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According to a data sheet the company provided me, to be distributed at Ringside’s formal launch at next week’s Open Source Business Conference, this is what the product does and is:

Ringside Social Application Server is the first open-source platform that enables Web site owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing Web site content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.

commentary (Credit:
Ringside Networks)

What the heck is that? Well, for one thing, Ringside Networks is certainly an innovative use of open source. For those who think that open source can’t compete and innovate new markets, Ringside is about to put that theory to the test.

Web site look and feel is exactly what a company uses today. Social applications can be designed and customized to be more meaningful to a given Web site’s users and business–rather than be limited to standard default capabilities. Existing corporate Web site content and business applications can be made socially aware. (Credit:
Ringside Networks)

It has a range of cool features like the ability to gather “social intelligence. In other words, the Ringside platform allows business owners to gain insight into the social graph of users, relationships, groups, interactions, and sharing that is occurring on their Web site. Suddenly, socializing becomes smart business.

I guess it was just a matter of time before Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, and other former JBoss employees started another application server company. Who knew, however, that they’d launch the world’s first open-source “social-application server”?

This provides three primary advantages:

This sounds incredibly cool. It means that existing corporate Web sites can be made socially aware. I’m not sure this is even possible with Ning, but certainly not to the extent that an open-source platform like Ringside offers.

In my work with Alfresco, I see demand for this sort of application growing stronger by the day. Kudos to Ringside for recognizing the market opportunity and to David Skok at Matrix Partners for funding it. This is one of the most interesting open-source opportunities in the market today.

Facebook, like most other social-media companies, has not had particularly stellar revenues. The IAB conference on Monday was designed to address that issue, and possible solutions, for New York’s ad industry.

But the “product” will just involve encouraging them to promote user participation through Facebook Ads, Kendall confirmed to CNET News.com later. He wasn’t specifically referring to Facebook Connect. That’s something that Facebook has offered since November, and it currently encourages developers to purchase ads to spread the word about marketing campaigns on Facebook’s developer platform. Up until this point, the social network hasn’t directly profited from its developer platform, and making part of the code open source isn’t going to rake in the cash either.

Some companies have already had successful advertising campaigns by using Facebook’s developer platform for free, Kendall said. One of them is FedEx, he said, which allows users to package up a selection of virtual “gifts” or any other kind of digital attachment into a “virtual FedEx package” and share it with their friends on the social network.

“It’s gimmicky, but it’s a great example of leveraging the hooks that Facebook provides, creating social context,” Kendall explained, “and FedEx does a great job of subtly incorporating their brand into the whole experience.”

This post was updated at 1:21 p.m. PDT with comment from Tim Kendall.

NEW YORK–It would’ve been cool: Facebook director of monetization Tim Kendall hinted Monday that the company would offer “a product” to help third-party companies “accelerate” participation in its developer platform when asked whether the company had any plans to start directly monetizing the technology.

Since no further detail was provided, and Kendall had said that this would deal with “whether an application is within Facebook or outside of Facebook,” this reporter inferred that he’d meant something involving development assistance for Facebook Connect, its upcoming data portability project. With Facebook Connect, third-party sites will be able to incorporate Facebook identity credentials into their own services.

Kendall was speaking on a panel at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s IAB Leadership Forum on User-Generated Content & Social Media here.

Now back to your regularly scheduled soap opera.

So why do I think Google is such an important part of the deal with Yahoo and Microsoft? It’s simple — Google is Microsoft’s arch rival and neither company wants anything to do with the other. And because Google doesn’t want to see the merger happen, it knows that this sweetheart deal with Yahoo could turn the tide.

“This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo,” Microsoft said. “We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo and Google are closer than ever to forming a deal that would see Yahoo increase its revenue by as much as $1 billion per year and throw a wrench into Microsoft’s plans post-acquisition.

After that, companies that are more willing to work with Google (like Time Warner) will get serious in their talks with Yahoo management, which suddenly has a new lease on life, and will offer Yahoo deals that will make Microsoft sweat.

That said, Microsoft is unwilling to increase its cash offer right now and believes (rightfully so) that it shouldn’t bid against itself. But what Microsoft may have failed to realize is that Yahoo is doing all it can to find other ways for Microsoft to bid against itself.

Let’s face it — Microsoft is not naive to what’s really going on with the Google deal and it understands the ramifications if such a deal is struck. Not only would it be forced to call in reinforcements to get some of the fence-sitting shareholders back on its side, it would need to figure out exactly what it can do after the Google deal is made.

And while the Journal is reporting that the Yahoo-Google deal may have a stipulation in it that says it can be dissolved if Microsoft acquires the company, I’m not so quick to believe that any deal between the company won’t put the hooks in Microsoft.

Aside from the deal with Google, Yahoo is desperately trying to seek suitors and so far, AOL has shown the most interest. And although it won’t be acquired outright, Yahoo would allow Time Warner to take a 20 percent stake in it and totally change the dynamics of the entire industry.

Right now, Yahoo is dealing with a relatively hostile group of shareholders that would like to see the Microsoft deal get done. That said, they’re unhappy with the fact that Microsoft’s lower stock price has diluted the value of its offer from $31 per share to about $29 per share. Because of that, some shareholders that were firmly in Microsoft’s corner have been asking for more cash and Jerry Yang and company has been able to fend off any pressures so far because of it.

And if you ask me, when the deal is reached, Microsoft will be forced to back off.

So far, no deal has been reached with Time Warner, but let’s not forget that a deal with Google could make it easier. After finding $1 billion in a deal with Google, Yahoo suddenly becomes a far more attractive target for Time Warner and many others that wouldn’t mind working alongside Google. With that, Yahoo can finally acquire some leverage and use Microsoft against itself to get out of its stranglehold.

Over the past few months, we’ve been inundated with constant stories about the future of Yahoo. Will it be gobbled up Microsoft? Will Yahoo get away? For quite a while, no one was quite sure. But after seeing what’s going on with Google and the deal it may soon strike with Yahoo, the writing could be on the wall.

After announcing to shareholders on April 22nd when it’s forced to reveal its earnings that the Google deal has been struck and should bring in an additional $1 billion per year, some of those leaning on the fence that are already upset with the diluted Microsoft acquisition price will give Yang and shareholders a reprieve and wait to see what happens.

Will this definitely happen? Who knows. But if Yahoo plays its cards right and can strike deals at the right time with the right companies, Microsoft will have a problem.

Here’s how I see it happening: Google and Yahoo will form a deal by the end of this week or early next week. After that, Microsoft will come out and say that the deal is an extremely ridiculous move on the part of the Yahoo executives and just another example of the company’s managers not knowing what to do.

Upon realizing that its support is eroding and it has no real prospects to acquire Yahoo without a ridiculous sum of cash, Microsoft will back out and this whole saga will end.

But let’s also not forget that Microsoft doesn’t want to see the Google deal happen either. Last week, the company said that it was extremely displeased by the development and thought it would be bad for all parties involved.

Last week, Yahoo announced that it had formed a temporary deal with Google that involved the company outsourcing its search ads to Google. At that time, the online firm said that it would give it a two-week trial period to see how it worked and make a decision after that time.

But after foregoing that two-week stipulation and deciding instead to try to form a deal now, Yahoo seems anxious and more willing than ever to sell itself to any other company but Microsoft.

Though more technology and product details will certainly emerge in the next two days in Shanghai, the main chip themes are already out there. Gelsinger spelled them out at briefing earlier this month.

Nehalem boasts increased parallelism, better branch prediction (to move instructions more quickly through the instruction pipeline), and an on-chip memory controller for increased memory performance–what Intel calls “memory latency reduction.” Something, by the way, Advanced Micro Devices already has in its chips.

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

While the marquee processor theme at IDF Shanghai is “milliwatts to petaflops,” Intel is also set to offer a vision of universal connectivity.

The chip buzzwords are: Tukwila, a new quad-core chip with 2 billion transistors, a whopping 30MB of cache, and a new interconnect technology called QuickPath; Dunnington, a six-core chip for multiprocessor computers that can support four or more processors (in this case, each with six cores); Nehalem, a follow-on to the current “Penryn” processors, it is a new 45-nanometer chip microarchitecture due in the fourth quarter that scales up to eight cores; and Larrabee, a visual-computing architecture that uses many cores (”many” usually means many more than a typical quad-core computer).

In addition to Atom, the processor spotlight will likely fall on Nehalem and Larrabee. Nehalem is a relatively known quantity; Larrabee, a relatively unknown quantity. So interest should focus on the latter.

There is also a demonstration of wireless device discovery and setup. This demonstration shows how to detect and connect to nearby wireless displays, using the familiar FnF7 (Function F7 key combination).

On a slightly more practical level, the Cliffside technology is being demonstrated from the Mobile Products Group; it enables a single Wi-Fi adapter to function like two independent Wi-Fi adapters. The hope is that this technology could sync your MP3 and video files without a USB cable, directly and wirelessly connecting your notebook to your TV to view HD movies. More here.

The main theme for the event, which starts Wednesday, Beijing time, refers to “very, very big to very, very small and low power,” according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, speaking in a video.

“Milliwatts” refers to chips such as Atom, a tiny low-power, low-cost processor destined for ultramobile devices and low-cost desktops typically running either Linux or Windows XP. The first Atom chips will launch in June.

(See: Intel rolls out five new Atom processors.)

The specs for Intel’s Dunnington processor

“Petaflops” refers to high-performance computing–what used to be called supercomputing. (”Peta” is quadrillion, or a thousand trillion; “flop” is floating-point operation.) Intel is targeting petaflop supercomputers that would compete with the fastest supercomputer in the world: IBM’s Blue Gene/P machines.

On another front, Intel is evangelizing universal connectivity, always a problematic proposition, simply because it invariably promises more (sometimes much more) than it can deliver. Intel puts it this way: “Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket…knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time…Imagine a day when this device…can dynamically become a hybrid combination of other computing and multimedia devices in close proximity.” You get the picture. Intel calls this “Carry Small, Live Large.”

(Credit:
Intel)

Larrabee is a graphics processor scheduled for the 2009-2010 time frame. It will include a new vector instruction set to improve the performance of graphics and video applications. Larrabee will be compatible with Intel’s popular x86 instruction set, theoretically making life easier for software developers.

Looks like it wasn’t the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle that was keeping potential customers away from high-definition video players after all.

The NPD Group released some of its retail sales tracking data Wednesday that showed sales of Blu-ray standalone players (not a
PlayStation 3, combo player, or PC with Blu-ray drive) had mostly decreased since the beginning of the year.

Standalone Blu-ray player unit sales in the U.S. decreased 40 percent from January to February and saw a very slight increase (2 percent) between February and March, according to NPD.

HD DVD players fared even worse–player unit sales dropped 13 percent from January to February, and 65 percent from February to March–which was expected. Toshiba stopped production of HD DVD units in February, and the format’s promotional group disbanded in March.

So what does this mean for Blu-ray player vendors? Why haven’t sales experienced any sort of substantial uptick without a competitor? Prices offer one clue. Blu-ray player prices were at their peak for the year in mid-March, around $400. During the holiday shopping season the average price had been closer to $300.

But more likely is what NPD’s high-def video analysts have been harping on for a while: that DVD is “good enough” for most consumers. And that the picture offered by a Blu-ray Disc and accompanying player doesn’t appear so overwhelmingly better than a standard DVD and an upconverting player that many consumers can’t justify the dramatically increased cost.

To that point, sales of significantly less expensive upconverting DVD players have actually increased 5 percent over the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter a year ago. Standard DVD player sales dropped 39 percent over the same period.

Blu-ray player prices are going to have to drop dramatically, to around $200 probably, to make themselves more attractive to consumers outside of the early adopter/home theater enthusiast crowd. Sony, one of the largest producers of Blu-ray players, says $200 players aren’t likely until next year at the earliest.

commentary

The next time you want to flame me for something I write…remember that I have Lily, and have pity.

Asays Ski Grand Targhee
by mjasay

Next time you want to criticize me, just remember Lily telling me to “Shut up,” over and over again.

Trust me. I’m punished enough.

Finetuna is a dead simple collaborative image annotation tool. Meant mostly for casual designers, it lets you make a few short notes on an image and send it off to someone else. As soon as they get it, they can view your edits, make their own, then send it back. This keeps the paper trail out of your e-mail in-box, and in a single place.

Finetuna’s key appeal is that it does several simple things with ease. You can highlight, underline, and cross out text. There are also simple tools to insert text and make comments, which are essentially the same thing; you just get a box to write in suggestions to the sender. There’s no free-form doodling tool to make mark-ups, which photographers might yearn for, but the highlighter comes close.

Finetuna lets you make small suggestions or edits to an image, then send it off to someone else–all for free.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

There are a handful of ways to get images into Finetuna, although the easiest is just to upload the shot from your computer. You can also drop in a direct URL from where the image is hosted, or download the
Firefox extension which lets you mark up an image from any page you’re on.

I’m not sold on professionals using this over tools like ConceptShare and ProofHQ, but if your basic needs are highlighting, making small comments, and you don’t want to sign up for anything, it’s tremendous.

The demise of LinuxCare can be attributed to many factors. The first was that enterprises were slow to adopt Linux - in the early ’00s, IT spending came to a grinding halt with the dot-com and stock market crash. But the key factor to LinuxCare’s spectacular death spiral was the fact that they were going up against Red Hat, the very company they were basing their business on. Red Hat not only developed their own distribution of Linux, but also started offering support for it. Red Hat offered a one-stop shop for Linux software and services regardless of hardware. Enterprise customers decided it was easier to buy from one vendor. This same sentiment is what drives sales of Microsoft software in enterprises today.

Levanta, a Linux data center automation company that was reborn from the ashes of Linuxcare, has closed its doors.

I never thought that either company was a particularly bad idea, but there was some clear mismanagement at LinuxCare and some difficult marketing that needed to be done at Levanta.

I wrote about Levanta and LinuxCare for Slashdot back in December 2005. The company never seemed to get its mojo back from the LinuxCare debacle, despite having a pretty cool product.

Even though Google’s paid-click growth rate was well below the fourth-quarter’s 25 percent year-over-year growth, Google outperformed the market growth rate of 0.9 percent, JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan wrote in a research note citing ComScore figures. ComScore has not released the latest figures publicly, but has provided them to Wall Street analysts who pay a subscription fee.

Updated at 6:25 p.m. PDT with an analyst comment.

Earlier on Wednesday, Nielsen released figures that show Google’s U.S. Web search market share rose in February to 58.7 percent, up slightly from January and the same period a year ago, while Yahoo’s was down at 17.6 percent.

The latest paid-click figures for Google were up only 3.1 percent in February from a year earlier, possibly prompting a 3 percent drop in Google’s stock.

The vast majority of Google’s revenue is from people clicking on sponsored search listings.

Days later, ComScore explained that the drop in Google’s paid click rate was due to “Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings” and said that the reduction in listings was “offset by paid revenue per click.”

Last month when ComScore released the paid-click rate figures that showed flat-year-over-year growth for Google in January, the company’s stock fell 8 percent the next day as Wall Street worried about slowed ad sales growth at the bellwether tech company.

Yahoo had 5.3 percent year-over-year growth in paid clicks in February and Microsoft’s paid clicks declined 13.1 percent from the year earlier, according to Khan.

Unlike most tools in the category, Pinboard is not free. There’s a one-time fee for getting access to the service, and the fee is going up. For every person that signs on, the fee rises a tenth of a penny. As of this writing, the gate fee is $5.03, indicating that the service has about 5,030 users. It’s free to use after payment, although Ceglowski may eventually charge a subscription fee for additional features. He’ll give users credit for their sign-up fee if he does that.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

I asked Ceglowski, via IM, if he thought this upfront payment plan was limiting the growth of his user base. He told me that infinite growth is not the goal. “The site is spam-free and I was able to collect enough money to work on it full time for a while; those were my main goals,” he wrote. Ceglowski lives in Romania and is the only person working on this project full time.

Pinboard has several fast ways to save links, including this pop-up bookmarklet.

Ceglowski set me up with a (free) reviewer’s account before our chat. After talking with Ceglowski I told him I felt bad that I didn’t pay the $5.03 gate fee. He just said, “That’s ten loaves of fine Romanian bread, I’ll have you know.”

There’s no trial period, but there is a three-day satisfaction guarantee. The whole thing is part of Ceglowski’s plan to build a product he likes, make enough money to support himself for a while doing it, stay small, and prevent the service from filling up with spam accounts and bogus links.

Ceglowski built the Pinboard serivce, he says, after watching the Magnolia meltdown and watching Delicious become big and bloated. In fact, it was Delicious founder Joshua Schachter who gave Ceglowski the idea for the escalating sign-up fee.

Pinboard is Maciej Ceglowski’s Delicious competitor. Sort of. It’s a one-man show, a feature-light but fast site for saving bookmarks and seeing what other people are saving, too, if you wish. It’s easy to use, thanks to a collection of functional bookmarklets that do various things (I like the “read later” one). TechCrunch has a glowing review.

In fact, he appears to want to actively avoid rapid growth. “I have seen a lot of free services burn up all their development time scaling for users,” he said. He has no plan to cap the gate fee as more people sign on. “I am tempted to just let it go up and see what happens,” he says.