Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is not known for a lack of enthusiasm or hyperbole. It's surprising, then, to see him downplaying the expected effect of Windows 7's release on new system sales. Reuters quoted Ballmer on Wednesday at a news conference in Munich as saying "There will be a surge of PCs but it will probably not be huge." Certainly this is not a doom and gloom statement, but considering the source it's also not the inflated PR-speak that we've come to expect.

Does this mark a new approach for Ballmer? Are the days of the monkey-boy dance, or the developers, developers, developers chant gone? Or will Steve return to his shilling ways soon enough? Only time will tell.

A video of Ballmer selling Windows 1.0 like it's a used car is embedded after the break.

[via X-bit labs]

When we first heard about Viewdle yesterday we dismissed the company as yet another online video search and indexing system. But now that we've played with Reuters' new "Face Search" powered by Viewdle, we have to say, we're impressed.

Here's how it works. You type in a name, like Britney Spears or George Bush. Viewdle searches through an index of Reuters videos and pulls up clips featuring those people. As the video plays, you'll notice a little white box around the face of the person you searched for. Some videos include multiple faces in the index. You can click on any face with a white box to find more videos featuring that person. Or you can look under the player for a list of faces in the video you're watching and the times at which they appear in the video.

We can easily see this technology being crucial to online video sites featuring news, entertainment, and of course pornography.

In the early days of the web, before high-fallutin' content-management systems, document control, and database-driven blogs, web authors were for the most part forced to stage their content in a clumsy, time-consuming way. Manually uploading and resizing graphics and hand-writing HTML in an early web editor like "HotDog" or "HotMetal" (remember those?) was how we all did our first web authoring, and thank goodness the times have changed.

With the evolution of multi-user content management software (like Blogsmith, for example) and simple syndication protocols like RSS and Atom, it has become much easier to run high-volume web sites that require constant content additions and alterations. Sadly, the productivity evolution also made it easier for plagiarists to steal content and rebrand it as their own--mostly, we suppose, because of RSS, which give friend and foe alike equal, unfettered access to most blogs and news web sites. Since RSS is an open system with no access controls, it's as easy to rip somebody off using their news feed as it is to use it in the manner intended--usually, syndication with proper attribution of author and publisher.

Seeing this as a problem with a business answer, a former Yahoo exec started a company called Attributor, whose service can track and monitor the use of syndicated content across the web. This is an interesting idea, and aside from setting these Redwoodians up as obvious Google Bait, syndication monitoring appears to be good business, too. Attributor just signed up Reuters as a new account. Not a bad fish to have on the hook, especially when you're just getting started. Attributor also offers a service which will enforce content licensing--allowing publishers to monetize their syndication in a way RSS alone cannot.

Lots of news on the CNN corporate front this week. First the media giant announced that they were dumping Yahoo in favor of Google ads, now they are saying no more Reuters.

CNN said on Thursday that they would be terminating their 27 year relationship in order to cut costs. The Time Warner owned company said that they had not wanted to rely on outside sources as much as they currently do, and would be focusing their efforts and money saved on investing in their own news gathering staff.

CNN reiterated the fact that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Reuters, the way they operate or their content. CNN just wishes to own the content they serve, and they believe that content ownership is king. Reuters text, photography, and television materials will stop being used as of Friday, today, on CNN.

However, the big question is why will CNN still be using Reuters competition, the Associated Press?

[via Reuters]

Microsoft is tapping the social network phenomenon by starting up one of their own. This financial social network will focus on finance professionals, and be targeted towards career roles. By the sounds of things, this financial site could be based of the current Microsoft Live pages idea where users get their own personal blog area with the addition of forums, and on Microsoft Dynamics Live.

I know what you're saying. Oh no, not another social network started by a big tech company, and that's exactly what our thoughts are. With Reuters having announced their financial network set to berecently, we could see a full on financial social network war. However, companies like Microsoft do have built in following already, so the potential impact this network could have in a short amount of time could be quite high.

Could Microsoft announce new communities for sales, marketing, operations, HR, and IT fields later this year?

First Reuters announces that it'll be launching a social news service similar to MySpace. Now it turns out MySpace is rumored to be working on a news service (that probably won't really compete head to head with Reuters).

The upcoming MySpace news venture will allow users to post news clips on their personal pages, share those clips with others, and rate and comment on others' news items. We're guessing you'll find much more entertainment and general interest new on MySpace than on tech-heavy sites like Digg and Slashdot.

MySpace News should launch within the next few months.

[via Webware]

With MySpace being a successful proven social network and many other niche networks sprouting up everywhere, who would have ever thought that Reuters would jump on board?

Reuters is planning on launching their own social network this year that will be aimed at fund managers, traders, and analysts. The Reuters social network will be exclusive to subscribers of Reuters, of which they hope to enlist 70,000 members from their messaging service.

What's the goal of the Reuters network? Have Reuters financial services users post research or trading models. What do you think, have social networks gone too far? Or are they fitting in quite nicely with societies little niches?

Yahoo! and Reuters started accepting photos and videos of news events from users all over the internet to use in related online news articles this week. Both companies plan on taking advantage of the many people worldwide that use mobile devices and digital cameras to take shots of breaking news, aka crowdsourcing. This new program will be called You Witness News, with Reuters planning on distributing selected submissions for print and broadcast. As far as compensation goes for photo and video submissions, the companies are working on some kind of reward. Yahoo! plans to start the You Witness program by offering social rewards. These social rewards will be evident in the online profiles of news submission members who get mentioned in articles. Reuters is, however, planning on compensating submitters when it does distribute the materials to its clients. There is currently no word on how much the compensations will be. If done right, I think Yahoo! and Reuters can really harness the true powers of crowdsourcing. Pay the users a minimum of $20 per submission that actually gets used, and people will be hunting for breaking news. Thus pulling in a lot more traffic for both Yahoo! and Reuters news sites. What do you think? Would you submit breaking news for the opportunity to net some cash, or for a "social reward"?

Sun's CIO dropped the news today that Google is using open source implementations of Solaris. Google is currently running Solaris in its data centers, but is looking forward to installing more Sun servers because of the open source Solaris. Given that they have hired on a list of previous Sun employees, it only looks promising for Google to test its own modified versions of Open Solaris.

eBay, Yahoo, Vonage, Disney, and Reuters are also on the list of companies that have adopted the Sun Solaris platform.

Today iMesh will launch BearShare 6.0, which is a long-standing p2p file sharing client many people us to download copyrighted music. Apparently, this edition of BearShare is a legalized edition. It sounds like iMeshToGo and BearShareToGo will offer a long awaited solution to the problem of illegal file-sharing, and the other problem of no way for people to buy music in an effective way that is user-centric. The services will run side-by-side and users will be able to interact between the two services later this year. This makes it easy for users to share their music preferences and even download ringtones as well. I obviously haven't tested out the new product, but it is the first service I have seen to get a grip on the actual problem that exists with music downloading.

[Via Reuters]