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SharePoint goes solo, but why?

It continues to amaze me at how overlooked Microsoft's crown jewel is: SharePoint.

It's not overlooked by the market, which has bought it up to the tune of $1 billion or so in license fees in its first four years. Yet its competitors have largely downplayed it as a threat--even partnering with it--as it pillages their installed bases.

Now Microsoft is taking its SharePoint story one step further by decoupling it from Windows Server.

I wish I could think of some nefarious reasons for this, but it actually seems to be worse for Microsoft, not better. If Microsoft were cutting SharePoint adrift of Windows, allowing the collaboration portal to work with something other than Internet Explorer, SQL Server, Windows, and IIS, then it would be a truly killer move. (That isn't the case. If you go SharePoint, you have to buy into the complete Microsoft ecosystem.)

It's just a separate download that still only works with Windows. Microsoft gave these reasons:… Read more

Hate the RIAA? Buy a 'Free Jammie' thong

Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman ordered earlier this month to pay the recording industry $222,000, is pulling out the stops in her bid to defend herself in court.

The 30-year-old woman has begun selling men's and women's undergarments, coffee mugs, canine apparel, and baby bibs to raise money to pay her legal fees. All the merchandise is stamped with the new "Free Jammie" logo created for her by one of her supporters.

The logo features a music note superimposed on a globe and the words: "Free Jammie. Free Everyone."

Thomas is the first … Read more

From driving to file-sharing, the Brits do it backwards

Ever since Napster found its way into every college dorm room in 1999, the defenders of intellectual property have been perplexed at how to best deal with peer-to-peer file transfer. Last week's news that Comcast's servers were interfering with BitTorrent traffic may have come as a surprise to some, but given that few companies have been willing to acknowledge the legal uses for P2P, it shouldn't be too much of a shock.

What strikes me is the fact that in the United Kingdom, it is actually the ISPs who are opposed to banning file-sharing and the lawmakers who have been pushing it. According to Broadband Reports, a representative from the service providers union suggested that, "ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope." While this argument seems somewhat weak given Comcast's ability to infiltrate BitTorrent, it is true that file-sharers will always be one step ahead of the regulators, and I support their commitment toward an open internet.

… Read more

At NYC Flickr party, you're always on candid camera

As a member of the press, I'm accustomed to being the token partygoer taking awkward photographs of the room. Not so much at Flickr's "24 Hours of Flickr" party in New York on Thursday night, where there were so many cameras being whipped out that you'd think it were Times Square.

"I'm stuffing my face with cake, and then I look up and someone's taking a picture of me with chocolate all over my mouth," one mildly uncomfortable attendee told me.

The event, held in a cavernous studio space in Manhattan'… Read more

Notebooks continue to drive growth in worldwide PC market

Shipments of PCs to the saturated U.S. market may be declining somewhat, but the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) gave the worldwide PC market a big boost in the third quarter, according to figures released Wednesday by IDC.

PC shipments grew 15.5 percent worldwide in the past quarter. Growth in the EMEA regions, led by Hewlett-Packard and Acer, was paced by a strong demand for notebooks and back-to-school promotions, leading to the best growth rates in the region in the past two years.

"The issue is that it continues to be notebooks that are driving strong … Read more

Report: Vimeo's going hi-def next week

The New York Post reported on Tuesday morning that New York-based video-hosting community site Vimeo plans to announce this week that it will be distributing videos at a high-definition resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, making it apparently the first user-generated video-sharing site to do so.

The Post's Peter Lauria connects the new push for making high-definition technology available on user-generated video sites to the ongoing price drop in consumer-grade HD cameras--an inarguably hot item this holiday season.

But back to Vimeo--it's an interesting site. Originally a side project for CollegeHumor exec Jakob Lodwick, the site's close-knit community, … Read more

Defendant knocks Web illiterate juror in RIAA case

Jammie Thomas is hard to rattle.

She doesn't raise her voice or get angry when a reporter asks her to read a story where she is called a "liar" by a member of the jury that found her guilty of copyright violations and ordered her to pay the recording industry $220,000 in damages.

She calmly reads the quotes by juror Michael Hegg that appeared Tuesday in a story by Wired.com. She then draws a bead on where Hegg said he is a father, former snowmobile racer and has never been on the Internet.

"I … Read more

Yoink'd creates video playlists in seconds

Like most of us who spend considerable time in the Web 2.0 universe, I love to embed content on blogs and social-networking home pages. YouTube is loaded with countless hours of entertaining videos, but it wouldn't be nearly as popular without the ability to embed those wacky movies all over the Web. Now, a new online service called Yoink'd hopes to capitalize on the embedded-video craze by providing a free method of compiling, presenting, and sharing Web videos with your friends.

Yoink'd is essentially an online media player that uses AJAX and DHTML to search for, collect, and share online video files. It is an entirely self-contained, Web-based application. All of your preferences and playlists are saved within the Yoink'd Mediabox itself. There's no profile page or settings page you have to visit each time you want to add videos or change your preferences. To me, that's the beauty of Yoink'd. The entire application lives in the embeddable widget. Once you pop it on your blog, you'll never need to visit the Yoink'd site again.… Read more