From Silicon Alley Insider, August 5, 2008:

Apple has already apologized publicly to its MobileMe customers for the email/syncing service's flakiness -- including, for some, lost email. Now it's privately admitting its mistakes and moving on -- but not without casualty.

In an internal email leaked to Ars Technica, Apple (AAPL) boss Steve Jobs allegedly admits that MobileMe is "not up to Apple's standards," and that launching it at the same time as the iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store was "a mistake."

And it looks like someone is going to pay for it: In a reorg of sorts, Jobs announced the project will now fall under iTunes exec Eddie Cue, who will now oversee iTunes, the App Store, and MobileMe, as Apple's Vice President of Internet Services, according to Daring Fireball's John Gruber. We assume this means someone (or multiple people) got shown the door. (Know more? Drop us a line.)

"The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services," Jobs wrote. "And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year."

Admitting that MobileMe is a dog is the right move, and we also wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs or Apple made another public statement about MobileMe's botched launch.

And while MobileMe now has a soiled reputation -- including a rare bad review from Wall Street Journal tech reviewer Walt Mossberg -- we still think it has potential to be a long-term success. If the mobile Internet becomes anywhere near as important as it's hyped, everyone is going to need a personal over-the-air email/calendar/contacts synching service. For iPhone owners, once Apple irons out the quirks, there's no reason it couldn't/shouldn't be MobileMe.

From Silicon Alley Insider, August 4, 2008:

Think you have tickets to exciting events in Beijing next week? Pray hard. Because with today's photocopying technology, it's awfully hard to tell the real ones from the ones that aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

(And, of course, the look-and-feel test only comes into play if you actually have some physical tickets. Some scam artists don't bother to print them: They just collect your thousands of dollars and tell you to "pick the tickets up in Beijing.")

Gullible buyers worldwide are being taken to the cleaners by fake Olympics tickets sites. If you're one of them, you won't know for sure until you get there. And if it turns out that you have, in fact, paid thousands of dollars to watch the event in a bar near the stadium, there's nothing the Olympics people can do for you.

Here's one suggestion, though: Assuming fake Olympics tickets are as good as other fake stuff available in China, you might just be able to fool the ticket-takers, too. So just make sure you get to the stadium before the poor sap who has the real thing.

From Silicon Alley Insider, August 4, 2008:

Verizon and AT&T can't build out their next-generation, fiberoptic networks fast enough: While they spend a fortune upgrading their pipes to offer faster Internet access and digital TV service, little by little, the cable industry is sucking their DSL subscribers away.

As cable and telcos report Q2 results, one trend is clear: Cable companies are taking the majority of new broadband subscribers. So far, 69% of 476,000 total Q2 net broadband subscriber additions have gone to two cable companies -- Comcast (CMCSA) and Cablevision (CVC). And just 31% have gone to five phone companies, including the two biggest -- AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), whose results were both boosted by sign-ups to their new, faster, fiber-based services.

Why the shift? We think consumers are increasingly willing to pay a little more -- cable Internet is about $6 more a month than DSL, according to Pew -- for significantly faster download speeds, as bandwidth-intensive stuff like video streaming catches on. During its Q2 call, Comcast said that two-thirds of its new broadband subscribers were coming from DSL.

We've created a spreadsheet so you can watch the share shift happen live. We'll update it daily as companies report Q2 results; check here for the latest.

Several companies still haven't reported, such as Time Warner Cable (TWC), Charter (CHTR), and Qwest (Q). But Wall Street expects cable to continue its rout: Bernstein's Craig Moffett thinks that once it's all done, cable will have gotten 85%-90% of broadband net additions for the quarter.

When Disney reported earnings recently, the media company said its business was actually helped by its online video assets. Shocking! But according to my SAI colleague Michael Learmonth, Disney is a rarity. One stumbling block has been advertising models on the Web, where tolerance for ads is much lower compared with TV. Meanwhile, as the space continues to consolidate in the shadow of YouTube, the clock is ticking as patience wanes for clicks to translate into profits.

From All Things Digital, July 30, 2008:

For all the hype about “social networking” Web sites, the most popular and successful way to network over the Internet is still the oldest: email. If it’s organized properly, boring old email can reveal as much or more information about the people you know, and their relationships with you, than hipper services like MySpace or Facebook.

This is especially true if you are the kind of person who saves most of his or her email. That mound of messages can be a treasure trove of contact information and a history of your interactions with hundreds, or thousands, of personal and business acquaintances. It can tell you the phone numbers and job titles of people, and even who you and your correspondents most often copy on email. It’s a sort of social network all its own.

The trouble is, it’s hard to tease all that information out of the typical email program. And that goes double for the most popular, but most bloated and dense, email program of all, Microsoft Outlook.

Now, however, there’s a new, free plug-in module for Outlook that adds a set of social-networking and data-mining features right inside the venerable program. This new plug-in for Outlook is called Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backward and is pronounced “ZOB-nee.” It is completely contained in a colorful vertical panel that lives on the right side of your Outlook screen and doesn’t block or intrude upon Outlook’s own panes or functions.

From Silicon Alley Insider, July 30, 2008:

Less than two years after giving up on their attempt to take on Apple and the iPod, Dell is getting ready to try it again. Any reason to think they'll pull it off this time? Maybe: The WSJ notes that Dell has hired an Apple exec to oversee the project, which may or may not launch this fall. And it has a new strategy -- rather than playing music you own, the devices are geared around subscription services. And the price sounds right:

The music player Dell has been testing -- the product's name couldn't be learned -- features a small navigation screen and basic button controls to scroll through music play lists. It would connect to online music services via a Wi-Fi Internet connection, and Dell executives said they would likely price the model currently being tested at less than $100.

We can also think of many reasons why the project will fall flat: Hiring an Apple exec doesn't mean your products automatically get better (ask Sony, which picked up Apple vet Tim Schaaf a couple of years ago, and is still waiting for its wonder gadgets to arrive). Music subscriptions are a great idea that few people seem to like. And underpricing Apple has yet to work (ask Creative, iRiver, et al).

But there has been one geninuely encouraging development for Dell in the last year: The major music labels' decision to ditch DRM on the digital tracks they sell.

From Silicon Alley Insider, July 29, 2008:

It worked! It looks like Hasbro (HAS) succeeded in rubbing out Scrabulous, at least temporarily. Try to pull up the game today and Facebook gives you the following message: "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice." The message allows you to enter an email address "if you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter."

Hasbro filed suit last week against Rajat and Jayant Agarwall, who founded the wildly popular Facebook app two years ago. But what likely ended the game's two-year run on Facebook was a DMCA takedown notice demanding that the social network remove the application -- the same technique that Viacom and other media giants use to (try to) get Daily Show clips off of YouTube.

From All Things Digital, July 23, 2008:

People who work for large corporations are used to having their email, contacts and calendar appointments synchronized instantly among their various computers and smart phones. But average consumers haven’t had an easy way to do that. They often waste a lot of time manually synchronizing calendars and contacts, or waiting for email to be fetched.

So it was a big deal when Apple announced a new service that, for $100 a year, would bring corporate-type synchronization of email, calendars and contacts to anyone. It was even better that Apple promised that the service, called MobileMe, would work on Windows computers as well as on the company’s own Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPod Touch hand-helds. To top it off, Apple threw in 20 gigabytes of online storage, a suite of Web-based applications, the ability to synchronize browser bookmarks and an online photo gallery.

Unfortunately, after a week of intense testing of the service, I can’t recommend it, at least not in its current state. It’s a great idea, but, as of now, MobileMe has too many flaws to keep its promises.

I am not referring to the launch glitches that plagued MobileMe earlier this month, such as servers that couldn’t keep up with the traffic and email outages that, for some users, persist as I write this. Those were bad, but they have eased considerably. Apple already has apologized for them and is giving customers an extra 30 days on their subscriptions to make up for the poor start. The problems I am citing are systemic.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work.

"What now, Steve?"

That's the question a lot of Microsoft shareholders (and very likely employees) are asking after Steve Ballmer last night announced yet another new plan for Microsoft's struggling online division.

Three years after merging the Widows and online divisions, Microsoft is now going to split them up and Kevin Johnson, currently president of the Platforms and Services Division, is leaving the company to become CEO of Juniper Networks.

The backdrop of Microsoft's moves is the dual threat it is facing from cloud computing on the one hand and Apple on the other. Ballmer addressed both issues in a memo to Microsoft's staff:

"The success of Windows is our number one job," Ballmer wrote. And while that might seem obvious, Microsoft's crown jewel faces threats from both Linux-based software and Google's push into the enterprise space.

Meanwhile, Ballmer also acknowledged that "Apple is thriving," showing how far the industry has come since 1997, when Microsoft threw the then-struggling Mac maker a $150 million lifeline.

In reaction to Apple's current success, Microsoft is "changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises," Ballmer wrote.

The bottom line is no technology leader has gone through such a "paradigm shift" as is occurring now and emerged as a leader on the other side, as Microsoft is trying to accomplish.