TV is approaching its 'iPod moment,' according to Google's Vint Cerf, in the sense that 'You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.'

We may all yet live to see Google drop the pretense and try taking on Microsoft Office head-on. In its latest poke in Redmond's eye, Google has added Sun's StarOffice 8 to its Google Pack of free software - a motley collection of downloadable stuff like Google Earth, Norton Security Scan, the Google Desktop, Firefox, Google Talk, the Adobe Reader, RealPlayer and Skype - at a time when Office 2007 deployment decisions are being made. The commercial version of the open source OpenOffice, StarOffice normally sells for $70 standalone, but Google's version is free.

A few years ago, along with a bunch of other bloggers, I was invited to a Microsoft event to discuss their search engine. Having been to many such Microsoft events in the past, I thought the format was they would talk, and then we would talk, and then they would talk and we'd talk and so on. So when it came our turn, I gave them a lot of ideas, I thought that most of them were pretty good, but even if they weren't, my intention was to help them.

PeekYou.com (www.peekyou.com), the innovative search engine dedicated to finding people on the web, announced today that it has updated its tool set to offer users the quickest and most relevant online people search capabilities. The Web site is the Internet's first true openly-edited white pages, allowing users to easily locate other people with an online presence and access a list of all links about the person being searched. PeekYou now boasts an advanced set of tools, cleaner design, speedy profile editing, and a user-friendly navigation experience.

By making it possible to search and index code found in any Perforce repository, Krugle helps enterprise developers easily find code, see updates made to particular code files, see who made them and better understand their own code base. In addition to Perforce, Krugle also directly integrates with other Source Code Management (SCM) systems such as ClearCase, CVS and Subversion, as well as general file system structures. This makes the search for code and the information related to that code more efficient for developers to find and use. This is important because, according to Krugle, developers spend upwards of 25 percent of their time searching for code and related information.

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East sponsors included: Laszlo Systems (Diamond Sponsor), JackBe (Platinum Sponsor), Adobe (Platinum Sponsor), Cynergy (Platinum Sponsor), Backbase (Gold Sponsor) Google (Gold Sponsor), Nexaweb (Gold Sponsor), ICEsoft (Gold Sponsor), Oracle (Gold Sponsor), Helmi Technologies (Gold Sponsor), JetBrains (Gold Sponsor), TIBCO (Gold Sponsor), Kapow Technologies (Gold Sponsor), Sun Microsystems (Silver Sponsor), Parasoft (Silver Sponsor), Servoy (Silver Sponsor), Etelos (Silver Sponsor), Microsoft (Expo Plus Sponsor), Lightstreamer (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), IT Mill (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), FrogLogic (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), ThinWire (Expo Sponsor), Quasar Tecnologies (Expo Sponsor), Zapatec (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), MB Technologies Bindows (Exhibitor), OpenSpot (Exhibitor), ILOG (Exhibitor), Passport Corporation (Exhibitor), Addison-Wesley (Exhibitor), The Thomson Corporation (Exhibitor), Isomorphic Software-SmartClient (Exhibitor), Universal Mind (Exhibitor), Farata Systems (Exhibitor Plus), Manning Publications (AJAX Book Sponsor), Apress (AJAX Book Sponsor), Conference Guru (Media Sponsor), Flash Goddess (Media Sponsor), AJAXWorld Magazine (Media Sponsor), Web 2.0 Journal (Media Sponsor), SYS-CON.TV (Media Sponsor), IT Mill (Media Sponsor), Methods & Tools (Media Sponsor), Web 2.0 Journal (Media Sponsor), and OASIS (Association Sponsor).

Despite Google's $159 billion market cap - or rather, one suspects, because of it - Jimmy Wales, the guy who created - for better or worse - Wikipedia, figures Internet search is broken - because it's proprietary - and needs to be reinvented, freeing 'the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.' (Odd, he questions the biases of algorithms more than Wikipedia articles. Hmmm.) Anyway, back six or seven months ago he set up a LAMP-based project called Search Wikia to build a new for-profit search platform out of open source search protocols - like the open source Lucene search engine widgetry - and Wikipedia-like human collaboration. Wales has now acquired the Grub web crawler - dusty shelf-ware for the last few years - from LookSmart Ltd, an online targeted advertising company, on undisclosed terms and open sourced it.

As web applications evolve to contain more functionality and content, 80-90% of the time it takes a web page to load is spent downloading components in the page (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.). Solutions that reduce the number of components improve the user experience greatly by making pages load faster. This talk will highlight our latest research results and performance breakthroughs. Did you know that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time? Preloading components is one way to reduce the number of components a user is likely to need in their next page. We'll also explore case studies to demonstrate how these solutions have accelerated the user experience on Yahoo!'s most prominent web pages.

Seems we're waiting for Microsoft to make a defensive chess move against Google's freebie, ad-supported Docs & Spreadsheets software play and test a free hybrid version of the next release of its low-end productivity kit, Works, whose word processing, spreadsheet, database and calendaring skills are generally enough for most people. Some unidentified OEMs are going to install it pre-loaded with small supposedly unobtrusive display ads that pop up offline and when users connect to the Internet they'll get a continuing stream of new ones in the corner of their screen or at start-up. The ads are supposed to appeal to the known demographics of Works users.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

Wall Street Journal reported today 'The company, which has made billions of dollars in Web advertising on computers, is courting wireless operators to carry handsets customized to Google products, including its search engine, email and a new mobile Web browser, say people familiar with the plans. It wants to capture a big chunk of the fast-growing market for ads on cellphones. Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the cellphone project, say people who have been briefed on it. It has developed prototype handsets, made overtures to operators such as T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, and talked over technical specifications with phone manufacturers. It hopes multiple manufacturers will make devices based on its specs and multiple carriers will offer them.'

A seasoned Java professional has to know more than just the syntax of the Java language. Java EE offers a set of standardized technologies for enterprise development. A number of open-source frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate are widely used in a variety of Java applications. Familiarity with new 'beyond-Java' languages and technologies will widen your horizons and make you a more valuable Java professional. Real-World Java Seminar is sponsored by CodeGear, Red Hat, Nexaweb, Farata Systems, and PushToTest.

This session will serve as an overview of Google's AJAX APIs and describes how to create cool hacks and fun mashups with several of Google's hottest AJAX APIs, including Google Maps, AJAX Search/Feed, Google Web Toolkit, as well as Google Gadgets. Special attention will also be given to Google's newest APIs, including Google Gears and Mapplets.

European Commission regulators have authorized Germany to chuck roughly $165 million into next-generation Semantic Web-style multimedia search engine research evidently to take on Google. The Germans call the project Theseus after the legendary Greek hero who went about overthrowing tyrants like the Minotaur, the bull-headed creature who devoured the seven Athenian maidens and seven young Athenian men sent him every year in tribute. Siemens, SAP, Deutsche Thomson and Empolis GmbH are supposed to kick start the research with money then trickling down to smaller firms.

Sir Harold Evans has survived a libel action brought by Tom Paterson, the guy who wrote QDOS, the mother of PC-DOS, MS-DOS and Windows. In his 2004 book 'They Made America: From the Stream Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators,' Evans dredged up those old contentions - originally made by Gary Kildall - that Paterson had ripped off Kildall's CP/M operating system. Paterson sued but a judge the other day decided that Evans' 'opinion' doesn't rise to libel and that his statements were neither 'provably false' nor malign. He dismissed the case.

Digg, the increasingly ubiquitous reader-powered web site and popular with the Linux set, has fired Google and hired Microsoft and its AdCenter to place ads on Diggs' site for the next three years, describing Microsoft as 'a young ad service-innovative-[and] willing to work with us on the cutting edge.' Terms were not disclosed. Digg is the first major account Microsoft has lined up since Facebook last year.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing Google in federal court in Sydney charging it with misleading and deceptive business practices because it fails to adequately distinguish between pay-per-click sponsored links, the bedrock of Google's business, and so-called 'organic' search results. The agency wants Google enjoined. It also takes exception to Google's use of keywords. Seems when you typed in the names 'Kloster Ford' or 'Charlestown Toyota' Google took you straight to the Trading Post, their competitor and a Google advertiser.

As a way of diversifying - this time exploiting its core competency - and bringing in still more money, Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites. It calls the hosted, extranet service Custom Search Business Edition and is offering it for $100 a year for 5,000 pages and $500 a year for 50,000 pages. Google claims it can have a guy signed up online and running in 10 minutes and that appears to include refinements like sectional groupings.

Concern about Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick - some of it presumably fanned by the Microsoft lobby - is rising. Besides a pre-merger investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and a newly confirmed review by the European Commission, the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel is now planning to hold a hearing on the acquisition in September and so is a House Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection worried about privacy.

I just searched on Google for 'flatdown opml' and it returned the article I wrote 15 minutes ago. In 1997 I wrote about Just-in-Time Search Engines and how important they would be. Back then I was thinking about overnight indexing. Now we've got instant indexing. Knock that one off the to-do list, it's done.

Well, fancy that. Google may not be completely indomitable in its core market. According to comScore Networks, Google lost share in US search to Microsoft in June, when Google's numbers apparently tends to decline because of the vacations and the summer school break. Total queries hit eight billion, up 26% year-over-year. Google went from 50.7% to 49.5% sequentially; Microsoft went from 10.3% to 13.2%, an uptick attributed to the prize-based Live Search Club Microsoft started in May that's reportedly susceptible to cheating.

The Q2 profits that Yahoo reported Tuesday were shaky, down year-over-year from $164 million to $161 million, and its second-half forecasts were limp, which might explain why CEO Terry Semel bailed. Semel's replacement Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang promised a new strategic plan in a hundred days, but Wall Street wants things turned around faster than that. With Yahoo's shares down 18% or 19% in three months, Yang will likely be working under increasing pressure to sell, which of course reopens the question of Microsoft stepping into the breach.

Google, which as we all know (wink, wink, nod, nod) isn't competing with Microsoft, is acquiring privately held Postini for around $625 million cash. The deal just coincidently happens to strengthen its applications push into the enterprise, which may explain why Google is paying more for it - less whatever Postini's got in the bank - than it has for anything else except YouTube and DoubleClick, if the government doesn't stop the DoubleClick deal. Postini provides patented on-demand security and compliance services for e-mail and instant messages, which should fit divinely with Google's enterprise-bent hosted applications kit and give Google a built-in reservoir of the 35,000 companies or 10 million users that Postini services to go trolling in for new, paying, Google Apps Premier Edition users

The single-day, multi-track Real-World Java Seminar will be held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 13. Produced by SYS-CON Events, this is the largest Java developer event on the East Coast, and features a business track as well as two technical tracks. All attendees will have full access to all sessions at the event, so can either stay with one track or pick and choose specific sessions.

'With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users -- they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations,' said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Google.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

Krugle, the code search engine for developers, was founded in 2005 around the concept of search-driven development. The Krugle Enterprise appliance indexes code and presents it in context of other software assets that developers manage throughout the application development process. Krugle's context based search provides valuable insights to enterprise development resources that are information-rich but typically difficult to get to in a usable way. Krugle offers a free public site targeted at individual developers looking to leverage the 2.1 billion lines of publicly available code in our index. Krugle crawls, parses and indexes code for over 37 different languages across over 600 public repositories, as well as blogs and wikis, and other technical content. For more information about Krugle, visit http://www.krugle.com/

In response to Google's mollifying offer to cut the time it holds onto the personal data it amasses on searchers to 18 months, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, the European Union's privacy watchdog, has basically said, 'We'll get back to you on that.' It's reportedly preparing a substantive response and, according to Reuters, intends to look at other search engines. One can reasonably assume they mean Microsoft and Yahoo. The Article 29 folks feel Google's policies flout EU privacy rules.

Wall Street wants Yahoo! to do more than just kick Terry Semel upstairs to be chairman. There seems, however, little pixy dust in the notion of Rupert Murdoch throwing MySpace into Yahoo in exchange for 25% of the combined operation. Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005; the Yahoo! math values it at upwards of $10 billion. CNBC was first to pick up this rumor and by Wednesday Murdoch's own paper, The Times of London, was saying - based on unnamed sources - that the talks were 'preliminary' and pre-date Semel's departure. It also said the discussions could disintegrate in Semel's absence.

Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government and is going modify Vista to hush Google's complaints that it discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own desktop 'Instant Search.' The move comes after Google charged Microsoft with violating its 2002 consent decree with the government on the theory that the search facility is middleware and basically a controlled substance subject to the Final Judgment.

There's only a Google logo, the words 'Google has acquired Zenter' and a pointer to a Google blog left on the web site of the precocious six-month-old start-up said to have software for creating online, viewer-polling slide presentations, assets that are supposed to embellish the piece Google's been missing to duplicate Microsoft Office in a watered down, software-as-a-service kind of way. No price was given for the acquisition.

Privacy International says Google, the self-proclaimed 'do no evil company,' has an 'entrenched hostility to privacy,' a rating shared by no other web site it has been following. The British watchdog put out an interim report over the weekend called 'A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies' and flunked Google. The finding could possibly impact Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick currently being weighed by regulators, which may be why once the report got out Google immediately started trimming back on the amount of time it's proposing to hold its cache of personal data by six months to just 18 months.

The Justice Department has brushed off a complaint from Google alleging that Microsoft is violating its 2002 consent decree because Vista supposedly discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own. The New York Times broke a story on its front page Sunday saying antitrust chief Thomas Barnett, in a memo last month, urged state attorney general to ignore Google's confidential complaint.

At press time, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft's proposed $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive and Yahoo's $680 million buyout of the rest of Right Media as well as Google $3.1 billion DoubleClick deal. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have gotten the second request for information that Google has.

Yahoo has dumped its CEO Terry Semel--regarded lately as a main barrier to progress and thereby preventing the company from cutting Google-addressing partnerships and acquisition bids. Goodness knows Microsoft might be on the phone right now. The surprise news hit right after the market closed in New York. There has been much speculation that such a thing could happen in the last couple of weeks and many investors were disappointed that Semel wasn't handed his head at the company's stockholders meeting a few days ago particularly given his outlandish $71.7 million compensation package last year. In response to the news Yahoo stock, in the tank for a couple of years now compared to Google?s 300% run-up, was up 4% in after-hours trading.

This coming Saturday (16th June) will be Yahoo! Hack Day here in London, and a few members of my buddy's company (the Nestoria team) will be on hand. But rather than just attending, they though it might be a bit of fun if they tried to subvert the event and turn it into their own hack contest. As such, they are delighted to present 'The quasi-official Nestoria Hack contest' to be held at Yahoo! Hack Day.

Seemingly out of left field, Google has bought PeakStream, the two-year-old start-up whose young tools make it easier to program multi-core processors by kinda doing the parallelizing for you if you write to its APIs. Then you can run the program on a variety of chips. PeakStream has been out talking to just about everybody the last few months. Apparently Google's idea is to use the widgetry exclusively in-house to boost server performance. It's hard to tell. All Google's saying is that 'We believe the PeakStream team's broad technical expertise can help build products and features that will benefit our users. We look forward to providing them with additional resources as they continue developing high-performance applications for modern multi-core systems.'

Google has bought a site called FeedBurner that distributes and helps manage blogs and RSS feeds, tracks usage and serves ads. It supports 721,000 feeds representing upwards of 400,000 publishers. Google will put more ads on those feeds giving it a new revenue stream. It looks like FeedBurner will be integrated into the Google Reader. Terms were not disclosed but the number circulating is around $100 million in cash. The four-year-old Chicago company and its 30 people had raised $10 million in venture capital.

So Salesforce.com is gonna be a distribution channel for Google ads. That's what their big, widely leaked alliance is all about; other things like integrating Google's e-mail and Google's online productivity apps into Salesforce could reportedly follow. It was that potential, obviously anti-Microsoft, move and the speculation that Google might buy Salesforce that had people had the edge of their chairs.

Salesforce has been making noises that sound like it'll announce that anticipated, supposedly anti-Microsoft deal with Google on Tuesday June 5. It's assumed to have something to do with Google's online productivity apps.