Apple & Microsoft duke it out for top tech spot; will Steve Ballmer get TKOed?
Apple has been looking pretty shiny since Wednesday, having just crossed a golden threshold: slipping past Microsoft in "market capitalization"— the valuation of a company based on its current stock price multiplied by number of shares available; as well as "enterprise value" which is market cap, plus debt and minus cash holdings. Speculation had been rampant for months whether it would ever happen; and then, on Wednesday— surely to be memorialized in computer lore— after a wild ride on the market, AAPL ended the day worth a few billion more than its frenemy MSFT.
Apple was now not only the top technology company in the world, it was the second highest valued company in America (behind Exxon-Mobile.) Thursday, MSFT and AAPL traded neck-and-neck in valuation, but by the market close, Apple held the crown for a second day.
Wolverine leaks a torrential downpour
Wolverine's mad 'cause you pirated his movie
Wolverine has escaped from 20th Century Fox's secret labs and is rampaging across bit-torrent sites. The bootleg of the film, a spin-off from the blockbuster X-Men comic book franchise, may be missing the score and many special effects, but it's available a month before the premier, in near-DVD quality, without watermarks or a time code.
Reports claim that it's an early workprint, at least 10 minutes shorter than the release, and that action sequences may be "less gory" than in the final version.
“No Syfy” campaign launched
The backlash against NBC-Universals rebranding of "Sci Fi" has opened a new front: LA-based graphic designer Aaron Harvey has started up a "No Syfy" website and Facebook group.
In a parody of Syfy's meaningless new tagline "Imagine Greater" Harvey calls on NBCU to "Imagine Better" and declares,
Instead of making inane branding changes that you say were approved by fans, why not address the quality of the channel, the addition of wrestling and ghost hunting, the dearth of real science fiction programming? Programming that would make you money.
Amusingly, NBC-U may have anticipated some of the blowback, as it appears they registered "SyfySucks.com" on January 30, via Corporation Services Company— which also holds registration for Syfy.com. Stupidly, however, they failed to lock down "Syfy.org" or "Syfy.net"— both of which are currently generic landing pages.
Google chromes a new browser
Google continues to shake up the Internet with its announcement of a new entrant into the Browser Wars 2.0: Chrome.
Aiming squarely at Microsoft's IE8, which is said throw in a few features that bypass Google, the new browser will incorporate multi-processing and minimal overhead. It's based on the open source WebKit, the same engine that runs Apple's Safari, so a Mac and Linux version (from where it originally came) wouldn't be too difficult to produce.
News of the announcement was leaked when a German blogger received early proofs for a comic that Google produced to introduce Chrome.
The original launch date was moved up to today.
Taking on the Microsoft hegemony has been part of Google's gameplan for a while. Already, as part of its online offerings, Google offers a set of free Office-compatible services called Google Docs which have scared the Micro-juggernaut into comparable (but commercial) "Office Live Workspace". Taking the next logical step, and providing a browser to run them on was inevitable. Will a linux-based GoogleOS be far behind? Already, it has taken on the mobile platform with Android.
The likely location for the download will be: gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en
Cuil.com needs a clue
A new search engine launched today aims to play David to Google's Goliath... but shows up without a slingshot. Cuil.com (supposedly pronounced "cool" for a Gaelic word for "knowledge" but which others contend is derived from Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill) pumped out some major PR this weekend, getting impressive media coverage on Monday which lead to an apparent flood of curious visitors-- who just as quickly dried up.
In my view Cuil has three major strikes against it from the start: a terrible name, a disastrous launch and a clearly outdated indexing model.
First off, using a cutesy homophone with non-standard spelling means potential users will have difficulty finding the site or remembering it, right off the bat. Some commentators have even noticed that a slight typo turns it into the the Spanish and Italian slang for a certain body part -- the domains for which point to porn sites. A far better name would have been "cull.com" -- which, although it may still be similar to a particular body part at least means something relevant to search engines.
Server issues at launch were likewise Cuil's own making. Had its ex-Google engineers rolled the site out in stages (ala the various 'beta' Google products), to meet potential demand, it would have garnered a better reaction. Instead, due to so much media attention on its first day, potential users are getting "no results because of high load." That doesn't make me particularly enthused to go back. If they can't manage the server requirements or forecast the load of casual bleeding-edge users checking out the site on a first day, how can they plan for the constant mainstream usage?
The strike-out is Cuil's falsely claimed "world's biggest search engine" -- a boast so blatantly inaccurate, many reviewers are already taking the site to task for its obvious indexing shortcomings. Cuil's info page lays it on thick: "Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft." Its goal is nothing less than "solving the two great problems of search" indexing the entire Internet and making pages relevant to users. In my own search tests, it fails miserably on both accounts: many of the sites I pulled up a limited selection of pages, usually outdated-- some from months ago-- in seemingly random order of usefulness. Amusingly, a search for "cuil" fails to pull up their own site!
In short, Cuil is clue-less.
See:
- Silicon Alley Insider: Google-Wannabe Cuil: Worst. Launch. Ever.
- TIME.com: Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google