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The new Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac is really a repackaged version of the company's existing Bluetooth mouse.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft's current packaging apparently wasn't drawing too many Mac users, even with its inviting "Certified for Windows Vista" logo.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft is looking to make its Bluetooth notebook mouse more
Mac friendly.

The emphasis in that sentence is on the word “looking.”

The software maker hasn’t made any software or hardware changes to the Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000. It has, however, created new retail packaging for the product, dubbing it Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac.

Gone is the red packaging and the “Certified for
Windows Vista” logo. In its place is a Mac logo and white packaging. Of course, the same mouse is inside, meaning the Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 works perfectly well on a Mac, while the Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac has no problem working with Vista, or XP for that matter.

The mouse in its new packaging will be available this month with an estimated retail price of $49.95.

It will be interesting to see if Mac users take to the new packaging. The company has a mixed track record in the Mac space. Its Office for Mac is a huge seller and many people cite its availability as a key factor in their being willing to switch to a Mac.

But it has pulled back on other efforts, including killing its ill-fated MSN for Mac service, Internet Explorer, and Virtual PC for Mac.

I just watched this video demo of Zembly, a relatively new service that you create collaborative applications on the fly and deploy them to services like Facebook, Meebo, and the
iPhone.

There’s lots of widgets and Javascript involved, but it seems easy to use and overall Zembly is an interesting product as it lets users actually manipulate walled-garden content.

It’s also interesting in that the company makes use of a wide array of open APIs and developed their own to create a networked effect of usage.

In a bit of a twist, Zembly runs on Solaris and Sun hardware at Network.com. Maybe Sun is getting their cloud act together after all?

Video courtesy of Cote at Redmonk.

Perhaps this was the plan all along. Although it would take a particularly fine vendor of asp oil to persuade me that they intended to present the new, very likable Bill Gates for just a few days.

Which is why Microsoft’s decision to regress its ad agency, Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, back to the mean, is merely another day at the Wishing Well.

As the Queen Mother would always say when she shook hands with eminently Latin-speaking international soccer players before important games: “Bona Fortuna.”

The problem, though, is an emotional change of direction that is more intoxicated than intoxicating. Microsoft has chosen to embrace a vignetty spaghetti–a series of testimonials that is a pair of blue slippers to the Gates-Seinfeld ads’ pink Conquistador winklepicker.

The internal tension was made public when a Microsoft spokesman declared that no more Bill and Jerry ads had been shot, while someone from the agency slipped that there is already one more intrigue-filled opus in the can.

Then I envisage the pressure put on Microsoft’s marketing department this week by those who always claim to know better, those whom some at Microsoft would describe as “well, the folks who, you know, seem to have been wrong quite a lot.”

With just one “I’m a PC” ad, the company reveals the hem of its powerholism skirts and hopes that a modicum of conventional niceness (after Deepak Chopra and Eva Longoria, who might be next? Michael Phelps and Dr. Phil?) will help it achieve its goals.

As I said in my last post on this subject, crucial to Microsoft’s ability to create change is the emotional approach of its ads. The radical emotional switch between the Bill Gates of the Road Show spots and the Bill Gates of “I’m a PC and I wear glasses” makes his persona and the brand’s appear just a little schizoid.

Crispin, Porter and Bogusky managed to persuade Burger King to persist with the quite loopy persona of the King character just when so many critics, within the Burger Kingdom and beyond, were telling the agency it was plain weird.

I find myself trying to imagine all the meetings that led to the brave decision to run the Gates-Seinfeld Road Show, even though the first spot was haltingly spotty. (”You want Bill Gates to be funny? Bill Gates isn’t funny, OK?”)

“I know I said I was going to the party dressed as a clown, but what do you think of this pin-striped suit?”

Perhaps the agency is biding its time before encouraging the client back towards distinctiveness. Perhaps the next “I’m a PC” ads will be more adventurous. And perhaps advertising is simply the most perfect job any masochist could hope to enjoy.

(Credit: CC Bob Jagendorf)

When you’ve worked in advertising for a long time–especially if you’re on the creative side–you learn to steel yourself to expect anything. Otherwise, your doctors prescribe you far too many strangely-named concoctions, all of them ending in ‘zepam’.

To retire Messrs Gates and Seinfeld after their Lewis and Clark journey has barely left Washington State is to give a sharp poke in the eye to one of the better chances Microsoft has had for radical image change.

It is, however, sadder than seeing Hillary Swank encouraged into the next life by Clint Eastwood.

While Gates and Seinfeld addressed Microsoft’s tepid relationship with its customers, the new “I’m a PC” work attempts to declare that “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! That Apple boy is just a bully! He’s not telling the truth, Momma!”

That’s not to say the two different Microsoft campaigns don’t come from the same strategy.
Clearly, the idea is to subvert the company’s perceived weaknesses.

The world's clowns are a little confused.

One might have hoped that those responsible for approving the Gates-Seinfeld spots would have managed internal expectations. You don’t create something so radically different and potentially market-changing and expect to be clutching favorable data by the time your CEO has finished dinner. A new ad is not a new Intel chip. (Though I know there are some out there who wish it was.)

The result of that client’s steadfastness (and remember, this is a client who has to satisfy some of the most fractious and recalcitrant franchisees in the world) is not only a re-energized brand, but sales that few could have imagined.

Obama has grasped the nature of the “Distributed Internet” and sent his messages to those (online) venues that are already populated with the audiences he wants to reach. The “Yes We Can” mash-up video by the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am was a free gift for Obama and became a viral hit. The campaign’s daily email blasts are smart, to the point, and written in a genuine voice that is credible and non-intrusive. Obama’s Facebook group is blossoming. The BarackObama.com site offers widgets, ring tones, photos, and other social media assets that supporters can use to spread the word beyond the site itself and into the self-reinforcing orbit of the social web. And MyBarackObama.com offers fully customizable tools for blogs, mini-social networks, mini-fundraising, and events, etc. At campaign rallies, Obama’s team hands out lists to the people waiting in line, asking them to call undecided voters from their cell phones. All of that illustrates the marketing genius at work here: Obama’s impact has been so big because the campaign has managed scaling down to the smallest possible level of offline and online engagement.

From Norman Lear’s speech at the Take Back America conference: “This country has always been a remix, yesterday’s ‘melting pot’ is today’s remix. What did Jefferson and Paine and Adams do but mash up history. Take a little from the Magna Carta, a little from John Locke, and a whole lot of rebellion. Now, thanks to the web and digital technology at Remix America everyone can join in. (….) I see a viral explosion of Born Again Americans, Americans of all ages and ethnicities, conditions and backgrounds, awakening to their power as free citizens in a free society. I see them doing it in 3-4 minute bursts, mixing and mashing their stories and hopes and dreams with the words, images and music from the American Playlist, to give us all a glimpse of the America they wish for.”

It’s a remix culture, stupid!

The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) — a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into. Obama’s entire campaign is based on the principle of “picture-in-picture web,” as Steve Rubel coins it. Or, to borrow another one of Rubel’s lines: Obama is a web service, not a web site. He is the “blue ocean” and not the (little) rock. He is, in the dictum of advertising agency Resource Interactive, an “open (on-demand, personal, engaging, and networked) brand” — a franchise brand that anyone can hijack, re-shape, and remix a la carte. That makes him vulnerable and volatile (think of the “I got a crush on…” video or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube ) but at the same time powerful and unstoppable. When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.

The web 2.0 analogy does not end with content production and viral distribution. The “product” Obama itself is a mash-up, a (hyper)-text, a rich media (re)-mix of statements, tunes, vibes, opinions, and facts. Obama embodies what Manuel Castells calls the “networked society,” and he not so much taps into the aggregated “wisdom of the crowd” but the collective intelligence of engaged and enlightened citizens. In the Fast Company story, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, another poster boy of the networked society, describes Obama’s “adaptive leadership” style: “A leader gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it’s part of the contract.”

When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.

It seems logical then that Obama, in his speeches, has been using the pronoun “we” far more often than “I.” This is emblematic of the open-source nature of the Obama conversation. Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen elaborate on Henry Jenkins’ comment that “Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement:” “Movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, they ask people to become self-motivated. Barack Obama understands that people want to be part of the process. It’s the end of retail politics and the green shoots of networked politics premised upon engagement. Obama says: Yes, you can write your own profile. Yes, you can meet supporters near you. Yes, you can plan and attend events. Yes, you can network with your friends. Yes, you can become a fundraiser. Yes, you can write your own blog. Barack Obama is saying: yes, you can be part of this, you can be part of history. You see people embrace what they create.” And who doesn’t want to be part of something larger than oneself — a cause, a network, a movement of like-minded and yet diverse voices? It is this inherent transcendence that lends Obama his power. It is a lesson in how to build brands in the age of hyper-fragmentation: When your brand’s essence — in this case: aspiration — is a vector, your base becomes a movement.

I just read Ellen McGirt’s poignant feature story on “The Brand Called Obama” in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. “The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news,” she writes, “but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well.” Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes beyond politics and marketing and may alter the very fabric of the American society: democratization with the means of the democratized web.

Many pundits have pointed out that while the Obama campaign has employed traditional one-to-many tactics, spending, for instance, hefty sums on broad TV ads, its more remarkable achievement has been to translate the concept of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.

Henry Jenkins argued in his keynote at SXSW Interactive two weeks ago that accusing Obama of plagiarism (as the Clinton camp did when it brought forward that Obama had borrowed words from past speeches of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) misses the point: It’s a remix culture, stupid!

Big impact in small worlds

It is thus no coincidence that Norman Lear just announced his initiative Remix America, co-sponsored by the USC Norman Lear Center, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kaltura.org, and the American University Center for Social Media. In the spirit of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody,” Remix America is a “multi-partisan” forum that invites Internet users to take clips from the site’s “American Playlist” and add other clips and audio to produce their own remix/mash-up vision of America — as a new platform for patriotic dissent and political commentary.

When your brand’s essence is a vector, your base becomes a movement.

(Credit: Unconfirmedsources.com)

A day after journalists learned their Internet activities would be limited, a senior IOC official admitted to Reuters on Wednesday that committee members had cut a deal to let the Chinese government block sensitive Web sites, despite promises of unrestricted access.

Allowing journalists access to an uncensored Internet apparently isn’t on the International Olympic Committee’s list of things to do before the Beijing games begin next week.

“We condemn the IOC’s failure to do anything about this, and we are more skeptical about its ability to ensure that the media are able to report freely,” the group said in a statement.

“I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on Web site access during games time,” IOC press chief Kevan Gosper told Reuters, referring to Beijing’s Olympic organizers. “I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered games related.”

The revelation came a day after journalists learned that organizers had backtracked on earlier guarantees that journalists would have access to an uncensored Internet at the Main Press Center and athletic venues. The announcement meant that thousands of reporters working in Beijing during the next several weeks won’t have access to a multitude of sites deemed embarrassing to the Chinese government, such as Amnesty International or any sites related to the crackdown in Tibet or the banned spiritual group Falun Gong.

However, IOC members issued a clarification Tuesday, saying that Internet freedom applied only to Web sites related to ”Olympic competitions.” Some journalists expressed frustration at the slow download rates and even voiced suspicion that it was deliberate and intended to discourage use.

When Chinese officials were bidding for the right to hold the games seven years ago, they assured international organizers that there would be ”complete freedom to report.” In April, Chinese organizers told International Olympic Committee members that Internet censorship, which is routine for China’s citizens, would be lifted for journalists during the games.

Media watchdog Reporters without Borders said it was increasingly concerned that journalists would face many cases of censorship during the Olympics.

Kaminsky: Good-bye.

Me: With regard to the DNS again what have you learned that you would maybe pass on to other security researchers about the process of brining multiple vendors together, anything that you would do?

Microsoft was very gracious, they completely agreed to host it and we had 16 people from all vendors and all these people (who) have been doing DNS for years fly in. We sat down, we did three things. First we looked at the problem, were we actually understanding this problem? Second, we tried to figure out what is the fix that would best protect the customer? And there are many fixes possible and once the bug is out, there are many more fixes possible.

Below is a transcript of my interview with Dan Kaminsky. The podcast can be heard here.

And this is going to sound a little strange because it ultimately goes back to the ultimate purpose of vulnerability research. There are two kinds of human creativity: there is the kind that kills people and there is the kind that doesn’t. Pretty much anything physically manufactured can kill you. Humans make chemicals and there is lots of stuff that can have chemicals. I mean, you know, you look up, the ceiling can fall on you, the paint on the ceiling can have fumes, the keyboard you’re typing on can have fumes, or the phone that you’re talking can too. Pretty much anything physical has product liability associated with it. Well if anything goes wrong then you’re going to have to pay.

Me: So you have this body of independent researchers looking at code, doing a service. They found something and there is two or three different ways that you can go with it. Some people sell it to a company that says, “We’ll act as your intermediary and we’ll contact the vendor for you.” Others approach the vendor directly and say, “I’m going to work with you on it.” And still others immediately post it to the Internet and say, “Look, I found this.”

Me: How long between the discovery and when you actually had these people in a room together discussing it?

Yes, software can kill people but it’s insanely rare. More people are killed by crashing windows than by Windows crashing.

The other day we had some remarkably complicated security policies floating around the Web and e-mail and various other things. There is a lot of things we want Web browsers to do, and there are a lot of things we absolutely need Web browsers not to do. And it’s the same for Web browsers and it’s for Office clients and it is for DNS servers, everything has capabilities, everything has more capabilities than they were originally designed to have. Those capabilities are problematic.

Me: So this was on March 31, 2008?

Me: Bye.

Kaminsky: It is about right; I mean this is an unusual situation in that you don’t usually have one bug show up in every single implementation. In this case and it was not every single implementation. EDNS is not vulnerable, Bert Hubert’s PowerDNS is not vulnerable. A lot of the newer DNS servers just have always been following this guidance, but the stuff that everyone was running: Bind8, Bind9, Microsoft DNS, IOS, these things were vulnerable. So what happened was and I don’t want to take all the credit for this…Paul Vixie is a machine. I mean that guy has been doing DNS since I was in grade school.

But at least I prefer there to be some kind of responsible disclosure timeline. Now, it can’t be forever, because if it’s forever, nothing ever patches and then the market never gets the information to know what’s safe and what isn’t. But people need some time. I mean we’re engineers here, and engineering takes time. It takes effort, takes testing, takes work to get out of the door.

Kaminsky: Don’t remind me. I got my stuff. I got my toys.

So, it’s a group thing as well, and at the end of the day, bug finding is communicating, anyone who’s ever worked in software knows that it’s not enough to file a bug and be done with it. The tester and the programmer often need to test the code to actually figure out what the problem is. They all got the same goal: ship good stuff, launch good stuff.

Kaminsky: No worry, just happy to help.

So I went to Vixie because I had been doing DNS research for a long time. I said, “We got a problem. We got to figure out what to do here.” And we eventually decided that we would have to hold a summit, that needs to be done in person.

So I went out with pretty much only the DNS people and only the vendors, didn’t get other hackers in on it and you got to realize people in the security community need to be very, very skeptical. They have to, because it’s so easy to make stuff up. It’s so easy. You can just say anything and the press will believe you. I mean that’s the honest truth. So there is a lot of skepticism and really, unless it’s the most important thing you’ve done, go out with technical details. If you don’t, go out with other hackers. Even if you’re the guy who did, does DNS, don’t go out alone. That probably be the biggest thing that I learned above and beyond the standard, you know, talk to the vendors, synchronize times, blah, blah, blah.

Kaminsky: Oh! Yeah, yes. There was a wildly entertaining phone call with Thomas Ptacek.

Dan Kaminsky: If you look at lot of my research I’m generally looking for interesting capabilities that are within the system. So really what goes through my mind when I find some new interesting capability with the system and just unfortunately the reality of things is, I can do X. Is X bad and then to be concrete that X caused a traversal of a security boundary?

And we ended up choosing a fix that would survive reverse engineering as long as possible, not forever, but as long as possible. And finally we all agreed the nature of this bug was such we needed to do a simultaneous patch. We needed to all do it at the same time…

Kaminsky: I’ve spent my entire career in corporate environments. I didn’t even start out as a security engineer. I…really started out doing graphics. Then I got a job in networking. I got into security because I was offered a really boring job and, you know, it’s easy to break the code. But I’ve always had the freedom to develop new and interesting software. And the reason or the big source of that freedom is the complete lack of liability in computer software programs. This is not a bad thing. This is actually an important thing and a critical thing to the ability to innovate. Really.

Kaminsky: …and that’s what we got.

Me: There is no hard and fast rule when discovering a vulnerability. I know some people have discussed the model where a researcher reports directly to the vendor and then sits on it for 90 days or so. Where do you fall on public disclosure of vulnerabilities or contacting vendors or all of the above?

Me: You realize that that one session at Black Hat is going to be full of people waiting to hearing what you’ve to say.

Kaminsky: Yes.

Me: You mentioned that you didn’t expect to discover this particular vulnerability, the DNS vulnerability. What goes through your mind when you hit upon something that you think might be a vulnerability?

Kaminsky: Yeah.

Me: So walk me through. I know I wasn’t to going to ask directly about the DNS thing, but you discovered it say early in the year and then you had a meeting with the vendors and then you arrived at a date where you’re going to announce it; you had a timetable. Is that about right?

Me: I think you spent the last 48 hours working it out with your fellow security researchers?

Me: All right Dan, take care.

Me: Yes, so…

I prefer there to be some kind of responsible disclosure timeline. Now, it can’t be forever, because if it’s forever, nothing ever patches and then the market never gets the information to know what’s safe and what isn’t.

Me: At some point on that day or thereafter you decided that you would have a simultaneous release on a particular date?

Me: Well, I’ve seen you speak before. I know you will do really well. I appreciate the time you took to speak with me today and…

I’m not a big fan of just dropping things out onto the open Internet. I mean, you know, what we’re looking at, what we’re looking for, is more secure code. We’re looking for people to be able to protect themselves. Yes, when you drop it on the Internet, everyone knows, including the vendor, and that is way better than some alternate models.

Kaminsky: It was–between contacting Vixie and us actually going ahead and getting this together–no more than a few weeks. We spent some time going back and forth on the e-mail and, you know, e-mail was great, e-mail is wonderful, but sometimes you just got to get bodies in the room.

Me: So how long…?

I just spent the last six months doing a lot of work that is not particularly technical–it was three days to find the hole, it was six months to get everything in the patch. That’s a lot of work. But I mean if companies like Zero Day Initiative want to be in that position, I think they’re great; they’re, often they are a force for good in our industry. I have no problem with somebody going ahead and doing the work, that work with each vendor directly.

But it does not mean the cost of failing is zero. We have this interesting third category where you’re not going to die but you might go broke. You might get everything stolen. You might get everything lost. And with this third category we need some way, if we’re not going to have liability. I’m not going to name names, but there are lot of the products, I don’t know what decade they could ship if product liability was in place but it wouldn’t be this one, it probably wouldn’t be next one.

We need some way to at least differentiate good software from bad and that is what interestingly independent vulnerability research allows. It allows the market to monitor the quality of software, and to figure out what’s safe and what isn’t. That creates positive pressure toward writing safer code. And that is right now, how in the lack of a liability model, we can still get more secure code. It’s not cheap but it’s actually happening.

And then there is the Hollywood movie. It can be terrible, it be can be awful, it can be atrocious, it can be the worst thing you ever put to celluloid and you’re not going to die, and so there is no liability for a terrible movie. Software, believe it or not, is actually in the second category. Yes, software can kill people but it’s insanely rare. More people are killed by crashing windows than by Windows crashing. So we don’t have liability associated with software and as such they can be far, far faster because the cost of handling is much lower.

Kaminsky: So this is an unusual lesson, but I’m going to bring it up anyway because it’s been almost, we managed to deal with it at the last moment. Unless it’s really, really, really, really important and you’re willing to stake your entire reputation on it, do not do a huge big press thing with no technical details. If it is so important that you must do a big press thing with no technical details to get people to patch. No, it’s not enough to have the entire vendor community behind you. No, it’s not enough to have the entire DNS community behind you. You got to go ahead and get some of the other security engineers in the field, who are known, and they got to know everything and they got to go out with you.

Kaminsky: I think people underestimate the degree to which new vulnerabilities are found and new classes of vulnerabilities are found. A good housekeeping seal is, I mean it’s, there is entire classes of low-grade bugs. I love to see something that said, “This software was bugged.” I mean seriously, that would be fantastic. People shouldn’t think that that is a replacement for independent security research, but yes at the end of the day we should have better ways for the market to be able to differentiate good code from bad.

Me: So going back to the whole disclosure thing: what if there was an independent body that certified that software met certain standards, sort of a good housekeeping seal of approval? Would something like that work in today’s market?

Kaminsky: Well, there is also the fourth where you provide it, you sell it to someone who is not going to provide it to the vendor. And I do not expect that market to ever be a legitimized market. But focusing on three you just named, there’s no problem selling an exploit to someone who is going to provide it to the vendor freely. I don’t necessarily understand why companies are in that position where they’re paying for vulnerabilities that they’re providing to the vendor for free. But I’m not going to complain about it.

Kaminsky: I’m not even joking, it was an absolute blast. And having to keep this secret for the entire year, actually being able to speak it aloud is kind of cool.

9. Global Solar - I have been following this company for a long time. CIGS is very hard and has broken (or is currently breaking) hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of wannabes. This management team, led by Mike Gering, respects how hard it is. And since they have actually been running a pilot plant shipping product for 3 years, so we need to take note when they say they have cracked the manufacturing scale nut.

1. Sharp Electronics - In solar, still the biggest, and still growing. Enough said.

10. Schott - Long a major player in crystalline silicon photovoltaics, amorphous silicon photovoltaics and concentrated solar thermal, where they are one of the top manufacturers of solar thermal receivers. That balance is unique, and exciting.

5. Fuel Tech (NASDAQ:FTEK) - I wrote about them in 2007. The CEO John Norris is a long time friend and an excellent operator. Cleaning up coal is a huge business that needs to be done, and they do it well.

6. Fat Spaniel - Distributed power, solar included, is a ticking time bomb without independent monitoring. Fat Spaniel does it the best.

8. First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) - Lowest cost producer in the photovoltaic business. Guaranteed to make the list until dethroned.

I have included cleantech companies big and small. Volume I surprisingly ended up with a lot more solar companies than I would have guessed, and no biofuels. Perhaps I really am a closet solar fanatic.

1. The company is energy or environmental technology related. 2. I like their products. 3. The market needs them. 4. The company is smart about building their business. 5. I’d like to own the company if I could (for the right price, of course!). 6. It is not already one of mine (my apologies to my friends Zenergy Power).

7. Smart Fuel Cells (XETRA:F3C.DE) - I wrote about them recently. I helped create a fuel cell business in 2002. This is the first fuel cell company in 5 years that has intrigued me. They actually ship product with solid gross margins. That is a start.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is Chairman of Cleantech.org, and a blogger for CNET’s Greentech blog.

4. Applied Materials (NYSE:AMAT) - The future of photovoltaics lies in scaling thin film manufacturing process. Who better to do this than the dean of semiconductor capital equipment. I broke the story of Applied’s entry to solar in the blogosphere in 2006, and if anything underestimated how hard they were pushing. The whisper mill has been whirring that the installations of their plants are not on track. Not only do I have faith they will get there, I think it is critical to the industry that they do.

I spend most of my day meeting and talking to companies in the cleantech sector. And those of you who know me know I have opinions on who is doing it right, and who is doing it wrong. So I thought it was about time to initiate the Cleantech Blog Power 10 Ranking of cleantech companies doing it right. Eligibility for inclusion in the ranking requires meeting a 6 point test. Suggestions for inclusions in future volumes are welcome. The 6 point test:

2. Det Norske Veritas - DNV is a massive 150 year old risk management firm. Their auditors underpin roughly half of the carbon markets. In carbon, audit and verification is everything. I could not leave them off.

3. IBM (NYSE:IBM) - What IBM is doing in smart grid is very exciting. They are part of a large proportion of the smart grid implementations that are in process, and a huge proponent of open standards. Smart grid is to electricity what fiber is to telecom. It underpins everything.

Microsoft announced its Windows Home Server product at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, but has struggled to get strong backing from big-name computer makers other than HP. It also had to grapple with a well-publicized glitch that could lead to data loss under certain circumstances. It fixed that issue and added additional features with a”Power Pack 1″ update last July.

The server is intended for home use as well as small businesses that have a need for networking multiple PCs. The easyStore will run Microsoft Windows Home Server. It enables users to access files, including photos, videos, and documents on any other computer connected to the network, and creates an image-based backup of each PC daily.

But Acer is diving in. This is part of Acer’s effort to expand its market share by offering more products besides Netbooks, notebooks, and desktops in the U.S. Acer already sells the third most computers in the world after HP and Dell, and much of that is due to its success with low-cost laptop sales, and its acquisition of Gateway in 2007. Earlier this year the Taiwanese company also dipped its toe in the smartphone waters.

Acer follows HP into the consumer home server market. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP recently refreshed its MediaSmart server, and Acer’s server has very similar specifications, including running Windows Home Server.

(Credit:
Acer)

Home servers in general have been a tough sell. Microsoft resorted to a mock children’s book last year to explain why such a device is necessary in a home.

Acer plans to unveil its first home server for the U.S. market on Thursday, called the Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server.

The home sever is an 8×7x7 inch shiny black box, powered by Intel’s Atom processor 230 and 2GB of DDR2 memory. There is a 1TB hard drive as well as three bays for swappable hard drives. Together, the easyStore can hold up to 7TB of data. There are also five USB ports, one eSATA port, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The total price is $399.

But it’s worse that that. It can be useful to have a client-side application–that’s the reality and, in any case, Picasa has one for reasons of history as much as strategy. But Picasa so often feels like its design center is that offline component rather than the online one. Does Google even have a truly coherent vision of computing in the Cloud?

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And then there’s the peculiar case of Picasa. At the end of the day, Picasa is much more about a simple image cataloging and editing program for the PC than it is a vibrant online photo site. Strip away the client component and it feels awfully first generation–a place to store some snapshots for a few friends and family than a place to participate in an online community. Think Snapfish, not Flickr. Nor does it have any of the more sophisticated tools that sites like SmugMug and PhotoShelter offer to better cater to more serious amateurs and pros.

However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.

Indeed, if one were to look at these two examples in isolation, one might be inclined to think that Google doesn’t even get social media, Web 2.0, all that good stuff. After all, the counterexamples like the Google Earth community are rather sparse.

Take Google Browser Sync for example. Social bookmarking may be the red-headed stepchild of social media, as I’ve written about previously. But that’s an opportunity for Google. So what do they do? They come up with some relatively lame mechanism to share bookmarks among multiple computers. I might have found this useful five years ago. However, for many people (especially those who worry about coordinating multiple computers), bookmarks have become something to be stored in the network rather than locally. At least if you aren’t storing the content as well as the URL, it’s not like they’re much use if you’re disconnected from the network cloud anyway.

Google has a decidedly mixed record with its acquisitions (including Picasa). But it’s too bad that it’s probably not practical at this point just to snap up the Flickr photo site and del.icio.us social bookmarking. Their owner, Yahoo, has certainly never known what to do with them. But Yahoo is a competitor and the tumult around Microsoft’s attempted acquisition likely makes any such move impossible. Too bad.

For all the company’s overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain… off.

I’m not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn’t rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.

In a side-by-side comparison, the Intel fan flow moves a Styrofoam ball around a track significantly faster. “It’s a 2x comparison,” Urban said. He added that Intel took less than a year to work out the kinks for a reliably faster fan to fit into ultrathin notebooks.

Click here for full coverage of the Intel Developer Forum.

“As soon as we can get it into production, we will,” he said. It was unclear how long this next step in the process will take before faster fans wend their way into the commercial market. “Maybe two years,” he offered.

Call it a product announcement by stealth: you’ll find the technology demonstration in a nondescript booth at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, a half stone’s toss away from the myriad Atom-based notebook PCs Intel is putting on display at its developer forum.

As with other engineering advances coming out of its research side, Intel intends to license the proprietary design to computer makers–the idea being that anything which fosters more demand for Intel-based computers will, by definition, add to the company’s bottom line.

“This will have the same power consumption and noise level of current fans,” said Bradley Urban, an engineer inside Intel’s thermal technology development unit.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Fan prototype developed by Intel.

Demonstrating a prototype of the technology in public for the first time at its developer forum taking place this week in San Francisco, Intel says the upshot will be cooler computers–and it’s not referring to style.

Intel has invented a way to double the air flow generated by fans used to cool ultrathin notebook computers.