I like to imagine that it happened this way: One day the computer guys in Silicon Valley looked over at the mobile-phone industry and realized those carriers have figured out the ultimate racket. They sell you a phone, lock you into a two-year contract, and anything you want to buy for the phone -- accessories, ringtones, games -- you have to buy from them. They control the whole thing, from top to bottom, and instead of getting a one-time sale, they get a recurring revenue stream. "Wow!" the computer guys said. "Why aren't we doing that?"

Well, now they are. Slowly but surely, companies like Apple and Google are wresting control away from the mobile carriers. Instead of a world where the companies that make the phones are just dumb hardware makers -- silent partners who never get to touch the customer -- Google and Apple are using the transition to smart phones as a way to flip the mobile-phone business model on its head.

Going forward, the phone makers will be the ones who deal with the customers and sell all the software and accessories. The carriers will be the silent partners, relegated to connecting calls and collecting a monthly fee.

Eventually, this means that we'll all be able to buy a phone and run it on any network we want, which is what we should have been able to do all along. There's a risk, however, that we're fleeing one cage only to run straight into another, and the only thing that will change is the name of our jailer.

Read the full column >>

...

As he opened his keynote presentation today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Steve Jobs projected on the screen behind him an image of an iPhone, a laptop, and a big question mark between them. If Apple were to create a new product to fill that void, he said, the machines would have to "be far better at doing some key tasks—better than the laptop, better than the smartphone ... Otherwise it has no reason for being."

Now that the iPad unveiling is over, some of Apple nation is in thrall, but most are still waiting for that reason.

Let's skip past the unfortunate name—Twitter lit up with references to feminine-hygiene products, and a MadTV sketch from 2006 became retroactively prescient—and try to pin down why so many Apple fans followed liveblogs today with a sense of disappointment. We wrote yesterday that the Apple tablet could upend a number of fields, from books and printed news to TV to music (again). That could still be the case, but in San Francisco today, Jobs didn't deliver the breakthrough technology—hardware nor software—to justify the hype. The Financial Times had reported this week that Apple might offer a $30-per-month "best of TV" subscription plan; numerous tech bloggers connected the dots between Apple's purchase of Lala, a music-streaming company, and a new version of iTunes that would duplicate your music library to the cloud and follow you everywhere. Both would represent entirely new ways to consume entertainment. Both may yet come. But the iPad, as Jobs presented it, doesn't seem to be the device that makes it all possible.

...

Steve Jobs is unveiling the Apple iPad, the company's feverishly anticipated tablet device, in San Francisco at this minute. NEWSWEEK Technology Editor Daniel Lyons is on the scene—and says the audience's reaction is surprisingly tepid. "I haven't been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation," Lyons e-mails.

On to some serious observations. The iPad itself seems less svelte than many fans expected—a blogger at Gizmodo estimates that 20 percent of the surface is bezel. The device's home screen features weirdly spaced-out icons. The overwhelming early response among those live-blogging the event, and reacting to the live blogs online, is that this thing looks like a really big iPhone.

Kimberly White / Reuters-Landov

With the unveiling of Apple's tablet computer less than 24 hours away, enough details have squirmed out of Steve Jobs's death grip to form a coherent picture of what the new device is likely to offer. After early speculation that the gadget would be a "Kindle killer," a gaming device, or just a really big iPhone, it appears possible that the Apple slate will be ... all of the above, a game-changer for an entire range of industries. Here's what the latest rumors, gossip, and details of varying confirmation point to:

• PRINT (books). Amazon's Kindle is in trouble. BusinessWeek reports that Apple has held talks with Hearst, McGraw-Hill, and Hachette about bringing their printed material to the feature-packed tablet. Users of the Kindle love its intuitive interface and easy-on-the-eyes E Ink screen─but that display is grayscale only and slow to load new pages. Analysts are predicting that Apple's device will offer so much functionality─color, a real Web browser, and e-mail client, easy "loaning" of books to friends─that the Kindle will seem prehistoric in comparison. The blog 9 to 5 Mac says Apple is enticing major publishers with more control over pricing than they have on the Kindle platform.
• PRINT (newspapers and magazines). News publishers screwed up en masse over the last decade by giving away their product for free online, and the Apple tablet represents a chance to put the genie back in the bottle, The New York Times reports today, citing interviews with people who have seen the device. Consumers have demonstrated a willingness to pay for stuff on mobile devices, from ringtones to text messages to tracks downloaded over the air from the iTunes store. That digital storefront has become familiar enough─and has so many credit-card numbers on file─that newspapers and magazines will finally be able to charge readers for polished, interactive editions of their product.
• TELEVISION. The Financial Times reports that Apple is pushing TV networks to cut their average price per episode from $2 to $1 to jumpstart sales in the iTunes Store. Watching videos longer than a few minutes on the iPhone has always been a doable, but unsatisfying, experience. Eyestrain sets in, the battery doesn't hold up well, and you either have to hold the device at an angle or buy an awkward easellike accessory. A device sized at 10 inches would solve many of these problems. The FT also says that Apple is considering offering a subscription service at $30 a month, offering popular shows in a package meant to entice consumers to ditch their cable-TV packages. Less clear is how the tablet will interact with the much-derided Apple TV so that viewers will be able to watch their downloaded episodes on the plasma screen in the living room.

To many in Silicon Valley, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who "get it," and those who don't. The people who get it are the ones who understand that the Internet is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race, a wave so huge and so powerful that the only way to cope with it is to jump on and hope to make money building a new world once the tsunami has laid waste to the old one.

Those who don't get it are the ones who try to fight the Internet wave, or slow it down. Entire industries fit that description: movies, music, publishing, real estate, cable-TV providers, operators of mobile-phone networks-the list goes on. Now, at the top of the list, goes China.

That is the message Google is sending by saying it will no longer comply with China's demand that its search results be censored. Suddenly China is being called out for its transgressions, depicted not just as evil but also, worse yet, as backward and stupid. This is all kind of incredible, because China is proving itself to be so advanced and sophisticated at next-generation technologies, from solar panels to high-speed trains.

Yet when it comes to the Internet, China does not get it. Hacking into servers so clumsily that you get caught? Throwing up filters? Choking off information? Hobbling search engines so that people get a censored version of reality?

This is idiotic. China is fighting the Internet. And like everyone else who fights the Internet, China will lose. 

Read the full column >>

Of all the choice lines in Conan O'Brien's statement about the late-night mess at NBC -- and there are plenty, from "terrible difficulties in prime-time" to "what I honestly believe is its destruction" -- one of the most interesting concerns technology. "Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter," Conan wrote. "But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more."

Conan's right, and he's wrong. Yes, a time slot does matter for a specific program -- millions of Americans still tune in to the various late shows live every night, and with a franchise as storied as the "Tonight Show," there is a symbolic and even psychic difference to airing at 12:05 instead of 11:35. But if Conan himself is interested in doing truly original comedy, he'll embrace this chance to leave the strictures of late-night broadcast television.

Conan has always appeared to be more interested than his late-night peers in pushing the comedic envelope. David Letterman may break the fourth wall and make characters out of his crew, and Jimmy Fallon may have experimented with webisodes before his program launched. But only Conan will improvise a joke about a nonexistent web site, www.hornymanatee.com -- and then actually purchase the domain and fill it with content.

This year the Internet turns 21. So it's somewhat ironic that 2010 will also be the year the Web finally sobers up.

Many of the startups and media sites that define the e-commerce ecosystem are, at long last, making serious plans to make serious money.  Hulu, the slick portal that picked up where TiVo left off in killing the idea of "appointment television," is the free site likeliest to begin charging in 2010. Chase Carey, a top executive of News Corp., which owns 27 percent of Hulu, announced in October that "it's time to start getting paid for broadcast content online" and "Hulu concurs with that." Comcast's recent purchase of NBC Universal, Hulu's other founding network, makes a pay-model future only more likely. Hulu hasn't made any official announcements yet, and it may continue to offer ad-supported versions of some programming, but expect to start using your credit card when you need your Arrested Development fix.

Music is headed toward the same fate. Cloud-based, streaming music is poised to replace the mp3, and Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora, and Rhapsody are the big names that currently dominate the format. Most of these sites have a free-to-users, ad-supported model, but the labels are starting to grumble that too much money is being left on the table. Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" was one of the most popular songs on Spotify in Europe, but she reportedly earned just $167 for a million listens through the service. (Spotify disputes the figure.) Naturally, record companies want to improve these terms. Reportedly, in their negotiations with Spotify leading up to the service's U.S. launch, they have insisted that Spotify scrap its free version altogether and require subscriptions across the board.

Google's new "superphone," the Nexus One, stole all the headlines yesterday, but there was another bit of tech news worth trumpeting: Apple's reported $275 million purchase of Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising platform.

True, mobile advertising isn't as sexy as a sleek new gadget. But the Quattro purchase highlighted the fact that there are really only two tech companies worth caring about anymore, and the lines between them are growing blurry. It used to be that Apple made the hardware and the gorgeous desktop software, while Google kept its head in the cloud, focusing on Web-based applications and, of course, advertising. But over the past year, Google has stepped on Apple's toes—hard. The Android operating system, a rival app store, Google Voice, and now the Nexus One are the first volleys against Apple's dominance in the smart-phone market.

ESPN announced this week that it is launching a 3-D sports channel. If other cable networks know what's good for them, they'll follow suit as soon as possible.

Everyone knows that over the last decade or so, a digital tidal wave has replaced postal mail with e-mail, landlines with cell phones, and home newspaper delivery with news Web sites. Cable networks seem not to realize that they're next in line. The basic rule is this: people born after 1980 want fewer pipes coming into their homes, and they want fine-grained choice about the media they consume. The more stuff we can get over the one pipe we do want—the Internet—the better. To those who buy individual tracks off iTunes for 99 cents apiece, and who pay Netflix $9 per month to stream unlimited movies, the practice of forking over more than $100 per month to the cable company for an undifferentiated mess of mostly crappy channels is insane.

...

Take mobile phones. Back in 2007, Google introduced a mobile-phone operating system called Android. That OS has been licensed by loads of phone makers. They hope it will enable them to build devices that can compete with Apple’s iPhone. Motorola’s new Droid phone is one example.

A few months ago rumors started going around that Google might go one step further and build an Android phone of its own. In October, Google’s vice president of engineering and in-house mobile phone guru, Andy Rubin, swore up and down that Google wouldn’t do that, because Google then would be competing against its partners, the phone makers and carriers.

Guess what? Now Google has done exactly that.

Everybody's talking about the new tablet computer Apple is expected to unveil this month. Some say it will save newspapers by giving them a new platform where they can charge for subscriptions. Some say it will destroy cable TV by letting people purchase shows a la carte over the Internet. Some say the tablet is pointless--nobody needs it, and it will be a total flop. But the truth is no one knows how this device will end up being used--not even Apple.

Yes, Steve Jobs and his team know exactly what the tablet will look like, what chips it will use and how much it will cost. They've probably created some slick software for the tablet, and maybe they've struck deals with software makers and media companies to deliver content for the device.

But the cool thing about technology is that nobody ever knows how new ideas will evolve. Today's hype around the tablet is a lot like the hype around the iPhone before its 2007 introduction. Back then, just like today, everyone was trying to guess what it would look like and what it would do--and as it turns out, nobody was even close.

Read the full column >>

For cybersecurity geeks, it was a moment to celebrate. In May, as President Obama announced a new federal office to oversee America’s digital infrastructure, he used language rarely heard in the White House. “We’ve had to learn a whole new vocabulary just to stay ahead of the cybercriminals who would do us harm: spyware and malware and spoofing and phishing and botnets,” Obama said. (Today, he named his pick for the post.) Obama also reminded the audience that he knew of what he spoke: in 2008 his campaign’s computer network had been badly compromised by a virus that hackers hid in an e-mail.

When frustration with malware has risen to the level of the BlackBerry addict in chief, the companies that make antivirus software -- a $6 billion global industry dominated by two U.S. firms, Symantec and McAfee -- know that their work is cut out for them. “I never thought I’d hear the day when our president was talking about botnets and Trojans,” says Rowan Trollope, an executive at Symantec, which makes the Norton brand of security software. “The industry has gotten a whole lot more interesting, and a whole lot more important.”

Wozniak

Yes, this is flash-based storage, which offers many improvements over traditional hard drives and their moving parts. Solid-state drives are faster, and lighter, and, um ... that's about all there is to say right now. If you're configuring a new laptop for yourself, there's nothing tremendously different you'll be able to do with a solid-state drive than with an old-fashioned, spinning-platter hard drive. These devices are still in the early-adopter phase, too, so you'll be paying a hefty premium and getting less total storage at the same time. For example, a high-end MacBook Pro comes with a 500 GB hard drive; upgrading to a 256 GB solid-state drive from Samsung costs an extra $650.

But that's for individuals. In the server arena, Fusion-io starts to get interesting.

Some people savor literature; others, fine wine. I prefer to relish the really exceptional sex scandals of our time.