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It’s fair to say the iPhone forced just about every handset maker to take a second look at their product development lineup. HTC and LG have shown off their iPhone-lookalikes already, and more will probably start to appear over the rest of the year.

Nokia showed off the Nokia Tube in a presentation slide noticed by Infoworld at a software development conference in California Monday. The Tube, like the iPhone, is a touch-screen phone that can be manipulated using your fingers, and is Nokia’s “first touch device,” according to Tom Libretto of Forum Nokia.

The world’s largest handset maker is starting to talk about its response to Apple’s
iPhone, almost 10 months since the iPhone made its debut.

Nokia didn’t provide a time frame for the launch of the Tube. Several Web sites have put up a grainy picture of a phone that purports to be the Tube, but I can’t figure out who took the original image, so I’m not putting it here until we figure out if it’s real, or if proper credit can be assigned. I can, however, show you what all the fuss is about through the magic of hyperlinking.

Anthony Soohoo, who joined CBS Interactive when it acquired celebrity gossip site Dotspotter, will oversee CBS Interactive’s entertainment unit–the Audience Network, Wallstrip and Moblogic, CBS.com, and forthcoming original programming ventures. CBSSports.com’s Jason Kint will also manage CBSNews.com, Jeff Sellinger will remain at the helm of CBS Interactive’s mobile operations, and Last.fm’s founding team will remain intact.

The CBS Interactive satellite office in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened, with its eye on tech partnerships and acquisitions. The Valley branch will “allow the company to better facilitate existing partnerships in the area, and future ones as well,” a release from CBS explained.

Smith is himself a Valley veteran, with a mergers-and-acquisitions background that involved the sale of Delicious to Yahoo, and Netscape to AOL. CBS hired him after his stint at investment bank Allen & Co.

CBS Interactive, the media giant’s digital division, has announced the opening of a Silicon Valley office and an executive reshuffling to focus on growth, President Quincy Smith announced Thursday.

In conjunction with the new Valley digs, CBS Interactive restructured its management: Bryon Rubin, formerly a senior executive in CBS’s corporate development and mergers and acquisitions group, will become CBS Interactive’s chief financial officer; Yahoo veteran Michael Marquez has been promoted to executive vice president of strategy and corporate development; and a number of senior employees have been named general managers.

CBS Interactive encompasses CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com, the CBS Audience Network video syndication service, the CBS EyeLab site, a number of mobile properties, and digital-media acquisitions like music service Last.fm and video series Wallstrip (along with its sibling show, Moblogic.tv, which launched after the CBS acquisition).

It’s not known yet how much Nokia will charge for the new 5310 XpressMusic with the one-year music subscription. Carphone Warehouse currently sells the prepaid version of the 5310 for about $145, including $18 worth of talk time. T-Mobile USA has subsidized it for about $50 with a two-year contract, making it much cheaper option than Apple’s iPhone 3G, which costs $200 with AT&T’s subsidy.

Nokia is clearly going after Apple with the launch of the new music store and the bundled offering. The company, which is the No. 1 maker of cell phones in the world, sees services as a key component of its strategy going forward.

Nokia hasn’t said when it will begin rolling out the Comes With Music bundle in other countries. The Nokia Music Store is currently only available in a handful of markets, including much of Europe, Singapore and Australia. U.S. customers will likely have to wait awhile before they can get access to the Nokia Music Store or the Comes With Music bundle.

(Credit:
Crave UK)

This is a clear differentiator from other music stores and services. Apple’s iTunes requires users pay for individual songs or albums. Verizon Wireless and Real have launched the new Rhapsody music store for mobile phones. It also allows subscribers to download and listen to as much music as they like for $15 a month. But once users stop paying the subscription fee, access to the music disappears.

Like the Rhapsody service, Nokia’s music service allows subscribers to share their music with other subscribers.

Nokia launched a new music service Tuesday in the U.K. that bundles free access to music with the purchase of a phone.

While Nokia’s music store is much smaller than what is currently offered by iTunes, the company has managed to sign up three of the largest music labels, Universal, Sony BMG, and Warner Music Group.

Nokia first announced the Comes With Music service last year. The service essentially bundles access to digital music with the purchase of a new handset. The first phone to use the service is the 5310 XpressMusic device. With the free one-year subscription to the service, Nokia users can download as many songs as they want and keep the songs even after the subscription expires.

The new service called “Comes with Music” offers users of certain Nokia phones a year’s subscription to the company’s music service. The program will initially be offered through Carphone Warehouse in the U.K., but Nokia has plans to eventually roll it out globally.

Research in Motion will hold its own conference for smartphone developers later this year, as interest in mobile development continues to grow.

Developers will learn more about creating apps for the BlackBerry Bold later this year.

(Credit:
RIM)

Electronista spotted a Web page advertising the BlackBerry Developer Conference, scheduled for the week of October 20 in Santa Clara, Calif. The two-and-a-half day conference will feature the usual keynote speeches and technical sessions, but RIM doesn’t seem to have settled on an agenda just yet.

Smartphone application development appears to be the next frontier for software developers. Such applications have already been in development for years for operating systems like Symbian and Windows Mobile, but the swell of interest in Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems is generating new demand for third-party software that knows how to play well within the constraints of a phone.

The BlackBerry is the leading smartphone in North America, and is No. 2 on a worldwide basis. RIM just launched the newest version, the BlackBerry Bold, this week.

Intel said it has acquired NetEffect, a company specializing in Ethernet products and technologies for server compute clusters.

The chipmaker purchased NetEffect’s assets for $8 million, which include the company’s Ethernet product portfolio, intellectual property, and technology.

NetEffect is a provider of solutions incorporating iWARP, an Ethernet alternative to InfiniBand. NetEffect’s product portfolio includes 1-Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) adapters for servers and blade configurations as well as 10GbE Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

“NetEffect’s role as a data communications solution provider…will enhance Intel’s current Ethernet efforts,” Tom Swinford, general manager, Intel LAN Access Division, said in a statement.

Swinford said NetEffect’s technology will be a boon to Intel’s existing business in 10-Gigabit Ethernet, including server virtualization, convergence of network and storage traffic, and server compute clusters.

Designed for multi-core processor-based servers and optimized for virtualization, Intel’s current portfolio of 10GbE server adapters includes single and dual port versions for both copper and fiber implementations. The NetEffect acquisition provides complementary High Performance Network Interface Card (NIC) products to Intel’s Ethernet portfolio.

NetEffect was founded in 1998 as Banderacom, a company focused on InfiniBand adapters and 16-port IB switch, and was recapitalized in 2004 as NetEffect. Thirty employees, primarily engineers, have joined the Intel team from NetEffect and will continue to be based in Austin, Texas.

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It was an ugly match, bookended with an excellent header from Senderos and then a finishing touch from Adebayor, but the rest of the 90 minutes were nothing to write home about.

Eduardo seemed too tentative to shoot; Adebayor was invisible; and the rest of the team seemed to mull around the fringes of the box, passing and passing and…passing. Not the best display, but at least it put the team five points clear at the top of the table and made up more ground on Manchester United’s goal differential.

These are the “ugly” games you just have to win, even if they’re not pretty. Arsenal won. I wish it would have been prettier. But I’ll take the win regardless.

Especially when it comes at the expense of Mark Hughes. I can’t stand that guy.

A pivotal meeting of international delegates to decide the fate of Microsoft’s Open XML finished on Friday with advocates and foes of the standards bid predicting victory.

Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft involved in the process to standardize Open XML, posted a blog Friday saying that consensus among delegates at the meeting had been reached. Microsoft has been seeking standards approval for Open XML for two years at a joint committee of the ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission).

In an interview, Microsoft’s general manager for standards and interoperabilty Tom Robertson on Friday said the “overwhelming majority” of comments and concerns raised by international standards bodies this week were effectively resolved.

Robertson stopped short of saying that Open XML will certainly become an ISO standard, but he said that the five-day meeting in Geneva has moved toward consensus as designed.

“I’m feeling very good about the process and the fact that what we have now at end of the week have a clear direction on how to address issue and concerns raised. Those changes should make the national bodies very happy,” he said.

Meanwhile, advocates of rival standard, OpenDocument Format (ODF), said that the weeklong meeting is unlikely to provide the impetus needed to make Microsoft’s Open XML an international standard.

The meeting in Geneva was held following a vote in September last year, when Open XML failed to get a sufficient number of votes to get the document format approved as an ISO-IEC standard.

During that vote, delegates from national standards bodies submitted comments about the 6,000-page specification, which were meant to be addressed during the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) this week.

National standards bodies have until March 29 to change their votes based on the activity at the BRM. If enough votes are changed in favor of Open XML, it moves ahead in the standards process.

In his blog, Jones wrote:

“The objective of the BRM was to work with all of the National Body delegations in the room and improve the specification on a technical level–and that we did. There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).”

But two people opposed to the standardization of Open XML said that technical issues were not sufficiently addressed during the BRM where delegates from 37 countries attended.

“I don’t think the BRM changed enough minds that Open XML is any more interoperable or more open than it was before,” said one advocate of rival document format ODF, who did not want to be quoted because no official results have been communicated. “Certainly this result should not change the minds of any delegates at the national bodies.”

No official word has come from the ISO, whose media representatives did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

ODF advocate and standards expert Andrew Updegrove attended the meetings in Geneva this week and posted a blog with details of the proceedings based on his conversations with delegates.

He said that only a small fraction–about 20–of the 900 comments, or dispositions, were discussed. Updegrove concluded that issues concerning Open XML were not adequately hammered out.

However, during an expedited voting procedure in which dispositions were not actually discussed, many of those resolutions were approved, he said, which would lead people to conclude that the BRM was successful.

Updegrove drew the opposite conclusion and said that Microsoft is essentially trying to inappropriately push a complicated specification without sufficient consideration.

“Many, many, people around the world have tried very hard to make the OOXML adoption process work. It is very unfortunate that they were put to this predictably unsuccessful result through the self-interest of a single vendor taking advantage of a permissive process that was never intended to be abused in this fashion. It would be highly inappropriate to compound this error by approving a clearly unfinished specification in the voting period ahead,” Updgegrove said.

Delegates from national standards bodies have until the end of March to revise their postions. At that point, final results on whether Open XML will be approved as an ISO-IEC standard should be known.

Getty hired Goldman Sachs as financial adviser and Weil Gotshal & Manges as legal adviser, the Seattle-based company said.

Or at least that its board is “exploring strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value,” according to a company statement.

Getty Images, a major seller of stock photos and other licensed media, confirmed on Tuesday a New York Times report that it’s for sale.

The company didn’t comment on the Times’ report that the most interested buyers were private-equity firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital, or that its price could go as high as $1.5 billion.

But then I talked with Bob and was even more excited to see what, exactly, he was up to, and with whom: David Skok of Matrix Partners, Rich Friedman, Jason Kinner, Rich Frisbie, and Mark Lugert of JBoss and/or Bluestone.

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Wondering what the company will be called? Five minutes of due diligence will tell you that. You have all the starting clues you need.

The proverbial “itch” needed scratching. Unlike Marc Andreesen with a proprietary background, Bob’s background is in open source. So instead of locking customers into a proprietary social fabric, Bob and crew are opening it up.

When I first heard that Bob Bickel was considering jumping back into the technology fray, I was deeply intrigued. Here’s a guy who made a lot of cash with JBoss and promptly let absolutely none of it go to his head. Instead it went to his feet.

Well, it turns out that is easier said than done. You can throw some widgets on your pages to do things like polling; you can install a php forum, and so forth–but it winds up being very disjointed. Of course, you can build a Facebook Group–but then they wind up owning all the data and there is no good way to integrate it with the rest of our Web site. I tried some of the “white label” community builders and hosting environments like Leverage and Ning. Those are great for “out of the box” communities with a ton of nice features and cool social apps. But the problem was I still could not very neatly tie that into my Web site. I got the feeling that if our dinky Web site needed social, then many, many Web sites needed social applications built into their Web sites and integrated with the rest of the emerging social capabilities on the Web.

This is exciting news, and a great outlet for some exceptional members of the open-source business and development community. It remains to be seen whether Bob will fully step into the ring or whether he’ll be an active coach from behind the ropes, but either way this team looks to be building an important new piece in the open-source puzzle.

As for the what, think social networking meets open source. It all started with Bob trying to build “social” into a running store Web site, as Bob explains:

Apparently, eMusic, which has long sold open MP3s, wants to show that Amazon’s offering hasn’t cut into its business.

The New York-based eMusic said in a statement that it is selling more than 7 million tracks a month. Interestingly, the company–the largest retailer of independent music–included in its announcement that it has sold 40 million downloads since Amazon began selling unprotected MP3s last September.

Online retailer eMusic, the self-described second-largest music service after iTunes, announced Monday that it has sold more than 200 million downloads since November 2003 when it moved to a subscription business model.

Lately, there’s been a dispute between the online services about which ones are the largest after iTunes. David Pakman, eMusic’s CEO, has been very vocal about some of the claims.