(Credit:
Valve Software)

“We do not comment on market rumor or speculation,” Google said in a statement. Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Update 9:40 a.m. PDT: Gaming site Kotaku threw some cold water on the report after speaking to Doug Lombardi, Valve’s director of marketing. The site said Lombardi called the Google acquisition report “purely a rumor, a bit of fiction.” Though that wasn’t a direct quote, and there’s some wiggle room in the wording, Kotaku also concluded that Google is “out of the picture.”

See update below that dashes some cold water on the report.

Google is on the brink of buying noted video game maker Valve Software, according to a report in The Inquirer that cites “well-placed sources.”

That rationale makes some sense to me as well, in part because getting into the video game business in and of itself doesn’t sound terribly well aligned with Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Steam is an online foundation for selling and distributing games, updating patches, enabling multiplayer online chat, and using digital rights management to control who has permission to use elements like game versions or game terrain.

While a lot of that is specific to games today, I see no reason why it might not apply more broadly. Google, of course, likes to be the clearinghouse for online activity, and this could add some expertise.

Activity on Valve's Steam Powered service currently crests with about 1.2 million users. (Click to enlarge.)

Steam Powered shows 448 games available now, and in February, Valve said Steam had 15 million account holders. But this is the more telling statistic: During peak hours, online activity crests at about 1.2 million users every day. That’s clearly a lot of activity.

Search Cube is the latest in a string of search engines that forgoes displaying search results in an easy-to-parse, ordered list, in favor of a whiz-bang 3D interface. It grabs its results from Google and site preview thumbnails from Thumbshots, then combines them in a 3D cube that you can rotate freely either with your mouse or keyboard.

Here’s a quick demo of what it looks like (a higher-quality stream should be live soon):

See also: Viewzi, Pixsy, OSkope, ManagedQ, and RedZee.
Related: Mozilla, graphics group seek to build 3D Web

What’s clearly missing here are which results are worth clicking on, something you get with Google’s search result relevance algorithm. On the flip side (literally), you get to see a lot more results at once, and with a little visual flair.

Actual traffic to Last.fm hasn’t jumped quite so much: CBS reports 27 percent more unique visitors and 45 percent more page views over the same time period. That suggests that existing Last.fm visitors are indeed tuning into the new music offering, but that it might not be boosting membership numbers quite yet. Claiming early success, however, is important PR for CBS: many have lost faith in ad-supported streaming music. Once hyped as the solution to both peer-to-peer piracy and the iTunes monopoly, enthusiasm has faded as start-ups like SpiralFrog have made disappointing debuts.

According to a release from CBS on Friday, there were 85 percent more unique listeners on Last.fm on Wednesday, January 23–the day that CBS Corporation and Last.fm announced the service–than there had been on the previous Wednesday. The next day, Thursday, saw an 80 percent increase from the previous Thursday, which CBS took as evidence that it wasn’t just a single-day phenomenon.

CBS executives have remained optimistic, suggesting that big-media muscle may be the secret to making free streaming music work online.

Last.fm had previously offered streaming music primarily in 30-second clips. But thanks to licensing agreements with all four major music labels, the social music service now allows users to stream a song three times for free before being given the option to purchase the song at a number of digital music stores.

Shares of IBM were down a hair in early morning trading to $115.80, down 19 cents.

For Big Blue, removing the ban will bring a few more bucks its way. Last year, IBM generated nearly $1.43 billion from federal government contracts. That represented a 1.4 percent slice of its overall revenues of $98.8 billion last year.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia is also investigating the issue.

But while the ban, which lasted nine days, has been removed, Big Blue is still busy cooperating with the Environmental Protection Agency with the investigation that had triggered the broad suspension. The environmental agency is examining possible violations of its procurement process over IBM’s bid for EPA business.

IBM and the U.S. government are back in business.

DENVER–During the primary campaign, Hillary Clinton lashed out at her rival, saying she was the only candidate with the right plan “to create 5 million new, green collar jobs.” She dismissed Barack Obama thusly: “My opponent doesn’t have much experience creating jobs at all.”

On Tuesday evening here at the Democratic convention, the Democrats’ intra-party dispute over who had the best plan to create “5 million green collar jobs” officially ended. In a speech that extolled the virtues of working together to defeat Sen. John McCain, Clinton said her onetime rival from Illinois “is my candidate and he must be our president.”

Through his Web site, Obama responded that he had a better plan to create “5 million green collar jobs.”

Joined by her husband, Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea Clinton, the New York senator acquiesced on the green-jobs point. Obama will “transform our energy agenda by creating millions of green jobs and building a new, clean energy future,” she acknowledged.

(Credit:
CBS News)

The issue of green jobs is likely to reappear again in the general election this fall, and Obama has some competition. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, also says he has a plan for green jobs, but doesn’t seem to say how many millions of jobs he’ll create: “Green jobs and green technology will be vital to our economic future. There is no reason that the U.S. should not be a leader in developing and deploying these new technologies.”

Except for Clinton loyalists, including some delegates who staged a rally in her support outside the Pepsi Center, this may put to rest the key question of who had the more efficacious plan–while not answering who came up with it first. The Obama campaign’s “factcheck” site claims that “Obama advocated for green-collar jobs for years–and unveiled his plan a month before Clinton unveiled hers.” (In an article titled “It’s Not Easy Being Green-Collar,” Forbes outlined this dispute.)

It’s about connecting any device to any network from anywhere at anytime.

BARCELONA, Spain–Mobility means different things to different companies. For Cisco Systems, it means more than just taking your handset or MP3 on the go.

“This will be the next phase of the Internet,” Cisco CEO John Chambers said at an event on Monday previewing a keynote address he will be giving Tuesday morning at the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress here. This is the first time ever that Cisco, the leading supplier of IP infrastructure equipment in the world, is addressing the cell phone industry in this forum.

One thing is certain: Cisco doesn’t see a single technology as the answer. Chambers said the company would keep its options open as it evolves its wireless and mobile strategies. For example, even though Cisco recently paid $330 million to buy the WiMax start-up Navini Networks, it doesn’t mean the company will push only WiMax solutions. In fact, he pointed out the danger of getting into a religious technology battle.

He said a hybrid approach is the most likely way to address consumers’ needs. In some cases, a wired broadband network will be the best choice, while in other cases a wireless infrastructure will serve consumers’ needs better.

“You can’t fall in love with one technology over another,” he said. “There are lots of people who would have told you that ATM to the desktop was the best solution. But it was fast Ethernet that won the day.”

Chambers said that applications and the information that users are trying to access are what should be mobile, not the device itself. And it shouldn’t matter whether the information is accessed on a wireless network or over one that is wired.

“Most people talk about mobility in terms of a device,” he told analysts and reporters Monday. “But the challenge is to think of mobility as the ability to connect any device to any content at any time, anywhere in any mode. It really goes across a combination of networks.”

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content,” Apple’s statement reads. “The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the
iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

Many observers thought that the App Store flip-flops might end when iPhone OS 3.0 was released because Apple could utilize the new operating system’s built-in parental controls.

(Credit:
Apple, Inc.)

That left a lot of people backpedaling after yelling at Apple for pulling the app. As it turns out Apple did pull the app–the company confirmed the move in a statement provided to CNET on Friday.

The developer’s note read:

Using parental controls you can block inappropriate content, including apps, movies and music from children.

Thursday saw the first softcore porn app arrive for the iPhone, only to disappear hours later. Many, including myself, thought Apple had approved and then banned the app, but a note on the developer’s Web site indicated that he asked for the app to be removed.

Yesterday was a little confusing.

Microsoft is competing heavily with Google and Yahoo to be the best Web search experience on mobile devices, which is the next frontier for search, ads, and other services. According to Nielsen Mobile, Yahoo was the top Internet wireless Web brand in 2007, followed by Google and then MSN.

Microsoft already offers voice input for Windows Mobile users, and soon BlackBerry users will be able to speak commands to find businesses on Live Search and get driving directions with results displayed on interactive maps.

The news is scheduled to be announced by Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, who is giving a keynote speech at the
CTIA 2008 wireless trade show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

For Windows Mobile, Microsoft is adding the ability to view the address for contacts on a map and get directions and to view custom maps of locations and events created by you or others on a PC. Users also will be able to launch Web search directly from the client to find Web pages, product comparisons, and other information. In addition, Windows Mobile users will be able to view weather conditions and a four-day forecast.

Microsoft is adding new features to its Live Search for Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry.

Anyone who has encountered the new oddball Facebook app du jour can attest that the novelty gets old rather fast. That’s because many of the ideas are insipid time sucks. At that point, you’re more likely to tune out (if you haven’t already hit the delete button.) Indeed, O’Reilly notes the “tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then to plateau in growth after a few weeks.”

Growth pattern for "falling" apps

Only a very small percentage of Facebook applications have enough traffic to generate substantial advertising dollars (this was a key finding of O’Reilly Radar’s original Facebook Application Platform report), and The social networking phenomena is still in its awkward (and baffling) adolescence, so few marketers can unravel the real opportunities from the hype and the hope. Anybody who spends a fair chunk of time on Facebook inevitably is going to get bombarded by goofy apps forwarded by friends. O’Reilly’s research backs up the anecodotal impression that “developers are not making heavy investments in the Facebook as platform. For the most part, applications are still fairly lightweight - “fluffy” - in nature.”

(Credit:
O'Reilly)

It’s easy to get caught up in the mania but as a new O’Reilly report reminds readers, only a handful of Facebook applications ever become smash hits.

The reasons why:

So for the time being, O’Reilly is land zoning Facebook more as a testing ground for promotional and marketing activity than for serious applications. On the surface, that may not sound promising for the future, but it’s useful to recall that we’re still in the very early innings.

It has a long ways to evolve before it will be the home of applications with more gravitas, solving meatier social networking and collaboration problems. A social graph platform, comprised of profiles, connections, sharing and access controls, groups, communication, conversation, and collaboration, can provide an environment for so much more than just playful social networking. There is yet plenty of room for innovation going forward, as social networking applications become more sophisticated, with greater investment in applications for different target communities of users - users for whom it makes sense to build tools for sharing, knowledge management, and collaboration upon a social graph. Once they figure that out, Facebook may be a more promising testbed where outside developers aim far beyond personal social networking.

If you want this new visual voice mail feature, you’ll have to go to Messaging on your handset, select the Visual Voice Mail link, launch it, enter your voice mail password, and then follow the prompts to subscribe to visual voice mail (it’s a free subscription). Existing Voyager customers can bring their device to a local Verizon store to get the upgrade, or you can download it directly by visiting this page. Here’s hoping that Verizon adds this visual voice mail feature to other phones in its lineup.

As with the other visual voice mail systems, the Voyager’s version will allow customers to listen to voice mail messages in any order; plus you’ll have the ability to erase and archive messages directly from the Voyager’s touch-screen interface. You will also be able to access the voice mail with a single button, and get instant playback.

The LG Voyager gets visual voice mail.

(Credit:
Verizon Wireless)

The Apple iPhone was the first to get it, then the Samsung Instinct, and now it’s the LG Voyager’s turn to get visual voice mail. Yes, as of Friday, all LG Voyager customers can get a free download to their phone that will add visual voice mail capability.

Verizon customers can send each other voice mail messages.

Each voice mail will have details, like the number or name of the caller, the day, date, and time of the message, the message length, and when the message will expire. You can then also choose to call back or text the contact. You can even choose to send a voice mail back to the person, as long as he or she is a Verizon Wireless customer.

(Credit:
Verizon Wireless)