What's new in week 20, 2008

Wednesday, 2008-05-14, Copenhagen

What can we guess from Microsoft’s failure in acquiring Yahoo? One possible answer is that Microsoft has to try harder on cloud computing to save its success in the enterprise market. Let us just be frankly, MS is not a good player in the online service market while Google was started on this market (and is in the leaders’ dimension now). Given the assumption that online services (ideas like SAAS, Cloud Computing) will be the next market trend for enterprise IT, MS has to make a solid move in order to take the lead in that direction (which is always viewed as a great piece cake). Without Yahoo’s reputation, MS has to find another way to attract more online users’ eyeballs.

The online virus-protection technology is one of the biggest trends in the security market. Given the fact that most of the virus-affections (and/or security breakage) happened through internet protocols, this market is indeed a great place to put innovations. McAfee and Yahoo just announced a beta launch of a new technology, termed SearchScan, to make Yahoo searching much safer by warning of dangerous sites before the user even clicks on them. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that, when you search on a site from Google, there is always a suggestion if the site is believed to contain malicious code? So, there is not just one player in this scenario.


Friday, 2008-05-16, Copenhagen

Quite a few major Internet players, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are trying to put profile-sharing into their service portfolio. The idea is that once a user has an ID and profile information created in one of their websites, the information can just be shared with other sites with one-mouse-click. The convenience is straightforward but many people have the concern that this will have certain amount of privacy leak (just like what happened to FaceBook.com).

Good news for VW fans! Volkswagen and Sanyo are working on a joint venture to deliver battery to be used in hybrid and electric cars. According to their plan, VW aims to start producing cars with the battery by 2012 (which is not far away from us). It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the battery can be, given the fact that VW cars are normally heavier than other competitors.