Ed: Mission critical elements for a netbook:

• High density LCD screen with chip assisted zoom, unzoom.
• Touch sensitive gestures - not just on/off states.

Apple owns a lot of the IP and chip technology to support the iPhone platform. Microsoft, Android, Symbian, RIM, and Palm need to invent around those patents - slowing their progress.

What Do Google Android Netbooks Mean For Microsoft And Apple? (GOOG)

Dan Frommer | January 2, 2009 12:20 PM

It's no secret that Google (GOOG) is hoping its Android operating system can be useful for more than just mobile phones. So it makes sense that Google would want to get Android on "netbook" laptops -- small, lo-fi computers that companies like Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Acer, and Asus are selling like hotcakes to geeks and early adopter-types.

If that happens, and Google-powered computers take off, Microsoft is the biggest loser. Early netbooks ran Linux, but today's best sellers run Windows. For instance, the 10 top-selling laptops on Amazon (AMZN) right now are netbooks running Windows XP Home. While selling an XP Home license likely isn't as valuable to Microsoft as selling a Vista Ultimate license, it'd still be losing some potential license sales. And if netbooks start cannibalizing real laptop sales, Microsoft stands to lose market share, too.

What about Apple? The company hasn't joined the netbook market yet -- unless you count the iPod touch, or maybe the iPhone -- but will supposedly start selling larger tablet computers sometime next year. We see no reason why a Google-powered netbook would necessarily be better than an Apple-powered netbook. But they could be cheaper.

So who will win? Obviously too early to tell -- most of this is theoretical. But if Google and Apple both enter the market, we think it's a positive for both companies, and a negative for Microsoft. Some thoughts:

• It will be hard for anyone to make hardware as nice as Apple's, especially if their multi-touch technology is involved. And their OS X is still more elegant and useful than Android (and Windows, many will argue).
• Assuming Apple's tablets can access an equivalent of the iPhone App Store, it'll be hard for Google or Microsoft to catch up quickly with similar offerings of lightweight, powerful apps. Android's app market is a disappointment so far, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile apps would be useless on netbooks.
• It will be hard for Apple (or Microsoft) to match Google's excellent, expanding base of free Web services -- which is the core purpose of a netbook -- ranging from GMail and Google Maps to Docs, Gears, and even ane-book store. 
  
• As long as these services run just as well on an Apple- or Microsoft-powered device as they do on a Google-based device, that's not a reason to buy a Google-powered device. However, if a special version of Google's Chrome browser is Android-exclusive, and makes Google apps much, much better, that could be an Android advantage.
  

It's always possible Microsoft has something up its sleeve -- the killer netbook platform, or something. But given the way they've punted so far in the next-gen mobile platform war -- Windows Mobile is weak compared to iPhone and Android -- we're not holding our breath.

Meanwhile, Google's best bet for making money still seems to be using Android as a tool to get more people using the Internet on more non-PC devices, and eventually viewing and clicking on Google ads. So... how's that mobile ad business going?

See Also:
Apple iPod Touch HD On The Way
It's Time For An Apple Tablet: Where's My iPod Touch HD?
20 Great Apps For Your New iPhone Or iPod Touch

CLIP: How To - Move From WordPress.com To WordPress.org

from ProBlogger Blog Tips by Jeff Chandler

Moving a Blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is something I’ve had a lot of questions about - today Jeff Chandler shares tips on hwo to do it.

Everyday it seems like I find a story or two from a cities local online newspaper which delves into the topic of blogging and what it’s all about. The story usually goes through a mini backlog of history surrounding the term, what blogging is and at the end of the article, there is usually a list of suggestions on how to get started with the most popular suggestion being WordPress.com. Using WordPress.com is a great way to introduce yourself to blogging but if you decide that you want to turn blogging into a full time job or just want more control over your work, you’ll need to move.

Thankfully, the move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (WordPress.org being the self hosted version of WordPress) is painless thanks in large part to a great export tool.

To start things off, login to your WordPress.com account and browse to your administration panel. From the menu on the left, click on TOOLS - EXPORT. At this point, you have the option to confine the export to a particular author or all authors. Using the export tool will compile yourposts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. This information is placed into a WXR file or, WordPress eXtended RSS file. Essentially, this file is just a normal XML RSS based file with a couple of custom fields added to it which makes it specific to WordPress. Once you’re finished, click on theDownload Export File button and save it to your desktop.

Once you have that file on your desktop, you can breath a little easier considering your half way through the content migration process.

The second part of this guide refers to an installation of WordPress 2.7. Login to your self installed WordPress administration panel and from the menu on the left click on TOOLS - IMPORT. From the list of blogging systems click on WordPress. Next, click on the Browse button and locate the XML file you downloaded earlier. This will upload the XML file into your WordPress installation and will unpack all of the data the file contains. There is one caveat though regarding this entire technique.

Most webhosts for whatever reason still have their PHP.ini configured in such a way where end users can only upload files with a maximum file size of 2MBor smaller. Although it takes quite a bit of content in an WXR file to go over 2MB, 2MB is not a lot of head room. If you find yourself in the position where your WXR file is larger than the maximum file size, I highly suggest submitting a trouble ticket to your webhost and asking them to increase the limit. If they choose not to, then ask them if they can import the file for you. If that doesn’t work, you can pull a trick from your sleeve by uploading a custom php.ini file to your webhosting accounts root folder. This is what my host did for me and afterwards, I took a look at the php.ini file and noticed it had this line in it:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 7M

Apparently, the php.ini file overwrote the settings on the original file and I was able to bump my limit up to 7 Megabytes. This trick is not guaranteed to work. As a last ditch effort, you can also try adding these lines to your .htaccess file. Just replace the pound sign with a number that is above the size of your WXR file.

#set max upload file size
php_value upload_max_filesize #M

#set max post size
php_value post_max_size #M

Once the WXR file is unpacked on your self installed version of WordPress, you’re ready to walk through the gates of freedom without skipping a beat!

P.S. This strategy also works for those wanting to go from WordPress.org to WordPress.com.

CLIP: JPG Magazine Folds, And With It A Radical Idea In Publishing

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

It’s not a good time to be a print magazine right now. Even a crowdsourced magazine with a stripped-down staff that relies on the contributions of it more talented readers. JPG Magazine and its parent company 8020 Media is shutting down after running out of money and not being able to find any new investors. The seed investment had come from Cnet founder Halsey Minor, who apparently also did not want to put in any more.

JPG was an attempt to create a photography magazine that relied on its readers for its content and included them in the editing process. Nearly 200,000 photographers have submitted photographs for consideration to JPG, many of them via Flickr. The site itself was able to attract about 300,000 unique U.S. viewers a month (Quantcast), but its business model relied on selling print ads. And that’s a business you don’t want to be in right now, especially if you are a startup with an artsy photo mag that was never very appealing to advertisers.

But it was a worthy experiment nonetheless. 8020 Media was founded upon the belief that a print magazine publisher could be viable if it stripped out most of the costs and created a community of readers to help in its production. Perhaps the flaw was in sticking to a print magazine as its final product. In reality, the print magazine was nothing but an artifact of the Website and the community that created it. The value of JPG was in the online portion—the process by which the best photographs were commissioned, curated, and selected with the help of other reader-photographers. It is a model that I believe we will see more of in the future because talent is everywhere. We just need a better way of finding and highlighting the very best of it.

You can download back issues in PDF form before the site goes down on Monday.

---

Halsey Minor's User-Generated Mag Venture 8020 Goes Bust

from Silicon Alley Insider by Henry Blodget

The online readership numbers of 8020 Media's two user-generated (professionally edited) magazines were off to a good start at 5 million pageviews a month. But the company's real business was print, and those numbers apparently weren't goos enough. Investor Halsey Minor has pulled the plug.

The NYT's Brad Stone:

8020 Media was backed by Halsey Minor, the founder of CNet Networks, and located in the San Francisco office of his investing firm, Minor Ventures. It had an unusual, low-cost editorial structure that many media and technology pundits pointed to as a model for the future. JPG Magazine had a small staff but solicited contributions from amateur photographers and asked its community of readers and contributors to vote for the best pictures, which then made it into a bimonthly print magazine. The company's similar travel magazine, Everywhere, ceased publication in August.

JPG had a circulation of around 50,000 and had recently secured some prominent space on newsstands around the country.

But ultimately the money ran out, and Mr. Minor declined to invest more, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. 8020 was attempting to either raise more money from other investors or to sell itself to big media names, including Meredith Corp. and Conde Nast, but with no success....

The 18 employees who worked for 8020 were given the holiday week off. On Tuesday, they received individual telephone calls and e-mail messages telling them that the company had exhausted its options and was shutting down.

8020 CEO Mitchell Fox:

In the face of these extraordinary economic times, in a devastated advertising climate, we can no longer continue to operate the business due to lack of funds, and hence we have to close 8020 Media effective immediately.

There is no doubt that our company has done what no others have yet to do that is, prove that the web and print can work effectively together, one supporting the other.

We've also proven that community generated media CAN be a powerful thing and it can create spectacular media.

The riddle of having a sound web platform support that drives interactivity with a print product has been solved, however, none of us could have predicted the global economic collapse we've witnessed in the past few months. So our timing to grow the business and bring it to profitability through even the smallest amount of additional funding could not have been worse.

So, while we sit here at the precipice of profitability, the negative marketplace forces are too strong to overcome, and we must take this regrettable action.

It remains undeniable that the publishing industry MUST find a new model, and mass collaboration and participation in the media property is certainly now proven it can be the foundation of this new model (NOTE: This is NOT citizen journalism).

We've cracked the code on marshaling a community around a media property online and in print .and helping them become active , loyal, and engaged participants in both.

We do owe a debt of thanks to Minor Ventures for believing in us, and funding us to this point and to have even given us a chance to make this business successful, and for that confidence we'll always be grateful.

8020's description of itself:

About 8020 Media

We are a revolutionary new hybrid media company, bringing together the best of the web and print. We harness the diversity and depth of online communities to create printed magazines that are uniquely relevant and insightful with an incredibly engaged audience. Started in June of 2006, and publishers of the award winning JPG Magazine and Everywhere Magazine, 8020 Media is backed byHalsey Minor, founder of CNET.

The Process

8020 Media empowers its communities to participate in all aspects of the magazine's content creation, thereby dramatically increasing reach, lowering costs, and engaging a knowledgeable, global community. By opening the field, we're blurring the lines between professional and amateur, inspiring photographers and writers of all types to engage in the process. What was once 'the audience' has been invited to participate in and lend its expertise to the editorial process by contributing content and critique online.

The Best of the Web and Print

The web is superior for organically growing real communities, connecting people to one another and housing and culling data. Magazines better provide serendipity and have a tactile, experiential element.

8020 Media takes the best of both worlds by empowering online communities in the process of creating beautiful, printed magazines. The editorial staff, freed by this pioneering reformulation of traditional roles, then function as curators; gleaning the best and most unique content from the vast pool of materials submitted by their contributors. The editorial role shifts from its traditional heavy-handed function, allowing the editors to peer into the collective and capture the perspective of their readers rather than over-stylizing the content. The results of this bottom-up approach are relevant, refreshing publications integrating editor, reader, advertiser and community.

Ed:

• Labor burnrate of 18 or $300k/month
• Revenues from 50k subscriptions, advertising did not cover print costs
• Online revenues were small from skyscrapers and sponsor spots - can't cover direct selling costs
• Community of photographers; failed to draw beyond immediate community
• Good execution, poor productivity as measured by revenues per labor cost