AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Not an OS
Last Thursday I tweeted: “I strive to maintain an open mind when nontechnical people talk about the ‘Internet OS’ or ‘Web OS’. Sometimes it’s tough.” I got some grumbles by email and I think the subject is worth more discussion. Let me be more specific: Neither the Internet nor the Web is much [...]

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All Things Digital
Adobe (ADBE) shares are losing ground today after Cowen’s Walter Pritchard cut his rating on the stock to Neutral from Outperform.
Pritchard is concerned about the company’s transition from the current version of its flagship software package–Creative Suite 3–to the coming update, Creative Suite 4. He says that with the May quarter, “the company [...]

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Mashable

Zemanta is a Slovenian-based web startup that has developed a very interesting service which, in a nutshell, makes blogging easier and more interesting for you. As of today, it’s available as a server-side plugin for Movable Type and Wordpress, as well as a plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you choose the browser [...]

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Venture Beat
With the launch of a new site called Acrobat.com, Adobe says it’s ready to compete against online office products like Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live. For now, the site brings together three of Adobe’s office services — Buzzword for creating and sharing documents, ConnectNow for web conferencing and an “organizer” with 5 gigabytes [...]

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TechCrunch
As we wrote last week, Facebook is turning parts of its application platform open source, the company announced today. It’s available here for download.
This comes a little more than a year after Facebook Platform first launched to allow third party developers a way to get their applications directly onto Facebook. The company says more than [...]

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TechCrunch
Userplane, the company behind Webchat and a number of other online communication services, has introduced a new video app dubbed “Mediaplayer”. The free white-label app will allow web publishers to add hosted video uploads to their sites under an ad-supported model.
Mediaplayer users will be able to upload videos as large as 100MB, and there is [...]

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NewTeeVee
While the ISP part of Cox Communications is busy interfering with its customers’ BitTorrent traffic, the cable part of the company is trying to improve its customers’ experience. The country’s third-largest cable operator tapped NDS Group earlier this week to revamp its user interface. Not only will the redesign unify Cox’s different digital offerings, but [...]

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Rough Type
A new study, to be released today by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly “becoming mainstream,” with three-quarters [...]

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Digital Media Wire
News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace on Thursday announced the public launch of its Application Gallery, which features more than 1,000 approved applications for the service developed using the Developer Platform the company launched in February. MySpace rival Facebook has been offering a developers’ platform since last May, while Google announced its OpenSocial social [...]

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Venture Beat
Microsoft is jumping on the software-as-a-service bandwagon by launching its SaaS version of Microsoft Office, code-named “Albany”, in private testing mode today. Albany will give users a new way to get the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other products — they can pay a subscription fee, rather than purchase a new [...]

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