The Weekly Round-Up: 26.10.07

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a fad as "a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal".

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer defines a fad as a $240m investment opportunity. At least if you follow what the software giant's CEO says on a week-to-week basis, like the Round-Up does. Religiously.

Microsoft will take a $240m equity stake in Facebook during its next round of financing. The deal values the social networking service at a whopping $15bn.

The announcement follows just a few weeks after Ballmer warned Facebook and other youth-oriented social networking services could be seen as a "fad". The Round-Up would be intrigued to know how much the company would have invested had Ballmer considered the site, which now has more than 49 million users, a serious business opportunity.

There are two possibilities here. Either Ballmer was playing it coy, or someone else is making all the big decisions in Redmond and Ballmer is just the media-friendly public mouthpiece of the company. The Round-Up thinks it knows which is more likely.

The deal will give Microsoft a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook. Naturally, it's all about advertising, with Microsoft sticking to its guns in its next big market, or just copying whatever Google is doing, depending on which side of the fanboy fence you sit.

In a joint conference with Microsoft, Facebook said: "We are pleased to take our Microsoft partnership to the next level," which sounds a bit like the idiom of a couple of American teenagers talking about their next level in frantic groping ("We've agreed to let Microsoft stick its hand in our bra and have a good rummage.").

The good news for Facebook users is that the deal will allow the site "to continue to innovate and grow as a technology leader and major player in social computing".

The bad news is that the deal will allow the two companies to bring more "relevant advertising" to the website's audience. It will inevitably leave Microsoft in a better position to exploit the amount of personal information stored by Facebook's users.

Then again, all this nonsense has to be paid for somehow and a solid advertising strategy is clearly the most effective way of achieving this.

Google has yet to comment on the deal at the time of writing. The company itself had long harboured plans to get its hands on Facebook's bra and the deal may come as a set-back for Eric, Sergey, Larry and their roller-blading minions.

In the joint conference call, Microsoft and Facebook emphasised that this deal is all about broadening the existing advertising partnership between the two companies, which has been going on for over a year now.

However, amid the party poppers and wild cheering was Gartner analyst Andrew Frank offering a sobering warning that there are still risks inherent in the category of advertising in social media.

"I think that no one has figured out the perfect formula for it," he said, raising his voice (we imagine) over the laughter as a Microsoft contract lawyer helped a Facebook marketing manager to photocopy her bottom.

He added: "There's risk around trust factors and privacy." So who better than Microsoft to guide Facebook along its new path, then?

Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, it should be noted, was not present on the call. Probably because it was a bit late and his parents told him he should be in bed.

Besides, he was still a bit overexcited at being voted the most influential person in all technology. Clever boy.

A brief aside - dear readers - just a reminder to check out this week's Caption Competition which features a rather unusual vehicle. The Round-Up can't help thinking of The A-Team but perhaps it'll put you in mind of something else entirely.

Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer was also turning his visionary gleam to our interminable problems with mobile technology this week.

The problem as Steve sees it is that a growing number of people have multiple mobile phones and that's actually a failure, not a success of the industry, neatly digging its handset partners in the ribs.

According to the Major-Charles-Winchester-of-M*A*S*H-look-a-like (which is a hell of a phrase to hyphenate), people are complaining they need one phone for work and another for home, or one phone for email and another for making phone calls. This is interminable. They couldn't possibly put people in different contact groups and use the ubiquitous email application, hell no.

"That strikes me as incredibly odd," he said. You're not wrong, Steve, you're not wrong.

He added that the computer had been usurped by the phone as the universal "remote control for your life", with people substituting power for portability. It's almost as if the past five years of mobile innovation had never happened, isn't it?

The visionary Ballmer said the goal of the industry - and of Microsoft, naturally - should be to create devices that work for both home and work and are capable of handling business applications, unified messaging and gaming.

And with three-quarters of the world predicted to have a mobile phone by 2011 it's a market with plenty of growth.

So some sort of smart phone is in order, then. It's almost as if the world is calling out for a sort of converged phone/web browser/media player that can be plugged into a dock to allow media to be accessed by other household devices, isn't it?

Why hasn't anyone else thought of that? Who could generate such a device? Expect the Zune Ultimate Home and Business Edition to launch anytime soon. Probably in brown...

Meanwhile, the iPhone has been garnering a lot of hype in recent months, with people falling over themselves to spout outlandish predictions on how it will change the way we live.

The latest prediction is that the iPhone is likely to prove to be the catalyst that will cause wi-fi networks to cover all our cities as people surf the web. It will also raise the dead.

Actually, that last bit is nonsense but the bit about the iPhone as the catalyst for wi-fi is the frank and firm belief expressed by experts at the MuniWireless conference this week who think the demand for the Apple gadget and similar devices will result in blanket wi-fi coverage across our cities.

The way it works is like so: as mobile phone operators push their 3G data services, new mobiles outfitted with wi-fi capability are also being introduced.

The iPhone was one of the first to reach the US market. And so far the phone has gained rave reviews for web surfing when it's on a wi-fi network.

Bill Gurley of venture capital firm Benchmark Capita is convinced wi-fi is the way forwards. He said: "The devices are coming. Most chip companies will soon be embedding wi-fi and 3G cellular capability into their chips, which will make just about every phone out there wi-fi capable."

Meanwhile, according to the splendidly named Ken Biba, managing director at consultancy Novarum, the wi-fi networks in some cities are outperforming the carriers' 3G networks.

For example, he noted the iPhone can connect at nippier speeds over the wi-fi network in cities such as Toronto - much faster than other handsets can connect using a major carrier's 3G cellular network.

He said: "In a city where wi-fi is deployed right, it can create a real paradigm shift."

Hmm, paradigm shift. The Round-Up's guessing that none of this will exactly be music to the ears of mobile operators who forked out outrageous sums of money on spectrum licences all that time ago. Over £22bn in the UK alone, remember.

Paradigm shift is all very well but it's a bit rough on some if the paradigm it's meant to be shifting never really found its feet in the first place...

The job of internet visionary is a cushy gig if you can get it.

Think about it, you spend all your time thinking about blue-sky technology, attending conferences with other blue-sky thinkers, playing with the very latest and coolest gadgets and spending the rest of the week stroking your beard.

Take Vint Cerf for example, although if the internet visionary job doesn't play out for him he could probably pick up work as a Sigmund Freud look-a-like. Assuming there's much call for people to appear at public and private functions as the father of psychoanalysis. Anyway, the Round-Up digresses.

The other cushy thing about the whole internet visionary thing is that you can make a whole load of outrageous statements about how the future will pan out and not worry about being found out for a good 30 years or so, by which time you've either moved jobs or probably retired.

Anyway, Vint has been stroking his beard for Google since 2005 and was speaking this week at Google's Analyst Day.

He predicted that in the coming decades, scientists will have developed an interplanetary web, or a common set of communications protocols that will allow sensors on spacecraft, satellites and planets to transmit information to each other and back to Earth.

Cerf said: "I think we're going to end up with an interplanetary backbone over the next 20, 30, 40 years."

The thing that bothered the Round-Up was the whole "common protocols" assumption. After all, look at the existing web.

The whole web standards thing has been a driving force for web developers and designers for years now but still a certain family of dominant browsers is failing to toe the line properly. Sure, IE 7 is better than its predecessors but it's not hugely impressive on the standards-compliant front. Meanwhile, it normally takes third-party apps to get different instant messaging networks talking to each other.

It's not unreasonable to think the fierce competition that exists between modern internet technology companies developing products for the web will be carried over to the space age. Same call for standards and common protocols, same resistance to developing common ground and commitment to proprietary software and hardware.

So the Round-Up is happy to offer its own vision on the future of the interplanetary web - web 47.0 or something - and makes no apologies for borrowing a little inspiration from Gene Roddenberry.

"Dilithium crystals completely drained and shields at five per cent, captain. Romulans attacking again."
"Number one, take control of the Romulan Warbird weapon systems and call for back-up."
"I'm sorry Captain, that weapons system protocol isn't supported in Vista, we need to download a patch."
"Then get us the back-up we need. Make it so!"
"Uh, sorry captain, we're on a different IM network to the nearest Federation craft, they've upgraded."
"I thought we we'd updated to Service Pack 1354? What the... "

BOOM!

And if the Round-Up is wrong, it will offer a full and frank apology.

Until next week, take a moment to check out the latest Caption Competition.