(Credit: Moo-Cow Music)

I immediately thought of all those band rehearsals in which nondrummers attempt to describe a beat they have in mind to the drummer, and end up spitting and clicking like the sound effects guy in the Police Academy movies. Now they can whip out their iPhones and play exactly what they have in mind. Drummers love that!

The 12-Bar Blues feature of the Band app for the iPhone will keep you on the I-IV-V.

I can’t wait to get rid of my Verizon Wireless service, which has deteriorated horribly in the last two months (nice timing, guys!), and my contract expires a convenient four days before the iPhone 3G goes on sale.

But exciting as it might have been for
iPhone holdouts like me, today’s keynotes at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference didn’t have much music-related news. Steve Jobs did promise that the audio on the new iPhones would sound better than the current version, and Apple is finally getting rid of the weird recessed earphone jack that caused a lot of angst because it was hard to use with older peripherals. But that was about it–no big iTunes updates, for example.

I’ll jump on the iPhone bandwagon, now that the price has dropped, and there’s faster data transfer.

Another issue is that mobile Gears only works with applications that are Gear-enabled. So far, Google Gear applications aren’t widely available, but Google is trying to make it easier for developers to create Gears-enabled mobile Web applications.

Charles Wiles, product manager for Google’s mobile team, posted a blog explaining how Google Gears for mobile would work. He used the example of Zoho, a Web-based productivity application, and Buxfer, a Web-based personal finance application.

Google Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create Web applications that can run offline. Google has been developing the software for PC users, but now it is extending it for mobile users too. Google Gears is still in its early days. The mobile version right now supports Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 phones. This means that other smartphone users, such as those using Apple’s
iPhone, or people using other popular
mobile browsers, such as Opera, won’t be able to use Google Gears.

Google Gears for mobile helps solve this problem so mobile workaholics can even get stuff done on airplanes or when they’re supposed to be on vacation in some far-off destination with no wireless access. (On second thought, maybe having access to work documents and other Web-based applications from anywhere isn’t such a good idea.)

Google is providing more information for developers on its developer Web site.

Google is bringing Google Gears to mobile phones so that people on the go can access Web-based applications even when they’re not connected to the mobile Net.

Google Gears is integrated into these applications. When users go to the Web site where these applications are located they will be asked to install Google Gears for mobile. Once installed, Gears sits on the phone and people can access their data even when there is no network connection.

Smartphones and 3G data services are changing the way some people work, allowing them to access documents and applications from anywhere. But when their wireless connection is interrupted or not available at all, they’re cut off.

Updated at 2:49 p.m. to include the information that Red Herring’s Web site is back up.

Red Herring is on at least one tech pub’s “Death Watch” and the site outage might have led some to believe the company had finally packed it in.

According to a former Red Herring employee, many staff members–who have since moved on–referred to Vieux as “Boss Hogg.”

Since Vieux took over Red Herring in 2003, the publication has been less notable for what’s in its pages than for its internal struggles.

Troubled online news site RedHerring.com was inaccessible Friday for more than an hour.

That’s not the case. Alex Vieux, Red Herring’s CEO, has told employees he is in negotiations with potential new landlords. He said Wednesday, after sheriff’s deputies had evicted him and his staff, that he would announce the location of his new headquarters on Thursday, and added that Red Herring is not in danger of shutting down.

The publication has seen high employee turnover, sporadic publishing of the magazine, and a quirky corporate culture.

In the same week that the publication was booted from its offices in Belmont, Calif., Red Herring’s Web site suffered a glitch Friday and didn’t go back up until about 1:30 p.m., according to a source, who asked for anonymity.

Vieux has stood out among technology publishers in Silicon Valley for his insistence on a dress code (male staffers must wear a tie), and his former policy on not including bylines on stories. Former employees have complained that the company was often late with paychecks.

The film, an analysis of how the U.S. occupation in Iraq evolved into a violent quagmire, was Ferguson’s first film project, but apparently not his last.

Charles Ferguson

“The experience of making this film was so amazing, so extraordinary, that it completely converted me to filmmaking,” Ferguson said in response to e-mailed questions. “I certainly hope that I can make more films, both documentaries and features, if the world lets me…I have no idea yet whether anyone in the industry will be willing to support my film ideas, but I am an optimistic person and I will certainly try very hard.”

Ferguson’s tech industry career ended a decade ago with the sale of his company, Vermeer Technologies–maker of a visual Web site development tool called FrontPage–to Microsoft for a whopping $133 million.

He went on to become a self-described “policy wonk” and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. But he told News.com last year, on the eve of his film’s theatrical release that, that he still reflects on lessons learned during those formative years running a software company–and even applied such lessons to filmmaking project.

Ferguson said he was “quite overwhelmed” by news of his film’s nomination. “Of course I had hoped we would be nominated, but I had not dared to believe that we would.”

The film, distributed by Magnolia, collected $1.4 million theatrically, according to Reuters. It was available on parent company 2929 Entertainment’s HDNet and was released on DVD in October, Reuters said. His film initially screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.

Ferguson also just released a related book, No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos, which draws on the 200 hours of interviews Ferguson conducted for the film, as well ones he has done since.

Other films nominated for an Oscar in the Academy’s documentary feature category include: Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, Sicko, Taxi to the Dark Side, and War/Dance.

Sony’s apparently has one more new laptop model in the offing (that we know of), and this one is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the 18-inch Vaio AW. It’s the ultraportable 11-inch Vaio TT, and according to the online rumor mill, Sony is going to officially announce it sometime Monday.

How do people find out about new systems like this before they’re officially announced? Some of the information comes from eagle-eyed inspection of publicly available FCC documents, and, it always helps when someone finds and leaks a few new unreleased advertisements, like the ones below.

(Credit:
http://forum.notebookreview.com)

Hitwise Hitslink reports a massive boom in Apple’s Mac market share, rising 52 percent over March 2008 to reach 11.43 percent. This is in stark contrast to data reported by ZDNet, which showed a .47 percent drop in the
Mac’s market share.

What gives?

Operating System Market Share - April 2008

(Credit:
Hitslink)

It’s doubtful that Apple’s numbers could jump 52 percent in one month. However, it’s almost equally doubtful that Microsoft’s stumbling Vista recouped any market share against the Mac, which has been on a tear.

Indeed, Gartner thinks the Mac is going to double its market share over the next three years, with BusinessWeek reporting that an increasing number of corporations are opening up to the Mac.

Maybe it decided to start immediately? Or maybe it’s just another example of data gone awry?

One of the issues, which would have allowed a maliciously crafted PICT image file to run code, affected computers running
Windows Vista and XP SP2.

Four other issues affected Vista and XP SP2, as well as
Mac OS X 10.3.9, Mac OS X 10.4.9 through 10.4.11, and Mac OS X 10.5 or later. QuickTime 7.5 fixes a memory corruption issue in the software’s handling of AAC-encoded media content; a heap buffer overflow related to PICT images; a stack buffer overflow related to the handling of Indeo video codec content; and a URL issue that was addressed by revealing files in Finder or Windows Explorer rather than launching them.

More information can be found on the Apple Web site.

Credit for reporting the different security issues was given to Dyon Balding of Secunia Research; Dave Soldera of NGS Software and Jens Alfke; Liam O Murchu of Symantec; an anonymous researcher working with TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative; and Vinoo Thomas and Rahul Mohandas of McAfee Avert Labs, along with Petko D. Petkov of Gnucitizen working with TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative.

Two months ago, Apple released QuickTime 7.4.5, which addressed a number of “highly critical” security flaws in the media player.

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

Only the most passionate cell phone geeks know that the Federal Communications Commission holds a treasure trove of information on upcoming handsets. Because the FCC has to certify every phone sold in the United States, not to mention test its SAR rating, the agency’s online database offers a lot of sneak peeks to those who dig. And to save you the trouble, Crave has combed through the database for you. Here are a selection of filings from the past week on new and upcoming cell phones. Click through to read the full report.

LG AX830

LG VX9100

LG 600G

Motorola

Motorola W376g/W377

Samsung SGH-F210L

Samsung SGH-L320

Samsung SPH-W4200

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson W890i

An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it’s cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.

I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.

The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?

Ryan told me that “SaaS is the business version of cloud computing,” meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples.

Cloud versus SaaS in the enterprise

According to Ryan, the multitude of big vendor announcements of cloud services haven’t filled the enterprise gaps. In the last six months, vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems have announced private or on-premise clouds, but you can’t actually buy cloud services from any of them.

This isn’t just about being cheaper and faster. It’s about the way people interact with technology. User expectations are dramatically different for cloud services:

Immediacy
Ubiquitous access on any platform
API–if you can access data on the human level, you need to be able to access it via API
The ability to collaborate on data

So how does this change over time?

According to Ryan, “we’re still talking about stuff at the hardware level–its much more about data and integration of applications. The underlying infrastructure shouldn’t matter, as long as there is a programmatic and human way to get to the data.”

Disaster recovery, compliance, and enterprisey features are where the growth is in the near term. You have to have an SLA and support for true enterprise-class applications. Amazon will probably do this over time, but right now, you have no real option. Rowell pointed out that for Amazon to offer these services would add significantly overhead and likely cause the price point to rise significantly.

More mature enterprise applications will all move to the cloud eventually, but the process will take time. Developers will get better about developing around the limitations of cloud computing.

As Web companies get decimated by the economy, developers who have the cloud-scale experience will end up with “real jobs” and connect with more formally trained software developers. The enterprise will become empowered as developers become better trained.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

Why in the world would Microsoft make available a free–and very cool–digital photo-viewing technology? Josh Lowensohn of Webware, who has been testing the new tool, offers his take.

Still having a rotten time with parallel parking? Well, if you have deep pockets–and I mean really deep pockets, have I got the
car for you.

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Today’s stories:

Judge: Copyright owners must consider ‘fair use’

Will Wright on the origins of ‘Spore’

Amazon launches hard disk in the sky

Photosynthing the nation’s capital