sr4hrh.org

“It’s not our desire to be biggest site. We are not going after the hour-long wedding videos,” she said. “People are taking videos on still cameras and mobile devices, and they are not doing much in terms of sharing videos.”

According to Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s director of product management, Flickr Video is intended to capture the “little moments of life.” She told me that the goal was not to invent a new kind of video site or take on YouTube, but to focus on “authentic user-generated and personal content.”

If you compare the number of people posting more commercial videos on sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video, people capturing the little moments is a huge unmet need and taps into existing behaviors, Srivastava added. Users can directly upload videos from their phones. She expects that the addition of video will bring in a new audience, although uploading videos is limited today to paying Flickr users.

After a few years of waiting, Flickr videos have finally arrived. As a long-time Flickr user, I have been wondering what took so long to add videos (more on Techmeme) to the service. In the meantime, YouTube managed to sprint way ahead, leaving Yahoo Video and the nascent Flickr Video in the dust.

Flickr videos live along side photos

Maintaining the differentiation will be difficult. Users are putting long and short videos on a variety of other sites, including new sites such as Seesmic and Qik. But, the Flickr experience has attracted 25 million active users, and they will appreciate the addition of video.

“If it means being more conservative out of the gate, that’s fine,” Srivastava said. “We want to maintain consistency of the feel and experience on Flickr. We don’t want to be the biggest video site day one, but the most interesting.”

Despite taking the gestation period of an elephant to appear, I like the Flickr Video experience, except for the limitation to 90 seconds of video. It’s the video analog of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters. It’s a fine communications constraint, but it doesn’t apply as easily to video content.

Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Flickr Video–the shorter version:

Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Yahoo Video–the longer version:

She explained the difference between Yahoo Video (which is the underlying technology for Flickr Video) and Flickr Video as follows: “Yahoo Video is about the broadcast experience, while Flickr is more personal content that you want to share with friends and family…and the world, but it’s more personal and authentic.” Yahoo will be patrolling Flickr Video and relying on the community to eliminate inappropriate and copyrighted content, she said.

The 90-second limit on playing time and 150MB maximum file size for upload will encourage users to post their little moments, but it will also be a cause of frustration. For example, I did an interview with Srivastava with my Flip Video camera that was 156 seconds in length. To post it on Flickr I had to go through the pain of editing it, which I would rather avoid for shorter pieces. I expect that the Flickr team and community will think seriously about raising the limit on playing time.

The addition of video content doesn’t disrupt the simplicity and utility of Flickr. It offers the same privacy controls, user interface, licensing options, and comments, captions, tags, APIs, etc.

What may happen before the end of the year is a partial reorganization of the company rather than a clean spin-off of all manufacturing assets. But the basic import of the Statesman comment isn’t necessarily inaccurate. AMD Chief Financial Officer Bob Rivet said during AMD’s second-quarter earnings conference call that Asset Smart “will be a major reformation of the company.” Asset Smart is AMD’s terminology for the restructuring of its manufacturing operations.

Advanced Micro Devices will split into separate companies as it spins off its manufacturing operations, according to a report.

UPDATE: According to Kirk Ladendorf, the author of The Austin American-Statesman article, the Statesman will issue an update, likely sometime during the week of July 28. In short, it appears that AMD’s contention that Dirk Meyer was misquoted is true.

However, Ashok Kumar, senior vice president at CRT Capital Group, said that one of the likeliest partners for AMD when it restructures manufacturing operations is Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which currently makes AMD’s graphics processors, has also been cited as possibly playing a role in AMD’s restructuring.

The Austin American-Statesman had one of the most unambiguous statements to date when it interviewed AMD’s new CEO, Dirk Meyer, last week: “Meyer says the company is just months away from a major restructuring that will spin the manufacturing operations off into a separate company, with new ownership,” the report said.

One of the biggest pieces of news that emerged from AMD’s earnings announcement last week was that Meyer would become CEO and Ruiz would remain as chairman to oversee AMD’s transition to Asset Smart. This arrangement has led to speculation that AMD would spin off the manufacturing part of the business. The question seems to be: How much of this would AMD retain?

“Part of the reason for the timing of the CEO transition…(is) we’re just about at the goal line on Asset Smart,” Prairie said. “It’s at a point where it requires 100 percent of Hector’s time and focus to see it through.”

Update on July 24, 5:50 p.m. PDT with additional information and corrections.

AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie says Meyer was misquoted, but did not give details on the company’s future plans. He did say that “it’s fundamentally important to AMD to transform how we manufacture our wafers.”

AMD already has an Asset Smart relationship with IBM, Prairie said. “We have a very good relationship with IBM on the process technology side. That’s one of the examples we have held out where we have gone Asset Smart in the past. Not having to have a 300 millimeter test facility on our books because we use their facilities.”

One thing is clear: AMD has been laboring for months over the details of the restructuring. “We have made enormous progress. Certainly have an incredibly high level of expectation we will be able to do that before the end of the year,” said AMD chairman Hector Ruiz–who stepped down as CEO last week–during the second quarter earnings conference call on July 17.

“I am no expert on such things, but provided Microsoft does not bundle ‘Morro’ in with its operating system I would be surprised if there were antitrust issues,” he said in an e-mail. “Anything which encourages more people to run antivirus has to be good news for all of us.”

Antitrust regulators in the U.S. have tended to focus on harm to consumers as opposed to competitors. Authorities in Europe and Korea have taken a broader view, taking action against Microsoft for actions deemed to hurt competitors, such as bundling its media player into Windows.

Over at Sophos–which focuses on the enterprise market and so doesn’t compete with Microsoft’s consumer security products–Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley predicted antitrust issues would not arise.

“They’re incorrigible,” Wall said of Microsoft.

Update 6:25 p.m.: And we got comment from security firms McAfee and Sophos.

It’s unclear whether giving away software that others charge for will ultimately be enough to justify regulatory action. Although one antitrust lawyer predicts rival security firms will complain and that antitrust authorities will listen.

“Sure, there will be antitrust issues. They’re just…daring the antitrust authorities to knock it off,” said Daniel Wall of the San Francisco firm of Latham & Watkins. “This is an old issue, the notion of them giving away for free products that others sell and it is absolutely guaranteed to get the attention of the antitrust authorities in Europe, Korea, Japan, and other jurisdictions.”

To be sure, those two–and other rivals–will be able to tout products that offer a broader range of features than Microsoft plans to deliver with “Morro” next year. At the same time, “nada” is a tough price to compete against.

CNET News’ Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

That raises the question of whether those companies or others may look to antitrust regulators for help. We’ve put queries into those companies and also posed the antitrust question to Microsoft. I’ll let you know what we hear back.

Update 4:45 p.m. PST: Here’s what Microsoft had to say.

Asked if Microsoft would ever consider bundling the security features into Windows, Microsoft’s Barzdukas said: “I can’t foresee such a time.”

Microsoft’s decision to offer free antivirus software puts rivals such as McAfee and Symantec in a tough position.

Microsoft appears to be getting out of the paid security software business, at least on the consumer end. (Microsoft still plans to offer paid security products for businesses).

Both Europe and Korea have required Microsoft to offer versions of its operating system without certain components. In this case, though, Microsoft is not talking about distributing the antivirus code as part of Windows itself.

Also, Microsoft said it plans to deliver Morro as a free download rather than bundling it with the operating system–another move that could dampen some antitrust concerns.

“We are focused on addressing the security needs of consumers,” Amy Barzdukas, a senior director in Microsoft’s Online Services and Windows Division, said in a statement. “We will, of course, continue to comply with any government rulings.”

Representatives from Microsoft, Symantec, and McAfee were not immediately available to comment.

One thing in Microsoft’s corner is the fact there are already free antivirus products on the market, such as AVG, though typically security vendors look to upsell consumers from low-cost or free products to higher-end ones.

McAfee spokesman Joris Evers, asked if his company would raise an antitrust complaint over Microsoft’s move, said: “It’s too early to say anything about that.”

Glassdoor, a site that gives insider reports on salaries and the zeitgeists of more than 11,000 companies, plans to announce Tuesday that has added multi-currency information for more than 100 countries. Basically, that means a Google employee in the search company’s terribly cool offices in Zurich, Switzerland, can see salaries in the local Swiss franc–probably more useful than seeing it in the American dollar.

Look out multinational employers, Glassdoor.com is also going multinational.

Glassdoor has added two other features: The first allows users to more finely filter the information they’re looking for. The second is an “employer” feature that allows a representative for one of the many companies being reviewed to have the ability to comment on reviews (fair’s fair, after all) and talk with Glassdoor employees to make sure their information is accurate.

Launched in June, Glassdoor says it has received more than 60,000 salary reports and company reviews. It was founded by veterans of Microsoft and Expedia (Rich Barton, the CEO of real estate site Zillow, is non-executive chairman). The idea was to make salary and workplace-quality information as public as possible. The service is free, but in order to get information, users have to provide information.

In this podcast, Naraine and Vamosi talk about the changing nature of threats today and what we might see in the future.

In this week’s Security Bites podcast, Robert Vamosi speaks with Ryan Naraine, security evangelist for Kaspersky and Zero Day blogger for ZDNet, about malicious software.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Naraine recently spoke at a conference on emerging security threats sponsored by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center about the increasing risks of malware on social networks, such as Facebook pages that to lead people to Google pages with additional links to malware sites (a two-step infection process), and the more straightforward approach of Facebook being used for botnets.

The premise is dead simple. You download the MobileTalk app, then make calls as usual. When your fingers dial out an international number, MobileTalk springs to life, delaying the call by a few seconds to connect you to a local number (that’s what gets you the cheaper rates,) then pushes the call through to your destination.

Quite a few services on the market offer some variation on the theme of making inexpensive international calls. Fring and EQO dress it up with IM and a social networking aspect that grants free international calls between registered friends and cheap calls to everyone else. Likewise, there’s Skype to Go and Talkster, which both require you to punch in local access numbers to get cheap rates. However, Packet8’s MobileTalk has risen above them all as a mass market solution that sheds the extra messaging frills, money-making ads, and prep time to make the call. (Note: Give yourself a few minutes for the initial account set-up, including finding the phone’s IMEI number.)

Payment is pretty easy too; it arrives as a separate credit card charge on your statement when you set up your account. The costs are comparable to other phone card and VoIP-out services–that’s about 2-3 cents per minute to most of Europe and 3-5 cents to most of Asia. Doubting Thomases can track call costs from their online account as they speak.

Because Packet8 MobileTalk requires the user to do absolutely nothing to connect an international call, it’s the kind of set-up I want to have for calling my London-dwelling sister on my morning commute, and the kind of app I would recommend to any smartphone owner who prefers to set and forget. Packet8 MobileTalk is currently available for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry phones, and is expected for Java phones in 4-to-6 weeks.

Genius expands its knowledge and recommendation abilities by collecting data from all of the more than 65 million iTunes users, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

“If Genius works as advertised, it is a long-overdue and potentially market-dominating feature,” McQuivey said. “With it, iTunes can do something no one else can do: build recommendations off not only your purchases, but your actual listening behavior.”

Apple launched an upgraded iTunes on Tuesday that features an automatic playlist generator called Genius. The technology, available for the
iPhone,
iPod Touch, and the new iPod Nano, makes a calculated guess from different data that includes the listening habits of iTunes users.

Apple says it can help you stay in your groove with its Genius.

Music discovery was a big part of Microsoft’s update to the Zune as well. It added two kinds of channels. First are pre-programmed channels such as selections from the Grand Ol Opry and various radio stations to weekly updated channels with the top Billboard hits in a particular category.

McQuivey sees an opportunity for Apple to cash in on Genius that could also offer benefit users.

My colleague Jen Guevin points out that users could find that annoying unless Genius guesses right most of the time and suggests something they like. I’m thinking why not let me toggle that kind of service on or off?

The true genius (sorry) of the offering is that it’s helping users enjoy their Apple devices more.

It’s important to note that iMeem, Pandora and other music services have been generating playlists and recommending music for a while to mixed results. But because Apple’s user base dwarfs them, the iTunes service is likely to have a big advantage.

My iPhone has now become my music player and that’s what I use it for more than making calls, surfing the Web, or checking e-mail. I’m not thrilled with the proposition with always having to buy new music or conduct exhaustive searches for songs to get value out of my iPhone. Maybe Apple will help me squeeze more enjoyment out of the titles I already own.

“The only thing they’re missing is a way to slip a song they want you to buy into the playlist,” McQuivey said. “If they could get the rights to do that, they would have an amazing music recommendation machine.”

Click here for full coverage of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event.

I’ve been thinking lately how I’m growing tired of the songs I loaded on my iPhone 3G. I love the device, but when the music is stale, I’m a bit less enamored.

The second creates custom channels based on, but not limited to, a user’s music collection. Because
Zune can be tied to a subscription service, it can recommend and add songs that a user doesn’t already have. Users can choose to only have them as part of a rotating channel or can add those tracks to their collection.

CNET News’ Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Everybody knows what it’s like to hear really good songs back-to-back only to lose that good vibe when the next tune is a dud.

Helping people locate songs they like is one of the biggest challenges facing digital music. Apple has now given the industry a boost, according to James McQuivey, a Forrester research.

The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This “turbo” mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, speeding up the page load when you’re on a crummy connection.

Another new feature that is long overdue is a built-in theme previewer, which will let you see a live preview of your blog using a selected theme. Previously you could only see what your existing content and widgets would look like with any theme by applying it over the one currently in use.

Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It’s the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.

Also introduced with the 2.6 update is revisioning, letting you go back to an older version of the blog post and either re-publish it over the newer one, or review the changes. This will be most helpful on multi-author blogs where you’ll be able to track changes made by certain members of your blogging team with specific coloring based on author.

As part of the shift in blogging culture, there’s also a new “press this” button, which is simply a bookmarklet for posting content from whatever page you’re on straight to your WordPress blog. Similar bookmarklets from Facebook, FriendFeed, and Tumblr have proven to be an easy way to take whatever you’re looking at and post it, even if the content author does not have a ShareThis, or similar sharing tool integrated into their content pages.

Users of previous versions of WordPress should definitely update to the latest stable release. As many users have discovered (myself included), some of the security holes that continue to be patched with each release can keep your blog from being overrun with spam.

Steve Wozniak said it best in his exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph earlier this week: “The
iPod has sort of lived a long life at No. 1,” he said. “Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after awhile.

Finally, someone on the “inside” at Apple has made some sense about the iPod and its future. Although it may be difficult for Apple zealots and even CEO Steve Jobs to understand, the iPod is not going to be one of the most important devices forever, and if we consider the impact the Walkman had on the industry, the iPod should be moving to the execution chamber in the next 5 to 10 years.

As Apple continues to sell millions of iPods, it realizes that it has no reason to change tactics and try something new. And as executives at other companies look at the state of the economy and their company’s own financial health, they think it’s better to offer a PMP that will appeal to a small percentage of the market than take a risk and try something new.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from wanting the iPod to die off as soon as possible.

And I, for one, can’t wait until that happens.

Here’s a clue: it’ll never happen if you do the same thing Apple does.

It’s not that I dislike iPods–I own three. Instead, I think the iPod is the main reason why innovation is at a standstill in the PMP market and why we’re not being satisfied nearly enough by the right devices.

But it’s tough to make the argument that iPods will die when sales are up. According to the company’s latest quarterly filing, iPod revenue is up 7 percent since last year and unit sales have jumped 12 percent.

But that popularity is attracting all kinds of bad things, too. How many times do we have to see another iPod clone before we finally say “enough is enough?” And how many times must we sit back and watch as Apple dominates the market without one real competitor to stop it?

Apple has been successful in the PMP (portable media player) market because it provides a real end-to-end solution that easily eclipses the competition’s. Let’s face it–buying a device and getting it to work with third-party software isn’t easy and it’s not seamless. But buying an iPod and getting it to work with iTunes is quick and easy. It’s usability that attracted people in the beginning and it’s the iPod’s enormous popularity that attracts them now.

So why do I look forward to the day when the iPod is no longer the toast of the town and finally enters the retirement home? It’s simple: it means that the industry has grown, more innovative products are finally available, and we can get away from all the derivative garbage we’re seeing at every turn.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Apple Store itself. How many times must Jobs find his way to the stage only to show off an iPod with barely upgraded specs and a so-called fresh design that we’ve seen already? Granted, the iPod Touch is unique in its own right, but the iPod Nano and Shuffle have been the joke of the iPod world for years now. The design changes look more like Apple felt it needed to do something to get people to keep buying them, so they went from long and thin to short and fat and back to long and thin again. And don’t even get me started on the iPod Classic.

When one company makes it big with a product in the tech industry, every other company in the market wants to try its luck in the same space. Because of that, we’ve seen countless iPod-wannabes like the
Zune, the iRiver Clix, and many more. None were able to vanquish the leader, and few were even able to make a dent. And yet, all these companies still try to make their iPod competitors work.

“It’s kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap, and they are not selling as much.”

And therein lies the rub. How can we get out of this vicious cycle if neither the leader nor the others competing in the market want to change anything?

The way I see it, nothing will change until Apple experiences a year of declining iPod sales. Once that happens, its competitors will panic and try to be the first to the market with something innovative and Apple will be forced to make serious changes to the iPod or come up with something new altogether. And once that happens, the market should start booming with innovation once again.

The product debuted in 1997 and has improved very little since. Given the absence of real competition for most of the last decade, you shouldn’t be surprised at the glacial pace of improvement. We saw the same thing in the browser market after Microsoft disposed of Netscape (though perhaps the nascent rivalry with Google’s Gmail is a harbinger of change.)

I didn’t think so.

But it’s best to forget about waiting for incremental improvements. Rafe correctly observed that Microsoft can’t fix Outlook without a complete rewrite. His conclusion is that you can’t patch and make it better. (Listen to our conversation at the tail end of today’s News.com daily podcast. For a deeper dive, check out this compendium of “Tech Nightmares” that CNET put together four years ago. The shame is that it remains as relevant today.)

Smart e-mail may be a contradiction in terms, but let’s get a show of hands: how many of you believe Microsoft is going to supply the answer?

The answers more likely will come from start-ups like Xobni and others investigating ways to add more intelligence to the program. Good luck to any third party that can manage that trick. What with a growing backlog of unread e-mails in my in-box–not to mention the daily dose of spam–users deserve a smarter Outlook that better prioritized and understood the tapestry of shared relationships between people.

I was talking earlier with Rafe Needleman, who runs our sister site Webware, about Outlook and its discontents. Rafe noted that while Outlook is the most important application in the business world, the product still remains flawed in any number of ways. At one time, Microsoft had ambitions to build Outlook into a platform. Unfortunately, developers found the APIs difficult to use and nothing much happened.

When the company brain trust repairs to the Ballmer Bunker to chew over its next big idea, post-Yahoo, I’ve got a suggestion: how about doing something to deal with e-mail and its discontents? Something grand–like bringing Microsoft Outlook into the 21st century. I don’t mean a tweak here and there; I’m talking about a top-to-bottom overhaul.

Xobni, which came out of beta testing today, has received a bounty of attention because its backers include Vinod Khosla and Niklas Zennstrom. (Getting a freebee compliment from Bill Gates hasn’t hurt.)

The challenge for Xobni and the rest is how to build a business that can scale. In the end, Microsoft will wind up spending some of the newly freed $42 billion in its coffers to buy Xobni or some other lucky third-party developers. Then we have to cross our fingers and pray that corporate infighting at the mother ship doesn’t make a hash of it all. (I know. That’s little help in the near-term. In the meantime, CNET’s Josh Lowensohn has a great piece on favorite in-box work-arounds used by some of the folks at Microsoft.)