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Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer has officially announced that there will be one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, followed up by the final release. The next release will be called ‘release candidate’ and will put an end to the ‘beta’ tag.
Dean also expressed that very selective changes will be done to the next and final release and has promised that the team would be very clear about product changes between the update and the final release.

If you need to get your hands on IE 8 now, you can download the IE 8 Beta 2 and also provide your valuable feedback to the team

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance. The Q3 2008 figures, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are 2 percent higher than the Q2 2008 results. Set against strong economic headwinds in the U.S. economy, Q3 ‘08’s $5.9 billion represents nonetheless the second-highest quarter results ever. For the first nine months of 2008, revenues totaled $17.3 billion, up from $15.2 billion in the same period a year ago and surpassing the record set in the first nine months of 2007 by nearly 14 percent.

The growth of interactive advertising that we’ve been experiencing over the past few years has stabilized due in large part to the difficult current economic climate,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “Interactive advertising continues to be the most measurable and cost-effective way to reach consumers, and we see more and more marketers seeking to harness its power.”

David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, added that, “a weakening economy will continue to be a challenge to all forms of advertising-supported media. However, the Internet should be better poised to withstand the storm given its ability to combine performance-based advertising along with broad-based branding.”

Quarterly $ Revenue Growth Comparison – 2000-2008 YTD

Read more @ IAB

A NASA official said Friday that the top Googlers’ new fighter jet will be used mostly to fly missions for the agency that four other jets owned by Google’s top executives could not handle.

“They are dedicating the plane primarily for NASA payloads,” said Steve Zornetzer, associate director of the NASA Ames Research Center, which operates Moffett Field near the Google campus. He said that the Google executives’ pilots would use the Dornier Alpha Jet for “training and pilot proficiency.”

Last year, a company controlled by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, along with Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, signed an unusual agreement with NASA giving them rights to use Moffett Field, an airfield adjacent to Google, for their growing fleet of private airplanes. At the time, NASA described the arrangement as a win-win: NASA would receive $1.3 million in rent every year, and it would get to place scientific instruments on the planes for use by its researchers.

Mr. Zornetzer said things didn’t turn out exactly as expected. The Googlers and the agency both found out that they could not make modifications to the passenger planes, which include a Boeing 767, a Boeing 757 and two Gulfstream Vs, without getting new certifications from the Federal Aviation Administration each time.

Continue reading @ NYtimes

A couple of months ago, Hugh Macleod created a bit of buzz with his blog post The Cloud’s Best Kept Secret. Hugh’s argument: that cloud computing will lead to a huge monopoly. Of course, a couple of weeks ago, Larry Ellison made the opposite point, arguing that salesforce.com is "barely profitable", and that no one will make much money in cloud computing.

In this post, I’m going to explain why Ellison is right, and yet, for the strategic future of Oracle, he is dangerously wrong.

First, let’s take a look at Hugh Macleod’s argument:

…nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody’s saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn’t be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today’s Microsoft or Google. We’re talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

I imagine many of my friends who work for the aforementioned companies know all about this, and know how VAST the stakes are.

Windows vs Apple? Who cares? Kid’s stuff. There’s a much bigger game going on… And for some reason, its utter enormity seems to be a very well-kept secret, at least to non-combatants like myself.

The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t take into account what causes power laws in online activity. Understanding the dynamics of increasing returns on the web is the essence of what I called Web 2.0. Ultimately, on the network, applications win if they get better the more people use them. As I pointed out back in 2005, Google, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, wikipedia, and all other other Web 2.0 superstar applications have this in common.

Continue reading @ O’reilly

If you’re living in a part of the EU that has yet to be reached by broadband internet access, then help could be at hand from the European Commission.

The European Commission is about to begin a review of the communications services available to EU citizens and, if it finds a majority of them use broadband, then it will likely mandate that it must be made available to everyone.

EU Rules called the Universal Service Obligations cover what member states must provide to citizens. When usage of any service passes 50 per cent of the EU, that service is considered essential and must be made universal.

The scheduled review has been brought forward because Commissioners realised that the rapid growth of broadband will probably hit the threshold before long.

Should that happen, telecoms companies across Europe could be forced to expand their networks to even the most remote areas as early as 2010.

At the same time, the minimum speed considered acceptable is likely to be raised from the current 28.8Kbit/s. It’s nice, but how about a slice of that Japanese 1Gbit/s pie, eh?

View: TechRadar

Chinese officials are calling for a mass migration to IPv6 after disclosing that they have only 830 days’ worth of IPv4 resources left.

The disclosure was made by Li Kai, director of IP of the China Internet Network Information Center.

Li explained at a conference that, without a rapid changeover to IPv6, internet users in China will start having problems getting online.
"We held seminars almost everywhere to tell operators to apply for the remaining IP addresses as soon as possible, and to prepare the new IP addresses from IPv6 for internet users," he said, according to state media.
Around 80 per cent of China’s IPv4 resources have now been taken up. The country’s IP allocation recently exceeded Japan’s, making it the second largest in the world behind the US.

View: Full story @ vnunet

The "Computer Navy" is here.

Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”.

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its Internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centers” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centers, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.

In the patent application seen by The Times, Google writes: “Computing centers are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away.”

The increasing number of data centers necessary to cope with the massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.

The supercomputers housed in the data centers, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the Internet is not very green.

Read more @ timesonline.co.uk

From the Times Magazine UK.

The computer chip industry on Friday celebrated the 50th birthday of the integrated circuit, a breakthrough that set the stage for the Internet and the Digital Age.

A half-century ago a young engineer named Jack Kilby first demonstrated an integrated circuit he designed while working through the summer at his Texas Instruments job because he didn’t have enough vacation time for a holiday.

Kilby used a sliver of conductive germanium to connect a transistor and other bits, dubbing the soldered assembly an "integrated circuit" (IC).

Engineer Robert Noyce was designing his own IC "in parallel" at Fairchild Semiconductor but didn’t debut his creation until about six months later. Noyce went on to found US chip making giant Intel in 1968.

While Kilby was the first to demonstrate an IC, Noyce came up with a design that could be mass produced, according to Leslie Berlin, project historian for Stanford Silicon Valley Archives and author of a book about Noyce.

"It was an idea whose time had come," Berlin told AFP. "There were efforts all over the world to make something like an integrated circuit."

History gives Noyce and Kilby shared credit for inventing the circuit that transformed the world of electronics.

Read more @ news.yahoo.com

From Yahoo! News.

Migration to the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) standard is virtually non-existent, according to a year-long study released this week by network security firm Arbor Networks. Experts and governments have been encouraging organisations to migrate to the new protocol because the current 20 year-old IPv4 is fast running out of available addresses.
IPv4 addresses could in fact run out as early as 2010, according to Scott Iekel-Johnson, principle software engineer at Arbor Networks. The firm used data from over 80 of its ISP partners and customers to determine the amount of IPv6 traffic on the internet. Arbor Networks found that the proportions of IPv6 and IPv4 traffic has stayed roughly the same over the past year. The report also found that IPv6 traffic is still a tiny percentage of overall internet traffic. There were 6Mbps of IPv6 traffic by the end of July compared to 4Tbps of IPv4 traffic.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Adobe has just unleashed a new online platform containing a word processor, file storage and sharing, both tied together with a Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Users of Acrobat.com can join each other in virtual rooms, and all those in the room have access to the same document. This is a great feature for virtual meetings, paper editing, and much more.
Acrobat 9 will include many features aided by the integration of Flash. Some of these features include animation integration and dynamic maps.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
With this Acrobat facelift, we can also expect a speedier environment. Everyone has had the ‘PDF opening blues’, which is hoped to be eliminated with Acrobat 9.

View: news.com
Visit: Acrobat.com Beta