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Both companies are still behind tech stalwarts like Microsoft and IBM, which closed with a market caps of $254.83 billion and $170.44 billion, respectively.

Exxon Mobile, which topped the Financial Times 500 list of largest companies by market value as of June, closed Wednesday with a market cap of $406.02 billion.

That figure, Apple fans were quick to note, is higher than that of search engine giant Google, which closed at $500.03 on Wednesday, with a market cap of $157.23 billion. (Market cap is simply the value of shares times the numbers of shares outstanding. While Google has a higher share value, it has far fewer outstanding shares than Apple, 314.45 million vs. 885.88 million.)

Apple’s stock price, which has been on a steady upward tear for the last few years, closed at $179.30 on Wednesday, sending its market capitalization to $158.84 billion.

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IBM has the resources to fix any shortcomings in Linux in POS systems. The article above claims it’s a question of third-party applications, but IBM helped to erase this problem on the server. Why not stick it out to ensure a neutral operating system processes our purchases, rather than Windows?

IBM says that it isn’t dropping SUSE Linux as a key part of its retail point-of-sale strategy. It’s just adding Windows (WEPOS, or Windows Embedded Point-of-Sale). But for a company that has everything to gain from Linux and everything to lose from Windows (except some near-term cash), this reeks of capitulation.

I’m not sure I want Windows to be the “universal blood type.” We’ve seen what happens on the desktop when Microsoft holds monopoly power: viruses and all sorts of malware have afflicted us ever since. Do we really want the consumer economy to be held in the hands of one company?

IBM saw Linux POS systems spike in popularity, but that has subsided. Now it’s voting with its feet:

“It’s like with blood types,” he added. “Windows is like a universal type. But not everyone matches well with Linux.” He predicted that Windows and Linux will eventually divvy up the POS market in a roughly 75:25 ratio.

As a rival to Microsoft in many other parts of the IT market, IBM had held out for Linux over WEPOS as long as it could. But the deal to support the Microsoft operating system should cement Linux’s fate as a niche offering that is attractive mostly to grocery store chains and similarly sized hard goods retailers, such as Pep Boys or Circuit City, [market research firm IHL president Greg] Buzek said.

Then there’s happiness–yes, happiness. Celik and Oberkirch mentioned one of the day’s featured speakers, Google engineer Kevin Marks, and an idea he asserted on his blog that a “pleasure plan” is just as important to new start-ups as a business plan. OK, that sounds a bit dotcom-hippie for me; we’ll see how that fares in a less bubbly economic climate.

And then there’s the hottest trend of the future of Web apps: openness. These days it’s hard to keep all the “open standards” projects straight: Open Authorization, OpenSocial, OpenID, DataPortability, and the like.

So what is the future of Web apps? There are a few concrete trends, Oberkirch and Celik told the audience.

“Openness is the buzzword right now,” Celik said. “It’s kind of the new black.”

It’s often evidenced in the fact that many of the most talked-about Web products these days got their start as side projects. Twitter, Flickr, and even Facebook, with its origins in a Harvard dorm room, had remarkably casual beginnings.

First, they said, there’s simplicity–the sort of thing evidenced in wildly popular start-ups like WordPress, which has one-upped bigger rivals by being easy to use and adaptable, and geek favorite Twitter, which famously does only one thing (lets members broadcast messages of 140 characters or fewer).

“We’re in Miami, so I guess it’s the new pink?” Oberkirch suggested.

There’s also speed. Celik and Oberkirch pointed to Pownce, whose co-founder Leah Culver is speaking at the conference later, and how quickly it’s been rolling out new features in an interactive manner rather than launching periodic major updates.

Another important pillar of the future of Web apps community collaboration, they said, is facilitated by the rise of social-media tools to make group work a whole lot easier and allow collaborators to get more done. Celik and Oberkirch called Google’s OpenSocial project “a great example of little guys and big guys working together.” It’s also become much more possible to organize real-life events with the help of wikis and social networks; on Thursday, FOWA was preceded by a Miami iteration of the BarCamp “unconferences,” which are famously organized by the attendees.

MIAMI–The Knight Concert Hall in Miami’s Carnival Center complex was filled with a whole lot of
Mac laptops on Friday morning for a day of panels and lectures at the Future of Web Apps conference.

Ryan Carson, co-founder of conference organizer Carsonified, had selected freelance Web consultants Brian Oberkirch and Tantek Celik to “emcee” the event and give the audience an idea of what the day’s major themes would be.

The digital distribution era as described by Mike Yuen, senior director of BREW Gaming for Qualcomm Internet Services, is one that requires the gaming industry to re-evaluate the way it distributes content:

Sooner or later someone will use the “blog defense” or “Twitter defense” when all of the noise of the Internet makes them go cuckoo. (For more such noise, you can follow my Twitter antics at Daveofdoom.)

A more-likely scenario than the death of the console is one in which the console can play games of all types, including those that are browser-based or require a download installation.

The immediacy of game content delivered via Web browser could be the thing that knocks game consoles out of the foothold they have established.

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

“The goal of the ‘video games’ defense is to both shift blame and to explain to a judge and jury why this good kid is suddenly acting like a terrorist,” says Illinois attorney James H. Waller. “Portraying your client as the victim of outside forces (be they child abuse, coercion by peers, or an ultra-violent video game industry) humanizes the client and shifts the culpability.”

Today, the most popular browser-based games are casual play, as opposed to console games that people tend to play more seriously. In fact, the immersive nature of console games has led to an entire category of legal issues, the most bizarre of which is the “video game defense.” According to the Palm Beach Post:

While you’re thinking of these heady topics, enjoy the classic (and casual) arcade game Burgertime, courtesy of my friends at Widgetbox.

At this year’s Casual Connect Conference in Seattle, Alex St. John, CEO of WildTangent, predicted the death of console gaming by 2020. He surmised that as the industry shifts its focus from quality graphics to production value it will be less inclined to invest in the development of next-gen gaming consoles. When coupled with rapidly increasing digital content distribution through online and mobile devices, the decrease in console production will cut into the profits and demand for retail console and PC games. With the increased proliferation of affordable, immediate digital content, St. John predicted that the PC and browser will emerge as the dominate “console” within the gaming industry.

But it seems a bit naive to think that people will only play games one way. Video games are not much different than other software–developed, consumed and distributed in different manners.

Of course, this assumes that consumers would be willing to have a less graphically intense experience and have the requisite bandwidth to make the game usable. While I don’t see the bandwidth as an issue, and games such as World of Warcraft aren’t hurting for high-quality graphics, it’s hard to see a world where the consoles go away completely.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

Fro is just one of about 30 people who built the orbs for Burning Man 2007, and now the project is returning to Burning Man 2008 as an art piece partially funded–and therefore honored as noteworthy–by the curators of the annual countercultural arts festival.

And that’s why the orb has rolled away and is bearing down rapidly on the unsuspecting and defenseless robot a few yards away. In the end, Fro caught the wayward sphere and saved the day, or at least the innocent robot.

(Credit:
Swarm 2.1)

And that’s at least in large part because of what they can do.

At Yuri’s Night Bay Area on Saturday, the orbs from Swarm were one of the most popular projects on display.

And as befits many Burning Man art projects, the 2008 version is sure to be new and improved. In fact, Fro said, the Xbox-like controllers were a big part of what’s new for this year: joysticks that can allow anyone to take very subtle control over the orbs.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Corey Fro is chasing a large metal orb across the pavement at the NASA Ames Research Center here. He is desperately trying to make sure that the orb doesn’t crush a nearby robot.

“Try not to rock it so much,” he said to someone at one point, “because if you hit the kill switch, it will stop.”

But it’s also very easy to lose control of them, as I saw multiple times on Saturday as Fro would hand the controller over to one person or another.

That means, once all the orbs are in motion–something that wasn’t on display at Yuri’s Night–the only way to stop them is direct the mother node to stop.

The idea is that five of the six orbs–which look something like specialized see-through hubcaps turned into spheres with really expensive robotic controls and LEDs inside–are subservient to the desires of the lead orb, or mother node.

Or, as Fro put it, “They’re kinetic sculptures that drive around in an autonomous but choreographed pattern.”

“The orbs control their own movement, light show, and music,” explained Fro. “The way they do that is by communicating with the mother node.”

The orb is part of Swarm, a project designed for Burning Man built around the concept of autonomous spheres that can be programmed to perform in one of many ways.

I was very happy to see the orbs at Yuri’s Night because Swarm was one of the legendary art projects I missed at Burning Man 2007. It was something I heard a lot of people talk about after the fact in very reverent terms.

“To turn right or left,” Fro said, “we swing the ballast right or left.”

The only information the subservient orbs send out is GPS and accelerometer data, which they send to the lead orb, which, Fro said, uses that information to coordinate the movements and lighting effects of all the spheres.

“The Swarm of autonomous beings by their very nature will have emergent and complex behavior,” the project’s Web site states. “They will flock, flirt, dance and interact, and their actions will surprise and astonish even us, their creators. They are simple, but together they will behave in ways more complex than we can predict.”

But before it can go back out to the Nevada desert, Swarm had to make an appearance at Yuri’s Night, and it was certainly one of the main attractions for the thousands in attendance Saturday.

Each orb, Fro said, is driven by counterbalancing using the weight of lead-acid batteries as ballast. By swaying the ballast forward, the orb moves forward as the center of gravity changes.

The idea is to define a safety zone so that pedestrians, bicyclists, and those on other forms of conveyance are safe.

If this sounds unusual, it isn’t. At least not at Yuri’s Night, a 12-hour celebration of space, science, music, and art held at NASA Ames and other locations around the world Saturday in honor of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space.

At Burning Man, where the entire project, in its 2008 configuration, will be unfurled, the Swarm team plans to erect a mast on the open desert floor that projects a large laser circle on the ground.

“So the movement coordination allows it to follow the leader, drive in patterns or (even) make the orb representation of planetary systems,” Fro said. “But once they’re running under control of the mother node, there’s no control from humans.

“If they walk into that circle,” Fro said, “all bets are off.”

Swarm is the work of at least 30 artists and is the continuation of a project originally created for Burning Man 2007. It is expected to be even more developed for Burning Man 2008.

Swarm is a project made up of six large orbs in which five of the orbs are tethered to a single ‘mother node’ that can then autonomously direct the others in open space. Here, project member Corey Fro chases after one of the orbs, trying to keep it from crushing another robot.

The orb in question is being remotely directed by a kid wielding an
Xbox-like wireless controller, but it’s the kid’s first time using the device, and he really doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing.

Raj Gupta will be HP board's 11th member.

“For nine years as chairman and CEO, Raj Gupta has successfully guided Rohm and Haas through today’s ever-evolving global business environment,” Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming his financial, operational, and corporate governance expertise to the HP board of directors.”

Gupta will be the 11th member of HP’s board. The perks include an annual salary of $100,000 as well as $175,000 in HP stock, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, if Gupta attends any more than six board meetings, they’ll give him $2,000 in cash for each of those.

Since 1999 Gupta has been the chairman, president, and CEO of Rohm and Haas, a chemical company. Before that he held various other positions at Rohm, where he started in 1971. Gupta also serves on the board of electronics maker Tyco International and The Vanguard Group.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

Rajiv Gupta will join Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors beginning in January 2009, the company said Wednesday.

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One big question to be answered in such a merger is whose platform prevails? Microsoft’s, of course. But Microsoft’s platform (.Net, etc.) may be doing well in the enterprise but it’s a complete bust on the Web. Try to think of a single cool startup (besides MindTouch) that is building on .Net? Time’s up. There really aren’t any.

Think Microsoft has a chance on the Web? I just can’t see it. Not unless it gives up its OCD-derived attempt to control platforms. Am I wrong?

In the recording of today’s Open Season podcast, Dave Rosenberg likened Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo to the combination of AOL and Time Warner. A bit brutal, perhaps, but one gets the sneaking suspicion that he may be right.

Microsoft is going to need to look beyond Windows and .Net to tap into the fast-rushing flood that is the Internet. Google owns the Web right now, and it does so with open source, open data, and LAMP. Yahoo is a child of the LAMP revolution and could help Microsoft to see the light…if Microsoft is interested in a world where no one entity (and certainly not it) controls the platform.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $159.99
View the latest prices for Apple iPod Touch (second generation, 8GB)

The latest firmware for the iPod Touch (version 2.1) is available for both the first- and second-generation players, and adds support for on-device Genius playlist creation, Microsoft Exchange push e-mail, multi-language keyboard and dictionary support, MobileMe, multiple calendar management, contacts search, and a scientific calculator.

As expected, the biggest news with Apple’s second-generation
iPod Touch is its drastically reduced price. The 8GB version of the iPod Touch is now $229 (down from $299), the 16GB is $299 (down from $399), and the 32GB is $399 (down from $499).

Just like the iPod Nano 4G and iPod Classic 2G, the second-gen Touch now accepts microphone input through its headphone jack, by way of compatible iPod accessories such as the newly announced Apple In-Ear headphones. That may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but when you add in the iPod Touch’s built-in speaker and App store compatibility, the Touch is starting to look like a ripe platform for VoIP communication over Wi-Fi. Time will tell.

Click here for full coverage of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event.

On the hardware end of things, we’re happy to see that the new iPod Touch’s lower price does not mean cut-rate construction. In fact, the new iPod Touch 2G feels sturdier and sexier than its predecessor, with a rounded chromed-steel backing that seamlessly wraps around the back and sides of the device much like the
iPhone 3G. By popular demand, the iPod Touch 2G now includes a volume rocker switch just like its iPhone cousin, for making quick volume adjustments without fussing with the touch screen. A built-in speaker is also included, concealed within the body of the Touch.

The rounded metal back of the second-generation iPod Touch feels like a million bucks.

Apple has also bundled Nike+ hardware and software directly into the iPod Touch 2G, leaving you to only need the Nike in-shoe transmitter hardware to activate the feature.

(Credit:
CNET Networks/Corinne Schulze)

Apple rates the new iPod Touch at 36 hours for music (up from the first-gen’s 22 hours) and 6 hours of video (unchanged), although mileage will vary based on screen brightness and Wi-Fi usage.

(Credit:
Engadget Mobile)

OK, folks. Here is your smartphone rumor for the day: The touch-screen RIM BlackBerry Storm is headed for Verizon Wireless. Several sources have reported on this news after a “talking points” sheet for Verizon employees was leaked, highlighting some of the key features of the smartphone.

Unfortunately, there were no details about launch date or pricing, but you can believe that you’ll know as soon as we know. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of what’s being said around the Web:

According to the document, the BlackBerry Storm is said to have a click touch screen that helps for more precise text entry; dual-mode connectivity (CDMA and quad-band GSM for world roaming); and a 3.2-megapixel camera. The Storm will also support visual voice mail, VZ Navigator, and full HTML Web browsing.

Engadget Mobile
The Boy Genius Report
Howard Forums
BlackBerry News
CrackBerry.com

Perhaps best known for its broad line of laptop bags, Targus also manufactures laptop accessories to carry in the bags–travel mice, presentation remotes, and the like. Tuesday morning, the company announced six new mobile accessories, all specifically designed to coordinate with Apple MacBooks.

The $80 Bluetooth Presenter for Mac, meanwhile, is compatible with both Keynote and PowerPoint and includes a laser pointer. The device is designed with tactile cues for the primary presentation controls–such as previous slide, next slide, and laser pointer–to prevent accidental button presses; secondary functions, such as blank screen and slide show, are recessed. There are also volume controls, plus two programmable buttons to give you quick access to your favorite applications or functions.

And I think the $50 Chill Mat for Mac will be a welcome accessory, given the MacBook’s reputation for running hot. With two USB-powered fans and a soft mesh bottom that allows for optimal air flow, the Chill Mat promises to help your Mac stay cool on your lap and prevent heat damage when used on other work surfaces.

The lineup includes two travel mice: the $50 Wireless Mouse for
Mac uses a USB microreceiver that tucks inside the mouse for transit, while the $70 Bluetooth Laser Mouse for Mac keeps your USB ports free for other peripherals. Inspired by the
iPod Touch, the company has outfitted both mice with a 4-way touch scroll that lets you move up/down and left/right with the tip of a finger. Two additional buttons can be programmed with your most-used functions or apps.

Other products in today’s announcement include a four-port USB Hub ($30), a USB file-share cable ($50), and privacy screens in three sizes (up to $80 for the 17-inch version). All the Targus Mac accessories announced Tuesday are available immediately at the company’s site and from resellers.