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Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

MobileBeat 2008: “Bang or Bust” panelists bullish on more open platforms  —  Are new platforms such as the Apple iPhone or Google’s upcoming Android being overhyped?  That’s for certain.  But the “Bang or Bust” panelists at MobileBeat 2008 offered their own nuanced takes about where the opportunities …

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Today during MobileBeat 2008, Tapulous chief executive Bart Decrem got up to talk a little bit about Tap Tap Revenge, the top app in Apple’s App Store. After a week at the top of the mountain, he revealed that a new challenger was rising: Labyrinth Lite Edition. He predicted that it would soon overtake Tap Tap Revenge and now it has.

If you’ve ever played the board game version of Labyrinth, (the wooden box with the various maze overlays and a steel ball) you’ll know how to play Labyrinth Lite Edition for the iPhone. The game utilizes the iPhone’s (or the iPod Touch’s) accelerometer so that you tile your iPhone to navigate a ball around holes in a board to get to the end of the maze.

Decrem made it clear why he felt games like Tap Tap Revenge and Labyrinth were popular: They’re free — but perhaps most importantly, they’re simple. You don’t need to download the app and sign up for some service, you simple download and play.

The fact that a similar game to Labyrinth was popular on jailbroken iPhones before the App Store opened seems to be a testament to that as well.

Labyrinth also happens to be a great demonstration tool for the iPhone’s accelerometer. All the new iPhone 3G owners are perhaps downloading it to show off what their new device can do.

Decram didn’t seem too upset about the possibility of losing his top app crown, and he shouldn’t: He has  other promising apps in the pipeline, including the recently launched Twitter-client Twinkle.

Overall, games and entertainment apps continue to dominate App Store downloads.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

The Final Days of DRM: Yahoo Music Store Closing, Will Eat Your Purchased Music  —  Digital Rights Management technology is dying, it’s becoming understood that hobbling tunes to enforce scarcity isn’t the best way to monetize the music business online.  What about all the suckers who bought DRM laden music in recent years, though?

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The 18-month saga of XM and Sirius trying to merger just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. Yesterday, we pointed to all of the silly hoops the FCC was trying to make the companies go through, that often had absolutely nothing to do with antitrust issues, and today comes the news that the FCC has fined the companies nearly $20 million for technical violations as some sort of precursor to merger approval. What do these technical violations have to do with the antitrust questions the FCC is supposed to be deciding? Absolutely nothing. Instead, it appears that the FCC is simply using its position as the decider over whether or not the merger goes through to get whatever licks in that it can against the two satellite radio companies, knowing that they’ll have to obey quietly. Its like hazing. Because XM and Sirius need the approval of the FCC, it can just do anything it wants to them, such as adding bizarre requirements or even asking them to hand over $20 million.

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creyes123 writes “I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I’ve gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he’s mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he changes the subject and bad mouths a different ‘flaw.’ The cycle repeats a few more times, with no apparent end in sight. I want to encourage folks to share their opinions, but constructive criticism was clearly not his goal. I feel that the whole episode was just a massive time waster for me. What did I do to deserve this? Could I have handled this better?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tech bloggers and investors have come up with a new parlor game: Guessing Facebook’s “real” valuation. Nobody seems to believe the company’s official $15 billion valuation that it announced when it raised its most recent, not-yet-closed round from Microsoft and others.

The latest guess: A new study out today by VC Experts pegs the valuation $12.5 billion, a number derived from the firm’s proprietary valuation-calculation methodology and based on numbers from numerous public documents. Take a look. This is perhaps the most well-researched guess yet, and includes lots of details like stock prices on the dates of various funding rounds.

Also, I’ve personally had it on good authority that the company does indeed have an internal valuation that’s lower than $15 billion — it’s somewhere between $3.7 billion and $4 billion. Facebook, like other private companies, produces this estimate due to an Internal Revenue Service disclosure requirement called Section 409a.

Facebook’s $15 billion valuation is a fact, from my understanding. It is the preferred stock valuation for its institutional investors. The $4 billion valuation, on the other hand, is a defacto approximation for what employee’s common stock stock options may be worth at the moment.

Preferred stock, as opposed to common stock issued to employees, contain beneficial provisions for its holders, that make it potentially more valuable. Let’s say a company were to sell for lower than the valuation that a preferred investor’s investment was calculated for (say, for less than $15 billion). In that case, the preferred investors can get all of their money back — and maybe even make a profit — before common stockholders are allowed to sell. In Facebook’s case, there also are other aspects of valuation tied to its preferred stock. Microsoft, for example, gets special advertising and search deal rights with Facebook.

Employee stock options, as many of our readers know, give an employee the right to buy company stock at a price set at a certain point in time. Employees are then able to buy that stock at that price, based on a timetable that’s agreed upon with the company. So, when the value of the stock goes up, after the price is set, the employees can sell the stock and make a profit.

Right now, some ex-employees of Facebook have, in industry terminology, exercised these options and are selling the Facebook stock that they now own. Various reports suggest that this Facebook stock is selling at implied valuations ranging from $3 billion to up past $6 billion.

As this open-market price for Facebook common stock goes up, Facebook will have to continue refining its internal valuation for the IRS. It needs to do that anyway, of course, as its own value increases for more substantial reasons, like revenue growth.

Indeed, rumors about what Facebook stock is selling for make for interesting data points in approximating how well Facebook’s revenue growth is coming along. If rumors of common stock sales start happening at, say, $10 billion, the cause may be that stock purchasers are hearing especially good things about the company’s revenue.

[Photo via Research Information Network.]

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Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals

You think your liquid-cooled rig is pretty snazzy, don’t you? After Purdue researchers get their technology on the streets, that stuff will seriously look like old hat. The team is working on a “miniature refrigeration system small enough to fit inside laptops and personal computers,” which would hopefully boost cooling performance while enabling computers to be smaller. According to Suresh Garimella, they have “a very good handle on the technology,” but it’s still a ways from being implemented in end products. Don’t worry though, we’re sure the likes of Alienware and Voodoo PC will have it up as optional equipment just as soon as it clears the quality assurance lab.

[Via TheFutureOfThings, thanks Iddo]

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Microsoft is working on a way to combine all of its online services under a single Web page, rather than continue on with its confusing online presence involving multiple brands and services reached through many different portals.

The change will happen along with a streamlining of the branding, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in response to a question from an analyst during the company’s annual analyst get-together on Thursday.

Microsoft has been criticized for the introduction of the Live brand, which didn’t fully replace the MSN brand, resulting in a confusing online presence for the company.

“The real question isn’t the brand question. The real question is, If you type ‘www. whatever-Microsoft-wants-you-to-see-first.com,’ what does that page look like?” Ballmer said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a blank page.”

Currently, Microsoft’s Live.com page and Google’s Google.com site are essentially blank apart from the search bar. While the search bar will remain central, the new main site will also include other components. “Given the monetization model, it has to predominantly feature search. At the same time, it should have a range of content tailored and directed at you,” Ballmer said.

The analyst who asked the question suggested that if Microsoft integrates its online branding and has a single showcase for all of its services, the company might be able to show Internet users that its services are worth using. Microsoft trails Google by a wide margin in search and has struggled to keep up with competitors in some other online services.

The branding issue and the restructuring of a main page were put on “short-term hold” during Microsoft’s discussions with Yahoo, because if that deal had gone through, the problem would have been different, Ballmer said.

In early June, a Microsoft executive speaking at an advertising conference in Seattle first mentioned that the company was planning to “fix” its online branding problem.

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Are new platforms such as the Apple iPhone or Google’s upcoming Android being overhyped? That’s for certain. But the “Bang or Bust” panelists at MobileBeat 2008 offered their own nuanced takes about where the opportunities are and how fast they will come as closed mobile platforms open up.

Users are already flocking to the iPhone in part because it has many more choices of software available for download compared to your typical cell phone or smart phone. Sam Altman, CEO of location service Loopt, said that iPhone owners use his service 47 times more than other mobile users. Those kinds of results are the norm for companies that develop applications for the iPhone and other phones, he said. (Data shows that as many as 31 million applications have been downloaded from the App Store in just the past month).

Rich Miner, general manager of the Google Android platform, said that what’s different now is that software developers who understand consumer experiences are flocking to the new platforms. That’s forcing more changes to accommodate them, such as more open access to applications.

J. H. Kah, senior vice president at South Korea’s SK Telecom, warned that the iPhone will give consumers just a taste of what they want in terms of accessing applications over 3G data services. But the demand will be so great that those consumers will quickly find that the bandwidth available to them is underwhelming.

“The iPhone 3G is a wake-up call for American carriers to upgrade their networks,” Kah said, noting that Asian carriers have provided much faster connectivity for a while. “People will demand more from their networks.”

The slowness of the networks could hold back progress. In the meantime, the iPhone 3G is here and is clearly the focus of new investment in applications because the phones are selling out.

Matt Murphy, head of Kleiner Perkins‘ $100 million iFund, said that his fund has invested in five iPhone application companies so far. That includes iControl, which brings home automation to the iPhone so you can use it to control the lights in your home. He noted that, even with its more closed approach, Apple has opened new opportunities for app developers who were previously stuck dealing with carriers to get their software up on the “deck” of a phone where users could use it. Now, it’s much easier to get an application up on Apple’s App Store. Since the debut of the store, more than 1,000 applications are now available. Over time, Murphy predicted new business models would emerge beyond charging a fee for App Store software. Those include virtual goods sales and affiliate sales programs, where those who promote transactions can get a cut of the transaction amount.

That, in turn, should whet the appetite for getting applications on a broader array of phones using the Google Android platform. Miner said that the project is on schedule with four major handset makers engaged in making Android phones now. Carriers are also at work on carrier-branded Android phones, he said. The first will hit in the second half of 2008 and many more will come next year. There is still a wait-and-see attitude on Android, though.

Asked if the Android software development kit was delayed, Miner said that his company did roll out new updated kits to a small number of higher-profile developers. But he said more members of the developer community would get their kits soon, allowing them to get started on development.

“Android is getting attention because of its openness them, but people want to see volume sales before they develop for it in droves,” Murphy said.

He said that developers have the choice of either making an application that can run on a couple of hundred phones or a feature-rich application that exploits the uniqueness of the most popular smart phone, the iPhone. Trying to do both may stretch resources too thin.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of TechCrunch, moderated the panel. He asked whether the open versus closed models would play out between Android and the iPhone, much the same way that Microsoft’s more-open approach won out against Apple’s closed approach in the computer wars. That’s the big question.

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We’ve been remiss in informing you of this: Cal Henderson, the eminently scalable Flickr engineer, and Leah Culver, the shrill-voiced cofounder of Pownce, San Francisco’s favorite way to share MP3…

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Microsoft on Thursday plans to delve deeper into Ruby programming, with plans to ship Ruby libraries and participate in a testing project for the language.

The libraries are akin to any other software library, helping developers build software.

The company at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) also will announce intentions to participate in the RubySpec project, which features a standard test suite used to define a compliant Ruby implementation.

In a prepared statement, Microsoft’s John Lam, program manager for the company’s Dynamic Language Runtime team, stressed the company’s Ruby backing.

“All of these [OSCON] announcements underscore our commitment to listening to customer feedback and ensuring that we are true to Ruby as a language while still bringing the full benefits of .Net programming to the Ruby user base,” Lam said.

IronRuby, a version of Ruby for Microsoft’s .Net platform, is in development at the company, which as of Wednesday morning had not yet announced a release date for the 1.0 version.

Also at OSCON, Microsoft will unveil IronRuby-Contrib, a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) open source project for collaborative development of code supporting IronRuby or the underlying platform, but not part of the IronRuby distribution. An example of such a project would be the Ruby on Rails plug-in built to make it easier for Rails developers to add Microsoft’s Silverlight rich Internet application technology to their applications, a Microsoft representative said.

Under Ms-PL, licensees can change source code and share it with others. They also can charge a licensing fee for modified work. Microsoft uses this license most commonly for developer tools, applications, and components.

While often criticized by open-source advocates, Microsoft nonetheless has established a presence at OSCON this week, with its sponsorship of the Participate08 session at OSCON, which was focused on boosting dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities.

On Friday at OSCON, Sam Ramji, Microsoft director of platform strategy, is scheduled to present on “Open Source Heroes.” His brief talk will cover Microsoft community participation and ways in which Microsoft plans to contribute during the next 10 years of open-source development, according to the conference program.

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Slatterz links to a story which shows that nowadays, it’s sometimes possible to find out whether someone is a dog on the Internet, excerpting: “A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate. Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer, set up a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted false information about his sexual and political preferences. He also set up another page for Firsht’s television company, the latter entitled ‘Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?’ … ‘The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,’ media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Megan McArdle points to a post by “cactus” claiming that progress in the telecom industry has slowed since the passage of the 1996 Telecom Act, and suggests that this is an argument against deregulation. Megan points out that cactus is likely exaggerating the responsiveness of Baby Bell customer service in the early 1990s. Here’s another part of the argument that’s really misguided:

“My guess is that the improvement in technology available to the consumer from 1984 to 1996 is more significant than the improvement from 1996 to 2008. (Anyone remember using a BBS?) And the improvements on the cell phone side of the business seem to come mostly on the manufactured hand-unit, which was never regulated because it isn’t a natural monopoly.”

The problem with this is that if we’re talking about Internet access, there were no improvements at all between 1984 and 1996 in what phone companies offered to residential customers to get online. In 1984, if you wanted to get online, you got a second phone line and purchased a modem. In 1996, if you wanted to get online, you got a second phone line and got a modem. Now, the 1984 modem was probably 1200 bps, while the 1996 modem was probably 28,800 bps. And the 1984 online service was probably Compuserve, while the 1996 online service might have been a real ISP. But of course the Baby Bells weren’t major players in the modem or online service markets during these years, and neither market was regulated. So touting them as evidence of the virtues of the pre-1996 regulatory regime, while dismissing the analogous improvement in cell-phone handsets since 1996, is disingenuous.

More broadly, it’s just silly to claim that progress in the telecom industry has slowed over the last 12 years. Between 1984 and 1996, typical home online speeds increased from 1200 bps to 28.8 kbps, an impressive 24-fold improvement. By 2008, typical internet speeds were upwards of 3 mbps, an even more impressive 100-fold improvement. And 28.8 was the fastest you could go in 1996 without paying exorbitant charges for a dedicated data line. In contrast, some broadband providers are offering speeds as high as 20 mbps—a 700-fold improvement—for under $70/month. Now, I don’t think improvements in the telecom market have been primarily due to the 1996 Telecom Act (which wasn’t especially deregulatory anyway). Primarily, I think the progress was due to two things: cable companies getting into the broadband and phone markets (which which has created pressures for faster DSL and fiber roll-outs), and the government auctioning off spectrum to increase competition in the wireless market (which has provided additional competition for the Baby Bells’ phone business). The former was likely sped along by some provisions of the 1996 Telecom Act, although the the “local loop unbundling” fiasco may have stunted development of DSL service during the same period. On the other hand, spectrum auctions were first authorized by Congress in 1993, so the latter can’t be credited to the Telecom Act.

The bottom line, though, is that deregulation is most successful when it’s designed to increase competition. A well-designed deregulatory scheme will enhance competition by removing barriers to entry and letting new firms enter the market. Poorly-designed “deregulation” will leave barriers to entry in place and simply relax regulations that limit the monopolist’s ability to extract monopoly rents. There was some of each in the 1996 Telecom Act, but either way it’s clear that progress continued at a brisk clip after 1996, and increased competition was a big part of that. If Congress wants that progress to accelerate over the next decade, it should look for ways to further increase competition in the telecom industry, not try to turn back the clock to the 1980s.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The Avon and Somerset Police department have published some awesome YouTube videos featuring audio from drunk and stupid people calling 999 (911 in the US) with inquiries that don’t quite qualify as…

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