Microsoft wants Windows Phone 7 users to have it fast and fun. The new mobile operating system swaps static homescreen icons for "live tiles" - self-updating buttons that aim to speed up phone interactions. All Windows Phones will have a dedicated hardware Bing Button, another intended time-saving tool. The Bing screen has three search options - Local, Web and News - for specific and fast queries.

Themed hubs collect "related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks." These hubs are titled as follows: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.

These hubs are filled with intuitively relevant content - People provides live feeds from social networks, and a central updater for Facebook and Windows Live. Pictures shares images and video with social networks and connects with the Web and PC. Continue Reading »

This year’s Macworld is different than most tech conferences because, outside of vendors on the exhibition floor, much of the focus is on entertainment.

Both David Pogue and Leo Laporte did variations on the talk show – Pogue’s a celebration of all things Pogue, Laporte’s more traditional, featuring an interview with The Bird’s Roger McGuinn on the new music space, a chat with one of the Mythbusters guys, and a performance by Warp 11, a classic-punk band whose songs are all about Star Trek.

And of course Kevin Smith rocked the crowd with his decidedly non-PC (the ideology, not the platform), non-tech, Q&A.

So while in a sense the tech fades to the background, Macworld is still a conference about the Apple ecosystem. The three main themes repeated among conference attendees and the media are:

1. Apple’s absence has really marred the event.
2. It should no longer be called Macworld, as it’s more focused on the iPhone than anything else.
3. What do you think of the iPad?

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Building a video game from scratch takes a lot of resources. But just like anything creative, technology is making this category more accessible to those of us who have ideas, but not necessarily the technical knowledge.

Now there is GameSalad - "Game creation for the rest of us." Currently being exhibited at MacWorld by a developer with long blond dreads and a few other guys, this stand-alone application makes game design something most anyone can do.

With an interface that gives resolution for Apple iPhone, GameSalad.com, and some larger options, the program has a building block component feel. As attendants define rules for objects and preview animations, the GameSalad team shows the basic principles for design. The program includes quick start genres, but customizability seems extensive enough that there is not a "GameSalad look" to the games that have used the software.

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The overall consensus is that this year’s Macworld is a shadow of what it used to be. With Apple’s pulling out, the conference and mystique has shrunk to the point that some are predicting that this Macwold will be the last.

“Macworld used to take two days to see,” said one attendee. “This year you can see it in an hour.”

While the event has – largely with director Kevin Smith, who absolutely killed in yesterday’s 1 ½ hour Q&A – been able to fill in the absence with an entertaining sheen, the general sense here in the media room is that pickings are pretty slim.

That was even apparent in the Best of Show, exhibition floor companies that were chosen by DEMO as the best. The awards, presented by VentureBeat’s Editor-In-Chief Matt Marshall, the new head of DEMO, were indicative of this. Of the six ‘best,’ three were great, and three were pretty blah.

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Kevin Smith’s talk at MacWorld on Thursday afternoon began as one would expect, full of filmmaker talk and adult humor.  His structure basically was answering questions from the audience, and had little to do with technology, and less still to do with Apple.

However, in a response that was concerned with the types of stories that interest him when he is making films, he revealed the extent that tech has influenced him. With Podcasts and Twitter, his opportunity to publicly discuss certain subjects has meant that he does not feel that he needs to include them in his films.

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The big story about this year’s conference is that Apple is no longer involved.

“I’ve got four words for you: Steve Jobs isn’t here,” keynote speaker David Pogue said after arriving onstage doing a Steve Ballmer imitation (which itself was an imitation of a drunk gorilla).

While attendees see Apple’s exit from Macworld as a loss for the conference, Pogue says that it will be freeing, saying, “For the first time we don’t have to kiss apple’s – we can say anything.”

“This is a Macworld where anything will happen,” said GM of Macworld, Paul Kent.

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We have earthquake simulations in San Francisco, but I’ve never heard of a simulated cyberattack. They happen, just aren’t advertised.

Except for this one.

Next week, February 16, there will be a public, simulated cyberattack on America. Dubbed ‘Cyber Shockwave,’ the attack, coordinated by the Bipartisan Committee, “will provide an unprecedented look at how the government would develop a real-time response to a large-scale cyber crisis affecting much of the nation.”

It will take place at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington D.C., where the White House Sit Room will be recreated.

Cyber ShockWave was created created by former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and the co-chairs of the 9-11 commission, Thomas Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton.

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Interesting strategy. Google followed up its semi-interesting – if semi-redundant – Buzz announcement yesterday with a much bigger one today.

Google is getting into broadband.

The Mountain View-based company announced today that it is going to build an experimental 1 Gbps broadband network.

“We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States,” according to Google. “We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.”

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Teens in tech face some particular problems that others in their age group surely do not. Like if college will be a detriment to their success.

Tech is famous for its most successful entrepreneurs not finishing their studies – Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for example – and whether or not to go to school is a legitimate concern for teen entrepreneurs for whom classes are an obstacle to their business activities.

“The important thing is all these people [Zuckerberg, etc.] enrolled in college,” said John Ramey, who started his company, isocket, while a student at Indiana University.

“They just didn’t finish,” said Ramy, who didn’t finish either but whose company signed a deal to handle Techcrunch’s advertising last May.

If you do enroll in college, do you spend all your time worrying about your grades and slack off on running your business?

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In video ad network YuMe’s recent analysis of their numbers, they found that the different ad formats had their own strengths and weaknesses. In the YuMe Video Ad Metrics January 2010 report, twelve months of key data and trends from in-stream video across their own network. YuMe served over three billion video ad impressions from January 2009 to December 2009.

Top in-stream video advertising spending categories were Auto at 18 percent and consumer packaged goods. CPG Household ranked second at 15.4 percent, beauty third at 10.1 percent.

By far the majority in YuMe online video ads were pre-roll commercials - rising from 81.5 percent to 92.6 percent throughout the year. While overlays made up over ten percent of all video ads in the fiscal year’s first quarter, and in-banners nearly eight percent, the rise of pre-rolls squeezed them both down to less than two percent in the fourth quarter. Custom ads rose from practically zero in Q1 to over four percent by Q4.

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