Outside the Lines

Lenovo has taken a page straight from Apple's playbook. The parody of the Macbook Air commercial promoting the ThinkPad X300 ultramobile PC has an effect similar to Apple's series of ads with John Hodgman and Justin Long that put down Windows.

It's not what you would expect from the Chinese company that acquired IBM's PC business, but it works. The ad is getting passed around like candy, and it is really funny and points out the weakness of the Macbook Air. (It lacks some ports and an optical drive.) Expect the Macbook Air crowd to strike … Read more

How much is Facebook, Wikipedia, or Twitter worth? Silicon Alley Insider is attempting to crack the mysterious code on the valuations of the major Web start-ups with its SAI 25 Live! It tracks the valuation of the private companies and shows changes in those valuations in real-time (updated every 20 minutes on the site).

Given that the companies in the SAI 25 (or 47 in this case) don't share their numbers like a public company, the index is based on educated guesswork, looking at a combination of VC financing, financial performance, growth rate and market share and size.

Interestingly, … Read more

To this point, I have avoided getting into the conversations weighing the value and future of Twitter, FriendFeed, and the latest generation of community communications services. They clearly represent an evolution of instant messaging and the triumph of the feed.

Twitter is an early adopter service (see Kara Swisher's post) and hasn't yet caught on with mainstream Web users. The Twitter population is a rounding error compared with Web mail or Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger.

But Twitter adds a new dimension to instant messaging beyond its SMS-like 140-character constraint with the concepts of following and followers, enabling … Read more

The tech world, at least the those fascinated by the mating rituals of tribes bickering over the size of the dowry, is still waiting this weekend for word from Microsoft or Yahoo on their wedding plans.

The Saturday deadline set by Steve Ballmer for the two tribes to try to resolve their differences before Microsoft shifts gears has passed with no news.

Yahoo and its leader, Jerry Yang, continue the holdout for more than the $31-per-share offer made on Feb. 1. Microsoft doesn't see a reason to bid against itself with no alternative bid having materialized at this point. … Read more

David Treadwell is the special guest on the Gillmor Gang this week (check out the podcast of the show here). He is the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services, which includes the recently introduced Live Mesh. Treadwell works directly for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has been working to put the Web, rather than the PC, at the center of Microsoft's computing universe.

Live Mesh is trying to solve a key user problem--how to mesh the desktop, mobile, and the Web for consumers and developers. For example, Live Mesh can provide core underlying infrastructure for … Read more

Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim.

"We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform."

Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform.

Netvibes … Read more

During a post-keynote luncheon with a few reporters, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh and Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) chief architect Neal Sample shared more details about the inside-out rewiring of the Web giant.

Balogh said that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang is taking a personal interest in the project, which began in earnest as part of Yang's 100-day plan, which he created when he took the helm of the company from Terry Semel in September of last year. He noted that Y!OS was started before Microsoft came knocking on Yahoo's door. Balogh joined Yahoo from VeriSign just … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh revealed how the company is transforming itself into an open and social platform from the ground up.

"We are taking open to a whole other place," Balogh said. "We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers." He noted that Yahoo has 10 billion latent connections across its properties, such as mail, messenger and … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim O'Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

"The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything," he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. "It's an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities," he continued. "It's a huge change in the way the world works."

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. "We … Read more