Around the Web 6.27.08: Bill Gates Day

-- The Big Man on Campus leaves after more than 30 years: Today is Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft, the company he co-founded, although he'll keep his hand in a bit as chairman. It's a day to reflect on what will happen to the company he leaves. Bloomberg

-- It's also a chance to ask the transitioning man if Microsoft will try to buy Yahoo again. Unlikely, Gates told NBC's Tom Brokaw. CNet

-- And an opportunity to take stock of the Bill Gates era. Ars Technica

-- And review Gates' hits and misses. BBC 

-- And tell some classic Gates' stories (yes, I can see it now. There was a touch of willfulness there in the early days). SiliconValley.com

-- And talk to old friends about post-Microsoft life for Gates. He'll be fine, says Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft too but left long ago. Seattle Post-Intelligencer

-- And roast the guy with embarrassing videos (another reason Microsoft should have bought YouTube). Portfolio

-- Hold on, Gates will never leave Microsoft, says IT World.

-- Outside of Microsoft, life continues. Nine Inch Nail's latest album, "The Slip," has been downloaded 1.4 million times from the band's site. NIN's clever tech gurus made an interesting map using Google Earth of the location of the downloaders. Fiji, here they come. TopSpin

-- An iPhone casualty? Motorola's new phone, the ROKR E8, according to Silicon Alley Insider

-- Ever tried to watch online video but just couldn't get past the ads? Web Scout

-- Profile of Trilogy Studios, which builds virtual worlds for "Pimp My Ride" and other brands. LAT

-- Finally, for those of you who suspect that Bill Gates isn't quite human, we bring you the other robot in the news today: Wall-E. Critic Kenneth Turan calls the film "daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental." LAT

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo credit: Associated Press

iPhone fixation vs. Britney Spears fever and Barack Obama mania

Back in April, as rumors began to swirl about a new iPhone, 1.3 million people conducted nearly 7 million online searches for information about the iPhone or iPhone-related terms, according to a new study by comScore Marketer, a Web traffic measurement service.

That works out to about 5.3 iPhone searches per person.

To get a sense of whether that's a teensy bit obsessive, I talked with Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore. He ran a few more terms for me to see how Apple's iPhone stacked up in April against other pop culture standard-bearers.

What emerged is that the iPhone searchers are a small passionate group who may be in need of an intervention, or a new iPhone.

In comparison, almost 2 million people searched for "Britney Spears" 3.8 million times in April -- a month that saw the pop diva back in the news after the singer was involved in a minor traffic accident. That's about two Britney-related searches per person.

The same month, as presidential candidate Barack Obama was distancing himself from his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., just over 2 million people searched for "Barack Obama" for a total of about 5 million searches. That's about 2.5 searches per person. But still not at the iPhone preoccupation level.

And what about the new Indiana Jones movie, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which was scheduled for release in May? Half a million people did 1.8 million searches in April, which works out to 3.6 Indiana Jones-related searches per person.

The iPhone even beat out its cousin, the iPod, in obsessiveness if not in volume. In April, 3.5 million people searched for iPod-related terms 12 million times, which is 3.4 searches per person.

"It was clear there was an overwhelming interest in this product that was just rumored at the time," Lipsman said about the iPhone.

How exactly those numbers will translate to sales when the new iPhone 3G goes on sale July 11, Lipsman couldn't say.

Apple surely must be reading its own set of data-infused tea leaves and seeing in their swirls that demand for the new iPhone is high. The company will produce 15 million iPhone 3G devices -- which run on a faster data network, include built-in GPS and cost as little as $199 -- this calendar year, Craig Berger, a semiconductor analyst with Friedman Billings Ramsey, told Barron's.

Berger estimates that Apple will produce 17 million iPhones this year, including the 2 million older versions it has already made. That's 4 million more than what Berger had previously expected and 7 million more than what Apple has publicly targeted.

Could the fixation with technology have trumped the obsession with celebrity?  Yes, among a core group of followers, iPhone fever is bigger than Britney fever or Barack fever. Someone tell the paparazzi.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo credits: (top) Dan Steinberg / Associated Press; (bottom) courtesy of Apple

He? She? Facebook wants to know your gender

New rule: Facebook says you now have to inform the world whether you are female or male.

Facebook says it's a grammar issue that has reared its ugly head as the popular social network seeks worldwide domination.

"Ever see a story about a friend who tagged 'themself' in a photo? 'Themself' isn't even a real word. We've used that in place of 'himself or herself.' We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven't, until now, selected their sex on their profile," Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager explained in a press statement today.

But, Gleit says, translators and users in other countries say that not specifying your gender is confusing. And it leads to people in mini-feed stories defaulting to the "wrong sex." (Is there a right one?)

So Facebook is asking for you to declare yourself. If you don't, you will soon get a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as "him" or "her." That information won't be displayed in your "basic information," but it will appear in mini-feed and news feed stories about you.

To their credit, Facebook folks realize this is a sensitive issue. "We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male-female distinction too limiting," Gleit wrote. "We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account, including how we refer to you in mini-feed."

-- Jessica Guynn

Microsoft rumored to be buying Powerset

The rumors have been on again, off again for months that Microsoft plans to buy San Francisco search engine Powerset for $100 million or more.

Now VentureBeat says the rumor will become a fait accompli next month as the software giant locked in combat over search snaps up the semantic, or natural language, search engine. TechCrunch says a deal may not happen if Microsoft swings a search partnership deal with Yahoo, which has turned spurning the Redmond, Wash., company into a worldwide rubber-necking event.

Microsoft and Powerset both declined to comment. Powerset is best known to L.A. Times readers for its employees' facial hair (above).

Microsoft, with its giant warchest, certainly could afford Powerset. The start-up raised $12.5 million in a financing round from Foundation Capital and Founders Fund in 2006, valuing the company at $42.5 million.

Powerset specializes in natural language search. Basically it tries to understand the underlying meaning of the phrases you enter so it can deliver more relevant results. The technology has taken a long time to develop. And, in general, it's a tough and expensive trick to pull off. Which may be why a Microsoft buyout is in the works.

Wonder what Google thinks of that?

Reminds me of ...

Coming soon: .everythingyoucanthinkof

UPDATE: Here's a more detailed version of this story from the paper.

-----

Ushering in the most dramatic expansion of virtual real estate in 40 years, the group controlling Web addresses said today that pretty much anyone would get a shot at buying a top-level domain to go along with the current crop, which includes .com and .net.

The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names & Numbers, which is as close as the Internet gets to a governing body, opted to open up the process to companies, individuals and coalitions. That means that any word or name approved by ICANN could conceivably follow the dot in a Web address. Get ready for .pickles and .google.

"The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net," ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey said in a news release issued from the group's Paris meeting. New domains could be forthcoming next year, after another round of refinements and the first applications.

"There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris," ICANN said in the release.

The decision stems from ICANN's philosophy of keeping as little power for itself as possible, as well as from lobbying by the companies that dole out domain names. Those companies, including some in Los Angeles, see a potential windfall in administering new top-level domains and selling off individual addresses.

But not everyone was thrilled with the step. Critics warn that scammers will rush in, grabbing up trademarked names or misspelled versions of those names and then taking their chances in court.

"Google doesn't want a scam artist running Google.whatever," said tech policy consultant Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of the nonprofit People For Internet Responsibility. "It's almost like an extortion racket -- you'd better buy your name in this new top-level domain or you're going to get blamed."

"The process has been hijacked to a significant extent by folks who see the domain-name system as their personal piggy bank."

-- Joseph Menn

Image courtesy of ICANN

YouTube star's spinning is out of control

Warning: Do not try this at home.

Of course, that's exactly where Peter Bragiel learned how to do it.

Bragiel grew up outside Chicago. At the age of 15, he had a tumor removed from his leg. He healed, but a few months later, while he was playing basketball, a bone in his leg snapped.

On crutches for months, Bragiel couldn't play Frisbee with his friends. But he could spin a Frisbee on his finger. Soon he was spinning all kinds of things.

"I was the kid on the sidelines," he said. "It was my way of engaging with my classmates."

Bragiel's brother Paul, a San Francisco Internet entrepreneur, told him about YouTube, the video-sharing site that friend Jawed Karim helped create. It turned out to be the perfect platform for an aimless young entertainer who graduated in 2003 with a degree in marketing from Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

Peter Bragiel soon developed a small following for his goofy skits and music videos. He also developed his own spin on a long-distance travel series. He documented walking from Los Angeles to San Diego in a stunt called the Walkstars. Then he and a friend rode red scooters that couldn't go faster than 29 mph cross-country all summer long -- he called that stunt the Scootstars. He met his girlfriend, Patty Doria, at the end of the ride in New York City.

He calls this mode of transportation inTransit, by which he means he focuses on the journey, not the destination. Bragiel is a free thinker and a free traveler. His vagabond existence comes courtesy of his parents, who used to pack up him and his brothers and travel for months. He has lived in seven cities and visited 30 countries. Next he plans to film his travels to the southern tip of South America all while taking buses, trains and other forms of public transportation and hitchhiking.

In his SpinStar video, which has gotten more than 135,000 views on YouTube, Bragiel spins more than a nightclub DJ: He spins a white board, a Scrabble game, a mirror, a suitcase, a basketball, even a MacBook Air. The idea, he says, was to get as many "obscure, expensive, dangerous items and items with flair."

A former roommate, Josh Hallman, protests when a possessed Bragiel barges into the room and unplugs the Nintendo Wii while he's playing. "Not the Wii!" he calls out.

The most challenging feat? A tossup between spinning a saw blade and a flat, thin piece of wood lighted on fire. For the latter, out of view of the camera was a strategically placed swimming pool ready for dunking should Bragiel catch fire.

"I enjoy performing for people," he said. "I like to see the outcome of what I can create and get people's feedback. When someone recognizes you on the street, it's a really good feeling that your work paid off. I really enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. I can just speak my voice through video, and some of the crazy things that come into my mind."

In the meantime, all is well at brother Paul's new start-up Lefora (where brother Dan also works). The company offers free hosted forums (its motto is "Forums made easy"). Lefora just hit a big milestone: 10,000 communities created 3 1/2 months after its public launch.

-- Jessica Guynn

Can't get into TED conference? Watch it online

In February hundreds of celebrities, tech geeks and other random important people will converge in Long Beach for Technology Entertainment Design, a conference started 25 years ago to bring together people from the tech, entertainment and design worlds.

TED is where Microsoft revealed its worldwide telescope, where Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins tried out a new pair of artificial legs online and where such people as Al Gore, Bono and Jane Goodall might bump elbows while reaching for a jumbo shrimp.

Sound cool? You might think about going, because this is the first time the conference will be held in Southern California -- it's moving to Long Beach after 20 years in Monterey. But you probably can't get in. Curator Chris Anderson (no, not that Chris Anderson) says that thousands of people apply but that TED staffers have to winnow the field using a complicated formula based on things like how interesting they are.

Don't weep yet. Even if you're not interesting enough to attend next year's conference, which is themed "The Great Unveiling," you can still watch the lectures. Two years ago, TED started putting a few videos of lectures online. Today the organization said that talks had been watched more than 50 million times worldwide and that the conference would release a new talk every weekday.

Videos up currently: brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor talking about her stroke, Gore lecturing (again) about climate change, tech guru Johnny Lee showing all the cool ways to use a Wii controller and "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt questioning whether we need child car seats.

The most-viewed talks are by some of the conference's least-famous speakers, Anderson said. "It shows the Web's ability to create a different kind of celebrity," he said.

At February's conference, three recipients of the TED Prize will reveal their one wish to change the world. In 2005, Bono wished for a social movement of 1 million American activists for Africa. Last year, Bill Clinton wished for a better rural health system for Rwanda.

This year's TED Prize recipients have not been revealed. Here's hoping that one of them wishes for more seats in the TED auditorium.

-- Alana Semuels

Semuels, a Times staff writer, covers marketing and the L.A. tech scene.

Around the Web 6.26.08: Joss Stone and shifting friendships among Slide, Facebook, MySpace and Meebo

-- Grammy winner Joss Stone, pictured at right, wants to share more music with her friends -- and far less with the music industry. Torrentfreak

-- Has Slide had a falling out with Facebook? The popular social network dumps top application TopFriends. TechCrunch

-- Speaking of friends dumped by Facebook... AllThingsD

-- Oh, but Meebo is a Facebook friend with benefits. VentureBeat

-- Of course, MySpace is always trying to make new friends. CNet

-- Xobni is finding new ways to help you be friendlier with your LinkedIn friends. TechCrunch

-- But Xobni is starting to get a lot of competition from friends. ReadWriteWeb

-- Danny Sullivan says Ask.com still can't compete for friends, no matter how hard it tries. Search Engine Land

-- But Microsoft, that big ol' friendly teddy bear squeeze of a software giant, is the friendliest of them all. AllThingsD

-- If you don't count Google, which is very friendly with its new CFO and ponies up the money to prove it. Mercury News

-- And here's a prediction of an unlikely friendship between Google and Microsoft. Conversation Marketing

-- Fear not, everyone's favorite Subway friend, Jared Fogle, is not in fact dead, as reported on Twitter. Web Scout

-- But the mouse just might be. So long, old friend. Datamation

-- So might the remote control. Use your face instead. NetworkWorld

-- No friends? No problem. You can be mine. Check out this cartoon I found on my FriendFeed. It's the next big thing. Geek and Poke

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo by Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times 

Doing it the Dell way with new colorful laptops

Michael Tatelman, Dell's vice president of global consumer sales and marketing, was recently in San Francisco to unveil a new brand of Dell laptops, dubbed Studio, which go on sale in Best Buy and Staples stores in the next few days.

In the last year, Dell has made a bigger push into the consumer market by paying closer attention to design. Last year, with the Inspiron line, consumers could pick the color of their laptop from a palette of five colors.

Tatelman said the effort was beginning to pay off. In May, Dell reported that its consumer PC sales grew more than twice the industry rate during the first quarter and that the company had increased its global share of the consumer market by 1.2 percentage points, to 8.8%. (HP is still the king of global computer sales with 19%, compared with Dell's 15%, according to IDC. But in the first quarter, Dell increased its share, most dramatically in the U.S. Here, Dell's share is 31%, up from 28% in the same quarter last year. In the U.S., HP dropped slightly to 24% from 25%.)

The Studio laptops come with the customizable goodies one expects from Dell, such as optional back-lighted keyboard and a 15- or 17-inch screen. They'll cost $799 to $999 and go on sale tomorrow.

But what Tatelman wanted to talk about was how people personalize their laptops. With Studio, consumers will have two more colors to choose from -- plum purple and tangerine orange (chosen because it is also a common school color) -- and an array of accessories such as laptop bags and mice that can be color coordinated with the laptop.

Tatelman sniped at the competitors' approach to customers, indicating that Dell wasn't ready to cede the consumer market yet to Apple, with its thin MacBook Air, or to HP, with its TV ad campaign that focused on the hands of celebrities as they talked about their computers. He described Apple's approach as "we'll tell you what you want" and HP's as "they will tell you what you want." He described Dell's, of course, as "what do you want to do with this?"

And then, Tatelman pulled out a gadget that looked like a midget laptop, about the size of a paperback novel. It was actually a wooden demo model of a future Dell product: a portable Internet surfing device with a keyboard. Then he giggled and put it away.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: Dell

Video games for chicks

Not all games are shooters, and not all players are geeks. Take Daisy Durham, a 40-year-old community college professor in Houston who likes to play online puzzle games when she's hit with a bout of insomnia.

The self-described snobby intellectual is part of the newly hot demographic target for game companies looking to expand their reach beyond the traditional 18-to-34-year-old male gamer. Reaching this audience, however, requires more than just repackaging superhero games and buying ads in "Cosmo."

One approach, taken by King.com and Electronic Arts' Pogo, is to offer free, snack-size games online and collect advertising revenue. King.com serves up puzzle games to portals such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. About 65% of its 10 million unique monthly visitors are female, according to the company's estimates.

Microsoft used a different strategy: It hired Christa Phillips, aka TriXie, as a goodwill ambassador for women in the Xbox Live online game service.

Another tack is to sell games that women would want to buy. Game Factory, a privately owned subsidiary of a Danish toy distributor with offices in Santa Monica, is betting that it has the right formula: Take half a dozen addictive puzzle games, add one part ambient music, toss in some soothing graphics, and women will snap it up on their way to the spa. The game, called Zenses, is slated for release in the fall for Nintendo's DS Lite hand-held console.

Zenses has a big pool to draw from. About 28% of the 70 million DS owners worldwide are female, most of them adult women, according to Nintendo. That's close to 20 million potential customers. Will those women dig this style of game play? We'll go out on a limb and say that it will have better odds of appealing to women than, say, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Just a hunch.

-- Alex Pham

Screen shot of Zenses Rainforest courtesy of Game Factory