It’s also important technology in Microsoft’s strategy to attract more application designers to its Expression line of products. XAML is a lingua franca that designers can use with Expression tools and developers can manipulate with Visual Studio.

On Tuesday, Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith is scheduled to talk at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco and the company’s open-source lab, led by Sam Ramji, is expected to make an announcement.

The information is covered under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise, which is meant to protect third parties from patent infringement.

Microsoft on Tuesday made more technical information available for XAML, a language for designing the user interface of Web and Windows applications.

In a statement, Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s general manager of interoperability and standards, said:

XAML is the markup language designers use to lay out an application’s front end. Microsoft’s Silverlight Web browser plug-in for displaying media can render XAML along with JavaScript and HTML.

“Microsoft’s posting of the expanded set of XAML format documentation to assist third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products will help promote interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community. Use of the Open Specification Promise assures developers that they can use any Microsoft patents needed to implement all or part of the XAML formats for free, anywhere in the world, now and in the future.”

The documentation is aimed at other software companies and developers who want to make products that can “read” XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language).

The added technical detail will allow servers from other companies to send information to clients written using XAML, Microsoft said. Non-Microsoft client software will also more easily read XAML.

It only works with Twitter accounts that are publicly accessible–some members keep their updates friends-only–and it takes a while for the app to munch through all the “tweets” and form a cloud. And like many small Twitter applications that get unexpected viral buzz, the server sometimes crashes. But when it’s working, the end result can be kind of cool.

My TweetCloud.

Another new application of note is TweetStats, a more quantitative Twitter application that crunches numbers on how often you Twitter, to whom you send the most “reply” tweets, and when you’re Twittering the most (3 a.m. anyone?). CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern suggests it as a way to spy on other Twitter users. He’s probably got the right idea there.

Also in the cloud are some of my favorite things, like “running,” “reading,” and “pizza,” and a display of my propensity for words like “dude,” “awesome,” “omg,” and “pumped.”

(Credit:
TweetClouds.com)

This morning, it seems like everyone on my Twitter contacts list is talking about TweetClouds. It’s an application that uses the microblogging service’s API to create a “cloud” of the most frequently used words used in a given Twitter member’s feed of “tweets.”

Now if there were a way to mash up TweetClouds and TweetStats, well, that would be creepy.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

LG Decoy has a built-in Bluetooth headset

Gupta plans to hire two new corporate vice presidents to oversee Microsoft’s educational and emerging market products, Microsoft said.

Orlando Ayala, the Microsoft executive who had been leading the unit (and with whom I had been traveling with in Colombia) is shifting to a new role inside Kevin Turner’s sales unit, while Microsoft veteran Will Poole is retiring from Microsoft this fall. Poole, who had been heading the unit with Ayala, is a former top Windows executive, while Ayala had been sales chief and head of the midmarket group at Microsoft, prior to joining the company’s Unlimited Potential effort.

Poole will report to Mundie until he leaves in the fall, while Microsoft called Ayala’s job an expanded role but offered only vague indications of what he is doing, saying he will be involved in “external evangelism, field engagement, and direct input on strategy.”

Anoop Gupta

Gupta will report to Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer.

“The mission of (the Unlimited Potential unit) is one that fits naturally with Craig’s charter to develop the long-cycle research, innovation, and business incubations that will impact the future of technology–and the role it can play in addressing societal needs in areas like health care, education, and scientific discovery,” Microsoft said in a statement.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The chipmaker also said that the quad-core Opteron “Barcelona” processor will be available from computer manufacturers in the middle of the second quarter.

AMD also announced an energy-efficient desktop quad-core processor, the Phenom X4 9100e that operates at a maximum of only 65-watts.

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AMD)

*Black Edition

AMD announced Thursday that it is shipping triple-core processors, a first for the PC market. AMD also updated the quad-core Phenom lineup and reaffirmed that quad-core Opteron chips for servers will be available later in the second quarter.

AMD roadmap

AMD Phenom models

The initial Phenom X3 processors will ship as the B2 “stepping” or version. The follow-on versions in the channel will be the B3, said Moorhead. The B3 version fixes the TLB bug, which AMD has said all along is an extremely rare occurrence and affects virtually no one except, possibly, very high-end customers. Any chips designated with a “50″ suffix will be a processor that implements the fix in silicon.

(Credit:
AMD)

Hewlett-Packard is already offering the Phenom X3 and X4 in business PCs and will add systems to its consumer lineup too, said Thi La, director of marketing, North America Consumer Computing, HP, in a prepared statement. Dell is also expected to offer systems.

Intel may respond to the mainstream segment challenge by changing its pricing equation. “Intel may go after it with a high-performance dual core or under price a quad core. A sub-mainstream quad core is most likely,” said Dean McCarron, founder and Principal of Mercury Research.

Phenom pricing:
Phenom 9850: 2.5GHz–$235*
Phenom 9750: 2.4GHz–$215
Phenom 9750: 2.4GHz–$215
Phenom 9650: 2.3GHz–$215
Phenom 9600: 2.3GHz–$251*

When paired with the AMD 780 series chipset, the triple-core Phenom will deliver the greatest performance improvement–up to 30 percent compared to dual-core at the same clock speed–according to AMD.

The AMD Phenom X3 8400 (2.1GHz) and 8600 (2.3GHZ) triple-core processors are the first processors that use three cores. This is expected to allow AMD to target price-performance points that two- and four-core processors can’t easily match. “The value proposition is simple. Three cores versus two cores. You make the choice,” said Pat Moorhead, VP of Advanced Marketing at AMD. “When you’ve maxed out your two cores…(this is an) extra core to do background tasks,” he said.

Chemists at the University of Munich made tiny bombs from two tetrazoles called HBT and G2ZT, which not only proved more stable than conventional explosives but more powerful as well, according to researcher Thomas Klap?tke. Here’s a video that shows it in action.

(Credit:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M?nchen)

When detonated, common explosives now used in military and industrial applications such as TNT and RDX generate toxic gases that pollute the environment. They’re also dangerous to handle: They don’t like to be dropped or bumped and are super sensitive to electrical sparks.

To make them safer and reduce environmental dangers, German scientists have turned to tetrazoles–synthetic compounds that derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon, as do many conventional explosives. Tetrazoles are already used to generate the gas to fill the airbags in some
cars.

Yahoo shows a combination of graphical “display” ads, used to promote advertisers’ brand clout, and search ads that appear next to search results. Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from search ads, which are easier to tie to customer behavior like purchasing a specific product and which are paid for only when a person clicks on the ad. Because search-ad spending can therefore be tied closely to financial performance, spending can be justified and the ads are less vulnerable to an economic downturn.

Yahoo hopes for $800 million in new revenue during the deal’s first year by showing Google-supplied ads on for search results where Yahoo’s technology currently can’t, but it’s not clear whether the deal will go into effect at the scale expected. Other wild cards include selling off decreasingly valuable Asian Internet properties and an acquisition of AOL that could come with a cash infusion from its corporate parent, Time Warner.

Here’s the visibility investors have, though: Yahoo lowered its full-year revenue outlook from a range of $7.35 billion to $7.85 billion to a range of $7.175 billion to $7.375 billion.

Yahoo's net income has risen and fallen in recent quarters.

“This is a pretty different environment than even four weeks ago,” Yang said. “I don’t think we have any visibility into ‘09.”

Plan B
Layoffs, of course, aren’t Yahoo’s only answer to its plight, and some of its initiatives hold promise. Decker was eager to draw attention to Apt, the company’s new system for letting advertisers deal with display ads, and to a move to a customizable Yahoo.com home page that’s a centerpiece of the Yahoo Open Strategy. Ads on the home page are sold out in October, and there are only a few days available in November and December, “which is better than we expected,” Decker said.

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang had some bold words to say while announcing the company’s third-quarter financial results. The only problem is that they might have been a different set of words than disgruntled investors were expecting.

One uncertainty, though, is what will happen with a Yahoo’s search-ad deal with Google, implementation of which has been twice postponed as the companies grapple with antitrust regulators.

Overall, though, Yahoo is betting that smaller adjustments are appropriate, even though it raises the risk the company will end up muddling along through a series of not-bold-enough course corrections.

Cost cutting
Any company has two ways to improve profitability: increase revenue or decrease expenses. With advertisers’ purse-strings tightening, the latter option rises to the fore.

Based on Yahoo’s third-quarter expenses, the company spends money at a rate of about $3.9 billion a year. The layoff is central to a plan to cut that spending rate permanently by about $400 million.

What remains to be seen is whether those possibilities and Tuesday’s layoff announcement will actually be enough to set Yahoo on a new trajectory. The grim stock price indicates a number of investors appear would prefer the company Yahoo to pare back to some more profitable core, in effect hitting the reset button.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

But Yang and his fellow executives are betting that this cut will be deep enough. Announcing the earlier layoffs in January, Yang declared, “We’re making good progress executing on this strategy, and I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction,” but as it turned out, not fast enough. It’s not pleasant being laid off, but it was easier for out-of-work Yahoo staff to find new jobs then than it is now.

“While the advertising market goes through a down cycle, we believe the Internet ad market will recover, with Yahoo positioned to take share,” Yang said on a conference call to announce earnings. “Despite a tough environment, I remain very optimistic about Yahoo’s future.”

Investors were only modestly cheered by Yahoo’s new position, though. In after-hours trading, a 7 percent increase the company’s stock only erased the day’s loss and left the stock under $13 per share. Compare that with the Microsoft acquisition offer, which when made public in February sent Yahoo’s stock from $19.18 to near $29, and you’ll see what Yahoo is up against.

Part of Yahoo’s core problem today is that the online advertising market–in particular ads for autos, finance, real estate, and travel–is weakening. Another part is that Yahoo is more exposed to that trouble than its top rival, Google, whose stronger results afford it some of the breathing room Yahoo lacks.

Bank of America analyst Brian Pitz called the quarter “lackluster” in a report Tuesday. “The weakening economic environment continues to weigh on branded advertising,” he said.

Though Yahoo announced a 10 percent layoff that will affect at least 1,430 employees, Yang and President Sue Decker also talked in optimistic terms about how the company is working to achieve a strong position when the advertising market recovers from the current economic troubles. It’s smart to plan for the long-term, but right now, investors are fixated on Yahoo’s short-term prospects.

That 10 percent expense cut is significant, to be sure, and Yang said in an internal memo about the layoffs that “having layoffs is very difficult, particularly in light of all we’ve experienced this year.”

Although the company reserved the option of more layoffs in 2009, those won’t cut expenses or mollify investors today.

Yang said the weakened spending environment triggered the current layoffs, and to be fair that environment that wasn’t visible early this year. But there’s no indication that the current economic woes will be short-lived, and Yang shied away from forecasting anything concrete.

To refresh your memory, other difficult moments of 2008 included Yahoo cutting about 1,000 jobs already in January, trying to fend off Microsoft’s unwelcome acquisition attempt, losing search market share to Google, and giving a seat on the board to activist investor Carl Icahn after an acrimonious struggle.

According to Goldberg, sales of the game cards will be worth $75 million to $100 million this year with an expected run to $500 million by 2010. Interestingly enough, Target was the retailer that figured it out first and convinced Apple to offer iTunes cards.

Now, there’s an interesting fact about these cards. Retailers love them over any other product they have in their store, because the cards themselves don’t take up any inventory.

And why do retailers love these cards? The economics work in their favor.

GMG started in the marketing services working with retailers–specifically Target–but around the same time as that, well, it’s not very well known, but it’s Target who actually brought the idea of the pre-paid iTunes card to Apple and sold them on that.

They’re not activated until they’re purchased, so they don’t sit on the balance sheet of the retailer. They feel like “free money” to retailers. So it’s a very positive business for retailers to get into, and it really lowers the bar for any retailers who are unsure about it, they don’t need to worry about losing money on it.

The tale of retail game cards is a pretty amazing one. In a recent interview Rob Goldberg, founder and CEO of GMG Entertainment, a publisher of “digital currency cards” that you see on sale at Target, Safeway and a number of other big-box shops, shed some light on how the market came to be and where it’s going in the future.

It’s a great interview if you have even a remote interest in virtual goods and gaming. It also shows that no matter how bad the economy is, someone will figure out how to make you spend your money.

The first iTunes cards were co-branded and were exclusive to Target. In terms of retailers in North America who were focused on pre-paid cards for digital entertainment, Target were ahead of the curve.

Since Aaron’s a buddy, I can’t give this product a fair review (see TechCrunch for an opinion on the service itself). However, I did want to point out that Iminta has a cool thing going for it: you can put your followers in groups and specify which group sees what. For example, if you don’t want your family to see all your Del.icio.us updates, you can remove that info from your family feed.

See also: Profilactic and Plaxo.

My former co-worker, Aaron Newton, is launching this week the product he quit CNET to build: Iminta (as in, “I’m inta,” get it?). It’s a service that aggregates all your social network feeds into one place, so your buddies can more easily keep track of what you’re doing online, and vice versa.

I don’t think any system has yet made variable privacy manageable. However, it’s a new idea, so I wouldn’t expect it yet. But if the idea of the implicit social network takes off (see Delver and my take on self-building social sites), we are going to desperately need variable privacy.

Iminta puts your pals' social activities into one ginormous feed.

I really like the idea of variable resolution for social feeds. Maybe that’s because, as an old guy (as opposed to a gen-MySpace guy), I think privacy matters and that it’s not an all-or-nothing concept.

Variable privacy: You control who can see what.

When I covered Yahoo’s centralized geolocation data service, Fire Eagle, I noted that it had a similar feature: You can let different followers see your data in different resolutions. For example, you could let your family know what town you’re in but not precisely where, while making you exact location visible to you co-workers, but only during work hours.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Find all the celestial objects in the sky tonight with CalSky.

This week, astronomers will be up in the early morning hours to see Perseids, a meteor shower that has historically proven to put on quite a show. This happens every August when Earth passes through debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet.

1. CalSky: It’s, quite simply, an extremely useful service.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

World of Astronomy If you’re looking for an astronomy encyclopedia, the World of Astronomy is for you. Think of it as the Wikipedia of the astronomy world.

(Credit:
EarthSky)

Astronomy Network would be even better with a larger community.

Go star gazing

If you’re an amateur astronomer or someone looking to get started with the hobby, you might be surprised to know that there are online tools to help you tonight, when you want to see Perseids, and every other night you go in the back yard and set up your telescope.

With WorldWide Telescope, you can choose to look through different constellations. The resource also lets you check out planets. If you want, you can even enjoy a guided tour to see the important stars and celestial objects that you don’t want to miss. The online client works well, but beware that it’s much slower than the desktop app. If you can download the desktop client, go with that. In either case, WorldWide Telescope will help you learn before you head to the back yard to see those stars for yourself.

Google Sky Google Sky is a neat utility that helps you determine where celestial objects are before you run outside to check them out for yourself. The app lets you see constellations, planets, the solar system, an infrared view of the galaxy, and more. It works far better in the browser than Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope. And since it provides you with the exact location of stars in the sky, it should help you find what you’re looking for sooner. It’s a great app.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

2. Weather Underground: Since it’s unique to your location, you should find everything you want with Weather Underground.

CalSky CalSky is an invaluable astronomy tool. The site provides you with a search that you can modify to find exactly what you’re looking for tonight. Do you want to see the International Space Station? Are you looking for meteor streams? The site will help you find it all.

Weather Underground Weather Underground is a really useful site. Once you input your location, the service will show you a visual depiction of all the celestial objects visible from your location. When you click on one of the many objects displayed in the image, you’ll be taken to a page detailing its important facts. So, if you’re looking for its exact location, distance from Earth, and the peak times to see it, you should be happy.

Astronomy Network Astronomy Network is a social network for astronomers. It sounds like a neat idea, but after you sign up, you quickly realize that the site has such a small community, it’s tough to find value in it.

When you get to the site, it determines your location. From there, it will find all the objects you search for in the night sky on a specific day (you can search for any day of the year). The site explains each cosmic event and where to find it in the sky. When you click on one of those events, it delivers a page that provides even more information. If you’re serious about astronomy, this is the site for you.

EarthSky helps you find constellations each night.

EarthSky EarthSky is an informative site for amateur astronomers. The main focus of the site is podcasts, which run daily providing astronomers with news that could affect their star gazing. But EarthSky’s real value is its daily “SkyWatching” feature, which provides tonight’s sky conditions. Using that, you can find different visible constellations in the night sky. EarthSky is easily one of the most informative services in this roundup. Check it out.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Google Sky shows all kinds of neat celestial objects.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

WorldWide Telescope Although it works best on the desktop, Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope has a great Web client that gives you the same view of the sky as the desktop version.

World of Astronomy lists several constellations.

When you search for topics in the World of Astronomy, you’ll find some short definitions to simple topics. But where the encyclopedia shows off is in its listing of major constellations that you can see with your telescope. It features their exact location in the sky, so you can quickly find the constellation you’re looking for. World of Astronomy is worth trying out.

3. EarthSky: It’s full-featured and informative. What else could you ask for?

My top 3

That said, Astronomy Network’s forums are a great place to hang out and communicate with some of the members. If you end up making friends with some users, you can instant message each other, send direct messages, upload videos, and add images to the site. It’s a full-featured social network designed specifically for amateur astronomers, but until more people join, it won’t live up to its potential.

Weather Underground helps you find everything in the sky.