Ajax Girl

Mozilla is expanding its universe today, moving beyond desktop software products like Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (email) and into cloud territory - web services.

The initiative, Weave, is a new project that will store user information - like bookmarks, passwords, history, preferences and customizations, and sync it to your Firefox account. Users can then access that information in the event of a hard drive failure, or if they are on a guest machine (say, at a cyber cafe).

An early version of Weave is available (you must be using the Firefox 3 beta) here. I have not been able to sign up for an account (the confirmation email won’t send).

The service clearly overlaps with initiatives by Google and Microsoft to store user information in the cloud (and Mac users can already sync some user information to the cloud via .Mac). And there will likely be a slew of casualties in the “web OS” space, as their main selling point is to store user settings and other data and make them portable for the cyber cafe crowd.

Based on the proposed architecture and use cases, Mozilla is not yet proposing to get heavily into the online storage space. Backing up non-browser content like photos and videos would compete directly with service providers who store this information online for customers (Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, etc.). But by managing passwords to those services, Firefox is both supporting those service providers and encouraging users to not even bother keeping a desktop copy of content. Keep it all online, and use the browser, from any computer, to keep it all organized. And don’t forget, the social graph just may be hosted by Firefox, too.

Mozilla’s vision is clearly to become the operating system of the Internet, much as Windows is the OS for most desktops. Web applications already run through the browser, and now some of the user data will be stored on servers connected to the browser, too. While Google and Microsoft fire away at each other in the battle for users’ online life, they just may want to keep an eye on Mozilla, too. Its a non-profit, but it’s brand is solid gold and they just might do an end around and grab all the users.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204857218/

On Thursday we announced that we are holding a “primary” that includes each 2008 president candidate. We are asking readers to vote based on the candidate’s positions on ten key technology related issues.

I talked with CBS news on Wednesday (clip is here) to announce the project. On Thursday morning, I spoke with Ross McGowan from the San Francisco Fox affiliate station as well. The clip is above.

Read up on the candidates’ positions on the ten key tech issues and vote for the candidate you prefer at primaries.techcrunch.com. We’ll announce our endorsements prior to Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008. You can also review the podcasts and interviews that we’ve done directly with five candidates so far: Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel.

By the way: TV is hard. It’s very new for me. And it is, of course, a lot different from blogging where you can think, write, edit, etc. And both of these interviews were done at the crack of dawn, when I am normally going to bed.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204714851/

2007 was another big year for Google with the company growing to become America’s fifth largest listed stock (by market cap) whilst continuing its march towards world domination.

According to figures from comScore Google traffic increased 22.42% this year across its main web properties (excluding non-US sites and acquired sites such as YouTube). The star performer for the year was Google’s personalized start page service iGoogle which increased traffic in the 12 months to November by 267.64%. Other strong performers included Google Book Search up 54.66%, Gmail up 53.6% and Google Maps up 51.57%.

It would appear that users aren’t using Google to buy goods, with Google’s worst performer in 2007 being Google Product Search (shopping), down a whopping 73.26%. Google Scholar search dropped 32.14% and perhaps oddly in a year that Google added YouTube videos to its index, Google Video search dropped 11.82%.

Google’s core search engine still remains the most highly trafficked part of Google with other products a long distance behind. Google’s most popular products in order of traffic for 2007 were: search, image search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google News.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204692170/