A few folks noted the rumor mill churning over 3G iPhones coming soon. Apparently they might be going into production as early as May, and announced somewhere in the 2nd quarter. Hopefully they manage to stick a GPS and another 16 gigs of memory in this one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iPass has just announced a new service targeted at individuals that provides mobile Web access via both WiFi hotspots and 3G wireless networks. The service, called iPassConnect, claims to be the world’s largest wireless data network, providing Web access via both hotspots at more than 95,000 locations including Starbucks, McDonalds, and Borders, and via 3G wireless networks when no WiFi connection is available.

Traditionally, iPass has offered access to its network through enterprise plans (such as iPass Mobile Office), targeting companies who buy access for their employees in bulk. The new service aims to provide smaller outfits and independent professionals with high speed wireless Internet for a fixed monthly fee starting at $29.95/mo for access to the WiFi network and $69.95/mo for the WiFi/3G combo. This compares to the daily rates or hourly fees that one often encounters at hotels or coffee shops, respectively.

iPass is touting several statistics about the access their network offers:

* Hotspots in more than 500 airports, including 83 of the world’s 100 busiest
* Hotspots in more than 20,000 hotels such as Hyatt, Hilton and Marriot
* Hotspots in more than 70,000 retail locations such as Starbucks and McDonald’s

You can look up specific hotspot locations on the iPass web site.

iPass has had a rough go of it on Wall Street since opening north of $25/share in late 2003. It currently sits around $3/share, following revenue of $191M and a net loss of $34M in 2007. Since iPassConnect leverages the same network that the company already markets to enterprise customers, it seems like a logical move that should add to both the top and bottom line, though there is some stiff competition.

The company will now go up against the likes of Verizon’s BroadBand Access in targeting individual business consumers with high speed wireless access.

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WordPress 2.5, a project which we’ve mentioned here back in February and March, has finally gone gold, as it were, and for those who update their blog by hand, you can go ahead and grab the software.

The popular blogging platform spent six months on this latest release, twice their normal development cycle, but there were some pretty big changes they wanted to implement. The most radical change is a complete overhaul to the admin area with a new dashboard with better organization as well as new stat tracking widgets.

Amongst other features are a new media gallery that allows you to manage and search images as well as video, editing protection for multi-author blogs, automatic plugin download & update and far too many additions more to list. Overall this is such a huge update to the system that you almost wonder why they didn’t go to calling it 3.0 as opposed to 2.5. Upgrading is easy if you do it manually; one-click install systems will probably have the upgrade within a few days. Overall it looks like a very worthy update from the previous edition.

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The Google Docs document editor has a new menu (see video), similar to the one spotted in a Google employee’s presentation before. Instead of the tabs, the menu is now more traditional, along the lines of what people know from their typical desktop applications from years ago. “Writely” (there still doesn’t seem to be an official name for this editor ever since it moved to Google) seems to be one of the most heavily worked on Google applicatons that does not have any advertisement stuck to it; a bit of its visual history can be seen below.

Indeed, tabs as Writely used them were a slightly wrong metaphor for the Insert functionality – as the full content below the tab did not change – albeit it made some sense for the revision history, HTML editing mode, as well as the sharing features. Sharing is now accessible by a button at the top right, whereas the revision history moved to the File menu, and the HTML editing to the Edit menu.

The menu has a bonus other than just allowing Google to keep the interface uncluttered while adding features; there’s now enough place to print the keyboard shortcuts (like Ctrl+K to insert a link) right next to the entry. On the downside, at least in Firefox the menu is overlaid by the blinking editing cursor, which looks slightly confusing. Also, the other apps of the “Google office” suite – Presentations and Spreadsheets – do not have the new-style menus yet, which adds some inconsistency.

In other Google Docs news, you can now pick folder colors in the file explorer, and a new menu entry of the “More actions” button lets you directly change the document owner. Plus, there were some Google Spreadsheets changes recently, including the (apparently new) functions Sort, Filter and Unique.

[Thanks Jérôme, Keith and Tony! Writely screenshot with hat tip to Ionut.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: New Google Documents Menu | Comments]

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stoolpigeon writes "IBM has made a move to support open source RDBMS PostgreSQL by investing in EnterpriseDB, a company that supports PostgreSQL as well as selling their own proprietary extensions to the database product. IBM participated in a $10 million funding round, though the article doesn't say how much they invested. In the past EnterpriseDB has primarily advertised itself as an Oracle competitor, though the article says, 'Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy, explained that Postgres Plus 8.3 also adds in new application quick starts which are supposed to help with installation issues. They will also help in EnterpriseDB's battle against MySQL for open source database supremacy.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chapter80 writes "At noon today (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you're not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenID, a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials, gained significant momentum over the last year as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all pledged their support for the initiative.

There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID framework - as “issuing parties” or as “relying parties.” Issuing parties make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing parties. Of course, sites can also be both. In fact, if they aren’t both it can be confusing and isn’t a good user experience.

The problem, though, is that the Big Four Internet companies that I mentioned above have made big press announcements about their support for OpenID, but haven’t done enough to actually implement it. Microsoft has done absolutely nothing, even though Bill Gates announced their support over a year ago. Google has limited its support to Blogger, where it is both an Issuing and Relying party. Yahoo and AOL are Issuing parties only.

This isn’t just toe dipping in the OpenID pool to see how things go before jumping in. Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, it looks to me like these companies want all the positive press that comes from adopting this open standard, but none of the downside. By becoming Issuing parties, AOL and Yahoo hope to see their users logging in all over the Internet with those credentials. But they don’t accept IDs from anywhere else, so anyone that uses their services has to create new credentials with them. It’s all gain, no pain.

I spoke to Bill Washburn (the Executive Director of OpenID and only paid employee) and David Recordan (Vice Chair of OpenID) today about the hesitation of the big guys to fully implement OpenID. Both were careful not to criticize, noting that the support of these companies has been an important driver of OpenID awareness. But both also said that they would really like to see full implementation happen sooner rather than later.

Recordan says that at least 11,000 sites now take OpenID credentials for sign on (see image to right). Among them are some large services like 37Signals and LiveJournal. And the open source community has been great about building OpenID support into their software, Recordan says, so that others building on that software can launch Relying party services. Among the projects that support it are Drupal, Movable Type, Wordpress.org, Ruby on Rails and MediaWiki. But all of those services put together have nowhere near the user footprint of any of the Big Four.

I’ll say what the OpenID Foundation cannot, for political reasons - It’s time for these companies to do what’s right for the users and fully adopt OpenID as relying parties. That doesn’t fit in with their strategy of owning the identity of as many Internet users as possible, but it certainly fits in with the Internet’s very serious need for an open, distributed and secure single log in system (OpenID is all three).

If and when the Big Four become relying parties, the floodgates will truly open and there will be no looking back. And until they do that, I’m not buying that they really support what OpenID is trying to accomplish.

By the way, Chris Messina has done an excellent job of monitoring these and other companies that have promised OpenID support but are yet to implement it. Keep pressuring them, Chris.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Google’s new benchmarking section is live now in Google Analytics. If you opted in to the servive, you will find it in your site stats navigation at Visitors -> Benchmarking. You will then see a number of charts from sites of comparable traffic, so that you can find out if e.g. your visitors stay longer on pages than average, or if they visit more pages than average. Your own site’s traffic will be displayed in the usual blue, whereas the traffic of all the other comparable sites is displayed with a gray line. (Note that the invidiual charts graphics use sub titles, not headlines; this is formatted so it can be misunderstood.)

Also, a category list on top offers items like Entertainment/ Music or Society/ Education which you can pick from to restrict the charts to compare to sites within that category only.

All in all I think the data is interesting to take a look at once, but personally I find it hard to imagine how to utilize these numbers on a more regular basis. If you have a site you probably want to grow the traffic anyway and not spend too much time comparing to sites of a similar traffic size – rather, for inspiration you would be more interested in what sites in your niche with a much higher traffic might do differently. And comparing data like “average time on site” by just picking a broad category, such as “Games”, seems too unspecific to gain good understanding of differences to other sites which would really matter (is it a Flash-based games site? Is it a single game or a collection? Is it for kids? Games for adults? A poker site? A game download site? and so on. What good would it do for me to know that people spend longer on my web-based games site than say a site which merely offers a PC game for download?). What do you all think?

[Via the official Google Analytics blog.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Analytics Benchmarking Live | Comments]

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The wait for the final season will end 10 hours early for fans who want to watch the show online. Show stars and producers drop this revelation, crush hopes for a BSG movie franchise and tell what it's like to play a Cylon at a red-carpet media event in New York.

Filed under: Cellphones, Features

We know there have been a couple of crappy videos here and there on the web, but we finally got our own grubby paws on the yet-to-be released iPhone 2.0 beta, which isn't officially due until this June. It isn't exactly awash with changes, but here's what you need to know:

• Exchange is so on! Changes are pushed over the network, but over WiFi it does check-ins, so it's not as instantaneous.
  
• There's no contact search that we can see, so far. Maybe that only gets turned on if you have thousands of contacts (which we definitely do not).
• There's a new button in the calendar, but we don't know what it is and can't make it do anything.
• The App Store is there, of course, but doesn't do anything yet (except error out that it can't connect).
• Wondering when Apple will make good on its agreement to license Cisco technology? Well, the branded Cisco VPN screen has definitely been added to the VPN settings. We couldn't really test this one, but assume it works as advertised. We don't yet know if it supports SecurID or other hardware token authenticators.
• Parental controls most certainly work. Marvel as we turn off YouTube!
  
• You can now order your preferred WiFi networks.
• In addition to having a new sideways scientific mode(!), the basic calculator now does commas and has new, useful functions for the math nerds; both the calc and the iTunes icons have changed.
• By far our favorite new feature is multi-select in mail, though. Now when you hit edit you can select as many messages as you want and delete or move them as a group. Friggin' finally. Now where's that two-pane client?

Definitely encouraging stuff in here. We'll have some video up of this thing a little later; in the mean time, there anything you want to know? Big ups to our source(s) for hooking us up with this!

 

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