Good Morning Silicon Valley

Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have stopped short of covering that great Steve Ballmer classic “Developers, Developers, Developers,” but the song remained the same. On its 2007 worldwide Developer Day, the search sovereign rolled out an early version of an open-source toolkit that can be used to enable online applications to work offline and told [...]

Just a day after it started selling DRM-free songs through Apple’s iTunes Store (see “That extra charge for restriction-free music? I learned that at iTunes U“), music major EMI took another step toward loosening its grip on content. EMI announced a partnership with Google that will give YouTube users not only access to a wealth [...]

All that was missing was a fireplace, some wing chairs, smoking jackets and a couple snifters of cognac. At their rare joint appearance on stage at the D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sounded like a pair of veteran pols from opposite sides of the aisle, different in vision and style [...]

“We know that Robert Soloway is one of the most prolific spammers in the world. He has condemned them (his victims) to perpetual spam hell.”
– Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma promises to bring righteous retribution down upon the recently arrested spam king.

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Screencast-O-Matic and The 1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters (including Esperanto, e.g. “Serpo servu cin por cherpo el cerbo de serba cervo” or “May a billhook serve thee to scoop out a Serbian deer’s brain.” Thanks, Klaus)

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The main event (Jobs vs. Gates .. Two walk in, one walks out!) isn’t until tonight, but the Walt and Kara Show, otherwise known as the D: All Things Digital conference, didn’t skimp on the undercard. (JP is blogging the event like crazy here.)
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off Surface, novel interface technology that powers [...]

As promised, Apple’s iTunes Store has started rolling out music from EMI labels in a high-quality format free of digital rights management restrictions. The initiative launched today under the banner of iTunes Plus, which is apt because the cost of a DRM-free track is the usual iTunes 99 cents plus 30 cents more for the [...]

In the latest example of an old-line media company shelling out for some Web 2.0 mojo, CBS today announced acquisition of British social music site Last.fm for $280 million plus incentives. Last.fm — which claims more than 15 million users monthly, including 4 million in the States — lets music fans connect with people who [...]

“You don’t see many ads for [Apple TV] on TV, even though Apple is blitzing the airwaves with iPod and iMac spots, and after living with one for the past few weeks, I think I see why. It’s just not very good. It’s about as uninspired as another prominent dud, the Zune, the MP3 player [...]

The Official Seal Generator (thanks, Fritz), and Ads of the World

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If you’re wondering where it’s at, it’s at Where 2.0 for the next couple days. The O’Reilly conference in San Jose focuses on the latest in location, and there’s a bunch of map news unfolding.
New from Google Maps is “Street View,” interactive panorama photos taken along selected streets in selected metropolitan areas so far (Silicon [...]

The folks at Symantec, McAfee and the other big computer security outfits may want to requisition some extra antacids for the office medicine cabinet on the news that Google has made its first acquisition of anti-malware technology. Google has purchased GreenBorder Techologies, whose product puts your browsing activity into a safe zone so that viruses [...]

It may not be the cage match of your fantasies, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will take the stage together tomorrow at the D: All Things Digital conference, despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum. Posing the questions will be Walt Mossberg and [...]

Ever since Google announced plans to acquire ad-management company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion last month, the power and reach of the two companies pretty much guaranteed an antitrust review, and the only question was whether the duty would fall to the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission (see “Don’t worry, son — those antitrust [...]

“[Warren] just kept spitting into a little receptacle, and then we FedExed it. Not very elegant.”
– An assistant to Warren Buffett describes the process by which the billionaire investor submitted his DNA for a test that finally, definitively proved he was not related to songwriter Jimmy Buffett (and — small world — the testing was [...]