Opera Upgrade

Opera Software has released Opera 9.5 software developer kit for Devices. The release will include a new beta visual effects layer that will give users an emotionally heightened Web experience with fluid transitions, panning, zooming and interactivity.

Opera 9.5 SDK will also include an improved evaluation kit that allow device manufacturers to quickly experience the potential of a product aimed to deliver the latest end-user experiences for Internet browsing, Web applications and Web-based user interfaces.

Vertical Search Salvation?

It appears lots of online publishers think vertical search is one way to survive the Google assault and prop up their walled gardens. It's too early to tell. It won't hurt. Not so clear to me that it helps much.

The ARPU Gap is the Issue

One might quibble with the precise Yankee Group numbers indicated here for voice and data average revenue per user. What remains incontestable is that there is a revenue gap between voice and data services, on either the wired or wireless business segments. So as broadband starts to become the foundation service upon which other applications and revenue streams are built, there is immense work to be done. I suppose everybody knows this, by now.

iTunes Dominates Downloads

Much as Google dominates search and search revenue, Apple's iTunes dominates legal music downloading. Aside from ringtones, it isn't so clear to me how well mobile service providers will do with their own music-selling efforts. Every little bit helps, I suppose. But music doesn not look anything like a "killer app" for mobile service providers.

Carphone Warehouse in Play?

Shares of Carphone Warehouse Group, Europe's largest mobile handset retailer, rose the most in more than five years in London trading on speculation the company may receive a takeover offer, says the Bloomberg news service.

"Rumors about bid interest from Vodafone and Best Buy have been doing the rounds for some time," says Jimmy Yates, a London-based trader at CMC Markets.

What is interesting is the strategy context driving some of the rumored suitors. Best Buy has a small stake in Carphone Warehouse, which operates 2,400 stores across Europe. Best Buy also is collaborating with the U.K. chain to boost sales of mobile products in the U.S. Best Buy stores.

So you might argue that Carphone is simply a way for Best Buy to expand its footprint in its current business.

But keep in mind that Carphone also has 2.5 million Digital Subscriber Line customers. It also has a backbone network. Consider that Best Buy's Geek Squad is in the technology services business.

And recall that Best Buy owns Speakeasy, a provider of business-class broadband access and voice services in the U.S. market. Sure, Best Buy can grow its retail footprint. But by acquiring Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy makes an even bigger bet to become a more-significant provider of broadband access, business voice and mobile services.

For Best Buy, its core business is more than acting as a retail distribution channel. It is a service provider. Owning Carphone Warehouse would only deepen that commitment.

Now consider the possibility that Vodafone might acquire Carphone Warehouse. The idea there is not so much that Vodafone wants to become a mass market electronics retailer. Vodafone, long a dominant wireless service provider, now must also become a multiple-services provider, and broadband-based services provided over wireline networks are part of the vision.

Carphone Warehouse would give Vodafone much more heft, in that area. It might not strike you as significant that wireless and wireline services are converging. It might be a bit more surprising that retailers are moving from simple channel partners into the service provider business.

Google Can Index Test in Images and Video

A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video, notes Duncan Riley at TechCrunch. That would be a big step forward in indexing visual media, since there would be no need to manually attach tags to such visual media.

Basically, the patent covers a method whereby any visible text in an image--a street sign, for example--can be automatically indexed. Obviously, as with any of the developing Web-based technologies, there are privacy issues. As someone who has to work with lots of images, and spends lots of time wading through images that a search suggests are appropriate, and aren't, this is really helpful.

Does Music Industry "Get It"?

as someone who arrogantly and wrongly has accused whole industries of "not getting it" at points in the past, I never like to presume I understand executive thinking better than they themselves do.

What sometimes appears as "cluelessness" often has more to do with deliberate timing. and rational calculations about how long to let one revenue model atrophy before heating up a replacement revenue model that will cannibalize the older model.

So let me be charitable. Perhaps U.S. music executives do have a plan for changing their business model and packaging. Perhaps they are executing on that plan even now.

Album sales declined 9.5 percent last year, while digital song sales grew 45 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Physical product sales were down 15 percent, including sales of "singles."

So maybe the issue is simply figuring out better ways to handle digital rights that aren't unfriendly to consumers who have paid for their music, nor damaging to copyright holders. It's a tough problem, to be sure.

And the problems extend far beyond copyright issues. As someone who has made a transition to iPod as my primary music playback system, and as someone whose PC-embedded hard drives need to be replaced once a year or so, the issue of storing and managing the music collection is a serious problem.

The reason, of course, is that each iPod syncs with just one hard drive. Lose that hard drive and one has two options: completely erase the contents of the iPod, or never change the data already on the iPod.

So now I have to take two paths to make sure the music isn't lost: store the copies on an external hard drive that hopefully "never" dies; and then keep the compact disk as well, since the external hard drive will ultimately fail, forcing me to restore or simply forget about the music stored on it.

As a simple music customer, this is a problem. Unless I have physical media backup, the music always is at risk of loss, for mechanical reasons. But keeping those CDs is not ideal, either. And the process of restoring lost music is time-consuming. So music storage "in the cloud" seems promising, at least to me.