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Over the years I’ve amassed a diverse collection of memory cards, from moldy old SmartMedia to brand-spankin’-new microSD. The iMONO 80-in-1 High Speed Card Reader accommodates them all–and then some. You can pick one up for a mere $17 plus shipping.

(Credit:
Brando)

The card reader is compatible with Windows and
Mac systems and supports USB 2.0 and 1.1. It’s available in black or white. [via Gizmodo]

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: There are 80 different kinds of memory cards?! Well, if you count up all the variants of the major formats and, um, carry the one… hmm, I still don’t get anywhere near 80. But better safe than sorry, right? This could be the last card reader you’ll ever need–until those pinheads come up with yet another format (MiniMicro SD, anyone?).

And for small businesses which may need immediate help with PC problems, Intel introduced Remote PC Assist Technology that connects businesses with service providers. After the business user enters a key sequence, the service providers can use vPro to solve problems.

Intel, of course, is a chipmaker and so there is plenty of silicon that goes along with the package. The third-generation vPro suite (formerly code-named McCreary) uses Core 2 quad-core or dual-core processors in combination with Q45 Express Chipset, the 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection, and Intel Active Management technology 5.0. Mobile chipsets, such as the GM, PM, and GS Express chipsets also support vPro.

For example, a feature called Remote Alert will “call” IT on its own if the PC is experiencing problems “outside preset parameters,” Intel said.

Intel says this is also good for the service provider, allowing broader access to customers. Initially, Intel Remote PC Assist will be available in North America.

Understandable because vPro is an under-the-hood, non-performance-driven technology that falls off many PC users’ radar screens. In essence, vPro allows PCs to be fixed and maintained remotely, potentially saving businesses money because they don’t incur the cost of IT staffing levels necessary if maintenance was done at each PC on site.

One of vPro’s marquee features is the ability to access a computer even if it has been turned off. This can be done on either a wired or a secure wireless network. And laptops outside the company firewall can be accessed with the newest versions of software and hardware, according to Intel.

Does Intel vPro ring any bells? Not for most people. The newest version of vPro software and accompanying Intel hardware introduced Monday won’t command the attention paid to an Intel processor rollout.

Intel also introduced two motherboards Monday supporting all of the new Intel vPro features. Aimed at channel customers, the DQ45CB is for standard-sized PCs and the DQ45EK is for small-form-factor systems.

Speaking with venture capitalist Ann Winblad at the Churchill Club onThursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer addressed those differences of opinion:

“I would have thought I knew what the word ‘cloud computing’ meant,” he said, “until I sat with Anne and a bunch of venture capitalists this morning who used the word completely differently than I would have used it.”

See also:

But he did offer this stab at a definition: “I think when people talk about cloud computing they’re talking about taking some stuff, putting it outside the firewall, and perhaps putting it on servers that are also shared–or storage systems–that are also shared, perhaps with other companies that they know nothing about.”

• Ballmer on search: ‘I don’t like not being No. 1′
• Mundie: The cloud needs killer apps
• Microsoft’s Mundie outlines the future of computing
• Ballmer jabs at VMware

Ballmer declined to get into the specifics of Microsoft’s vision, or to offer any details on its “Red Dog” project. That topic, he said, is something the company will open up about at its Professional Developer Conference in late October.

There’s no shortage of people talking about cloud computing these days. But are they all talking about the same thing?

• Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, mused about the future of search on Google’s main blog. Among various ideas about the potential expansion of Google search to become ever more pervasive and useful is the possibility that we’ll be able to upload a photo of a bird to a search engine to identify it, and that search engines will be able to draw upon social connections and other personal information to help understand queries better. Google’s working on cross-language information retrieval, so search results from all languages are provided in a user’s native tongue. And of course, as Star Trek has trained us to expect (and that Yahoo OneSearch with Voice enables today), we should be able to search with our voices, not just by typing text.

• Chrome’s Incognito apparently really does work, according to the SurfChrome blog, with a forensics expert unable to find traces of Web sites the browser visited. “There was no trace of cached images, history nor cookies,” the blog said.

(Credit:
CNET News)

• Google consumes a huge amount of open-source projects for its own use, and sometimes contributes back to those projects. It did so with MySQL, the Sun Microsystems open-source database, including changes that speed the core data engine, InnoDB, used in MySQL, and that make it work faster on servers with multicore processors, according to the Google open-source blog. “We expect several of these features to be merged into a future official MySQL release, and one of them, semi-synchronous replication, is already available as a MySQL feature preview,” Google said.

• Anyone skeptical that Google is building
Mac OS X and Linux versions of Chrome can put doubts to rest by looking at the Chrome build system, which shows how well the latest builds are faring for those two as-yet-unsupported operating systems as well as Windows.

Gmail Labs now has three new options for users

• Google plans to launch a YouTube feature this week called HotSpots that lets video creators see which parts of a video are most watched, according to Advertising Age. The tool graphs activity levels that reflects activity such as viewers rewinding to watch a particular spot more often or dropping off to do something else. (Via Google Blogoscoped.)

• Google’s Steve Souder, who focuses on high-performance Web sites, has released some statistics about speed-related features that various browsers support. His conclusion: Chrome is tied with
Firefox and the latest
Safari for the best speed features, with a score of 8 out of 10. His UA Profiler test is available on his Web site.

• Gmail Labs has produced three new features that people can try, according to Google’s Gmail blog. One is a keyboard shortcut, “G” then “L,” that brings people to a list of labels so they can show a specific category of messages. Another is the ability to move the Gmail control elements around on the left-side navigation bar, so users can reorder instant-messaging contacts, labels, and other items to put their preferred controls at the top. Last is the ability to pick your own colors for labels, not just rely on Google’s choices.

Time for our semi-irregular roundup of Google items:

• Themes to customize the appearance of Google’s Chrome browser are now appearing, with instructions at LifeHacker. Also handy are some command-line startup options that let power users configure Chrome to block the execution of Java, Flash, or JavaScript programs, or to launch Chrome maximized to fill the whole screen.(Via Google Blogoscoped.)

• SurfChrome and Valleywag both feature some amusing re-captioned parodies of the Chrome comic book from Google and illustrator Scott McCloud.

• Picasa is mostly a photo-sharing site, but it can house videos, too (as long as you haven’t run into any storage space limits at the site). Now Google has opened up an interface that lets programmers better use the feature. Specifically, Google has released an API (application programming interface) for video uploads, according to the Google Code blog, so a programmer could for example create an upload tool that can deal with videos as well as photos. Video API details are available online.

The center is slated to open sometime during Microsoft’s next fiscal year, which begins on July 1, and a review of potential sites is under way. The site will be modeled after Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Beijing, China, which opened in 2005.

“Searchers have different expectations and experiences in every geography in the world, so we believe it is critical to make deep investments in physical locations in multiple markets to ensure that we’re applying the best local expertise to our research and development efforts,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president of the Search, Portal and Advertising Group, said in a statement.

Microsoft plans to build on its previous projects in Europe, where it has been working on enterprise search via its $1.2 billion acquisition this year of Fast Search & Transfer SA.

The software giant currently reaches 68 percent of Internet users in Europe via its online assets and display advertising, said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division president.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to open a search technology center in Europe as it seeks to bolster its Live Search efforts.

With these international search centers, Microsoft is looking to dive deep into understanding the consumer search habits, methods, preferences of local residents.

“Using spyware for surveillance in cases of domestic abuse is a serious matter,” says Anna Stepanov, who manages the Anti-Spyware program at McAfee Avert Labs. She’s written a report titled Spyware: A Morphing Campaign (in PDF), which chronicles recent spyware trends including domestic abuse. “Monitoring a victim’s online, cell phone, or general computing activity is of more value than ever in controlling or hurting a victim.”

On Thursday, the Anti-Spyware Coalition will meet in Washington. Included will be experts from McAfee, Google, and the Pew Internet & American Life project to discuss the latest in spyware trends. In addition to the well-known damage caused by spyware–hawking advertising, stealing passwords, and slowing down PCs–McAfee is calling attention to a little known aspect of spyware: domestic abuse.

The National Network to End Domestic Violence offers these computer use tips to protect against such abuse.

Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface–it’s based on Adobe’s Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use–I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time.

My point: if you’re a beginning artist, I still think the best recipe for success is to give full downloadable samples away on your home page or MySpace, then sell your music through a service like CDBaby or TuneCore (another aggregator that resells your music through iTunes and other services). You’ve got to go where the people are.

In the case of eMusic, the site had first-mover advantage: it’s been around for almost 10 years (!), and has been able to sign up a lot of independent labels with rosters including multiple acts. With 2.8 million songs available, fans of independent music already know to look there, and new labels (or the aggregators that serve them, like The Orchard) strive to get their music placed there. With CD Baby, the service started by fulfilling a difficult role for most artists–online distribution of physical CDs, including packaging, shipping, tracking, payment processing, and so on–and only later expanded into a digital aggregator (placing its artists’ music on services like iTunes) and direct digital distributor (selling MP3s on its own artist sites).

The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have complete pricing discretion, but Speakerheart takes $0.25 per song. Speakerheart’s big differentiator, though, are the widgets (known as “Shelves”) that offer streaming samples (”Speakers”) and the ability for listeners to bookmark songs that they like (”Hearts”). Musicians and fans can place these Shelves on any site that accepts Flash, including MySpace pages. For artists, the idea is that users will be able to stumble across your music on a wide variety of sites, sample your music, then proceed to your storefront to buy a song or two.

An example of a Speakerheart shelf on the MySpace page of Nashville band The Bird Ensemble.

The problem with Speakerheart and other digital distribution start-ups is a lack of critical mass. Artists with labels or a significant fanbase don’t need the service–they can sell digital downloads through their own site or the label’s site. In either case, they (or their label overlords) will keep a greater percentage of the sales price. That means that Speakerheart will continue to draw relatively obscure acts, which means that few listeners will have any reason to visit the site or place widgets on their personal pages, which will keep the service too obscure to draw any acts with a significant fanbase, and so on–a sort of obscurity death cycle. The only way to break this cycle would be for Speakerheart to get a few name-brand artists to place their songs with the service, but that requires big marketing bucks or a lot of luck (a formerly obscure Speakerheart artist becoming the next U2, for example).

The folks at Speakerheart might say “But look at other services that started with independent artists, like eMusic and CD Baby–if they can do it, why can’t we?”

(Credit: Speakerheart; The Bird Ensemble)

Update 1:55 p.m. PDT: As several commenters have pointed out below, buying a music phone doesn’t necessarily mean it’s used for playing music. (Case in point: my own Verizon enV has a 2GB microSD slot, and I’ve never transferred MP3 files to it. But that’s mostly because my
iPod earbuds don’t work with the enV and I refuse to buy a separate set.) Music-playing ability was formerly a feature reserved for high-end phones, but as the technology gets cheaper, that means that those features will start to filter down to more inexpensive phones, which have always been the majority of the market.

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

As the developed world begins to be saturated with cell phones, handset manufacturers and wireless operators are forced to look elsewhere to keep their profits up. For leading handset maker Nokia, its secret to staying on top of the competition is its growing business in emerging markets, like China, India, the Middle East, and Africa, according to my CNET News.com colleague Maggie Reardon.

More than 500 million music phones were shipped worldwide in 2007, which puts that category of device 300 million units ahead of regular old portable music players, according to the report released Monday by MultiMedia Intelligence. The company is forecasting that by 2011, of the 941 million handsets that will ship worldwide, more than half will be music phones. (The report defines a music phone as a handset that plays music files, and has a memory card slot.)

The Walkman-branded W980 phone from Sony Ericsson is a phone but looks like a music player. Phones that play music are quickly outpacing standalone portable music players.

“Music has been the first ‘killer app’ for the operators to drive the consumption of premium content on the handset,” said Frank Dickson, chief research officer for MultiMedia Intelligence. To that end, MMI predicts the mobile music market will be worth $6 billion by the end of this year. “With such significant revenue and customer demand at stake, the operators’ and handset providers’ concerted efforts (will) use music as a central part of their handset strategies,” the report says.

Music players are losing out in popularity to phones that pull double-duty, according to a market research report released Monday.

The operators of wireless networks also need ways to increase revenue. So, though not everyone has a need for a data plan if they don’t want e-mail on their phone, music is something almost everyone can relate to. Right now the most promising driver of profits on cell phones is music-playing capability.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET, photos by Lori Grunin, Michael Ricca/CNET)

Photoshop.com may be Flash-y and Air-y with photo-editing capabilities, but it surprisingly still seems to lag sites like Flickr and Facebook when it comes to various sharing features. For instance, only this week has Adobe launched video-hosting and group album capabilities (available for free accounts as well as paid), long available from its competitors.

You can see how Photoshop.com’s editing capabilities stack up against the competition in 15 online photo editors compared.

There are some done-it-better aspects, however. For example, Adobe allows for larger videos: a maximum of 2GB vs. Flickr’s 150GB/90 seconds. Of course, the more large videos you upload the closer it will push you to the 2GB storage maximum of a free account. As it’s taking forever (it’s up to about an hour and still hasn’t completed) to process my short 177MB video, however–everything gets transcoded to Flash video–I shudder to think how long a 2GB file would take.

People you invite as Collaborators to Group Albums aren’t automatically added as your friends. And while it notifies you via e-mail of updates to the album there don’t seem to be other notification options, like posting Twitter, Facebook, or even an RSS feed. (Concurrently with the rollout, Adobe updated Photoshop.com’s terms of service. There doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable in the new terms. Yay!)

There are still a few UI kinks to work out as well. If you e-mail an invite to someone at an e-mail address other than the one connected to their Adobe ID, there’s no way to link the addresses or even allow the person to reply to you with the correct address.

Plutext is also going to release a free Java-based editor, Docx4all, that natively supports Word .DOCX files as well as the Plutext system. It’s not a pure Web-based editor, but it will allow document authors to send links to active versions of their files to users who don’t have Word.

Plutext Managing Director Jason Harrop told me that real-time co-editing is technically possible with his platform, but that his research says users want the level of control that the intentional publishing gives them.

Fighting this killer feature is Microsoft Word’s own killer feature, which is: Everyone in business has Word, and most people know how to use it effectively. There are plenty of people who would use a simultaneous editing feature in Word if it had one, and who aren’t going to switch to Google just because it does.

See also: Expresso, EditGrid, Sharepoint. And keep an eye on Docverse.

The service works as a plug-in to Word, adding a collection of buttons in the “Review” tab. These new functions let you invite users into a document, push your changes to the Web, and read in new changes.

Plutext adds new collaboration functions to Word.

While Plutext does not support strictly simultaneous editing (you have to intentionally publish your changes and get new updates), neither does it let two users get out of sync by letting them work on different versions of the same file. You really can have a dozen people in the same document at the same time. Plutext uses Word’s existing Accept and Reject Revisions function to review changes other people have made on your open document.

With Plutext, you won’t have the problem of multiple versions of the file floating around with different revisions in them, nor will you run into the issue of trying to open a document to edit it only to find that some other user has it opened and locked for changes, and is out to lunch.

To my mind, the killer feature of Google Docs is not that it is Web-based, per se. It’s that it makes real-time collaboration easy. You can invite a user into a document you currently have open, and you both can edit the file at the same time. It’s not a feature you’re going to need all the time, but when you’re on a deadline and need to get sign-off from one or more other person on a document right away, it’s a life-saver (see also: Zooos).

The system creates readable audit trails of changes.

The demo I saw was early and a bit rough; taking a file from standard single-user mode to collaborative looked complicated; Harrop says the system will be cleaner when it ships in October.

(Credit:
Plutext)

Plutext will be available as server-based software for companies that want their documents stored inside their own firewalls; a cloud-based Plutext service may also be forthcoming.

(Credit:
Plutext)

There’s also a wiki-like revision history that acts as an audit trail of all the work done on a document. Revisions in this report are flagged either by paragraph or section heading (user’s choice); the latter could make reading updates on technical and legal documents much easier than it would be otherwise.

A new service, Plutext, currently being developed, will bring nearly live editing to Word documents. I saw a demo at the Office 2.0 conference.