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A few bloggers have suggested that Dropio, which lets users toss all kinds of media into group “drops,” could be “this year’s Twitter,” as SXSWi attendees could potentially use it to communicate and share information with one another. Lessin has mixed feelings about the characterization. “There are aspects of Twitter which are awesome, and which we would love to be associated with,” he said. “We’d certainly love the kind of growth that they saw coming out of SXSWi (2007). There are other aspects that we’d rather not emulate.”

Nevertheless, Tumblr will be co-hosting a party with video start-up Next New Networks, and is encouraging people to contribute to a group blog. “During the party we’re going to just hand out an e-mail address that people can put into their phones, so that during the event they can send in video and text updates and photos,” Karp explained, still insisting that it wasn’t a big deal. “We kind of fell into this party that we’re now co-hosting. That was mostly an accident.”

But this year more than ever, many eager young entrepreneurs consider the festival, which takes place Friday through Tuesday, to be more than just a nerd haven where the margaritas are flowing, the barbecue is sizzling, and (almost) everyone knows that Ruby on Rails is not the name of an indie-rock band. Going to SXSWi is considered a crucial business move, particularly after the meteoric rise that the then-unknown Twitter enjoyed at last year’s festival. The microblogging start-up not only gained buzz from winning a SXSWi Web Award, but also earned a loyal following of tech-friendly addicts who used it as their communication tool of choice at the chaotic confab.

Is another Twitter needed?
Twitter broke out last year, he theorized, because it was just the perfect fit for the conference in a way that we won’t likely see again. “Twitter was especially magical in that such a thing didn’t really exist (before) and it blended in perfectly with the conference,” Karp said. He added that because of that, there’s a chance that this year’s SXSWi masses will just use Twitter again as their communication tool of choice; many of them still use it avidly, after all. There might be nothing that emerges as the “next Twitter” because nothing is needed.

Unofficial debut for many
Other companies consider this year’s SXSWi to be their unofficial debut in the tech enthusiast community–much like Twitter, which was already five months past its formal launch at last year’s SXSWi. “We really want to make a big splash,” said Matt Galligan, founder and CEO of the Colorado-based Socialthing, a new company that aims to help users organize their online social-networking profiles in one place. Socialthing, currently in private beta, is hosting a party on Sunday night, has set up a booth at the festival, and has beefed up its server power to accommodate new users.

And let’s face it: at its core, SXSWi is one big party, and plenty of those present will be there to have a good time with fellow geeks, not philosophize about the next big thing. At least one entrepreneur I talked to has indicated that the most important preparation he’s done pre-SXSWi has been brushing up on his Guitar Hero skills.

“It looks like everybody’s fighting for it,” said David Karp, founder of blogging platform Tumblr, which launched last year and will be making an appearance at SXSWi for the first time. “I think the whole thing is kind of funny, the way people look at this industry and the way they’re super competitive about it.”

Then there is the fact that the new-media industry may be looking less for a hot new start-up and more for sweeping ideas to help mature the industry. If the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami was any indicator, the hot topics in social networking and Web development are community-driven standards like OpenSocial and DataPortability that aim to infuse a jumbled landscape with a bit of order.

For bootstrapping entrepreneurs, SXSWi is like a cross between a debutante ball and a petri dish: spread the word about your new social-media brand among likeminded people (particularly over an open bar), and ideally get them to start using it on the spot. This time around, plenty of new companies are vying for the status that Twitter enjoyed last year–but caution is key. Not only will it be extremely difficult for any start-up to pull off a “Twitter coup” at the festival, but it’ll be even more difficult for it to do what Twitter has not yet achieved, and that’s the feat of translating SXSWi trendiness into real-world success.

One part college reunion, one part cultural showcase, and one part weeklong think tank, some classify the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) as “spring break for geeks.”

It’s true. While few actual product launches take place at the nearly press-conference-free SXSWi, many small companies have amped up their product offerings in the weeks before the festival or have created SXSWi-specific promotions to get the word out. Pownce, a microblogging start-up that launched last year, just opened an application programming interface (API) for developers. Publishing platform BricaBox formally launched in late February and has debuted SXSWi party guide SXSWhere.com as one of its inaugural product demonstrations.

Plus, there’s the disappointment factor. Despite the fact that it remains very popular among social-media geeks, Twitter really isn’t a household name, and the tech industry’s perpetual hype-backlash cycle has led some up-and-coming entrepreneurs to tone down their enthusiasm when it comes to SXSWi buzz. “This is not an important event for us,” said Karp, who added that he doesn’t think elevated chatter at SXSWi indicates future success for a start-up, given the festival’s insidery crowd. “Conferences aren’t necessarily a great case for a mainstream activity. This is going to be like a big tech slumber party.”

Lessin confirmed that Dropio’s servers will be getting extra juice for the festival to prevent high-profile meltdowns like the ones that still occasionally plague Twitter a year after its SXSW 2007 debut.

“South by Southwest is just one more step out for us,” said Sam Lessin, founder of file-sharing start-up Dropio, who says that he’s “really amped” that his company was nominated in the “Technical Achievement” category of this year’s Web Awards. “We want to push the name out, get the concept of what we’re doing out a little bit wider, and get feedback and reactions and engagement from those people.”

I got my hands on a CardScan Personal review unit and set up the system in no time. I installed the software, calibrated the scanner using the included blank card, and chose a location for the program data. I then started feeding the scanner with a series of cards I’d picked up at various parties, networking events, and conferences over the past year. Sadly, the scanner’s small size means you have to feed the cards through one-by-one–which is a drag if you try to catch up on hundreds of cards at once like I did.

The 7.6-ounce scanner measures 4.8 inches wide, 3.3 inches deep, and 1.5 inch high, so it won’t take up much room in your bag. (The device even comes with a carrying pouch that keeps the scanner and USB cable together.) According to the company, the CardScan can scan a monochrome card in 5 seconds and a polychrome card in a few more seconds. That’s a decent speed, however, the real value comes with the accompanying software. The software not only helps import the information from the cards but is also useful as a standalone contact manager.

(Credit:
CardScan)

Priced at $169, the CardScan Personal isn’t cheap. But if you have a stack of cards sitting on your desk–and especially if you’re in an industry where contacts equal money–the easy-to-use CardScan Personal will be worth that cost.

Once the contacts are in, you can automatically sync the information to your primary management software–including Outlook, Windows Mobile, and Palm Desktop–or you can export the records in a variety of formats for use by other applications. CardScan provides free online backup of your data, which also lets you look up your contacts via a secure Web site.

CardScan Personal is a compact business card scanner paired with powerful (though Windows-only) contact management software that makes short work of transforming a stack of business cards into useful information.

The results were less surefire when it came to cards with color backgrounds, photos, or non-Roman characters. These types of cards will doubtlessly require manual correction. Fortunately, CardScan includes a “verified” check box on each record so you can tell instantly whether a record has been confirmed by a human as being accurate. Checking the information can be a little tedious, but it’s still easier than typing all the contacts in yourself.

The software’s optical character recognition, which interprets the information on the cards, was impressive, if not quite perfect. It read the most straightforward cards with no problem. It even cleanly interpreted one card that was crowded with text and had the contact’s name at the bottom instead of near the top. The scanner also was not thrown off by some handwritten scribbles on the front of several cards.

The CardScan software saves an image of the card with the contact file, so you always have a visual record (helpful for confirming data or just jogging your memory of a person). You can assign categories, labels, and notes to individual cards or to whole batches of cards that you scan at once. For example, as I scanned several dozen cards from last month’s Twiistup party, I assigned tags to the whole batch with one click.

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The two PC industry giants sent out a media alert saying that they will host a teleconference to announce the research venture.

The amount of funding for the research, which several universities bid on, will be $2 million annually for five years, according to the Journal.

The need for more research stems from the emergence of processors with two or more processing units, or cores, which have now become mainstream. With multiple cores, chip designers can boost a machine’s processing muscle in a more energy-efficient way than by increasing the processor’s clock speed.

But multicore technology poses significant challenge to both hardware and software providers. Without writing programs to be optimized for multicore processors, applications will not benefit from the added chip power, or could run slower than previous chips.

The group believes developers could create a set of perhaps a dozen frameworks that understand the intricacies of the hardware. The frameworks could be used to write modules that handle specific tasks such as solving a matrix. New run time environments could dynamically schedule the modules across available cores of various types.

A report from EE Times said that about 14 faculty members at the University of California at Berkeley lab started work on the project in late January. The researcher will focus on creating development frameworks that make it easier for programmers to parse out computing jobs so that they can be done in parallel by processors with several cores, according to the report.

Microsoft and Intel on Tuesday are expected to launch a joint research initiative to tackle programming for multicore processors.

Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, and Tony Hey, corporate vice president of external research at Microsoft Research, are scheduled to host the media announcement.

Both Microsoft and Intel–as well other IT companies–have made programming tools for multicore processing a high priority in terms of product development and research.

Essentially, the lab is aiming to define a way to compose parallel programs based on flexible sets of standard modules in a way similar to how serial programs are written today. The challenge in the parallel world is finding a dynamic and flexible approach to schedule parallel tasks from these modules across available hardware in complex heterogeneous multi-core CPUs.

More details to follow after the 10 a.m. PDT press conference on Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that the venture will focus on multicore programming and that the bulk of the work will be done at the University of California at Berkeley.

Correction: The Microsoft and Intel press conference is scheduled for Tuesday.

With the annual Web 2.0 conference only a week away, we’re about to get bombarded with the latest avalanche of marketing hype about technologies that are supposed to change our lives. And if past is prologue, I’m quite sure the 24-hour attention cycle will again be dominated by more monotonous debates about the future of social networks and news feed platforms.

But as these debates play out among the usual cast of characters on TechMeme, pay close attention to the new rules of media engagement–and I’m using “media” in the widest possible sense here–where the blogosphere awards points to some favorite companies while giving the cold shoulder to many others.

Just to put that statement in context, that’s always been the case and it predates the birth of the Internet, long before the idea of a media conversation ever got born. Back then, the major tech companies could afford the biggest marketing budgets and they dominated the news cycle even more than they do now. As for companies that fell out of favor or were too small or too difficult to explain–well, let’s just say they had a rough time getting to center stage. Personally, I’m not waxing nostalgic for the way things used to be. I remember the frustrations voiced at the perceived favoritism (or laziness) of the media. Too many good and interesting stories got lost because smaller companies didn’t have the resources to buy the services of fancy PR operatives.

But I wonder whether history’s not repeating itself–with a twist. Bear with me on a short detour.

Last week I attended a briefing by Autonomy, a company based in the United Kingdom and San Francisco. On Monday, Autonomy will announce a product designed to assist companies with governance compliance. This likely will be a big deal for IT administrators and law firms that are scrambling to enact internal information management policies in the wake of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis. You can find out the details on Autonomy’s site but I’ll wager that most people reading this post have near heard of the company.

If we judge a firm’s importance by the amount of attention it invites these days, you would conclude that a firm like Autonomy is of little or no relevance to the wider technology world. Yet the company enjoys a $4.5 billion market capitalization and ranks as one of the leading commercial ventures in the field of the contextual understanding of electronic data. Unfortunately, it’s a complex story to sell in a sound bite or two and it probably doesn’t help that Mike Lynch, who founded Autonomy, built a business around his understanding of Bayesian inference and Shannon’s information theory. That’s a mouthful to get out and the product line is a lot more difficult to understand than compared with, say, Bebo or Flickr.

Most of what passes as worthy of comment in the 24-7 chatter cycle tends to focus on one part of the tech story. But I wonder whether another, more important piece of the narrative is getting shunted aside in the process. Autonomy’s not alone. Each week I receive a stream of e-mails and phone calls from PR people representing infrastructure software companies. Some are more interesting than others but we’re not talking about stuff that sets pulses beating harder. Guaranteed, not a one will ever lead the pages of the news aggregators unless their CEO first gets outed as a cross-dresser.

Sometimes I jump at the story. Most of the time I say no. When I turn them down, however, I do it with a sense of regret. Did I just let the next Salesforce.com slip away? I’ll never know until it’s too late.

Cape Wind, a controversial project to build a huge wind farm in Nantucket Sound, passed an environmental review from a federal agency, bringing the U.S.’s first offshore wind project closer to reality.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Mineral Management Service did a review of the potential impact of the installation, which would be five miles off shore, as part of the permitting process.

The study (click here for PDF) concluded that the effects on the natural ecosystem, when properly managed, were not sufficient to hold up the project.

The project calls for 130 very large turbines capable of generating 420 megawatts of electricity to be placed offshore between Cape Cod and Nantucket island to the south. Backers say it will provide 75 percent of the electricity needs of Cape Cod.

Location of proposed offshore wind farm.

(Credit:
Cape Wind) Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, an advocate of clean energy policy, supports the project. But former governor Mitt Romney and Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, whose family compound would have a view of the wind farm, oppose it, fearing the turbines would hurt tourism and property values.

Local groups in Cape Cod have formed to oppose the project. Concerns over the potentially harmful impact to birds and bats led to environmental group the Audubon Society to call for detailed studies.

For more, read this Boston Globe article.

A view of space from Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft is ready to boldly take Web surfers where none has gone before.

The software giant on Monday launched its WorldWide Telescope, a free Web-based program that allows Web surfers to explore galaxies, star systems, and distant planets. The program, which was developed by Microsoft’s research arm, weds images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and others.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

The program is similar to Google Sky, a mode of Google Earth that offers views of the universe, including high-resolution photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope and background information on discoveries and constellations.

Microsoft said WorldWide Telescope will be made available for free as a tribute to Jim Gray, a Microsoft researcher who disappeared off the California coast while sailing last year.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said in a statement. “Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

Update 2:15 p.m. PST: No sooner do I post this than RIM goes and issues an explanation for the outage. Read on for the details…

In the immortal words of Cinderella’s Tom Kiefer, you don’t know what you got, till it’s gone.

Monday’s widespread BlackBerry outage–the second major one in the past 12 months–left Research In Motion customers stranded and cut off from the rest of the world, sort of like what happened to the ’80s glam metal band after Long Cold Winter. The Internet’s equivalent of a snow day left reams of e-mail messages undelivered for about three hours Monday, according to RIM, which either still hasn’t figured out exactly what caused the problem, or isn’t willing to disclose the cause just yet.

Representatives for AT&T and Verizon told several media outlets Monday that from what they understood, all wireless carriers in North America that work with RIM were affected. The last time an outage of this magnitude occurred, in April, RIM blamed a database problem that snowballed when the backup “failover” process didn’t work as planned.

Users of BlackBerrys such as this 8820 model couldn't get their precious, precious e-mail for about three hours yesterday.

(Credit:
Research in Motion)

It’s amazing how dependent people have become on their mobile devices. CrackBerry addiction is an old story, but it keeps surfacing every time people are forced to go more than 10 minutes without access to their e-mail. Local television stations in San Francisco all teased the BlackBerry outage on their 11 p.m. newscasts as a near-disaster, since we don’t have weather events out here to keep people watching the local news.

While coverage of the outage just goes to show how mobile devices like the BlackBerry really are becoming the next wave of personal computing, it also points out that the entire system has a single point of failure: RIM itself.

All e-mail messages sent to or from a BlackBerry in North America must at some point in their journey travel through RIM’s network operations center (NOC) in Canada. The company tried to use that to its advantage in its patent dispute with NTP, noting that since such a critical part of the service lies in Canada, RIM should be exempt from U.S. patent claims. That didn’t take.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that expansion efforts at RIM’s NOC may have been to blame for the outage. The problem isn’t that the servers are in Canada; they could be anywhere. It’s just that everything has to go through the one location. In theory, as long as you have enough redundant backup systems and plans, that shouldn’t be a problem. But every now and then, it is.

Frank Gilman, the chief technology officer for Los Angeles law firm Allen Matkins, was forced to deal with the outage Monday afternoon. “What surprised me was the apparent lack of a solid business continuity plan on RIM’s part to ensure reasonable connectivity,” he said via e-mail, of course. “A company that is marketing devices that increase the mobility of professionals should have systems and contingencies in effect to avoid an outage of that size and duration.”

I’m sure that far more BlackBerry-related disasters are averted that never come to light. But RIM has an advantage over other service providers in that few people sign service-level agreements (SLAs) with RIM for the BlackBerry service. SLAs are basically promises from hosted service providers to maintain a certain level of uptime, which is usually 99.999 percent or so.

Those promises are usually only worth the paper they’re printed on, however, as the process of actually accounting for and proving damages as a result of an outage can be extremely difficult. Given the degree to which many large businesses–not to mention U.S. government staffers–rely on the BlackBerry service, perhaps RIM’s larger customers will start thinking about negotiating such an agreement when it comes time to renew the service.

As frustrating as the outage may have been, it’s not like the U.S. economy ground to a halt Monday afternoon as millions of e-mails about sales presentations and reminding the people on the fourth floor to empty the refrigerator on alternate Fridays went undelivered.

Still, RIM still needs to come clean about what caused the problem if it wants to keep people hooked on its service. I’ve seen the thumb wheel and the damage done.

Update 2:15 p.m. PST: RIM sent out a statement after waiting for me to post this blog, just to make sure we could test our own update procedures.

The company is blaming “a problem with an internal data routing system within the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had been recently upgraded,” according to the statement. RIM has been upgrading its capacity as demand for the BlackBerry continues to grow, and usually there isn’t much of a problem during one of those upgrades. This time, something apparently went wrong.

“Once again, RIM apologizes to its customers for any inconvenience.” The company said it would share further details once a more in-depth investigation is completed.

Microsoft didn’t say how much it was paying for Danger when it announced the deal on Monday. However, according to Om Malik, the price tag for the company was $500 million.

That’s more than $1 million per employee for the company, which has 294 workers. However, the price tag makes some sense when you consider the company has taken in $225 million from investors and had been pondering an IPO.

Our Open Season podcast series continued with Episode 19 last week as we wallowed in my general inabilities and the fact that open source realities are starting to kick in for many people.

Topics:
-Apache licensing and the inability to make money
-Bill Gates’ departure
-Contest: Bill Gates or Kermit the Frog

We were also joined briefly by RMS, Bill Gates, Nick Carr and others. It was an all-star event.

As part of its push into business telephony, Microsoft said Tuesday it is investing in Aspect Software, whose technology is used to run large call centers. Aspect, in turn, will make sure its software works with Microsoft’s unified communications products.

“A key pillar of Microsoft’s unified communications vision is improving access to the people and information you need to do your job better and more quickly, and with Aspect, we are making this vision a reality for contact centers,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president at Microsoft, in a statement.

Later this year, Aspect plans to release a new version of its software that works with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007.

Microsoft is counting on telephony to be one of the biggest growth areas in its business division, the part of the company that includes Office.