PLANET Bernie's world

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.

Acompañado de ocho bailarines e irradiando energía, el 'rey del pop' ensayaba dos días antes de su repentina muerte en el estadio Staples Center. El mismo lugar que el martes acogerá su funeral.

Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million.

More on that later.

No es sencillo hacer un reportaje sobre Garoña. Y, según Albéniz, no tanto por lo ambiguo del discurso gubernamental o lo complejo del tema, sino porque se trata de un debate miserable, basado en la propaganda.

The Wire in Street View

'Paddy' has put together a nice collection of Street View images of locations in Baltimore from the hit TV series The Wire. You can also download this kml from the Google Earth Community and view some of the filming locations in Google Earth.

WalkJogRun.net
Adam Howitt, of WalkJogRun.net, recently appeared on lifestyle show Better. In the video below Adam talks a little about the original idea behind the map and how you can use the apllication to improve your fitness.

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.

When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.

When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.

The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.

Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.

LOS ÁNGELES.- California está en bancarrota. La última medida urgente del gobernador Schwarzenegger es abonar las deudas con pagarés (IOU's en inglés). Ayer se imprimieron 29.000 de estos documentos por un valor de 53 millones de dólares.

Add FriendFeed to the long and growing list of players who are trying to win the race for comprehensive and quick real-time search. FriendFeed has always had a real-time element — the ability to track social activities almost as they happen. But the company has announced the addition of real-time search today. If you’ve used search.twitter.com, [...]

After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.

July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued.

From the Dovecote Blog:

Mientras en la India los sacerdotes rezan para que llueva más, en un campo de refugiados palestino los pequeños juegan al fútbol. Esta es nuestra selección de imágenes de hoy.

¿A quién puedo acudir si tengo problemas sexuales? Muchos se plantean la cuestión. Los criterios para elegir un buen terapeuta se resumen en dos: busca el especialista que te convenga y huye de los charlatanes. Te explicamos cómo.

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

Una nueva entrega de placer express pone contra las cuerdas a Oskar Alegria, fotógrafo, trotamundos, escritor meticuloso, 'bon vivant'. Él también ha respondido a nuestro cuestionario, ¿te lo vas a perder?

Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer Joe Hewitt didn’t mention yesterday, and it’s a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS.

Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

A lot of the innovation in search these days is all about What’s happening right now? Twitter is the poster child where real-time search is concerned, and despite its ongoing spam problem, Twitter Trends has become one of the primary places to get a snapshot of what’s happening now. Google Blog Search is getting in the [...]

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.

Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog (or below in this post).