit rate streaming,” the technology has long been a feature of most Web-based video delivery; it allows video providers to adjust the quality of streaming video in real time to fit the available bandwidth.

Last week Akamai said its clients publishing iPhone video can now take advantage of variable bit rate streaming as part of the company’s existing Media Delivery service. It also launched a mobile showcase for organizations doing exactly that. The showcase, at iphone.akamai.com, includes live and previously recorded videos from NASA, NPR, Fox News, USA Today, and the Discovery Channel, among other publishers.

To generate the live video streams, which include Fox Business News and NASA TV, Akamai turned to Raleigh, NC-based Inlet Technologies for help. Inlet’s “adaptive streaming” technology turns a live TV broadcast into digital packets that go out over a wireless system like AT&T’s 3G EV-DO network at whatever bit rate the network and the destination device can handle. That means users don’t have to pick from high- or low-bandwidth video streams, don’t have to wait while video “re-buffers,” and aren’t even aware when the stream shifts from a lower rate to a higher one, or vice versa.

Inlet also makes video encoding software that helps media companies build up libraries of recorded video content that can then be delivered on demand. That’s what most of the companies featured in the Akamai iPhone showcase are doing; today’s lineup, for example, includes several short episodes from USA Today’s “Talking Tech” video feature and a selection of animated slide shows accompanying audio reports from NPR News.

Akamai’s role is to transport the Inlet-encoded video over its global network to the AT&T media servers closest to the actual iPhone users requesting the material. The company hopes to work with more broadcasters to get their programs to iPhone and iPod Touch owners, who consume far more broadband content than owners of other mobile devices. (Some 80 percent of all data requests from mobile devices over Wi-Fi networks come from iPhones and iPod Touch devices, according to Akamai.)

“Apple’s extensive support for new web standards like HTML 5 and HTTP streaming of live and on-demand video to the iPhone and iPod touch has transformed the quality of video content that consumers can now view while mobile,” Tim Napoleon, Akamai’s chief strategist for digital media, said in an announcement last week. “To be able to watch video anytime, anywhere at a quality this high is nothing short of amazing.”

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Jim Johnson was named CEO of San Diego’s BakBone Software in late 2004, but he has only recently been focusing his full attention on what he was hired to do: expanding the company’s business and product lines. Embarking on something of a shopping spree in May, Johnson oversaw BakBone’s purchase of the assets of Santa Clara, CA-based Asempra Technologies for more than $2 million, then followed that up with the $15.9 million buyout of Broomfield, CO-based ColdSpark.

BakBone’s expanded business strategy has been a long time coming because the company got mired in accounting issues that were finally resolved in February.

Jim Johnson

Johnson told me in a recent interview that when he was hired, BakBone was basically a single-product company that specialized in data storage management software it had acquired from AT&T’s Bell Labs. “I was brought in to try to orchestrate a broader vision, and move the company’s strategy beyond a single product,” Johnson recalled. BakBone’s longtime core product, NetVault, provides data backup and recovery within organizations that use a variety of data storage machines running Unix, Linux, Windows, and even Apple’s operating system, OS X.

Asempra’s technology expands BakBone’s product line by providing real-time data protection for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows file system data. “We feel that technology was a great acquisition,” Johnson says. “It’s a product that we can immediately feed back into our existing clients.” (Those clients include Volvo, AT&T, and Yahoo.) ColdSpark, meanwhile, adds what Johnson calls e-mail management and network traffic management. The ColdSpark system replaces BakBone’s previous technology with a more sophisticated system, “So we’re able to capture an e-mail message, identify and classify it based on categories that the IT administrator can set,” Johnson says. Such capabilities, which makes it easier to search for messages on a particular subject or from …Next Page »

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If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the …Next Page »

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Ah, the beauties and the pitfalls of the new mobile-software ecosystem. With ready-made distribution platforms like Apple’s iTunes App Store, it’s possible for a couple of entrepreneurs to launch a company on the cheap around a single application. But if you go that route, you’re entirely at the mercy of Apple, where the App Store administrators are famously arbitrary, unpredictable, and close-mouthed about which apps get approved for the store, and when they’ll actually go live.

Fluent Mobile, a Boston startup that emerged from stealth mode today, has been sweating the App Store kingmaker process all month. Its new news-reader application for the iPhone, called Fluent News, was originally expected to show up in the App Store on June 16. Then it was June 17. Then there was long period of limbo. Fluent’s public-relations folks were forced to send journalists such as myself—who’d received an embargoed press release and a preview version of the app in early June—a string of e-mail updates about the latest delays.

Now the suspense is finally over, and iPhone and iPod Touch users can finally download the free app. Fluent News is basically a mobile multi-source newspaper—like a gussied-up RSS reader. The interface is reminiscent of dedicated iPhone apps published by individual news organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but the app combines stories from a range of major news feeds, all pre-optimized for viewing on mobile devices. So far I’ve seen stories on Fluent News from CNN, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, the Washington Post, Fox News, Reuters, ABC News, and USA Today.

When you start up Fluent, you see the Top News page, which shows the day’s hottest stories, as judged by Fluent’s content relevancy algorithms. You can also explore stories in specialized sections, including U.S. news, business, world news, entertainment, sports, technology, politics, science, health, lifestyle, and opinion. There’s also a “Most Popular” page that shows you the stories that other Fluent News users are reading most avidly. (See the video demo on the next page. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still access all of this content from any mobile browser by going to www.fluentnews.com.)

Fluent itself is free to consumers.Fluent Mobile makes money on the clickable interstitial ads that occasionally appear mixed into story lists (they’re prominently set apart inside black bars). Many of the ads relate to other iPhone apps, and are provided by AdMob, a San Mateo, CA-based mobile advertising network.

Fluent Mobile CEO Micah Adler, a former professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says the company developed Fluent News in order to …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Rogue Sheep, a software development and consulting firm, has won an Apple Design Award for its iPhone App, Postage. The news was announced this week at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and reported by the Seattle Times. Postage lets you create customized electronic postcards.

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