News Blog

Tuesday brought a mixed bag of Microsoft news. On the Daily Debrief, I sit down with CNET News senior writer Ina Fried to discuss the good, the bad, and the downright embarrassing.

Let's start with the good. The company announced the pricing of the new, pay-as-you-go business apps for the Web. The whole suite of business tools, which includes a variety of office communication tools, will run you $15 a month. Individually, the apps will go for $3 a pop. Ina suspects these tools will be very handy for professionals on the go or for companies who choose not to employ IT support.

The bad and embarrassing news is all wrapped into one. On Tuesday, the company launched the Vista Compatibility Center. Yes, you read that right. We're still talking about Vista, the operating system that Microsoft released 18 months ago. The need for the Center speaks volumes about consumers' slow adoption of the OS. Ina makes the point that if this were Apple, the company would have already moved on to a new cat. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the online Center was down and unavailable for most of the morning.

Too busy to book airline tickets, order takeout food, or call your parents? For $19 per month, virtual personal assistants from AskSunday.com will run 10 such errands for you.

Welcome to the world of online errand outsourcing, where on sites like AskSunday.com and GetFriday.com, ordinary people can get assistance with everyday tasks, for a small amount. SFGate recently ran an Associated Press article on the phenomenon, citing the growing number of Web sites that are making it easier to outsource virtual errands overseas to countries like India, China, and Bangladesh.

Some of the more unusual tasks handled by GetFriday.com include:

• Daily wakeup calls that also deliver the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed, and exercise

• Reading bedtime stories to children over the phone

• Buying underwear on behalf of clients (online purchase only, the company points out)

• Talking to mom and dad in a client's stead

Virtual assistants for individuals and small businesses represent a small but growing market. Last year, the estimated revenue for these services was $250 million, according to research firm Evalueserve, which expects the market to grow to $2 billion by 2015.

For more specific tasks, there are sites like Guru.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps employers find freelancers helping with Web design, language translation, and photography. Guru.com launched its online job board in 2000 and has a rating system similar to that of eBay, with reviews from earlier customers, as well as hourly rates, yearly earnings, and locations of the freelancers.

Another site where customers can search professionals based on rate, location, earnings, or feedback is Mountain View, Calif.-based Elance.

Elance and Guru.com are not only platforms for low-wage workers in the developing world, but also for Westerners. Will sites like this level the playing field of the global economy?

Starting July 1, users who have registered domains with Yahoo's small-business site will see their annual fee for the service jump from $9.95 to $34.95.

The news came in form of e-mail for anyone who has registered a domain with Yahoo Small Business, and a Yahoo representative told CNET News.com Friday that the e-mails have been sent 90 days, 60 days, and 30 days before users were set to renew their domain registration.

But some blogs are expressing dismay at the price increase, which is three and a half times what domain owners have paid in past years.

Yahoo said the $25 price increase is primarily being instituted to match the cost of doing business, and that registering domains--the process of creating a new Web address--can cost even more with other Web sites.

However, other competitors have much lower prices, including GoDaddy.com or Google Apps, both of which charge annual fees of around $10.

Since domain registration is not the core of Yahoo's small-business site, the company said its prices can not be as low as those of sites that focus on registering domains.

Low domain registration fees, though, can be a foot in the door to coax customers to upgrade to more profitable services.

According to Yahoo, new domain registrations will still only cost $9.95 and after a year, the fee will go up to $34.95.

It comes as no surprise that a healthy percentage of Apple consumers buy the products for the way they look. But for those of you less interested in the sleek white boxes and black rectangles, and more interested in the software, then perhaps the Psystar Open Computer is the way to go.

The Psystar computer (which looks like a pretty generic tower) comes installed with Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and functions exactly how you'd expect an Apple to function, but for hundreds of dollars less. In Monday's Daily Debrief, my first question for CNET News.com reporter Tom Krazit was how has Apple not caught on to the small, Florida-based company that's finding ways to get around the licensing agreements. And that's exactly why. They're small and they haven't sold enough machines to waken the sleeping giant. Not yet, at least!

Due to its science and technology assets, Massachusetts reigns supreme as the state in the best position to achieve economic growth. That's according to a new report by the Milken Institute that ranks states on their technology industries. The study claims that regions can use science and technology to propel high-wage jobs and viable industries.

This is the third time that Massachusetts has taken the top spot in the Milken rankings, a few months after the state's Senate signed a bill to invest $1 billion in high-tech research over the next 10 years. The first report by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based institute came out in 2002 and the second was released in 2004.

In the new report, second place goes to Maryland, with Colorado, California, and Washington right behind.

The researchers explored 77 areas of each state's economy and technology sector. Each indicator was a part of five major components: research and development inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science workforce, and technology concentration and dynamism. The results were compiled into an interactive map to show the differences among the states.

Rounding out the bottom of the list were Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Mississippi. The study also noted that California's slip from second place to third place is because, "the state shows signs of faltering."

The lead author of the study, Ross Devol, said states that are investing in science and technology assets are the same states that have a vision and plan for retaining high economic growth. Researchers also said, compared to information from the 2004 report, regional competition for technology industries is on the rise, due to global competition from China and India.

Matt Cohler, employee No. 5 at Facebook, will leave the high-flying social network this fall to join venture firm Benchmark Capital as its youngest general partner at 31 years old.

Matt Cohler

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Cohler, whose job description, as written on Facebook, is "ensuring that Zuck (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) never makes it back to Harvard," has been the company's technical adviser, recruiter, and business strategist since 2005, roughly a year after the company started from a dorm room at Harvard University. Cohler said he will remain a special adviser to "Zuck" and the executive team at Facebook even after he moves to Benchmark as an investor in early-stage Internet start-ups. (Facebook does not have an advisory team, so the adviser role will be new to the company.)

Many early employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo are hearing the siren call of venture investing, but this is a first for Facebook. When it comes to executive moves, the social network makes many more headlines for new executive hires. Still, Bryan Schreier, a former Google employee, not too long ago joined Sequoia Capital, an early investor in the search giant. Jeff Weiner, a longtime vice president at Yahoo, recently joined Accel Partners and Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence, following former Yahoo colleagues.

Cohler, a graduate of Yale University with a bachelor's of arts, has a healthy track record of picking promising start-ups and entrepreneurs, a talent that Benchmark partner Peter Fenton believes will translate well to venture investing. "He's worked at the center of social media and he's established himself as a go-to person for young entrepreneurs," said Fenton, 35, who's known Cohler for several years.

Cohler met the Facebook founders in 2004 through Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Facebook's first angel investor. He was introduced to Thiel through Reed Hoffman, the founder of business social network LinkedIn, which this week raised $53 million for a valuation of $1 billion. Cohler joined LinkedIn as a member of its founding team and a general manager.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Benchmark, which now has nine partners, is known for its early investment in eBay, Handspring, and Red Hat Software. Despite its eye for promising young companies, it does not have an investment in Facebook. (Cohler said that he has not talked with the venture firm about it taking an investment in Facebook.) Benchmark's portfolio includes Zillow.com and OpenTable.

As for his experience at Facebook, Cohler said, "I've loved Facebook, the people, the product. I just knew my long-term trajectory would be to be an early stage investor."

Cohler's Facebook status on Thursday? "I'm excited for LinkedIn!"

With less than an hour to go in Mozilla's 24-hour attempt to set a record for the most downloads, I check in with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland, about the launch of Firefox 3. Despite Mozilla's temporary site outage, it appears to have been a success, both with the numbers (7 million plus) and content.

As a Firefox user myself, I initially switched over for the tabbed browsing and some of the third party add-ons. Little did I know that I was building my "nerd cred" by choosing it over Internet Explorer or other browsers. As Shankland explains, being a fan of Firefox is almost like being an Apple fanboy: there's a certain cachet and a "stick-it-to-the-man" (that'd be Microsoft) attitude among its users. Who knew that the browser you chose could up your stock?

A fired Massachusetts state worker has been exonerated of a charge of possessing child pornography after computer forensics showed that his work laptop was infected with malicious software that was surreptitiously visiting illegal Web sites.

Michael Fiola, 53, was fired as a worker's comp fraud investigator with the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents in March 2007 after IT administrators found cached images of child porn in the temporary Internet files in his browser, according to the Dark Reading security news site.

Fiola, described as being "computer illiterate," hired a forensics expert who found the evidence that was used to convince the court to drop the case last week. He remains unemployed and plans to sue the agency over his firing.

"Our lives have been hell," Fiola, a former state park ranger now living in Rhode Island told the Boston Herald. "I hope to recover my reputation, but our friends all ran."

His laptop initially attracted attention because its wireless usage was four times higher than that of his co-workers. But because the IT department hadn't properly configured the agency laptop and antivirus software wasn't working on the machine, it was riddled with Trojans and viruses, in addition to the malicious software that was bringing up the porn sites.

I'm a Firefox user, how about you? If you're part of the roughly 20 percent market share using Mozilla's free, open-source Web-browsing software, you're probably looking forward to Tuesday, June 17th's release of version 3. In fact, the company is hoping that 1 million of you are excited in hopes of setting a record for the most downloads in a 24-hour period.

In Friday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET Webware.com's Rafe Needleman about what to expect with this version. He's been using the release candidate for a few weeks and says we can look forward to faster browsing, the "awesome bar," and more security features.

In sizing up the nation's status as a world leader in science and technology, here's a little good news-bad news from a study released Thursday by the nonprofit think tank Rand.

The U.S. remains the worldwide leader in science and technology, based on R&D spending, the number of Nobel Prize winners who call the U.S. home, and the number of top universities sitting on U.S. turf.

But the bad news is the U.S. educational system, kindergarten through high school, continues to underperform in developing bright minds in math and science. Europe and China are both graduating more university-educated engineers and scientists on a yearly basis than the U.S. As a result the U.S. may face an increasing reliance on foreign-born workers and foreign students in science and engineering to aid the nation in maintaining its lead, according to the report.

The study found that roughly 70 percent of foreign scientists and engineers who received Ph.D.s from U.S. universities remained in the country after receiving their degree, but that situation could change as salaries and research opportunities improve overseas, the report notes.

"Much of the concern about the U.S. losing its edge as the world's leader in science and technology appears to be unfounded," Titus Galama, a co-author of the Rand study, said in a statement. "But the United States cannot afford to be complacent. Effort is needed to make sure the nation maintains or even extends its standing."

According to the study, the U.S. accounts for 40 percent of all scientific R&D spending in the world, employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and houses 75 percent of the world's top 40 universities.

In order to maintain its lead, the Rand issued several recommendations:

• Establish a permanent commitment to fund a chartered body that would periodically monitor and analyze U.S. science and technology performance and the condition of the nation's science and engineering workforce.

• Make it easier for foreigners who have graduated from U.S. universities with science and engineering degrees to stay indefinitely in the U.S.

• Make it easier for highly skilled labor to immigrate to the U.S. to ensure the benefits of expanded innovation are captured in the U.S. and to help the U.S. remain competitive in research and innovation.

• Increase the United States' capacity to learn from science centers in Europe, Japan, China, India, and other countries.

The study further notes that issues related to skilled immigrant H-1B visas could lead to more domestic corporations outsourcing their research to foreign countries.