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Two of the biggest challenges facing our society — economy and climate change — are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to solve one problem without fixing the other. To eternal optimists, these challenges also offer opportunity and we are seeing that with major investment interest in alternative energies from folks as diverse as energy baron T. Boone Pickens to former Vice President Al Gore.

The cleantech movement is vital for our little corner of the world. If today’s broadband pipes are the 21st century highway system, electric power is the engine that keeps the traffic moving. From expensive data centers and large central offices, to routers and switches and all the way down to our iPhones — every single device depends on electricity. If we want our technical nirvana, we need to figure out ways to reduce our energy footprint.

We will explore some of these themes at Green:Net our one-day conference that will be held in San Francisco’s Golden Gateway Club on March 24, 2009. At the conference we will look at how software, the web and communication networks will help companies shape the future of our electrical system, deliver transportation infrastructure, create social movements and help reduce carbon emissions.

A team led by Katie Fehrenbacher, editor of our Earth2Tech blog, has helped put together the agenda for this conference. Here are some of the topics we are going to be exploring at the conference:

• Dotcom to Greenboom
• The Green Web Effect
• Green Data Centers: Low Carbon Diets for Your Data Center
• The New Networked Car
• Power Grid 2.0

Among our scheduled keynote speakers are:

• Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet, General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners and proponent of Enernet, the energy network.
• Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Saul Griffith – Co-founder of Makani Power, Squid Labs, Potenco and Wattzon, and MacArthur Prize Winner
• Jonathan Koomey – Professor, UC Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Dr. Albert Esser – VP of Data Center Infrastructure Group, Dell
• Rob Aldrich – Principal, Energy Efficient Solutions, Cisco
• Bill Vogel – CEO, Trilliant
• Andy Tang – Director of Smart Web, PG&E
• Sunil Sharan – Smart Grid Director, GE
• Erin Carlson – Director, Yahoo for Good, Yahoo!

In days to come we will be updating the list of speakers and will update the conference web site accordingly. The event will also include a startup launch session, which will introduce 10 up and coming startups that are leveraging digital technologies for green aims. Speakers from companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Cisco, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Foundation Capital, JP Morgan, GE and Pacific Gas & Electric have also been added to the event schedule.

You can register for the conference at the conference web site, which also details information about schedule, speakers and the venue itself.

See you in San Francisco in March 2009!

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Yahoo, one of the largest web sites on the planet, is being plagued by series of problems related to Domain Name System (DNS). A test using Gomez’s testing service shows error messages in certain cities such as Chicago. Others are experiencing slower access to Yahoo web sites, including the home page. There is already some chatter about this on Twitter, where people are pointing to problems with Yahoo Finance pages. If you have experienced these problems do let me know in the comments. I am going to try and talk to Yahoo and get to the bottom of it as quickly as I can.

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As expected, the FCC said today it will take up the issue of creating yet another wireless network, and set rules on cable pricing and programming, at its Dec. 18 meeting. As commenter Tom Evslin pointed out, the alternative wireless broadband network proposed is slow, will likely be filtered and will deliver yesterday’s technology in five or 10 years into the future. However, the rule-making on cable could be a win for consumers.

The cable efforts have the potential to bring more independent channels to cable systems as well as create rules designed to halt the disputes that arise between cable companies and content providers that can leave consumers without broadcast channels and force them to pay more for channels they once received as part of a cheaper package. Looks like Kevin Martin’s last fight as FCC chair will be against T-Mobile — which opposes the wireless efforts — and the cable guys.

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Microsoft Data Center Chief Mike Manos posted a blog entry yesterday on the company’s vision for next generation data centers. The blog post (and the accompanying animated video) has extensive details on how Microsoft envisions building the data center of the future — and it definitely has some of the “trailer park” modularity and scalability attributes that I mentioned in my post last week.

Some of the key features of the Generation 4 Modular Data Center design are the use of an innovative spine infrastructure for cooling, power and connectivity; the use of pre-fabricated and completely modular server containers and buildings; and ambitious goals for energy efficiency (an average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.125 for all data centers by 2012).

By putting forth its plans for the Generation 4 Modular Data Center, Microsoft is simultaneously throwing down the gauntlet in the data center arena and showing its cards. By openly sharing its data center plans it is taking the technology and thought leadership away from Google in the critical area of Internet and services infrastructure. At the same time, in somewhat typical Microsoft fashion, it is asking (or perhaps requiring) the industry to standardize on its data center design approach. Given its influence and buying power with vendors it may get its wish.

Viewing this information in conjunction with announcements of the Azure Services Platform and Office Live, there is no doubt that the giant in Redmond is aggressively focused on delivering enterprise cloud computing. To top it off, market timing could not be better for Microsoft, as its hordes of cash and diversity of enterprise products should prove one version of the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rule.”

Related stories:

• Inside Microsoft’s Internet Infrastructure & Its Plans For The Future
• GigaOM Interview: Ray Ozzie

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

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Japan’s second largest wireless carrier, KDDI, has taken the plunge into the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, by building an LTE overlay on top of its existing CDMA network. KDDI is using equipment from Nortel and Hitachi for the fourth-generation wireless network, which will be operating by 2010. For those of you in the U.S. eager to see what the 4G future holds, Verizon is expected to start deploying LTE in 2010 as well. Vendors such as Ericsson expect LTE to be widely deployed in 2012. As a footnote, KDDI also has a WiMAX network deployed in parts of Japan that it has said it plans to begin operating next year. If the two technologies are ever to merge, perhaps we can watch that unfold in Japan.

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Updated with correction: A few months ago, Sequoia Capital doused the ever-ebullient Silicon Valley with a bucket of ice cold reality when it laid “good times” to rest. Today, one of Sequoia’s all-time stars laid a big wreath on that grave in the pages of The Wall Street Journal: Google. And while it didn’t implicitly state that it might face tough times next year, comments by its CEO amount to a proverbial bear call, which could mean bad news not only for Google but also for the rest of the media and advertising sector.

“We have to behave as though we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal. It seems like a prudent move. But I see it as a big red flag and I think Schmidt is preparing us for what could be a terrible 2009. The WSJ says that Google executives have been preparing for slower growth for a year but that “the economic crisis is forcing them to step up their efforts.”

According to conventional wisdom (and investors), Google is the best-positioned company to survive and perhaps thrive in the current advertising slump. If the leader of the pack is feigning ignorance about its chances, what can one say about mere mortals?

I find it hard to believe that a company that keeps world-famous economist like Hal Varian (who muses on the economy and Google’s prospects often on the investor calls) doesn’t know. As a company, Google collects enough data on a daily basis that it can take a fair pulse of the broader economy. Remember, they could accurately track the spread of flu across America just based on searches, so why can’t they track economic sentiment? Additionally, it sells ads to everyone from mom-and-pop shops to consumer durable goods giants and as such it has a fair idea on the degree of tightness with which people are holding their billfolds. They have enough intellectual horsepower on campus to put two and two together.

Beyond Schmidt’s statement, one has to look at their other moves, such as plans to slash 10,000 or so of their contractors, slowing cap-ex investments and killing off projects. These point to tough times for the company that has lived a lush life so far.

Projects that are too pie-in-the-sky are going to be killed. Schmidt calls it the “dark matter.” Google Lively and Google SearchMash are two of the many projects which will soon not matter. Google is contemplating killing off Google Notebook and Google Audio Indexing as well. Google Page Creator has given way to Google Sites. In that vein, Google is going to prune overlapping products. No more the 20-percent time for pet projects for engineers, though it might come back once the economic wheel churns. These are smart and prudent moves even if they are prompted by desperate need to control costs and meet their numbers.Update: I totally misread the WSJ post and made an incorrect interpretation. In other words, I totally messed up about the 20 percent timing thing. A commenter from Google was quick to point out that the 20 percent rule still stands and I am just flat-out wrong. This is what Schmidt said, which I misread:

He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”

I know it might sound hokey, but the rich don’t stop driving their Aston Martins just because the price of gas is going up. They do so when they are not as rich! The same analogy holds for Google and its cost-cutting efforts. Just remember how much of PR they milked out of their 20-percent philosophy. They are essentially eating a cow-pie on that. (Now I am the fool for making the wrong assumption on the 20-percent philosophy, though the rest of my sentiment still stands.) They wouldn’t be doing this unless things are really really REALLY tough.

Google needs to keep its sales machine going at a time when it is facing the same malaise as that of the broader market – slowing spending on marketing and advertising. There is some argument that Google is going to win because of their performance-based advertising system.

While that is true to some extent, what happens when the economy goes into a deep freeze? If you don’t have the money to splurge on a large-screen plasma TV, there is little chance you are going to search for that, and thus there are fewer opportunities for Google to sell more ads against those searches. Of course, if there is no intent to buy amongst the searchers, then there is less inclination to click on those ads as well. And that is not good news for Google.

Google, of course, is going to try and meet its targets by taking more out of the pocket of its “adsense” partners and undercutting competitors. The WSJ points out that the company is focusing heavily on display, mobile and other ad opportunities, which can only mean bad news for their rivals.

Related: Why Silicon Valley Should be Worried

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Netbooks are all the rage at the moment, with Asus predicting that it will sell 5 million of its Asus Eee PC netbooks by the end of this year. However, one of the tricky aspects of netbooks is that they have much more limited hardware resources than larger, traditional notebooks. For that reason, it makes sense to put applications on your machine that are both lightweight and powerful. The good news is that many of the best choices are free. In this post, you’ll find 10 ways to pimp out your Windows or Linux netbook, without breaking the hardware resources bank. OpenOffice Whether your netbook is Linux- or Windows-based, one of the best free downloads you can get is this suite of open-source productivity applications. OpenOffice includes lightweight but robust applications that compete with the expensive Microsoft Office alternatives: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentations), Base (database), Draw (diagram creator) and Math (editor for math formulas).

PortableApps For Windows-based netbooks, this is a great collection of pre-selected free and primarily open source applications that you can stick on a netbook — or even a USB drive — in one quick download. It includes the portable editions of ClamWin (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Gaim (instant messaging), OpenOffice (office suite), Sudoku (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client), among other applications. You can cherry-pick the applications you want, or run the whole suite in under 512MB.

Google Chrome I usually favor Firefox when using a high-end computer or laptop, but on a netbook, Google’s open source Chrome browser is an extremely lightweight browser that is winning lots of speed competitions. It’s only available for Windows for the moment, but will be out in a Linux version early next year.

LXDE The “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is a fast, energy-saving Linux desktop environment maintained by an international community of developers. It has a slick interface and lots of useful features, including tabbed file browsing. Plus, it takes fewer resources than the popular KDE and GNOME Linux desktop environments.

GNOME The GNOME desktop environment is very popular with many Linux users, and is lightweight enough for netbooks. Within GNOME, you get e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia, games and more. The new version 2.24 includes the GNOME Mobile Platform for the first time, which will keep developers focused on mobile applications for GNOME on an ongoing basis.

KDE The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project is a very good choice for Linux-based netbooks. It includes slick desktop applications, including the Kontact personal information manager, Dragon Player for multimedia applications, and the Konqueror web browser.

RocketDock RocketDock is an animated application launcher that I highly recommend for owners of Windows-based netbooks. It is much faster and more flexible than the object docks on most netbooks, and it has an easy drag-and-drop interface. Check out a video of it here.

TinyResMeter TinyResMeter is a lightweight application for tracking system resources in use. Netbooks, of course, often have stripped down hardware resources, so this is a good way to get on-the-fly views of memory usage, CPU usage and much more. Keeping it on hand will help you stay under the system resource wire.

VLC Media Player Depending what hardware resources you have on your netbook and the media player you currently use, you may occasionally run into problems running video and audio content. VLC Media Player is a lightweight, free and open source media player that will work on either a Windows or Linux netbook. It supports nearly every popular file format and is specifically designed for portability.

Online Hosted Apps. Of course, one of the fundamental concepts behind netbooks is that you can use them with applications that are hosted online. If you don’t already use these, there are excellent, free choices from Zoho and Google Apps. Ulteo gives you 1GB of free online storage, and access to all of the OpenOffice productivity apps online.

Finally, don’t forget that a USB thumb drive can be an excellent adjunct to your netbook. You can get lots of capacity for very little money, and one simple download such as the PortableApps download above can put countless free applications in your pocket for use on your netbook whenever you want.

Image courtesy Asus

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In a measurement of statewide web-surfing speeds, Nevada came out on top with speeds of a mere 781 kbps, and that was far above the not-even-broadband speeds of 322 kbps experienced by users in New Mexico, the lowest ranked state, according to PCMag.com. The technology magazine published today its list of top Internet Service Providers, as well as the nation’s fastest states for broadband.

For those of you who looked at those speeds and noticed how much they differ from the multiple megabits per second most of us buy from our ISP, Jeremy Kaplan, executive editor for PCMag.com, explains that the publication’s measurements are a reflection of typical web surfing rather than a straight-up broadband speed test.

PCMag’s SurfSpeed application isn’t measuring speeds the way the ISPs or popular applications such as Speedtest.net do. Instead of sending a large file to test speeds, SurfSpeed measures how fast normal web sites can load the multiple frames of information sent down from a variety of servers. This is affected not only by broadband speeds but by the processing engine inside your browser, the latency on the servers delivering the web content and countless other points where a data packet might pause.

To see how your state ranked, check out the PCMag article and charts. I was bummed to see Texas, my home and the headquarters of AT&T, the nation’s largest ISP, was ranked 19th.

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Never before have Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales been so carefully tracked as they were this year. The scrutiny makes perfect sense, for the outcome of this shopping season will directly impact our collective economic future. But while there were numerous reports claiming that sales on those two crucial days were better than most had been expecting, my friend Barry Ritholz, a respected Wall Street contrarian, is skeptical — and says as much on his blog.

Later this week, we should get Master Card’s ShopperPulse data. It is the actual measurement of what people spent (via their MC Credit Card) and has proven to be more reliable than either foot traffic, surveys and other biased sources.

While we wait for that data, here are some facts from various sources which show that things are not as sanguine as people might think.

• comScore says Black Friday e-commerce sales were $534 million, up 1 percent from last year’s sales of $531 million.
• The number of page and product views across the online retail sector in general was down 8.55 and 8.29 percent, respectively, compared to Black Friday 2007, according to Coremetrics, which also points out that there was an 18-percent drop in average session length — a clear sign that retailers are struggling to keep customers on their sites. In addition, the number of people who actually completed a purchase dropped by 1.69 percent to 3.49 percent. In other words, there is a lot of hesitation on the part of consumers when it comes to spending.
• That 1-percent gain in online sales may not translate into profits for etailers. People are buying more per order (4.56 items vs. 4.45 items in 2007), but paying less for it. The average value of their orders dropped by more than 6 percent, to $126.04 from $134.29. It also points to people opting for lower-priced items.
• On the web sites of department stores, Coremetrics data finds a 12-percent increase in order sessions, a 30-percent surge in average items per order, and a 10-percent rise in average order value — none of which is good news for specialty retailers.

Who Buckled Under the Buying Rush?

Our friends at Gomez, a company that tracks the technical performance of web sites, sent us a long list of sites that went down and/or couldn’t keep up with consumers.

• On Monday, Victoria’s Secret had major problems. It was unable to complete shopping cart transactions (2:15pm ET) and was down completely between 10:06 am-12:00 pm ET, with a message on its site saying it was “down for maintenance.”
• Availability (defined as the percentage of times that a shopper’s end-to-end transaction is accomplished without error) was not up to par among major brands on Friday. Amazon’s availability was 73.49 percent, while Apple came in at 87.35 percent and Circuit City at 63.75 percent.
• Sears had just over 61 percent availability, but turned in a performance of 100 percent on Saturday.
• Dell saw downtime of around 35 minutes between 9:40 am and 10:15 am ET.
• Staples availability was somewhat off, at 84 percent, on Friday, but rose to 95 percent by Saturday.

What Was Hot — and What Was Not

• HDTV’s were the hot item this season, thanks to prices that literally nosedived. According to Retrevo (see disclosure below), a Sunnyvale, Calif-based company that tracks the consumer electronics market, by Black Friday, interest in HDTVs had surged by more than 250 percent compared to interest at the beginning of November. Indeed, Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV was the fourth best-selling product over the web on Black Friday, according to PriceGrabber.
• Nintento Wii topped PriceGrabber’s list of Black Friday products, followed by Ugg boots, the Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player, Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV and Nintendo’s Wii Fit. According to PriceGrabber, year-over-year interest in Blu-ray/HD-DVD Players was up 147 percent.
• The Wii was a big winner on Cyber Monday as well, according to Price Grabber. In their list of top products, the Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player came in at No. 3, Apple’s iPod Touch 8GB MP3 player was No. 4, followed by Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV in the No. 5 spot. Apple’s iPod Nano 3rd Generation 4GB MP3 Player and the Apple iPod Touch 16GB MP3 Player were ranked No. 10 and No. 11, respectively, followed by the Samsung LN46A550 46″ LCD TV (No. 12), the Sharp AQUOS LC42SB45U 42″ LCD TV (No. 14) and the PanasonicTH-42PX80U 42″ Plasma TV (No. 16).
• According to RBC Captial Markets analyst Mark Sue, consumer electronics retailers used navigation devices as a lure this holiday season. The Garmin Nuvi 200 was available for $97, the TomTom One 125 for $99, the Garmin Nuvi 260w for $189, and the Magellan 1212 for just $79. Sue points out that Garmin’s mid- to higher-tier products were being discounted as well. While this might mean good news for consumer electronics retailers in the short term, I get the feeling they might have pulled too much of their sales forward and will struggle in the coming months.

Image courtesy of tshein via Flickr.

Full disclosure: Retrevo is backed by Alloy Ventures, an investor in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this blog.

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The closure of Pownce, which was announced Monday via posts by co-founder Leah Culver and her new employer, blog software company Six Apart, didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed Pownce since its launch last year. Despite help from co-founders like Kevin Rose of Digg and usability guru Daniel Burka, the service never really found an audience, or at least not one big enough to make a go of it. In the end, Pownce was just too much like Twitter (and Jaiku and Plurk, for that matter); the added features it had — including the ability to transfer files — weren’t enough to set it apart in people’s minds, much less turn it into a must-have utility.

So why did Six Apart, the blogging software provider founded by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, decide to buy the company? It’s possible that they just saw Culver and her fellow Powncer Mike Malone as valuable hires in the programming department, and decided to acqu-hire them, as Google has done with so many startup founders over the years. But while the Pownce service is being shut down, could its features live on inside Six Apart and its Vox blogging service? I think that’s a very real possibility. Culver, for example, notes in her blog post that she hopes to “come back with something much better in 2009.”

Twitter and its ilk are often referred to as platforms for “micro-blogging,” because (in the right hands at least) a 140-character message posted to the service can be almost as good as a blog post. More than one blogger has said that the frequency of their blog posts has decreased since they began Twittering, and some have given up full-blown blogging altogether. Others, however (myself included), use Twitter as a kind of feeder system for their blogs. Not only do they use it to find ideas, links and conversation that spark longer blog posts, but they use it in reverse — to alert potential readers to their posts. And in many cases the conversation extends from the blog to the chat service and vice-versa. There’s an almost symbiotic relationship between the two services, with each feeding off and benefiting from the other.

Six Apart has made a number of acquisitions that indicate the company is thinking about how to extend its services, including social media application maker Apperceptive. Much like its blog software competitor Automattic, the home of WordPress (see disclosure below), the company seems to be looking for tools that can be incorporated into its platforms to make them more robust as media publishing services. Could a Twitter-style tool be part of that vision for Six Apart? It would make a lot of sense, just as WordPress buying Buddypress (a startup that added social networking functionality to the platform) and launching a Twitter-style chat theme called Prologue made sense.

There are already a variety of plugins and tools that allow WordPress and Movable Type bloggers to incorporate Twitter into their blogs, either by posting their messages automatically in a sidebar, or in some cases, by allowing them to post to Twitter from their blog dashboard. But having someone who understands how such services operate could help Six Apart integrate these kinds of features more fully into their platforms, as well as making it easier to develop new ones that could merge micro-blogging and “real” blogging. At the end of the day, Six Apart and Automattic aren’t just blogging services but content-management and content-publishing companies, and Twitter messages are just another form of content that needs to be managed and published.

Auttomatic is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Phorm’s chief operations officer and several members of its board have left the company, citing disagreements with CEO Kent Ertugrul. According to a regulatory filing, Steven Heyer, David Dorman, Christopher Lawrence and Virasb Vahidi — who also served as the controversial ad firm’s COO — have stepped down from the Phorm board. The four blamed their departure on “a result of differences with Mr. Ertugrul as to the management and future direction of the Company.”

Phorm has already replaced them, and plans to continue selling ISPs on a program that delivers targeted advertisements based on where a customer surfs on the web. However, with other UK broadband providers rejecting Phorm’s rather invasive technology, another investigation into the legality of Phorm’s actions and worries in the U.S. over privacy, maybe the executives were getting out while the getting was still good.

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Sierra Wireless, the maker of wireless data cards, today said it’s agreed to spend about 218 million euros ($274.9 million) to buy Wavecom, the Paris-based maker of machine-to-machine communications chips. It’s a good move for Sierra, which is paying a 108-percent premium over Wavecom’s last trading price, in order to beat rival bidder Gemalto. For Sierra, the deal gives it the ability to follow the growth of the web as it moves beyond people to machines. The deal also provides a new avenue for growth as Sierra sees interest in wireless cards fade as communications chips are embedded directly into laptops.

A leader in this trend is Qualcomm with its Gobi platform. Gobi contains a variety of wireless chips embedded into the laptop that are activated by the user if and when they need them. Like any other external card for computers, as wireless networks become more commonplace, and users are willing to pay for connectivity everywhere, the card’s functionality gets embedded into the machine. This is already happening, albeit slowly.

That means rather than working with Qualcomm to buy chips for the Sierra wireless cards, Sierra finds itself competing with Qualcomm’s Gobi platform. The deal for Wavecom offers Sierra an entry into the growing market for Internet connectivity for other devices — from the telematics in cars to point of sales systems — as its wireless card business faces its likely decline.

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More than two years after Apple launched the iPhone, and months after its rivals launched their versions of touchscreen phones, Nokia today started selling a touchscreen phone (5800 XpressMusic) and announced the N97 superphone, which has a touch screen and a keyboard and will be made available sometime in the second quarter of 2009. Maybe. Despite the collective oohs and aahs that can be found on the Internet, however, it would take a lot more for Nokia to beat its competitors, especially Apple and its iPhone. You can buy the Xpress device, which was first announced in October, for $314 unsubsidized, though in India and Russia the prices are higher. As for the 5800 Xpress, a friend of mine recently brought one to the U.S. and after I played around with it for an hour, my response was meh! The touch was OK, just like it’s OK on any other device, but it’s not as responsive as the iPhone. So no, it’s not an iPhone killer, not by any means.

The N97 however, seems, like a worthy competitor — in an Aston Martin vs. Infiniti sort of a way, at least. I am withholding further judgment until I’ve had some time to play around with it.

The N97 is a Symbian S60 touchscreen device with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera and 32 GB of on-board memory (the Prada II has similar touch-with-a-QWERTY keyboard approach); it also features an upgraded version of Nokia Maps LG. You can bump up the memory by adding a 16 GB microSD card. It features a large 3.5″ touch display with 640 X 480 resolution. And yes, it will be sold in the U.S., where it’s going to cost $650; it will go on sale in June 2009 (specifically June 29, 2009, according to the company). One of its more attractive features is this concept of “social location.”

With integrated A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass, the Nokia N97 mobile computer intuitively understands where it is. The Nokia N97 makes it easy to update social networks automatically with real-time information, giving approved friends the ability to update their ’status’ and share their ’social location’ as well as related pictures or videos.

They are taking a cue from other phone makers, like INQ Mobile, which have already released their version of Facebook phones and are finding early success with them. (Scoble has a hands on review of the phone from a social perspective.) From the looks of it, this is an impressive entry. My frustration with Nokia phones is that they are either underpowered or are hampered by the S60 OS, which is not very reliable and makes the phones crash all the time. (Well, more than my iPhone and less than Windows Mobile.) (Related post: Symbian, iPhone and the New Mobile Reality.)

The very fact that Nokia is only now getting out touchscreen phones shows that as a company it is stuck in bureaucratic quicksand, with a culture of consensus that makes it difficult to respond to new challenges. Nokia — and I have been following them for a while — has become one of those companies that, much like Microsoft, is good with announcements, not so great with the follow-up.

There is word that Nokia has a whole arsenal of touchscreen phones coming in the latter half of 2009. Let’s hope they can get their mojo back and start coming out with great devices — especially ones that will make me go back to using Nokia devices on a daily basis. Until then Apple and its iPhone has the pole position all to itself. 

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Yahoo is not waiting around for 2008 to pack it in, and has released the top stories (and top searches) for the year that still has 30 days to go. I just spent 20 minutes on the site, and I love it. The presentation is simple, elegant and inviting. It is definitely better than most of the lists magazines are going to churn out. I wonder why Yahoo doesn’t do more of these technology-enabled media properties. Regardless, the top 10 searches of 2008 is an ironic reflection on our times - Britney Spears and WWE beat Barack Obama as the top search for 2008. (Yahoo offers a rational explanation for that as well.) The rest of the top 10 is also highly skewed towards entertainment artists. The site has also top 10 picks in different categories - News, Olympics, Politics, Economy and more.

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Today Clearwire said it had completed the transactions that will allow it to build the first nationwide WiMAX network, to be known as Clear. CEO Ben Wolff took a few minutes to answer some questions about what the upcoming service will look like, how Clearwire might handle network congestion and how the recession might affect the speed with which Clearwire builds its network. Below is an edited transcript of our interview:

GigaOM: How much will it cost to build the nationwide network and will the economy slow the buildout?

Ben Wolff: Coupled with what we’ve spent, the $3.2 billion from our investors, and based on the same build schedule we released in May, we need to raise $2 billion to $2.3 billion in additional capital and will look at doing so in the next couple of years. We’ve got the ability to modulate the build plan to the point where we could reduce that funding gap by slowing down the build. That’s one of the first things the new board is going to address in the January meeting — make decisions about how quickly we build.

GigaOM: How will the white spaces broadband spectrum compete with WiMAX?

Wolff: We don’t see the whites spaces spectrum as being competitive with our network, much as we didn’t view the Muni wireless networks as competitive. We see it very much as being complementary with the Clear service. The white spaces spectrum will be unlicensed, and any time you have unlicensed spectrum as the primary means of connecting to the Internet you have the potential for interference and quality-of-service issues. We like the idea of relying on white spaces in some of the more rural areas and dense urban areas.

GigaOM: Will Clearwire or its partners use femotocells to build out the wireless networks?

Wolff: I think that femtocells are promising for any kind of wireless network. Having a femtocell indoors will provide better in-building coverage, and an opportunity for our [cable] partners to look at ways to utilize the backhaul they have going into the house. I think all wireless networks going forward could use them, but there are still questions about the business model — who pays for it and getting the cost of femtos down to a point where they can be cost-effective for a home.

GigaOM: Will WiMAX be as fast as LTE and can it act as a fat enough pipe to deliver Internet service to the home?

Wolff: I don’t think there is going to be much in the way of performance differences in LTE and WiMAX. The limiting factor is unlikely to be the technology; it’s likely to be how much spectrum the operator has available for 4G services. We have 100 MHz of spectrum and are in great shape to ultimately deliver a robust broadband experience.

GigaOM: What kind of services can Clear deliver using WiMAX?

Wolff: The suite of services people will eventually be able to buy are residential broadband, mobile broadband for each individual in the house, residential voice, and ultimately, mobile voice.

GigaOM: Since this is all IP network, will you charge for this as individual services or will this be one service that consumers can buy and add things like VoIP to?

Wolff: There will be some customers that will use a bring-your-own-VoIP service and we’ll offer our own managed mobile voice services that will offer higher quality of service.

GigaOM: What about network management such as blocking some traffic or slowing it down when the network is congested?

Wolff: We will have to experiment with how were dealing with network management issues. We won’t ID specific bandwidth-hogging apps and try to restrict or limit those. What we’re going to do is manage the network on a sector-by-sector basis, so if there’s no congestion we do nothing. If it turns out we do have congestion, we’ll manage bandwidth for all users in that segment rather than by applications.

GigaOM: Can a WiMAX network really provide the amount of bandwidth necessary to offer services such as streaming video that can really clog wireless networks today?

Wolff: One of the benefits over 3G is we have much more capacity, and we designed it to have a large number of customers using a large amount of data — including consistent streaming capacity.

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The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennet, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennet, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennet’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

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Pownce, a microblogging service started by Leah Culver and others back in May 2007, has been acquired by blogging software giant, SixApart and will be shutdown. Culver and other members of the Pownce team are going to work for San Francisco-based Six Apart, well known for products such as MoveableType and TypePad. What it means — negligible or no money changed hands.

Pownce seemed like a pretty cool idea, but it never got any major traction, losing out to the simpler and more popular Twitter. I used the service for a few months but then lost interest, and so did many of my friends. From Culver’s post, it seems that SixApart is going to incorporate Pownce’s microblogging technology into its blogging platforms. It makes a lot of sense for SixApart to buy a microblogging platform, since microblogging is one of the faster growing parts of the “social media ecosystem.”

Poor Beaumont. The tiny Texas town gained fame in the technology world when Time Warner Cable said in January that it would use it as a testbed for its tiered broadband trial. Then Hurricane Ike hit in September. And right before Thanksgiving, AT&T told the local paper it would start trialing its own brand of tiered broadband service there. When I ask AT&T why it would pick on Beaumont, a spokesman told me via email that, “While we are aware of Time Warner’s local trial in Beaumont, our decision was based on Beaumont’s good representation of many of our other markets.”

Perhaps, but it’s also a classic example of why we need competition in the broadband arena. Beaumont is a small market and as such, doesn’t offer a lot of choice when it comes to broadband providers — making it easy for the dominant players to implement anti-consumer initiatives such as overage fees and tiered plans. AT&T will charge its Beaumont customers $1 for every gigabyte over 150 GB per month, while Time Warner Cable has a set of plans that allow users to download between 5 GB and 40 GB per month before facing overage charges. The FCC is attempting to bridge the broadband gap by encouraging new wireless technology, but I’m not sure those networks will be robust enough for the home, which will require fast speeds and the ability to stream video content. That means the digital divide will continue to exist even as companies and the government attempt to eliminate it.

Clearwire said today that it has closed several transactions that will allow it to build out a nationwide WiMAX network, including gaining control of Sprint’s Xohm network and a $3.2 billion investment from several large companies. These deals were announced in May, and despite the downturn that has pummeled stocks since then, the terms of the deal have not changed. The new nationwide WiMAX service will be branded Clear.

Clearwire received the $3.2 billion investment from Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks. The cable providers will also resell the WiMAX service, even hinting that they will integrate wireless into some of their other broadband and entertainment offerings, much like AT&T and Nokia each hope to do. Sprint will also resell access to its current 3G network to the newly created Clear, paving the way for dual-mode 3G and 4G devices that will ensure that WiMAX devices work even where there’s no WiMAX network. This will be important in signing up mobile users. Below are other important bits from the call:

• Baltimore, Md., and Portland, Ore., will be the first cities to go online, with no mention of Chicago and Dallas which were to go live under Sprint’s Xohm brand soon.
• Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff says most of the $3.2 billion investment will go toward building out the nationwide network. Many of the pre-WiMAX markets that currently have Clearwire service will get Clear service in 2009.
• Wolff also said that Clearwire is building the Clear network with equipment that can also be used for LTE deployments, meaning if LTE becomes necessary, Clearwire can upgrade its network more easily.
• Barry West, the former CTO of Sprint Nextel and head of the Xohm efforts, will become president and chief architect of Clearwire.
• Atish Gude, formerly senior vice president of Sprint’s XOHM mobile broadband operations, is now senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Clearwire.
• First products on the market are embedded WiMax chips in laptops and USB modems, but by mid-2009 consumers will see more mobile Internet devices, MP3 players and other consumer electronics that can run on the Clear WiMAX network.
• The Clear network should provide customers with average download speeds initially of 2-4 megabits per second and peak rates that are considerably faster.
• Clearwire now has 100 MHz or more of 4G spectrum in most markets across the U.S.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to address the issue of creating a nationwide, filtered broadband network at its Dec. 18 meeting according to the Wall Street Journal. That gives that meeting the potential to be as controversial as the one held last month on election day. The November meeting approved two mergers and created the potential for free wireless spectrum over the protests of broadcasters. This upcoming meeting could create free, licensed wireless spectrum in the AWS-3 band, ticking off T-Mobile, which paid $4 billion to lease the adjacent AWS-1 spectrum.

The FCC had issued a rule making on the topic back in June with a proposal that would create two tiers of wireless Internet service in the 2155-2175 MHz spectrum band. The lowest tier would provide free wireless broadband for the 100 million Americans who don’t have access to broadband right now, and a carrier would sell access to the faster tier for all comers. The rule making was similar to a proposal created by the Kleiner-backed startup M2Z Networks, which had asked the FCC to give it the spectrum for free.

Originally, the FCC had talked about filtering that free wireless network to rid it of objectionable content for everyone, but in October, when the FCC issued a report saying that such a network wouldn’t interfere with T-Mobile’s network, a spokesman for the regulatory agency said the filtering provisions would only be aimed at children. That could stop some consumer advocates from protesting the FCC actions, but it won’t stop T-Mobile, which shows no signs of backing down, even though its efforts to stop the proposal on the grounds that it will interfere with the T-Mobile network have failed.

At the meeting, the Commission is also expected to take up the issue of a la carte cable, as well as cable providers’ tactic of switching some formerly basic channels to a higher service tier — in effect raising the price for service for some subscribers, angering consumers and content providers. Much like the outgoing Bush administration is striving to issue its own rules before the changing of the guard, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is attempting to make his mark on the nation’s communications before his exit.