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“I’m not sure we can squeeze it out this year, given everything we’ve got going on,” Paczuski told me at last night’s Churchill Club event.

As I predicted, it is the company’s Tellme unit that is actively developing a program for Apple’s iPhone. Tellme offers voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including the BlackBerry.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–Microsoft is, indeed, working on an
iPhone application.

With that time frame, it is possible some other Microsoft division could beat Tellme out of the gate, although I haven’t heard any other firm plans. (Microsoft did license its ActiveSync technology to Apple, which allows the iPhone to connect to an Exchange server.)

The iPhone does present some interesting challenges. One of its big features is the fact that everything is done via a touch screen. But Tellme relies on a physical button to determine when to start listening to a query.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Although the company created an early alpha program in a matter of weeks, senior director Dariusz Paczuski said it will probably be a couple of months before a public version is ready. He said it will definitely happen within the current fiscal year, which runs through June.

“You want a button,” Paczuski said. Even on Sprint’s touch-screen Instinct, Tellme is able to use the call button to determine when a user is speaking. He said that when the iPhone application launches, there will probably be a big virtual button in the middle of the screen.

One of the big challenges in bringing the Tellme search application to the iPhone: the lack of physical buttons on the device.

Even after trading for Ken Griffey Jr., my White Sox are struggling against the Royals.

Have you ever been forced away from watching your favorite sports team because of some prior obligation, only to find yourself sneaking away to the nearest TV to check on the score? Well, then ScoreMobile’s new iPhone app is for you. Essentially, ScoreMobile has taken its already killer iPhone web app and translated it over to a nice downloadable package. Right now, ScoreMobile offers real-time scores and stats for MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, NCAAF, NCAAB, and even CFL for our Canadian readers.

The lack of sports applications that are available for the
iPhone is really amazing to me. There is certainly a large market of sports fans out there, waiting to be tapped into. Despite the apparent void of good sports applications, ScoreMobile’s app for iPhone is clearly the best available right now. It serves up rich and timely statistics and has a slick UI. The best part is that it’s free, so it’s worth your click to download it at the very least. You can give it a try here.

Even though I have dropped a lot of jaws by showing off the instantaneous video highlights that MLB.com’s iPhone app provides, it is certainly lacking in the statistics department. ScoreMobile picks up the slack. The application gives live standings, lineups, and a variety of other statistics. Even though it doesn’t have video highlights like MLB’s app, the statistics provided here are much more robust.

Chrome is more than a bright and shiny Google lab experiment. It’s a useful browser that is going to steal share from the existing products.

(You can get Chrome from CNET Download.com.)

When Google Chrome was released a week ago, I bravely volunteered to use the browser exclusively for the next seven days. That means no
Firefox, no IE, no Opera, only Chrome, with no exceptions. I was fully expecting a week of frustrations, incompatibilities, and annoyances. I was ready to criticize all of the fatal flaws that were sure to turn up. I am happy to say that I was wrong. Google Chrome passes the full-time use test with flying colors.

The thing I missed the most by switching from Firefox to Chrome for the week is the absence of my Remember The Milk todo list in Gmail. Google is promising extensions for Chrome, but doesn’t support them yet, so you lose a lot of the functionality that Firefox’s extensions provide.

The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper if you are a Hotmail user. It seems like this is an easily correctable issue and probably not the fault of Google. Chrome also suffers from the same insanely annoying bug as Firefox, where Flash videos sometimes stop after two seconds.

Chrome shows the locations of search terms in the scroll bar.

One of the first things that people notice when they load up Google Chrome is the gigantic viewing window. Chrome’s presentation is very elegant, with the larger than usual viewing window, beautiful animations, browser bar that searches, suggests, and shows history, and a good-looking and highly functional start page. Page searches also show the locations in which your search terms appear in the scroll bar. Surfing has been way easier on my eyes in the past week.

As everyone else has mentioned, Chrome is really snappy when using Google apps. Gmail and Google Reader work like a dream. Loading each tab in its own process also makes a difference. If you are in the middle of something important, a balky page or Flash element in a different tab doesn’t crash everything. During my entire test of Chrome, there was only one instance when the whole browser started choking, but it was able to pull itself out of it. Chrome certainly showed nothing like the crashing issues that pop up with Firefox (although they have been made better with Firefox 3).

Windows Live Mail is incompatible with Google Chrome, suggesting that you "Upgrade your web browser."

All in all, my experience with Chrome was very positive and it really did not give me any major difficulties. I see Google Chrome potentially winning over some of Firefox’s users, especially if they add extensions and get support from the developer community.

That’s otherwise known as keeping the aim true.

And while the article raises questions about potential conflicts of interest that could arise as Malik covers the VC industry and its start-ups, while also being a member of the club, Malik notes that he will not pen any articles about companies in True Venture’s portfolio. He adds that disclosures will be made of the True Ventures relationship, should any Giga writers make reference to any of the firm’s portfolio companies.

In a a blog post, Malik notes that he will continue to write about issues he holds dear from major technology trends to the underpinnings of the Internet. But, he notes, by signing on as a partner with True Ventures, he’ll also have a front-row seat in learning about the VC business and may one day venture out as a full-fledged venture capitalist.

Om Malik kicks off GigaOM’s Structure event in June, which centered on the massive build-out of infrastructure to power the wired planet.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Malik, who recently transferred the CEO role of his company to Paul Walborsky, has signed on as a venture partner at True Ventures, a firm that is an investor in Giga.

In an interview with The New York Times, Malik said his part-time role will include offering up advice to the firm’s portfolio companies and sharing his opinions with the other partners at True Ventures.

Giga Omni Media founder Om Malik has penned a new chapter to life, adding the role of venture partner to the mix.

(Credit:
Apple)

The May issue of Popular Mechanics includes a comparative review, with extensive benchmarks, of Macs and PCs.

PC: Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general, they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs.

Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown, and program launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software–and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine.

The verdict turned out to be somewhat in line with Apple’s exaggerated commercials–the PC is slower (running Vista, compared to Apple’s
Leopard operating system) and less easy to use, and it doesn’t have a clear cost advantage. Both are running Intel, so that’s always good news for the chipmaker.

Following is the Popular Mechanics verdict:

Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means that for the price of the Gateway, you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot–and still save $100.

Apple on Friday issued an update for iTunes 8 that specifically addresses problems experienced by
Windows Vista users, and issued general recommendations for Windows XP and Vista users experiencing sync issues with
iPhone and
iPod touch devices.

Since its release earlier in the week, iTunes 8 has bedeviled some Windows Vista users with the so-called blue screen of death, or BSOD, and other issues. Speculation has focused on an incompatibility with USB devices, such as Webcams and printers.

In a support post, Apple recommends that Windows Vista users experiencing difficulty should uninstall iTunes 8 and, after rebooting the computer, reinstall the updated application. (You can download the updated iTunes 8 for Windows from CNET’s Download.com.)

Also on Friday, Apple posted recommendations regarding problems experienced by Windows XP and Windows Vista users when syncing the iPhone or iPod Touch devices containing saved photos. Apple says that “while any driver software could be a factor, updating the software drivers for Logitech QuickCam/Webcam products, Lexmark scanners, and some built-in media card reader drivers on the computer may solve this issue in a majority of cases.”

Beatles fans can now download the Fab Four’s tracks legally for free. But there’s one catch: they can only do it by subscribing to, and downloading, a podcast from Norwegian Broadcasting. According to a deal inked by the organization late last year, Norwegian Broadcasting can offer podcasts containing music as long as no more than 70 percent of the entire duration of the show contains music. Using that to its advantage, the organization has started offering daily podcast episodes that feature a three-minute discussion about an individual Beatles track and the actual recording of that track subsequent to the discussion. The podcast is available for free by subscribing via iTunes.

TraderPlanet.com, a service that offers users investment advice, has launched a new social-networking platform that aims at becoming the investment world’s “cross between MySpace and WebMD.” TraderPlanet.com will allow users to interact with each other over trading strategies and investment returns, while supplying its users with market news, an index of trader opinions, as well as chat rooms, blogs, and forum discussions to help improve interaction. Registration is free and available now.

PropertyRoom.com, an online auction site that works with law enforcement agencies to sell previously stolen merchandise, announced Monday that it witnessed a significant upswing in traffic over the holiday season as shoppers were using online auction sites to find better deals on goods. According to the company, it welcomed over 1 million visitors in December, representing a 35 percent increase over the previous year. It also saw a 25 percent revenue increase over December 2007.

Israel Defense Forces has launched a YouTube channel containing bombing footage, surveillance video, and daily updates about the movements of Israeli forces on the ground. The channel’s official description says the videos are made available to show “documentation of the IDF’s humane action and operational success in Operation Cast Lead.”

(Credit: The Beatles)

Amazon announced Monday that it has partnered with Roku to deliver video-on-demand services through the hardware company’s Netflix set-top box. Amazon said over 40,000 titles will be made available for the Roku Netflix box and will cost the same price–around $3.99–as titles currently offered on Amazon’s page. Amazon’s films will be available on the box in the coming weeks.

Kohl’s antitrust committee held a hearing in mid-July to examine the nonexclusive agreement, which calls for Google to place some of its ads on Yahoo search page results.

Yahoo plans to report its third-quarter results on October 21.

While we have conducted a careful review of this transaction, we do not have the benefit of the confidential business information supplied by the companies to the Department nor the economic models necessary to predict consumer behavior…nonetheless, we conclude that important competition issues are raised by this transaction. Should the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google grow significantly, we believe the threat to competition will also increase.

Yahoo is contemplating another round of layoffs, according to a report in Silicon Alley Insider.

Updated at 2:21 p.m. PDT, with information on Yahoo’s stock performance and a letter sent by Sen. Herb Kohl to the head of the antitrust unit for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Any carnage count would likely be less than 20 percent of the workforce, SIA notes, citing people familiar with the company’s financial health. According to the report:

Yahoo’s stock is already under great pressure, closing Thursday at $15.58 a share, down 8.14 percent over the previous day’s close and dropping to a level that hasn’t been seen since August 2003.

In his letter to the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Thomas Barnett, Kohl stated:

Sen. Herb Kohl, chairman of the congressional subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, sent a letter Thursday to the head of the antitrust division for the U.S. Department of Justice, requesting a close examination of the controversial Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership be undertaken.

The deal is currently in the final stages of an investigation by the Department of Justice, which will indicate whether it will seek to block the partnership by filing a lawsuit, or allow it proceed with or without remedies.

While our Henry Blodget has called on Yahoo to can 3,018 people (that’s more than 20 percent of the workforce), the odds that Yahoo will make cuts on that scale are very low, we’re told by people familiar with the company’s thinking. But we’re also told that another round of layoffs are indeed on the drawing board, prompted by a grim financial forecast.

The parties assert the transaction is in the advertisers’ best interests since it will create a more efficient marketplace.

While the broader markets were also down on Thursday, Yahoo’s descent was particularly steeper toward the last hour of trading.

Without Bell Labs, very few people who read this blog would have jobs today.

Here are 10 Bell Labs innovations that changed the world.

I was based in the Murray Hill, N.J., building and used to see Dennis Ritchie in the elevator. We even got to bowl in the Unix lab. I then moved to the optical networking group down in Holmdel, N.J., before moving to California.

One of the pictures shows part of the Holmdel building, which was recently sold off to developers as part of the Lucent/Alcatel debacle. The building is historically significant not just because it was designed by Eero Saarinen but also because all kinds of technological breakthroughs occurred there. There is also a famous myth that a researcher at the Holmdel building got beat to the punch on his discovery and hurled himself off the 6th floor into the atrium.

Besides the fact that Bell Labs was one of the greatest innovation companies of all time, I worked in two of the buildings that are part of the photo collection. My first “really real” job was at a Bell Labs start-up based on the Inferno programming language (which was based on Plan 9, a very early open-source OS) that Lucent attempted to commercialize.

Data networking
The transistor
Cellular telephone technology
Solar cells
Lasers
Digital transmission and switching
Communications satellites
Touch-tone telephones
Unix operating system and C language
Digital signal processors

Wired is running a photo gallery related to the history of Bell Labs. If I had to pick one word to describe the photos, it would be depressing.

It may be the Google era on the Internet, but when it comes to finding company information that employees need to do their jobs, it’s barely even the CompuServe era.

That, more or less, is what research firm AIIM found in a study that surveyed more than 500 businesses in May about the “findability” of information.

Enterprise search technology is widely available, so the issue lies more with corporate priorities than with the state of the art, AIIM said in the study, announced Tuesday.

(Credit:
AIIM)

AIIM's study showed that it's hard for people to find the information they need for their job.

In the study, 49 percent agreed that it’s hard to find information they need, and 69 percent said less than half of their employer’s information is searchable online.