Since Eric the Silent rarely talks about what really goes on inside the inner sanctum, I’ve saved you the trouble of the guesswork and conducted my own imaginary Q&A:

In a way, though, you also opened the door for your rivals in the mobile business to make a big splash in mobile search and online advertising.
Imaginary Schmidt: We don’t talk about the competition.

Q: Thanks for taking the time, Eric. Did you ever seriously think about building your own wireless network in case Google actually won part of the spectrum auction?
Imaginary Schmidt: Get serious.

It never entered into your thinking?
Imaginary Schmidt: Come on. Do you think we’re so insane as to want to butt up against AT&T or Verizon?

What a magnificent bluff! After hearing about the outcome of the FCC’s wireless spectrum auction (click for PDF), I have to marvel at the poker face Eric Schmidt assumed throughout the course of the last several months.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Android is such a cool name.

When they look back at the last year, do you think people will say it was all a smoke screen?
Imaginary Schmidt: No. Maybe we could have leased spectrum to other service providers and let them build services. But who needed the headaches? Doesn’t really matter what Verizon does with the C block. As long as it remains open to devices running the Android mobile platform, everything’s cool.

I just wanted to go back to the reasons behind the original decision to bid the minimum $4.6 billion…
Imaginary Schmidt: Let me stop you there. It’s very simple. The future’s all about open-device and open-application rules. Steve Jobs may not understand that. I can tell you that Sergey, Larry, and I do.

Wasn’t there at least a chance this could serve as a launching point for a new business out of Google?

Imaginary Schmidt: What are you smoking, pal? Our business is solid. We’re all about developing apps, making money off of advertising, and causing Steve Ballmer agita. Bear Stearns or no Bear Stearns, we’ll still make a bundle. Now, you explain to me why we should even consider taking on the expense of becoming a wireless operator.

Last year, when all this first broke, your lobbyists went to Washington and pressed the FCC to make sure there was open access. But you only convinced them to accept one of your proposals. Can you comment?
Imaginary Schmidt: Sure, we still came out ahead. The regulators required the winner–in this case, Verizon–to let any device (or app, I should add parenthetically) to connect to a network using this spectrum.

But you did file an application with the FCC, didn’t you?
Imaginary Schmidt: Glad you noticed.

So, you’re still feeling OK even though Google didn’t win any licenses?
Imaginary Schmidt: It’s all good.

As Apple COO Tim Cook told us last month, the iPhone 3G will land in 20 more countries August 22. Several carriers made their formal announcements this week, including Telefonica and America Movil. Those rivals will overlap in eight Latin American countries. As of this writing we know 17 of the lucky 20 nations, which are listed below. Reuters is predicting that Singapore’s SingTel will also join the mix, but the carrier has yet to confirm that report. After August 22, an additional 28 countries are scheduled to get the
iPhone 3G before the end of the year. We’ll bring you that news as soon as we get it.

Argentina – Telefonica and America Movil
Chile – Telefonica and America Movil
Colombia – Telefonica and America Movil
Czech Republic – O2
Ecuador – Telefonica and America Movil
El Salvador – Telefonica and America Movil
Estonia – Eesti Mobii Telefon
Guatemala – Telefonica and America Movil
Honduras – America Movil
Hungary – T-Mobile
India – Bharti Airtel and Vodafone
Paraguay – America Movil
Philippines – GlobeTelecom
Peru – Telefonica and America Movil
Poland – Orange and Era
Romania – Orange
Uruguay – Telefonica and America Movil

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

iPhone 3G

Apparently, Verizon realized not all was well in the land. On Friday the carrier announced that the Storm would support V Cast Video for your viewing pleasure. The cost will be $10 per month for the usual programming including news and weather, sports recaps and television programming.

The Storm now has V Cast.

V Cast Video and the earlier V Cast Music addition help the Storm gain a little more respectability. Now if they could just fix that SurePress feature.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)

The Air Force is developing a data-mining technology meant to root out disaffected insiders based on their e-mail activity–or lack thereof, according to an article in this month’s International Journal of Security and Networks.

The technology, based on something called Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PDF), scours an organization’s e-mail traffic and constructs a graph of social network interactions illustrating employee activity. If a worker suddenly stops socializing online, abruptly shifts alliances within the organization, or starts developing an unhealthy interest in “sensitive topics,” the system detects it and alerts investigators.

(Credit:
AFIT)

Here’s another reason to get off that antisocial kick and get with the networking.

Most corporate security efforts focus on electronic threats from the outside, even through insiders with access to sensitive information can pose a greater threat to an organization, according to researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Alienated individuals who display a secret interest in suspicious topics but never let on by communicating with others are the most likely to be an insider threat, the researchers say. The program could prevent security breaches, sabotage, and even terrorist activity at multinational corporations and military organizations alike, according to the article.

Daily Debrief: iPhone 3G’s unveiling
Following Steve Jobs’ announcement Monday of the new iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, CNET News.com’s Charlie Cooper and Tom Krazit discuss features the smartphone both boasts and lacks.

Jobs unveils GPS for the 3G iPhone
Steve Jobs demonstrated GPS on the new iPhone 3G. Jobs showed how an iPhone traveling in a
car going down San Francisco’s famously crooked Lombard Street can be tracked as its user navigates the curves.

Apple unveils MobileMe at WWDC
Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, unveiled MobileMe, the company’s new cloud computing service that will connect all of your devices and push information up and down to keep everything up to date.

We’ve pulled together our video clips of his introduction, along with demos of some of its new features, including GPS, the faster 3G wireless technology, and MobileMe, a service that syncs users’ e-mail and calendar info on every device they register. Follow the jump for all those videos. And go here to see a roundup of all the third-party apps shown off Monday.

iPhone 3G makes its debut
Steve Jobs revealed the
iPhone 3G with faster download speeds, longer battery life, GPS, a lower price, and a near worldwide release beginning July 11.

As expected, Apple CEO Steve Jobs used his time on stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference to announce a new version of the iPhone.

commentary

There’s no telling where Mike will turn up next, but he’s someone that deserves the best. I’ll hope to see you back in the open-source fray before long, Mike.

Mike Olson, Sleepycat CEO and co-founder, has left Oracle. Mike quietly left Oracle in mid-January on amicable terms and indicates that he’s going to spend the next while looking around the industry to see what problems he can help fix. (Plus I think he’s going to ski a bit.

In particular, Yahoo has proven itself adept at making itself a less attractive takeover target. In addition to the usual sorts of poison pill defenses, it has found other weapons like cutting sweetheart deals for employees and negotiating a partnership with Google, the very company Microsoft is looking to rival.

It’s a natural question to ask. I mean, if Microsoft has had the hots for Yahoo for two years, can it really be so sure that it is no longer interested?

View results

News.com Poll Microhoo fallout
What’s most likely to happen, now that Microsoft has abandoned its bid for Yahoo?

“Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft,” Ballmer wrote. “We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a ‘hostile’ bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo today.”

Oracle walked away from its bid for software maker BEA Systems when the companies couldn’t come close to a price. But both companies returned to the table and ultimately negotiated an amicable deal. (Though it’s also worth noting that Oracle ended up paying far more than its original offer.)

My take is that Microsoft has ruled out two options, but that one possibility for Yahoo remains out there.

Microsoft says its offer for Yahoo is off the table, but could this be just a negotiating ploy?

From my point of view, though, it doesn’t mean Microhoo is totally dead. Even though several doors seem closed, I see one door that could swing back open. Yahoo shareholders may find it tough to swallow the fact that Yang said no to $33 a share and push him back to the negotiating table. In that scenario, the Yahoo that Microsoft finds so attractive could once again be on the market.

News.com’s Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

That’s not to say that a good feint can’t seal a deal.

For his part, Gartner analyst Allen Weiner thinks Microsoft really did walk away. “I think the drama is pretty close to being over,” he said. Microsoft and Yahoo both think they can rebuild themselves to their glory days on their own, he said.

Such a move might not pass regulatory muster, but Ballmer indicated in his letter to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang that Yahoo’s moves have succeeded in making the proxy battle sufficiently unattractive.

There’s also the possibility that Yahoo tries to go it alone for a little while, stumbles, and Microsoft comes back with a new offer.

Google gets stronger
Yahoo’s stock plummets
Microsoft tries to buy another company, like Facebook
Microsoft waits a while, then bids again for Yahoo
All of the above
None of the above

Many years ago we realized that we needed some processes around our adoption of open source. We were very clear that we wanted to take advantage of FOSS (free and open-source software) but also that we needed to manage our use of it. Our processes have grown and evolved over the years, and we’ve written software to assist with these processes.

I recently spent some time talking with Christine Martino, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of Linux and open source, about HP’s plans to provide services around open-source software. That HP is doing this is now old news (the news broke this week).

Are you helping to build those communities around the tools?

Christine elaborated:

HP has figured out that there’s more good that can come from giving a little value to its competitors than bad. A very grown-up view of software, indeed.

We thought about that, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to FOSS governance. Our software fits HP very well, but there are other ways to handle governance of FOSS. We don’t assume that we have all the answers or that we’re even finished with how we manage FOSS at HP. The way to create the richest set of FOSS tools and practices is to open-source it so that others can build on what we’ve done to tailor the tools to individual enterprise needs.

Fine and good, but why not create a proprietary product that HP could sell?

A very savvy effort. Yes, this will be good for the wider community, but you can bet that HP will be center stage in it, too, as well it should be. HP is the “source of the code” in this case, and as such will be the trusted adviser to which customers go to manage their open-source adoption.

The goal of all of this is to reduce a barrier to adoption of FOSS by enterprises. When you can understand it and you can manage it, the FUD factor goes away.

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In sum, we’re not just contributing the intellectual property, but we’re also actively working to build a community around it.

We are releasing the tool’s gents under LGPL, as people may want to use them in a proprietary fashion but the framework will be GPLv2.

FOSSology. This is where we’ll put the first two agents and the framework and will be focused on academics or those that want to dig into the data behind open-source adoption.
FOSSBazaar. This second community is focused on business managers. Its focus is on policies and practices so that companies can establish their own practices. HP is contributing white papers, assessment pools, supportability tools, etc., to kickstart this. This is being launched in connection with a range of partners like Novell and Coverity. These are our initial strategic partners. This is targeted at businesspeople to help them figure out their enterprise open-source strategy. It will be a working group within the Linux Foundation.

But the truly interesting thing in this is HP itself. HP is an appropriate company to take this on, given the extent of its adoption of open source and the sophistication with which it manages that open source internally. Back when I was part of Novell’s Open Source Review Board, it was HP that helped to shape the processes that made the Novell OSRB successful.

Free and open-source software is everywhere. It’s not just Linux (not that Linux is just one thing, anyway). At HP we’ve been using free and open-source software throughout our company for years as a consumer and contributor of free and open-source software.

About 18 months ago during our open-source customer councils we talked about the tools that we had built internally and there was almost a rush to the doors, with our customers clamoring for these kinds of tools to help them manage their open-source adoption. So, really, it was our customers asking for our assistance in managing their open-source software that was the impetus for our open-sourcing our framework today.

(Credit:
Rick Broida)

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little spoiled by all the free software out there. Seriously, I feel for the developers working hard to make a buck when there’s so much good freeware. Like these five gems, all of which I use almost daily and love dearly:

Okay, your turn: What lesser-known freebies did I leave off the list? Hit the Comments and list your favorites.

CrossLoop – Need remote access to another PC? It’s hard to find a simpler solution than CrossLoop. Just run the small client app on your system, then instruct the friend/grandma/user at the other end to do likewise. Presto: You’re connected, able to see and control the other PC and even transfer files.
Revo Uninstaller – If you routinely install and uninstall new programs, ditch Windows’ crappy uninstaller and use Revo instead. It works faster and removes all traces of the selected program, leaving behind no system-clogging Registry debris, icons, etc.
SyncToy – One of Microsoft’s little-known XP/Vista PowerToys, SyncToy offers soup-to-nuts folder synchronization between networked PCs. It’s not particularly well-documented, nor does it come with technical support, but I find it indispensable.
Windows Live FolderShare – Another little-known Microsoft jewel, this free service not only keeps folders in sync between two or more non-networked computers (like, say, your home and work PCs), but also lets you share files with others and access them remotely.
Xobni – Best. Outlook add-on. Ever. Xobni can automatically extract names and phone numbers from e-mail messages, search e-mail in a flash, thread your e-mail conversations, and analyze your e-mail to provide all kinds of useful information.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

In addition, so far on Tuesday we’ve learned nothing new about Apple’s iPhone software development kit, expected to arrive sometime this week before the end of February. It was a busy day for the company, though, with new MacBooks and MacBook Pros making an appearance in Apple stores.

It’s not clear at this early juncture whether the new update does anything to the legions of jailbroken and unlocked iPhones out in the world, but if you’re one of those users living outside Apple’s user agreement, you might want to hold off installing the update until more details are uncovered. We’ll update if we hear more.

It’s not a software development kit, but there is something new today for
iPhone owners.

A new firmware update for the iPhone is out with bug fixes, according to Apple.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)