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(Credit:
Radiohead)

A press release came out Wednesday from our sister company Last.fm, touting the fact that Radiohead’s landmark album In Rainbows is now available for free streaming on the site.

AOL and Yahoo have done this for years with pre-release “listening parties” and exclusive tracks, but because sites like Last.fm and iLike use developer platform access to tap into the social-networking audiences of Facebook-MySpace-Bebo-ad-nauseam, they can reach a more distributed network of music enthusiasts. And bigger digital-music players are doing it too, with iTunes and MySpace debuts (not to mention exclusive songs) already industry mainstays.

The likes of iTunes, iLike, and Imeem might be making troubled record labels’ lives a bit more complicated. But on a brighter note for the music industry, they’ve also created digital music’s ultimate publicity stunt.

Disclaimer: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes News.com.

In Rainbows has been out since October, and it was famously distributed across the Web with a name-your-own-price policy. So it’s not exactly the freshest story, though In Rainbows is no longer available for free and had not been turned into a free stream anywhere on the Web. The band had originally opted to distribute it through its own Web site.

But these “digital release” announcements, where an artist that already has a decent fan base teams up with a digital music service, are growing more and more popular. R.E.M. debuted its most recent album, Accelerate, as an ad-supported stream on iLike in February; and in May, Imeem debuted Anywhere I Lay My Head, the album by actress Scarlett Johansson.

It’s probably a win-win situation for both the site doing the promotion and for the album: the artist gets extra publicity, especially if accessing the streaming file requires joining a mailing list or signing up as a “fan,” and the site gets some buzz from new visitors who may be fans of the band but haven’t heard of the site. Assuming neither party paid an arm and a leg to get the promotion in place, it’s a cheap way to promote an upcoming album even as the concept of “albums” grows increasingly antiquated.

That said, it’s only a matter of time before this sort of promotion is so commonplace that it’s no longer newsworthy–remember when we all wrote breathlessly about every big Web company’s foray into Facebook applications?

That’s the upshot of a technique devised by Carnegie Mellon researchers and announced Wednesday. The technique, called IM2GPS, compares a single photo to the millions already on Flickr that already have latitude and longitude coordinates.

(Credit:
Carnegie Mellon University)

Geotagging today is a complex task that typically requires a user to run specialized software that pulls location data from a GPS device’s track log, then adds it to photos depending on the time each was taken. Geotagging isn’t for the faint of heart today, though higher-end cameras from Canon and Nikon make it easier with the ability to plug a GPS directly into the camera, and camera makers have begun building GPS into some models.

Or with technology that converts geographic coordinates into actual place names, you could find your own photos or others’ shots with ordinary search terms. For that latter challenge, Flickr is working to try to make it easier for users to identify in works the locations of their geotagged photos.

It worked more specifically at times, for example matching Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral well, but the algorithm found Sydney’s Opera House similar to a hotel in Mississippi and to a bridge in London.

Geotagging may seem abstruse, but it has potential advantages. You could find out just where that photo of the nice church in Ireland was taken even long after your vacation itinerary has faded from memory, for example.

Thousands of others have taken the trouble to geotag their photos, so why should you have to jump through a lot of technical hoops to add location data to your pictures?

The researchers found they could locate sample photos within 200 kilometers for 16 percent of their test photos, which may not sound terribly useful, but it is 30 percent better than chance would predict, the university said. And that could still be useful for tasks such as forensic crime research or for guiding other image-processing tasks–for example identifying a taxi in Japan.

IM2GPS compares a sample photo (top left) to geotagged Flickr photos to find other similar shots (top right) to guess where the sample was taken.

Efros also has been involved in photo research such as the scene completion technology that can patch over unsightly elements in a photo by drawing from similar ones stored at Flickr.

“We’re not asking the computer to tell us what is depicted in the photo but to find other photos that look like it,” said Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, in a statement.

The algorithm looks at a photo’s properties, such as textures, color distribution, and line patterns, then looks for matches at Flickr.

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

Papadopoulos acknowledged that the nirvana of every customer or user in charge of their own data that lives in the cloud has challenges. Today, users cede control of their data to service providers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. It’s not as easy for users to manage and move their data as it should be, which means users are generally stuck with the user experience and monetization schemes of the host sites. “It’s proprietary systems all over again,” Papadopoulos said. Over the last several years Sun has differentiated itself proprietary vendors, focusing on free open-source software and open standards.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Papadopoulos also laid out a map (see below) of the current universe of cloud computing in terms of increasing virtualization and consolidation across various categories: processor, operating system, language, and application services. Over time, the categories will fill out more especially as more languages and applications services or platforms rise up. Papadopoulos pointed to two Sun projects, Dark Star and Project Caroline. Dark Star is about software infrastructure designed to simplify the creation massively scalable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Project Caroline is a hosting platform for developing and delivering Internet-based services. It’s not clear why the Sun research projects are positioned at the far right on the chart, and players such as Google, Joyent, and Rackable are missing.

Further out into the future, Papadopoulos expects that the technology infrastructure industry will be similar to the energy industry. In past presentations, he has called this transition the Red Shift.

(Credit:
Sun)

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

SAN FRANCISCO–Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Higher up in stack developers have more targets and more freedom to innovate below it, Papadopoulos said.

Papadopoulos has predicted a “neutron star collapse of data centers,” meaning at some juncture it won’t make sense for businesses to build their own data centers. Instead they will contract for computing resources from hosting providers who bring “brutal efficiency” for utilization, power, security, service levels, and idea-to-deploy time.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.

There will be a grid of a half dozen very large cloud infrastructure providers and a hundred or so regional providers, Papadopoulos said. It will also look more like the banking world, he continued, with customers willing to trust the service providers with their private data as they do banks with their money. It’s a question of when, not if, this scenario will occur.

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos

Zoho users with a Google username and password will be able to log directly into Zoho applications, according to Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho.

Vembu was impressed by Google’s cooperation and willingness to work with a competitor. Zoho and Google Docs are both trying to replace
Microsoft Office. Google has been willing to contribute code, such as OpenSocial, to the larger community.

“Users won’t need a separate Zoho account,” he told me at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The Google sign-on integration should be finished within two weeks, he said.

Making it more convenient for Google users to work with Zoho applications indicates that Google is open to or supportive of technologies such as OpenID, or that it doesn’t view Zoho as a threat. It’s most likely a bit of both, and overall, it’s good for their mutual users.

One example in the Web 2.0 world is OpSource, which is delivering billions of transactions a day as an SaaS provider using the ESB at the crux of the transactions. This is much larger than Twitter and has actual revenue impact. Maybe OpSource can host Twitter?

It’s not. It’s very common, and it can be solved.

As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can’t send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.

In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.

This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.

Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don’t have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.

If you really want to save money on gas, drive mellow and inflate your tires to their maximum recommend pressure. Thanks to the Obama/McCain energy spat it’s become cliche, but I just corrected the slightly saggy tire pressures I was driving on and my mileage went up 15 percent. No iPhone or Twitter widget is going to save me money like my gas station’s air hose just did.

To get the best prices on gas, there are map sites like GasBuddy. Sadly, none of the mileage tracking sites yet integrate with a gas price database like this. And do keep in mind that driving a few miles to save 10 cents on a gallon of gas might end up costing you more than you save, not including the cost of your time or extra wear on your car.

The iPhone app Triplog will do the useful mileage calculations as well as track your car use for tax purposes. iPhone users might also want to check out lower-cost apps like AccuFuel, FuelGage, GasHog, and CarStat.

Those sites don’t have the social angle that Fuelly does, though. With Fuelly, you can compare and compete with other users for mileage bragging rights. Does that matter? It could help you research real-world mileage on a car model you’re thinking of buying. And it might be something you want if you’re a competitive hypermiler. I can’t imagine the novelty of Fuelly’s social network becoming something you’d actually want to stick with, but if you use the site for tracking your personal mileage, it’s a gimme.

Believe it or not, there are already other Twitter-enabled gas purchase trackers out there. MyMileMarker and FuelFrog both let you Tweet your receipts, so when you visit your account later from a big computer you can analyze your driving and expenses.

I saw Twitter buzz building this morning over Fuelly, a site that records your gasoline purchases and gives you potentially useful info in return: your
car’s mileage and cost data like dollars you’re spending per mile and your fuel economy over time. You can record your info on an
iPhone, even. The site’s special sauce is the social angle; you can follow people and compare your mileage to theirs. Coming soon to the service: A way to update your gas purchases over Twitter.

Fuelly also serves to remind us that there are a lot of resources to help us track our gas spending and save money. In addition to the sites mentioned so far, there’s also FuelEconomy.gov’s Your MPG, which does mileage tracking using a retro, hideous K-Car-era interface.

Track your economy with Fuelly. If you have friends with the same car model, you can see how you compare.

“Despite these challenges, many consumers with PCHRs will soon control a valuable resource–an integrated copy of their health care information across sites of care,” the researchers note.

The report says that Google and Microsoft’s databases of patient information may eventually grow to be larger and more up-to-date than the databases of other well-known medical research programs. As a result, researchers may find it easier and cheaper to team up with Microsoft and Google when doing their research, rather than relying on a number of sources for data to do their research.

Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers’ own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).

But the authors of the report, Dr. Kenneth Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, raise a number of key questions concerning the PCHR service providers, such as whether the service providers will have a research mission and whether they would allow secondary use of any aggregated data of their users. And, of course, the issue of privacy was also addressed (PDF). The PCHR service providers are not under the same regulations as the health care industry, which restricts the sharing of patient information to only those people or entities whom the patient designates under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Under a PCHR, a patient would set up a portal that could authorize their doctors, health care providers, researchers, and family members to provide and share information relating to the patient. Those records and information would be stored in the patient’s PCHR, which would be hosted by Google Health or the Microsoft HealthVault.

Once patients give their approval, companies, government organizations, health-related operators, and others could create applications that would connect to the PCHR platforms.

The movement toward consumers controlling their own health records and the means that will get them there raises several issues of concern, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Microsoft is working with New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Google is working with Cleveland Clinic to have those institutions provide their patients with an electronic copy of their own records.

Challenges in putting PCHRs to use include limitations by some laboratories in releasing medical results to patients, the fact that a substantial number of medical records are still paper-based, and that the U.S. currently has no universal patient identification system.

As to whether or not game developers will make violent games for the Wii and if they will be big sellers is not my area of expertise. It’s the underlying possibilities of the technology that I find interesting.

It could be where you can pull a street sign from the ground and shove it into your enemy’s head, or it could be a cooking game where you have to assemble a Gordon Ramsay-esque 10-course meal. The point is, the Wii has unique features that are well suited to violent games.

Violent video games on the Wii address two specific points:

I figure if you can do one thing (hit a baseball) then you can do more things (hit an in-game enemy in the head). How that gets manifested into the game is a whole different story.

I don’t know if video game violence has an effect on children, and I’m not sure if I care. I write about software disruption, not social issues.

1. Nintendo wants to sell more Wiis and games. Hardcore gamers are not buying Wiis
       a. I could make a couch-jockey/carpal tunnel joke, but the Wii doesn’t have the graphics horsepower of other consoles or PCs. What it does have is the ability to use more than your thumbs to play a game.

I wrote recently about the need for violent video games on the Nintendo Wii and, for clarity, the main point of my message is that the
Wii is a great platform for a game that has physical interaction.

The comments and arguments around my previous post (in which I assert violent video games are cool) remind me of the Simpsons episode when Marge campaigns against Itchy and Scratchy.

2. The Wii brings a whole new level of human/game interaction that would be well suited to more adult/violent games
       a. Wii baseball has a batting game. I’m not suggesting this is the same social context as hitting some in-game enemy in the head, but I am saying it’s pretty fun to hit stuff.
       b. We all need more exercise

I talked to a friend of mine who is in school. His student loans have been tied up for weeks. He thought it was a bureaucratic issue, but more and more it’s looking like the lender isn’t processing the loans for him or his classmates. We’re seeing this reflected in other ways, such as
car dealers who can’t replenish their inventories (a new study says one in five may fail) and small businesses and start-ups that find themselves unable to get the capital they need.

Among the other notable inclusions is a mental health parity bill that calls on companies that offer health insurance to cover mental health issues as they would other types of medical conditions.

A number of businesses, including Microsoft, have been calling on the House to reconsider its actions. CNET readers, not so much. According to our very unscientific poll, nearly two-thirds of readers thought the house was right to vote down the bill.

Nearly three-fourths of Senators passed the bill late Wednesday. The House is scheduled to take up the bill later this week, though it is expected to be a tougher fight there.

The Senate on Wednesday did what the House of Representatives failed to do on Monday–pass a bailout bill.

Once again, I put a lot of the blame for the unpopularity of the bailout on the way it has been described. I still think the consequences are not being talked about in ways that people can relate to.

The New York Times also has a great piece showing how the credit crisis is harder to see–and giving the backstory on what’s been happening behind closed doors.

We can and should debate whether we as a society take on too much debt and rely too heavily on credit. But I don’t think we can afford to just turn off the spigot after running the tap at full blast for decades.

Meanwhile, the total cost of the bill went up significantly in that two-day period. That’s because the bill passed by the Senate includes a variety of other measures, including billions in tax cuts, along with authorization for the Treasury department to take $700 billion off the books of financial institutions.

Revenue reflects a significant decline in network revenue, which we believe is due to increased competition from Google with this business line. We think other companies with similar exposure could also show weakness. Query declines at Ask.com reflect significantly lower marketing spend in the period. Revenue per query also declined due to fewer clicks per visit.

Barry Diller’s media conglomerate reported revenue of $351 million in the quarter, down from $378.9 million in the same quarter a year earlier. That performance missed Wall Street expectations of $368 million, analyst Imran Khan of J.P. Morgan said in a note.

The company did post double-digit revenue growth in its ServiceMagic.com business and emerging businesses, such as Shoebuy.com, Pronto.com, Gifts.com, and InstantAction.com.

Update at 8:12 a.m. PST: Analyst comments and stock price added.

IAC attributed a portion of that decline to scaling back on some of its partnerships after it renewed its partnership with Google.

Khan’s note also commented on IAC’s weakness in media and advertising:

But when excluding the sale of one of its investments and the write-down of other investments, IAC posted a profit of 18 cents a share. Analysts were expected a profit of 20 cents a share on that basis, Khan said.

IAC’s Match.com revenue fell a modest 3 percent to $88.1 million over the same period a year earlier. Despite the revenue decline, worldwide subscriber growth increased by 5 percent in the quarter, reaching its highest level of paid membership.

The company, however, posted a profit of $227.4 million, or $1.57 a share, in the quarter, compared with a net loss of $369.9 million, or $2.53 a share, during the same period a year ago.

IAC was up less than 1 percent to $14.94 a share in morning trading.

During the quarter, the company’s media and advertising businesses, such as Ask.com, Fun Web Products, Dictionary.com, and Citysearch, posted revenue of $183.7 million, a 19 percent decline compared with the year-ago quarter.

InterActiveCorp turned a profit in the fourth quarter but took a 7 percent revenue hit, amid a sharp downturn in its advertising and media business, the company said Tuesday.