Is Steve Balmer Actually Surprised At The Crappy Windows Phone 7 Sales?
Steve, you have to actually build a brand, a community, and a solid app store before you can start to capture market share. Oh, and if you have to battle the retail sales folks for pushing people away from your product, you will have an even harder time selling your product. You have some serious holes in your plan. Read more here: http://thom.ws/qgZ7yI

MOG Launches Free Version Of Music Service
MOG announced today that they are offering an ad-supported free version of their music service. The interesting thing here is they are trying to gamify the service, giving users free music,  based on the amount of sharing, playlist creation, and the number of referrals to the service. This could be interesting. According to their press release “Tastemakers and influencers can easily get a lifetime of free on-demand music.” Read more here: http://thom.ws/o4P0CC

Chegg Buys Zinch In A Move Towards A Social Education Platform
You may not have heard of either of these companies, but they are leaders in their own industries. Chegg is an online book rental service for college students, and Zinch is an online service that connects high school students with college recruiters. On the surface, this is an odd acquisition, but more and more companies are buying complimentary services and products to increase their over all sales. Read more here: http://thom.ws/nvLUNG

Samsung Wants To Own Your First, Second, And Third Screen
Samsung is making a push to build technology that directly competes with Apple and it’s AirPlay technology. The company has had some success in the past, but this push could be fueled by the back and forth patent infringement claims made by both Apple and Samsung. Read more here: http://thom.ws/qZK9T4

2. Yahoo Is About To Spin Off A Billion Dollar Business
Yahoo is going to spin off its Hadoop unit this week, a Giga Om report says.

Hadoop is an open source software framework pioneered by Yahoo that’s useful to handle tons of data in the cloud, which is exactly the type of thing that is really hot these days. We wrote previously about Yahoo’s impending Hadoop spinoff; it’s a potential billion-dollar business that’s not in Yahoo’s core, and so would be best spun off with Yahoo retaining a stake.

3. How NextDrop Is Using Cell Phones, Crowdsourcing To Get Water To The Thirsty
In cities where the water coming from pipes is anything but reliable, a new service alerts people so they don’t have to sit at home all day waiting for the tap to turn on.

4. All-You-Can-Watch MoviePass Brings Netflix Model to Theaters
MoviePass, a new $50-per-month service for film fans, will let subscribers watch unlimited movies in theaters using their smartphones as tickets.

Using an HTML5 application (native smartphone apps coming soon), MoviePass will let users search for a film, find a local show time, check in to the theater and go straight to the ticket-taker.

5. Top 10 Reasons Geeks Should Love the Tour de France This Saturday, the 98th edition of the Tour de France starts in Province of Liège, kicking off three weeks of bicycle racing. Twenty-one teams of nine riders each will have to endure 3,400 kilometers of racing and 23 mountain passes to reach the finish line on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. It’s an event full of incredible human achievement and endurance. But it’s also full of geeky goodness. I decided to update my article from 2009 encouraging you to enjoy the race.

BONUS

6. Apple “steps up its game”, new iOS 5 firmware to block downgrades
Apple has started to introduce new security checks in its new iOS 5 software that could possibly restrict owners of an iPhone, iPad or iPod from downgrading the firmware on their devices, the iPhone Dev-Team has revealed.

7. Companies Are Erecting In-House Social Networks
What would Facebook look like without photos of drunken nights out and tales of misbehaving cats? It might look a lot like the internal social network at the offices of Nikon Instruments.

8. Take that Netflix, HBO Go app sees big growth 
If you don’t believe cord cutting exists and that there isn’t any competition between Netflix and cable programmers, then you needn’t read on. If on the other hand, you at least see the potential for Netflix to some day snatch customers away from the cable guys, then take note: this weekend HBO expects to see the 3 millionth download of the HBO Go app, which debuted on May 2, a company spokesman told CNET. There are 28 million HBO subscribers in the United States so the 3 million downloads would indicate that roughly 10 percent of the company’s audience has tried out the app.

2. Google Invests $102 Million More Into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center
According to an official company blog post today, Google is increasing its investment into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) by $102 million, bringing its total investment in the renewable energy facility to $157 million.

3. Tips for taking good handheld photos at night
The problem with taking photographs in low-light situations is that the camera has little alternative but to leave the shutter open longer to soak up more light. These tricks and tools will help you take better nighttime photos, without having to pack a tripod.

4. Music Discovery Platform exfm Goes Mobile With A Killer App For iOS
The artist formerly known as Extension Entertainment, now known simply as exfm, has officially gone mobile today, releasing its first mobile app for iOS. I’ve been enjoying exfm for a few months now through the startup’s Chrome extension, so I’m very excited to be able to finally bring that experience with me on-the-go.

5. A New Mobile Social Games King In The U.S.? Former Facebookers Take Storm8 To 210 Million Downloads
On the heels of PopCap’s billion dollar acquisition comes some interesting news from the social games front: Game developer Storm8 is today announcing a few impressive stats. Among other things, the company is claiming that it has become the “largest mobile social games developer in the U.S.”, boasting over 210 million downloads across iOS and Android. While those numbers are certainly impressive, with Angry Birds raking in over 200 million downloads, I think Rovio, Zynga, PopCap, Outfit7 and quite a few others might have a thing or two to say about that, each of which has fairly sizable user bases in the U.S. Then again, Rovio is in fact Helsinki-based and Outfit7 is international as well so Storm8′s claim to American soil likely stands — at least in relation to the Angry Birds and Talking Tom Cat makers, respectively.

BONUS

6. Google Launches New DOM Snitch Chrome Extension To Keep You Safe From Malicious JavaScript
Google has this week announced via its security blog a new tool its created called the DOM Snitch which is an experimental Chrome extension that enables developers to identify insecure practices commonly found in client-side code.

7. Amazon’s “state of the cloud” — it isn’t stacking up
When it comes to the cloud, just forget about the stack. Cloud computing is evolving beyond the data structure of interchangeable layers, said Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President at Amazon, during his “state of the cloud” address at GigaOm’s Structure conference.

So far I think Pulse is the best iPhone app on the market. And now you can access the app on any web enabled device using their new website, pulse.me. This is huge. Another feature that rocks this app is the ability to save an article for future reading. In the past I’ve had to email the link to myself so I could read it when I had time.

And Pulse now allows you to send article links to Instapaper and Evernote. Again, this is huge on many levels. The ability to send content to Evernote is great for me because I use It throughout my day.

Take some time to check out Pulse, you’ll be glad you did.

This isn’t like other products Microsoft has failed gain market share with, and eventually cancelled, like the Zune. This to me is a make or break product line for Microsoft. The future is mobile. And if they are unable to keep up, they deserve to fail, and fast. There is no way Microsoft can say they didn’t see this coming. As I’ve said in the past, they have an enormous developer base. They should have been tapping into that long ago. They should have an app store that rivals Apple’s iTunes App Store.

If you’re a Windows Phone 7 user, what are the missing pieces? Do you feel you have backed the right horse? Could Microsoft survive a Windows Phone 7 failure?

50GB of storage for $5.99 a month for one computer.
125GB of storage for for $9.99 a month for up to 3 computers.

Not having an unlimited plan will force some to rethink what they backup. Most will probably fall into the 50GB plan, but with hard drives reaching the terabyte range, full hard drive backups will cost considerably more.

Mozy competitor Carbonite.com still has an unlimited plan which only costs $4.57 a month. I wonder if the move by Mozy will signal their competitors to follow suite, or keep plans and pricing the same.

Do you use Mozy? What has your experience been? I’ve used Mozy for a long time, and they have been 100% reliable. I’ve never had a problem backing up or restoring.

Update: Several people reminded me today that they have terabytes of data backed up on Mozy. After calculating the costs, yeah, it skyrocketed for sure. For example, if you have 1 Terabyte of data backed up on Mozy, your looking at something like $110 a month now up from basically $5.

• 1TB of backed up date – 125GB of alloted backup space = 975GB of storage not covered under the high end plan
• 975GB / 20GB = roughly 50 20GB block of storage that you must pay for each month
• 50 20GB blocks * $2.00 a month = $100 per month
• $9.99 monthly cost + $100 overage cost per month = $110
• That looks like a +/- 95% increase in cost

My math could be wrong, and if it is, I apologize, love to have someone gently correct me.

I wonder how many others have that much data backed up on Mozy. At $5 for a terabyte, I wonder if they were losing money. I think businesses should make money. And if this is what it takes for Mozy to make money, then I’m all for it. I just know several people who are looking for cheaper solutions now.

Microsoft is late to the mobile party as it were. Apple owns a commanding lead in the smart phone arena, with Android and BlackBerry having large user bases. But Windows hasn’t had a game competing device or OS until now. If Microsoft does this right, and doesn’t strong arm developers as much as Apple does, the Windows Phone 7 app store could be the piece that makes this phone a winner.

Application Stores like iTunes, have given Apple the leverage it needs to remain strong and keep their lead. With over the top developer agreements, and total control over the hardware and software, they also control the experience. Microsoft owns the OS, but is allowing other manufactures to build the devices, which isn’t necessarily and bad thing, but could be one reason it only achieves mediocre success. If I could wave a magic wand and command the Mobile division at Microsoft, that’s what I would do. Users may kick and scream, but taking a queue from Apple, so what. The experience is second to none.

The application space for the Windows Phone 7 could be a land rush. And with the shear number of developers who write software for the Windows platform, and so have a good understanding of the language used to write applications for WP7, I would expect see the volume of apps built and sold in the WP7 store to dwarf that of Apples iTunes App Store. I could be wrong, but the numbers are in Microsoft’s favor.

Microsoft is definitely muscling in on the mobile and cloud space. With the introduction of the Azure platform, and the WP7, Microsoft is finally starting to embrace anywhere computing as it’s lead platform.

From the Twitter blog:

We dug into the platform with a development partner, IdentityMine, who helped us get started creating our application. We used an open source REST API library, Tweet Sharp, as the foundation for our app, and IdentityMine will release some significant improvements back into open source for everyone to use.

Wow, releasing this application back into the community as open source. That will let developers take the code and create their own versions, based off the work Twitter and IdentityMine have already done. Nice to see them ahead of the curve.

I read this Wired article today, and I had too cringe hearing Microsoft is taking aim at Google and Apple. Why would they want too? They own such an enormous desktop market, and they could own the mobile space too, but not trying to come at it from the rear. Utilize your existing customer base to build the best mobile experience for Windows users. The reason Android is catching on so quickly, besides the open software and the backing of Google, is it’s really the only smart phone alternative to the iPhone at the moment. There are other platforms, but nothing at the level of an Android phone.

I’m not foolish enough to think Microsoft doesn’t have a huge gap when it comes to mobile market share. I mean they haven’t really put any effort into it for years. But that’s what’s cool about the opportunity they have. If they want to take something from Apple, take the fact Apple goes to incredible lengths to make the user experience the best on the planet. Whether you think that is egotistical, close minded, or plain and simple snobbery, it doesn’t matter. They make products that people like. And Microsoft should focus on the same thing.

I think Microsoft is in the perfect position. I really hope they don’t blow it by trying to “be” a bigger better Apple or Google, because they will fail.