Bach Technology

A proposed file format called MusicDNA will allow content owners to ship up to 32GB of information, such as album cover art, song lyrics, and even up-to-the minute blog posts and concert listings, alongside a music file. If enough content owners and distributors sign on, it could become an alternative to the MP3, giving users a more album-like digital playback experience, and allowing artists and content owners to charge more money per download.

The proposed format was announced by Bach Technology on Sunday at MIDEM 2010, a music-industry conference under way in Cannes, France. Unlike current alternatives to the MP3, such as Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), MusicDNA is not a new audio technology, and requires no new audio codecs. Rather, as Bach CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer explains in this video interview with PaidContent, MusicDNA is an add-on to existing audio formats.

MusicDNA analyzes the audio itself for characteristics in 13 categories such as mood and tempo. This information is encoded as XML and ships with the file. Content owners can also provide data, such as album art and lyrics, to be included with the file. This data can even be updated when the user is online–for example, concert listings could be added as they’re announced, complete with links to ticket-buying sites. Bach hopes to make money by licensing the technology to software and hardware manufacturers.

Because MusicDNA isn’t a new audio technology, MusicDNA files should play on existing hardware and software–they’ll play the underlying audio file and ignore all the added data. This is how MusicDNA could escape the fate of marginalized formats like Windows Media Audio or Sony’s ATRAC.

It’s an ambitious and interesting idea, but the digital music industry right now is dominated by one player: Apple. A lot of what MusicDNA proposes to accomplish could be handled at the application level–if Apple wants to analyze the audio content in files and add more categories to describe them, it could build this technology into iTunes. Moreover, Apple’s already got its own format, iTunes LP, for shipping additional information with music files. So I don’t see a lot of incentive for Apple to spend money to license and support this new third-party format. And without Apple, I don’t see how MusicDNA can survive.

Google Inc. and major music companies launched a free Internet music download service for China on Monday in a bid to help turn a field dominated by pirates into a profitable, legitimate business.

The advertising-supported service will offer 1.1 million tracks, including the full catalogs of Chinese and Western music for Warner Music Group Corp., EMI Group Ltd., Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music and 14 independent labels, the companies said. It will be limited to use by computers whose Internet protocol, or IP, addresses show they are in mainland China.

“This is the first really serious attempt to start monetizing online music in China,” said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia and regional head of the global recording industry group, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Chinese pirate Web sites offer downloads of unauthorized copies of music despite repeated lawsuits and government crackdowns. Legitimate producers have no estimate of lost potential sales, but some Chinese performers have announced they were no longer recording because piracy made it unprofitable.

The venture gives Google a new way to compete in a market where its research shows 84 percent of people say finding music is their main reason to use search engines, said Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s president for Greater China.

“With today’s offering, we complete the puzzle and offer a complete set of services that are fully integrated,” he said.

China has the world’s biggest online population, with some 300 million Internet users, according to the government. Online commerce is still modest in China and most Web surfers are looking for music, games and other entertainment.

Lee said the company was optimistic that use would grow rapidly but he declined to give any revenue forecasts.

EMI launched a separate venture with China’s dominant search engine, Baidu Inc., in January 2007 to compete with pirates by allowing free streaming pop music from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It sells downloads for a small fee.

Google’s service is to be run by Top100.cn, a 3 1/2-year-old Chinese Web site partly owned by Google. The site will sell advertising on its download page and split revenues with music companies, said its CEO, Gary Chen.

Providers will abide by Chinese censorship and withhold songs that are banned by the communist government, Rutherford said.

“When you’re in the music business in China you know you have to follow the regulations,” he said. “We wouldn’t give files to people in China (in situations) where a song has been banned.”

Google, headquartered in Mountain View, California, has struggled to expand in China, where it says it has about 30 percent of the search market. Baidu’s market share is just over 60 percent, according to research firm Analysys International.

Google’s Lee declined to comment on Beijing’s blocking of its YouTube video-sharing service last week. China occasionally bars its Internet users from seeing YouTube to prevent access to videos considered critical of communist rule or unflattering to the government.

Source: Yahoo! & AP

Yahoo is introducing a new type of search advertising that integrates images and video in paid listings, the company plans to announce Thursday.

Search advertising typically shows only text advertisements and links. Marketers usually devote part of their online budget to search — which shows text-only advertisements and links — and part to display, the banner and box advertisements that show images or video.

By introducing video and images, the new offering from Yahoo, called Rich Ads in Search, gives search some of the advantages of banner advertisements. “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, the vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo.

Yahoo has been trying to win back paid search advertising from the market leader, Google. Yahoo’s market share in paid search has fallen from 13.8 percent in 2004, to 10.5 percent this year, according to the research firm eMarketer. In the same time period, Google’s market share has more than doubled, from 32.8 percent in 2004, to 67.7 percent this year.

Yahoo’s strength has been its display advertising, where it sells boxes and banners on its highly trafficked pages. However, as the recession has deepened, many advertisers have shifted money to search, which gives them direct, measurable results.

Yahoo’s fourth-quarter results, reported in January, reflected that change. Search revenue was up 11 percent, and display revenue was down 2 percent.

Yahoo has been testing its offering with advertisers like the dog-food company Pedigree. A search for “Pedigree” on Yahoo turns up a light-blue box at the top of the search-results page holding an image from a Pedigree commercial, which plays when clicked.

“Video is always more powerful than just words on the page,” said John Anton, the marketing director at Pedigree. “It’s definitely compelling to us to have options like this, where, when you type in ‘Pedigree,’ you get more than just the words, you get the video itself.”

Yahoo can also include images — a search for Staples results in a similar light-blue box with the company’s logo on the side. Or, it can include a search box within the light-blue space, asking the visitor to enter his ZIP code, then taking him to the section of the advertiser’s Web site that lists bank branches or car dealerships near him, for example.

“What the search results look like is a very different experience with rich ads in search versus the text link,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s senior vice president for revenue and market development in the United States. “There is consistency to the experience, which all advertisers want, and were unable to get until this point.”

Yahoo is charging a monthly fee for the service, versus the auction-based pricing of search advertising, which Mr. Mayer said Yahoo might use in the future. For now, it is allowing only certain large, brand-focused advertisers — which have existing commercials or logos — to participate in the program. SoBe, Pepsi and Home Depot were all part of the pilot program.

According to Yahoo, some advertisers in the pilot program saw an improvement by as much as 25 percent in click-through rates. Karin Blake, the senior search manager at the ad agency Razorfish, who tested the offering for some of her clients, saw slightly less significant results: she said her clients had a 5 to 10 percent increase in click-through rates compared with a regular text ad.

Still, the new type of search will probably be attractive to advertisers, who pay high prices to develop their commercials and logos, and want to be able to show those wherever they can.

“In a typical search landscape, you can’t utilize things like video and images, just because the nature of search listings is really text,” Ms. Blake said. “It does allow Yahoo to sort of put together a more robust offering.”

Ms. Blake said that “right now, there isn’t anything in the paid search landscape that either Google or Microsoft is offering” along these lines.

Even as Yahoo updates its search capabilities, it has been under pressure from Wall Street analysts to consider selling its search business to Microsoft. Recently, Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, has repeatedly expressed interest in such a deal.

Carol A. Bartz, the new chief executive of Yahoo, has not specified her plans for Yahoo’s search business.

“Maybe we should divest of some things, maybe we ought to focus a little more on the company,” she said in a conference call last month with investors. “So, yes, everything’s on the table,”

But, she added, “this is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

Source: New York Times – By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Microsoft also said it recently expanded its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, which includes partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, among others.

Google Sync, currently in beta, uses push technology that lets iPhone and Windows Mobile devices get Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events to phones.

When Sync is set up on phones, it automatically starts synchronizing a user’s address book and calendar in the background and over-the-air and allows changes or additions to transfers over devices in minutes. For example, when a colleague changes the time of the TPS report cover sheets meeting, it will let alert Sync users immediately.

As a security feature, data is automatically backed up to Google accounts, so information is stored even if a user loses their phone.

In addition, for devices that support the open SyncML protocol, Google Sync allows two-way contacts synchronization. For BlackBerry users, a version of Google Sync is already available.

“This agreement is a great example of Microsoft’ s openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel and vice president, Intellectual Property and Licensing, in a statement.

Source: ChannelWeb

The brief filed Thursday in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argues that allowing webcasting of the Feb. 24 hearing is in the public interest, and is in keeping with camera access already granted in the courts.

The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing a Boston judge’s decision to allow the webcast, which it says goes against federal court guidelines on cameras and threatens its ability to get a fair trial.

“It is hard to imagine a hearing more deserving of public scrutiny through the same technological medium that is at the heart of this litigation,” the news organizations said in their brief to the appeals court.

The copyright infringement lawsuit is part an effort by the RIAA to stop online music sharing. Since 2003, it has filed civil lawsuits against about 35,000 people who allegedly swapped songs online.

Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, is challenging the constitutionality of the lawsuits.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner approved Nesson’s request to allow a courtroom video service to transmit the hearing to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which would stream it unedited on its Web site with free access. Gertner has said the RIAA also can subscribe to the video feed and stream it on a Web site of its choosing under the same conditions.

New organizations argued in their brief there was “nothing inherently harmful” in camera access to oral arguments, and countered the RIAA’s claim that online streaming could be manipulated, saying the potential to edit video is no different from the potential to edit transcripts or a reporter’s own notes. The news groups said the webcast would allow for more accurate reporting.

The news groups filing the brief also included Courtroom Television Network, Dow Jones & Co., Gannett Co. Inc., The Hearst Corp., Incisive Media, National Public Radio, NBC Universal Inc., Radio-Television News Directors Association, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The E.W. Scripps Co., Tribune Co., and Washington Post Digital.

Source: Yahoo! & AP

The movie rental company has partnered with Sonic Solutions to offer more than 10,000 movies for rent and sale to a variety of PCs, cell phones, portable media players, Internet-connected televisions, and Blu-ray disc players. The collection of offerings will be a combination of titles from Blockbuster and CinemaNow, a movie downloading service Sonic recently purchased.“Blockbuster is a ubiquitous entertainment presence in the physical world. Through this alliance with Sonic, we plan to become a ubiquitous presence in the digital world as well,” Jim Keyes, Blockbuster’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “Our goal is to offer consumers the most digital content, the most accessibility, via the most devices, both in and out of home.”

The partnership is Blockbuster’s latest attempt to match Netflix, which has expanded past its DVD-by-mail service to offer movie streaming on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console, Blu-ray players, and TiVo digital video recorders. In November, Blockbuster introduced the MediaPoint player, a set-top box that–like Netflix’s Roku–offers on-demand content to a user’s TV.

Blockbuster plans initially to sell or rent videos on a pay-per-view service, but the movie rental chain said it was considering offering a subscription plan for unlimited access to Blockbuster’s digital library.

Netflix already provides a free Web streaming service to customers who are signed up for a monthly subscription that costs at least $8.99.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Steven Musil

Palm’s Pre won CNET’s Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world. Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new OS, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

I wrote something like this about RIM’s BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still…where’s the music?

I don’t mean that the Pre won’t play music–of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? interference?) from the carrier, Sprint.But let’s recap why the iPhone became the first smart phone to capture the consumer imagination. Sure, its design had a lot of pleasant “just works” surprises, from the bright touchscreen to the way the keypad auto-corrects for big fingers. But a large reason is because Apple branded it as an extension of the iPod, which has become synonymous with mobile music. When music fans were looking to consolidate from two devices (MP3 player, phone) to a single one, the “i” brand reassured them that they wouldn’t get a second-class music experience.

Equally important: iTunes, the software that every iPod user was already familiar with. It’s not perfect. I know people who hate it, particularly on the PC. But compare it with the proposed Pre experience, as covered by PC Magazine:

9.) How do you get music and video onto the Pre?

You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB mass storage, or buy songs on the device using a built in Amazon MP3 Store client.

My immediate reaction upon reading those three little words, “drag and drop”? Yecch. No sync? No library? No rating system? No playlists, preset or automatic? No way to view and change information about songs?

Here’s the thing: without iTunes, there’s no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there’s no consumer smartphone audience. I don’t doubt that Palm (and RIM, for that matter) understand mobile communications and information management, and there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in business phones. But if I’m going to replace my MP3 player with a phone, these phones won’t cut it.

That’s why Microsoft’s recent justification for the Zune–it helped them learn how to build music-management software and an online store–didn’t ring as false to me as it did to some other folks. The device might be a failure. But whenever Microsoft rolls out its next-generation mobile phone platform, at least it has a reasonable story for managing and buying music.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Matt Rosoff

The sleek little Palm Pre phone promises to make it easy to call your friends by looking up their numbers on Facebook.

A new version of the Ford F150 pickup truck will let contractors check service manuals by browsing the Web from an in-dash computer.New televisions from LG, Samsung and others will let viewers watch movies from Netflix and other Internet sites.

In two years, 90 percent of all Sony products will connect to the Internet, Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, predicted.

These developments can be seen as more of the electronics industry’s constant quest for something new to tantalize gadget lovers.

But there is a darker side, too, for the companies that make the devices. If the most exciting thing about your phone or truck or TV is the Web sites you go to and the software applications you download, then the device itself is less important.

That is what happened to the computer industry, with its relentless price pressure and indistinguishable products. It is hardly an attractive business model, even for consumer electronics companies already accustomed to low profit margins.

“We are commoditizing new technology,” said William Wang, the chief executive of Vizio, which has become the country’s third-largest seller of televisions after Samsung and Sony. Now that flat-screen high-definition televisions have become commonplace, he said, “the technology shifts are not that dramatic.”

Other, more established brands beg to differ, of course. Their screens are thinner and their pictures are brighter, they advertise. So consumers will inevitably be drawn to them, they argue. And they are working on what they hope will be another technology on view at the show, one that makes mere high-definition sets seem passé: Three-dimensional televisions.

But the more established brands know the battleground is shifting. Increasingly what will differentiate one TV from another is the software it runs and the Internet services it connects to.

Even Nokia, which sells more cellphones than its three nearest competitors, says that much of its future success will come from selling services, ranging from music to maps, that operate on the phones.

Another approach is to try to embed computer chips with Internet connections, all of which keep getting cheaper and smaller, into ever more unusual devices. Sony introduced an Internet-connected alarm clock that will wake you up with your favorite music videos and traffic forecasts for your commute.

Asustek, the giant Taiwanese electronics company, has developed a touch-screen computer that hangs on a wall. It also has built a PC into a keyboard that lets users surf the Net on their TVs . In the future, according to Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek, everything in your house, even your bedroom mirror, will be a computer display.

So even as electronics makers struggle with the extremely sluggish economy and the relentless competition, they can look forward to finding ever more shapes and sizes in which to embed their gadgets.

Here are some edited excerpts from interviews with top executives who attended the electronics show. More of these interviews, along with other articles about the electronics show, can be found at nytimes.com/ personaltech.

Services via Devices

“For a long time, our business was defined as cellphones. Hardware is not enough. We need to have a wider array of services and content. This is a major change for us.”

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia

“In the next five years, we are not only going to provide hardware, but content through our devices, in an easy, more convenient way. TV is no longer just TV. TV is interactive TV these days. You will use the same TV and the same remote control, but have completely different functionality.”

Jong Woo Park, the president of Samsung’s digital media business

“You ought to expect that to be more and more unified — three screens: TV, phone, PC — one cloud-based experience. Live, essentially projecting through consistently, and appropriately, to the three screens.”

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft

The Evolving Television

“Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. One view is that the Web, a browser like Firefox, Chrome or I.E., will be right on the television in the next couple years. Another view is, no, a PC-based Web is just too complex. The second one is the phase that we’re in now.”

Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix

“Three-D television. That’s really a major, major revolution coming into consumer electronics. That’s one area where we are placing our bets”.

Woo Hyun Paik, chief technical officer and a president of LG Electronics

“Over five years, the big concept that changes for a consumer is, ‘Gosh, do I have to track whether I have my content on my PC, on my phone, on my TV and how do I move it around?’ ”

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices business

New Computer Shapes

“A fraction of what we sell, a much bigger percentage of it, will be lower-priced client form factor. It may have all the functionality of a PC, but maybe it’s smaller. Maybe it is just an LCD display with PC functionality in the back, that is sitting on a desk or hanging on a wall.”

Dirk Meyer, the chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices

“To make the whole digital home possible, in the eventual state, every wall becomes a display. The mirror should become a screen. You already watch the mirror.”

Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek

Coping With Recession

“Customers are spending less, but they are still buying. They are putting off vacations, so they can buy TVs and stay at home. Last year, customers bought $900 and $1,000 laptops. This year they are buying $500, $600, $700 laptops. They are not buying cars, so they’ve got to buy something.”

Source: The New York Times – By SAUL HANSELL

Yahoo Inc wants viewers to “fall in love” with its effort to bring the Web to the TV, but questions remain about how the service will operate and how successful it will be in reaching consumers.

It’s an ambitious undertaking because past attempts to “converge” the online and TV worlds have sputtered.

Yahoo’s Web TV offering, which the company said will be free of charge, is centered on so-called “widgets” — or small Internet applications — that are lined up along the bottom of the screen.

By design, the widgets offer only a slice of the online experience and not a complete Web interaction. For example, there is no standard Web browser, and a conscious effort was made to avoid applications that involve typing.

Moreover, perhaps the most common online activity, Web search, is not offered for now. Whether consumers will find such a limited online service attractive remains to be seen.

Yahoo plans to make money off advertising, although the company will roll it out carefully.

“We want users to fall in love with the service before we bombard them with ads,” said Patrick Barry, vice president of connected TV at Yahoo.

NORMAL ONLINE ACTIVITIES

Barry emphasized that the Internet experience is designed to never overshadow the TV’s content. Users will be able to stream videos from YouTube, check news, share photos, and do many other normal online activities.

Yahoo formally unveiled the service at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

The company managed to convince a number of consumer electronics heavyweights to include the widget service in their future products, announcing partnerships with companies including Samsung Electronics Co, LG Electronics Inc and Sony Corp.

The service will be included in TVs being shipped in North America and to 10 countries in Europe, Yahoo said.

The Web TV initiative was originally jointly announced last summer by Yahoo and Intel Corp. But Intel’s CE 3100 chip will be used only in Internet-enabled TVs and devices offered by Toshiba, and a set-top box from Samsung, the company said.

Wilfred Martis, director of Intel’s digital home group, emphasized that the partnerships announced at CES were only the start of the initiative.

“This is the beginning of this huge sea change in the consumer electronics space … . There have been a lot of false starts in this industry but I think we now have critical mass between content providers, service providers, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), silicon providers. Everybody is working together.”

OPEN PLATFORM

One of the most intriguing — and perhaps trickiest — aspects of Yahoo’s Web TV push is the open platform. Much like Apple Inc’s iPhone, third-party developers will be able to write new widgets that can be downloaded onto a TV, some for free, some for a fee. A developer’s kit was released on Wednesday.

Barry declined to say how much of a cut Yahoo would take for fee-based widgets. The number of widgets a user can download will depend on the TV.

New widgets will first have to be approved by Yahoo and then the individual TV makers will decide whether or not to offer the application.

When asked whether the company would block any widgets that contained objectionable material, such as adult content, Barry declined to answer the question directly.

He said the company is working with its hardware partners to formulate a content policy. Barry stressed that the service would feature an extensive array of administrative controls for parents looking to keep their kids away from inappropriate content.

Source: Reuters – By Gabriel Madway

A few years ago, Palm was the unquestioned leader in the U.S. smartphone and PDA market. But it has failed to keep deliver devices that consumers lusted after, and it has been rapidly losing customers and has posted six consecutive quarterly losses.

Palm’s unveiling of its Pre smartphone and WebOS at CES on Thursday gives the company a decent shot at taking back customers who have flocked to Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)’s BlackBerry smartphones and Apple’s iPhone 3G. The comeback trail will be tough, though, as the marketplace is wildly different from when Palm dominated it.

Once the domain of early adopters and business professionals, smartphones have now become a mainstream product. The space has strong entrenched players like RIM and Apple, and up-and-coming newcomers looking to capitalize on Google’s Android operating system. To make matters worse for Palm, LG and Nokia are making hard pushes for the U.S. market as well.

The smartphone market is still somewhat divided between enterprise smartphone users and the casual user, but that line is rapidly disappearing. Palm said it wanted to go after the “fat middle” of the market between the business-centric BlackBerry and the media-centric iPhone.

“We think it’s perfectly balanced,” said Palm CEO Ed Colligan during the handset’s unveiling. “It’s not just for work, it’s not just for play. … We think it’s the one phone you can use for your entire life.”

In terms of design, the Pre should be an appealing device to consumers. The 3.1-inch touch screen has a sharp resolution and it has multitouch and gesture-based navigation like the iPhone. The Pre takes gesture control a step further by including an area under the screen to let users quickly perform a few actions in any application with a swipe of the finger.

There’s also a slide-down physical keyboard that curves forward slightly, and it should make mobile professionals and rapid-fire text message users happy. Including the touch screen and a physical keyboard does have its price though, as the Pre is a bit thicker than Apple’s smartphone and the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm. Additionally, some may be bothered that there’s no on-screen virtual keyboard.

In terms of features, the Pre has nearly everything one expects from a high-end smartphone, including Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, full HTML browser, 3-megapixel camera, the ability to add applications, 8 GB of storage, multimedia capabilities, and a high-end processor from Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN). It doesn’t blow the competition out of the water with its specs, but it is a highly capable smartphone that isn’t out-classed by its rivals.

But most high-end smartphones share similar set of features anyways, and there’s an increasingly important emphasis of the software. Palm’s WebOS has been in the works in various iterations for more than four years, and the company believes that extra time allowed it to create the right OS for a modern mobile user.

Palm’s WebOS has been built from the ground up with constant mobile Internet connectivity in mind. Palm’s OS pulls information from various Web services and aggregates it into a single, finger-friendly interface. For example, it will be able to aggregate contact information from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Outlook, Web-based e-mail, and social networking site into a single contact list. The Outlook integration could make this a useful device for mobile professionals, and hands-on reports said it handles multitasking well.

The company said the platform was built on industry-standard technologies like CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript, and Palm intends to offer a rich open development environment for third-party developers to quickly create content. For example, the Internet radio provider Pandora was able to create an application in three days, Palm said.

Palm was well known for its rich stable of developers for past smartphone platforms, but getting developers to create compelling programs for WebOS may be the biggest challenge because the market is getting extremely crowded. While developing apps for Palm’s platform may be easy, developers are likely to go to where the largest audience is.

Right now, Apple is clearly the most attractive platform because its App Store has had more than 300 million downloads in the last six months. Developers may also be drawn to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile for their large user bases, and Google’s Android platform is expected to be on multiple handsets and carriers in 2009. Additionally, many industry watchers expect Symbian to make a strong play for the U.S. market once it has gone open source in 2010, further siphoning potential content creators away from Palm.

This could potentially lead to chicken-and-egg scenario where developers ignore the WebOS platform because it doesn’t have a large user base but it can’t get a sizeable following because there aren’t compelling apps. This shouldn’t be an issue with the larger entities like Facebook which have the time and resources to create programs for multiple platforms, but it could keep out smaller developers who create niche or exclusive content.

Additionally, questions still remain on how WebOS applications will be distributed. The company will most likely take its cue from the App Store and Android Market and create a single store for users to browse, buy, download, and install apps on the go. But the company has not said if this is the case, what payment method will be used, and what percentage of revenue developers will get.

Palm has partnered with Sprint to be the exclusive carrier of the Pre at its launch in the first half of 2009, and this has positive and negative aspects. AT&T has the iPhone 3G, T-Mobile has the G1, Verizon Wireless has the BlackBerry Storm, and Sprint will likely make the Pre its flagship handset. This means the Pre will benefit from Sprint’s advertising and marketing muscle, and it can take advantage of the company’s large EV-DO Rev. A network. But Sprint continues to struggle with maintaining subscribers, and it still has a bit of a reputation for having poor customer service. The companies haven’t released any pricing details, but it may be hard to sell the Pre for more than $199, which is what the iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Storm cost.

Palm appears to have cherry-picked popular features and services from its rivals while adding enough unique qualities to make the Pre and WebOS attractive. But there are still too many unanswered questions to say if these products will get it back to the top.

Source: By Marin Perez – InformationWeek