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Apple only sells one Mac below $1,000–the
Mac mini–so it’s not all that surprising that it would do well in that category, given the momentum behind Mac sales over the past year. By contrast, the single largest category of notebooks available at Best Buy–when sorted by price–falls between $700 and $899. And two-thirds of the desktops on the site are priced below $1,000.

(Credit:
Apple)

Notebooks like the MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,999, are helping Apple dominate the $1,000-and-up market.

These numbers don’t include an awful lot of sales–such as corporate PCs that account for about half the market, and online-heavy sellers such as Dell–but tend to illustrate trends in the U.S. PC market over time. Apple only had about 18 percent of the same category in January 2006, according to Fortune. That was the same month Apple introduced its first Intel-based Mac.

This is a profitable category, however, that all PC companies covet. Those PC companies may be reaching corporate customers at those price points, but Apple is dominating the consumer half of the high end.

Apple’s doing well in the high-rent district of the computer industry, according to NPD.

On Friday eWeek published some data confirmed by NPD that reveals Apple now owns 66 percent of the U.S. retail market for personal computers that cost more than $1,000. Its percentage of the U.S. retail market in general is 14 percent, according to NPD.

Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook–a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace–was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.

The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That’s largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.

Even according to Pingdom’s numbers, MySpace doesn’t appear to be shrinking. The performance firm thinks that could be due to a number of factors: that MySpace is continuing to recruit new users to replace those who may have left for Facebook, that people are using both social networks, or that Facebook is recruiting members who haven’t been prior users of either site.

There’s something to note, though: Pingdom used Google Trends to make its assessment. Google Trends traffic data is one of only many sources of statistics out there, and it’s collected primarily from people who have installed the Google toolbar. Numbers from Compete.com, for example, show that MySpace is still ahead.

“I was really impressed technically with what’s going on and, of course, the price speaks for itself,” Poole said.

NComputing, the start-up that aims to provide cheap Internet access by allowing one PC or server to be shared by many, is set to announce Tuesday that former Microsoft executive Will Poole will join its board as co-chairman.

Dukker said the company has deployed over 1 million seats over the past 20 months, with half of those in emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Among the company’s deals is one to provide computing for every elementary and secondary school student in Macedonia. Adding Poole to the company’s board, he said, is a sign of the company’s maturity.

NComputing’s approach takes advantage of the fact that basic computing tasks use only a fraction of the power of a standard PC or server. The result not only saves money, but also power. That’s especially important in places like India where access to the grid can be limited.

Poole won’t have an operating role, but will help guide strategic planning and serve as a global ambassador, the pair said. Poole is also taking a small stake in the company, joining its existing backers, which include two venture capital firms and a Korean company that provides rare gasses for use in computer chip manufacturing.

“It really is kind of a signpost of us leaving the company’s adolescence,” he said. Among the other tech names on NComputing’s board is Advanced Micro Devices’ longtime marketing chief Rob Herb.

There are downsides, though. Although the company’s software ensures no one user will hog too many computing resources, that means that high-end tasks like serious gaming or graphics arts applications are probably out. Still, it’s proved to be a good option for those in emerging markets as well as for schools here in the U.S.

Poole, who left Microsoft earlier this year after more than a decade, will share the chairmanship with Stephen Dukker, the eMachines founder who has been NComputing’s sole chairman and remains its chief executive.

In a telephone interview, Poole said he got to know NComputing as part of his final role at Microsoft, where he helped head the company’s emerging markets efforts.

Through its own virtualization software, the Redwood City, Calif., company allows a single server to serve up to 30 users a PC-like experience–allowing an entire classroom or business to be wired for about $175, including keyboard, monitor, software, and the hardware terminals.

Fotonauts is a smart registry for images that come from other photos services, according to CEO Jean-Marie Hullot.

The former CTO of NeXT and Apple’s application division, Hullot showed off fotonauts,a kind of Wikipedia for photos at TechCrunch50. Currently in private beta for Windows and
Mac users, the Web application stores 1080p thumbnails of photos from major services and provides synchronization of photos across multiple services. As a result, fotonauts allows users to share, remix and reuse and enrich images across multiple services, Hullot said. Fotonauts includes an event stream for people or albums a user is following, and a drag and drop facility for moving image into different albums.

Clavier said that Hullot’s track record gave him a lot of confidence in the future of fotonauts. Indeed, fotonauts has a better shot at going into orbit than most startups on the stage at the TechCrunch50.

But Hullot isn’t satisfied just to create an collaboration environment for images. “We have one goal–create a great search engine,” he said.

Fotonauts albums can mix images from multiple photo sharing services.

At the core of fotonauts’ search engine effort is tagging that comes from adding relevant content, such as maps and Wikipedia content, to images and albums and applying tags from other services. Fotonauts also created its own ranking algorithm, ImageRank, which combines tags and usage data to deliver the most relevant results. But, search won’t be very effective until fotonauts reaches a critical mass of users.

Jean-Marie Hullot

“Fundamentally, a lot has been done in the photo space in last 4 to 5 years, but no one has built a proper photo search that is one or two times better than Google’s search,” fotonaut investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech told me. “The fotonauts feature set allows individuals to collaborate and take the world’s pictures from Flickr, Picasa and other services and create structured datasets with metadata. When you have tens of thousands of photos organized and structured by people, you have a huge dataset, which also becomes an index–a Wikipedia of photos.”

Fotonauts has received $2.3 million in funding, from Ignition Parnters, Banexi Capital, SoftTech and Digital Garage, as well as from angel investors.

In addition, fotonauts public albums can be turned into widgets and easily distributed to any Web page. Fotonauts provides a unique URL for each album for sharing.

The same goes for the business model. Hullot said that users will be creating content useful for the whole community, and like Wikipedia, fotonauts could offer contextual advertising as well as product placement. “We know lots of things about what users like. For instance, if person interested in
cars, we have an event streams and we are very graphically oriented and Toyota could push an image into the event stream or add it into a widget,” Hullot said.

An estimated 500 million images are captured every day, but less than 5 percent end up on major photo sharing sites. Uploading photos is not the easiest task and most photos are locked into a specific photo sharing service and have all rights reserved licenses. Jean-Marie Hullot, wants to liberate photos from silos and offer news ways to organize and discover images.

Fotonauts allows users to add comment and follow the albums and photos of other people.

The browser battles are heating up, with Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple all releasing offerings to entice Web surfers into their respective camps.

That’s according to a set of articles that appeared on the paper’s Web site early Saturday. The articles were published in error, of course, and they disappeared from the newspaper’s Web site a few hours later. While they were live, the list of prepared-in-advance headlines said Obama had variously chosen Biden, Clinton, Evan Bayh, Chet Edwards, Sebelius, Tim Kaine, and Richardson.

Politics go tech
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Barack Obama announced that he had selected Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate. Obama was expected to announce his selection via text messages and e-mails to supporters on Saturday. While supporters who signed up for the announcement still received them, the Associated Press reported the selection of Biden late Friday.

What’s different about Io and Viacom is that Io didn’t notify Veoh of the copyright infringement on the site before filing suit. In contrast, Viacom sent more than 100,000 “take-down notices” to YouTube prior to filing its $1 billion copyright complaint.

In April, the judge seemed to agree with the defendants’ arguments that the RIAA’s “making available” position “amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized.” However, the RIAA accused Howell of uninstalling Kazaa and reformatting his hard drive after being served with the lawsuit.

Ubiquity grew out of Firefox’s new Smart Location Bar, or “awesome bar,” which helps resolve incomplete URL entries into browser address bars. Ubiquity doesn’t replace the awesome bar, but a separate command line is generated by typing Ctrl-Space for Windows or Command-Space for Macs.

The unprecedented decision is definitely favorable to Google, YouTube, and all user-generated sites, but it doesn’t mean that Google will necessarily prevail in the $1 billion copyright suit filed against it by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures.

Also of note
Hundreds of flights were delayed in cities across the country due to a computer failure in the Federal Aviation Administration’s system for processing flight plans…An electronic gaffe at news outlet Bloomberg mistakenly sent an incomplete obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the wire on Wednesday afternoon…Amazon.com is buying Shelfari, the social-networking site for book lovers.

Copyrights in court
Video-sharing site Veoh defeated a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in 2006 by the Io Group, an adult entertainment company. Veoh defended its actions by citing provisions within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that call for a party to remove copyrighted material from its Web site, when notified by the copyright holder.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have released an extension for Firefox 3 that can protect wireless network users from so-called man-in-the-middle attacks. The software, dubbed “Perspectives,” is available for download for free.

IE 8 adds a Security pull-down menu between Page and Tools on the main toolbar. In addition to blocking phishing sites, IE 8 now highlights the main domain of any Web site you visit. IE 8 also contains a cross-site scripting filter, one of the first in a mainstream browser. Cross-site scripting allows an attacker to execute script on users’ browsers without them knowing.

The free Firefox plug-in enables the creation of “user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs,” according to a post on Mozilla’s site. “In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.”

According to Nielsen’s numbers, the SMS campaign tactic reached 2.9 million people. However, Keynote Systems, which measures and monitors e-business performance, estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of people who signed up to receive the text either received it late or not at all.

Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8, bringing it up to par with alternative browsers such as Opera, Apple’s
Safari, and Mozilla’s
Firefox in terms of security and features.

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Ubiquity is a command-line interface that enables users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, or Twitter.

However, a copyright attorney said Viacom can still prevail provided that it proves YouTube is a business built on pirated material and that parent company Google has knowledge of the unauthorized clips on the site.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders. Biden, whose antiprivacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP, ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide.

A U.S. District Court judge found that Veoh was not liable for hosting copyrighted videos that its users uploaded to its site because the company used an automated process to post videos and did not play an active role in getting the material onto its site. The court also found that Veoh removed the material when informed by the copyright holder, putting it in compliance with a “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA law.

Meanwhile, Google brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple’s Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline. Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn’t connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

In another feature, known as InPrivate, Microsoft allows the user to suspend caching functions while you surf. The scenarios for using InPrivate include when you’re using someone else’s computer, for instance, when you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise, or when you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person to know which Web site you visited.

However, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Obama had actually chosen his former archrival, Hillary Clinton, to be his vice presidential candidate. And Bill Richardson. And Kathleen Sebelius. And four other Democrats, too.

Technology companies were at the Democratic convention in Denver this week to highlight more than just their new products–they’re pushing an agenda as well. The Consumer Electronics Association, a lobbying firm that represents 2,200 technology companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Hitachi, brought its 28-state “America Wins with Trade” bus tour to Denver this week to convince Democrats that free trade benefits the tech industry, as well as consumers. Groups with opposing views are taking a high profile at the convention, however, and the conflicting interests in the party are apparent from its mixed messages on trade.

Another closely watched copyright infringement case seems to have been resolved over charges of evidence tampering by the defendant. Judge Neil Wake reportedly ruled that Jeffery Howell, a defendant in Atlantic v. Howell, had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions.”

Perspectives also protects against attacks that exploit a recently exposed flaw in the DNS (Domain Name System), which translates Web addresses into numerical IP addresses.

Three out of four teens were bullied online over the last year, according to a study released this week by psychologists at the University of California at Los Angeles. And while that number may seem high at the outset, only 1 in 10 of those kids told their parents or another adult about it, the study showed.

Online bullying could be more pervasive than you think.

Juvonen said it’s important that parents talk with their kids about bullying well before it happens, as well as look for changes in teens’ behavior.

However, it’s also equally important to teach children the importance of not becoming bullies themselves, is it not? Surely if bullying is this prevalent online, it’s not always a one-sided affair.

“Many parents do not understand how vital the Internet is to their social lives,” said Jaana Juvonen, lead study author and a professor of psychology and chair of UCLA’s developmental psychology program. “Parents can take detrimental action with good intentions, such as trying to protect their children by not letting them use the Internet at all. That is not likely to help parent-teen relationships or the social lives of their children.”

The anonymous Web-based study surveyed 1,454 kids between the ages of 12 and 17. Of those, 41 percent reported between one and three cyberbullying incidents during the year; 13 percent reported four to six incidents; and 19 percent reported seven or more. In other words, no longer are victims of bullying relegated to the geeks and nerds of yore when it comes to the Internet.

Many teens neglected to tell their parents about the incidents because they believed they “need to learn to deal with it,” according to the research. Others kept it to themselves because they feared that their parents would cut back on their Internet access.

The psychologists published the results of their research in the September issue of the Journal of School Health.

The House Rules Committee approved the change for the House of Representatives on Thursday, while the Senate Rules and Administration Committee adopted the new rules on September 19.

The Senate rules also allow for links to be added to official sites. They allow senators to use any third-party site of their choice, but the senators will have an “approved list” of sites for reference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the change “a significant step forward toward bringing House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online.”

Members of Congress can finally use Web sites like YouTube, after committees in both the House and Senate adopted new rules allowing members to post content outside of the .gov domain, as long as it is for official purposes.

“In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites,” the new House rules read. They also allow members to provide links to or embed outside content on their official sites, provided they include an exit notice indicating the visitor is leaving the House.

Many members of Congress have, in spite of the rules, already been posting content to YouTube. Relying strictly on the official House and Senate sites can prove insufficient at times, as it did this week as Congress considered the bailout bill.

Well, if you’re part of the community of “educational institutions, science museums and other appropriate organizations,” NASA just might have something for you after the shuttle program ends in 2010.

It’s probably safe to say, however, that NASA doesn’t intend for the recipients of the shuttles to fly them, and as such, probably won’t be providing astronauts with the delivery of the spacecraft.

Want your very own authentic space shuttle?

Interested applicants have until March 17, 2009 to respond.

The agency said the purpose of the initiative is to decide whether institutions or other members of the community have the appropriate wherewithal to display a shuttle or engines, including the ability to fund such efforts.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The space shuttle Discovery touching down at Kennedy Space Center on June 14, 2008. NASA now says it is going to solicit proposals for how to display the shuttles once the program ends in 2010.

Sponsored by NASA’s Office of Infrastructure, the RFI seeks input from appropriate officials and decision makers from museums, science centers, institutions, and other organizations dedicated to education or educational outreach with experience in public display of space hardware and nationally-recognized historical artifacts,” NASA said in a release. NASA will use information gained from this RFI to develop strategies for eventual placement of two space shuttle orbiters and a minimum of six unassembled space shuttle main engine display “kits.”

On Wednesday, the space agency issued a request for information (RFI) soliciting ideas for what to do with the shuttle orbiters and main engines once the program ends.

The service can also be used on the product pages of commerce sites to show other stores that have the same product you’re looking for, but possibly at a better price.

In the spirit of examining the economics of social network services, as I did yesterday with Meebo, today I’m looking at YooNo, another social product that we’ve reviewed favorably but that appeared to be in desperate need of a business model. YooNo is a social network aggregator: You install it in your browser and it helps you keep track of your friends and what they like.

The YooNo sidebar locates products from a variety of stores based on what's showing in the main browser window.

As YooNo VP Regan Fletcher told me, “It’s really difficult to monetize social aggregation itself. We are monetizing our discovery technology. YooNo bundles social aggregation and discovery together, and we’re able to monetize one.”

Affiliate fees are substantial, compared to advertising rates, so the model makes sense in theory. Where it may fall down for YooNo in practice is scale. The service is based on a browser plug-in, and that’s just a gigantic roadblock to achieving scale in the social media market. With a plug-in as the distribution model, a good product should be able to grab a devoted core base of users, but you don’t get to scale quickly these days–or at all–if you require people to install code.

And here’s the revenue model: Today, in addition to announcing feature improvements such as a new IE version and support for MySpace and iMeem networks, YooNo is also announcing the addition of a product recommendation pane. If you’re on a site–any site–that mentions a product, author, or artist, YouNo will scan product data from partners Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, Walmart, iTunes, and other stores and display relevant product info. If you buy a product by following one of those links, YooNo gets an affiliate fee.

When the shopping widget launches on November 24, it will display products based solely on the page you’re on and what the partner sites are selling. Future versions will take your friends’ activities into account.

In his letter to the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Thomas Barnett, Kohl stated:

The parties assert the transaction is in the advertisers’ best interests since it will create a more efficient marketplace.

Yahoo plans to report its third-quarter results on October 21.

While we have conducted a careful review of this transaction, we do not have the benefit of the confidential business information supplied by the companies to the Department nor the economic models necessary to predict consumer behavior…nonetheless, we conclude that important competition issues are raised by this transaction. Should the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google grow significantly, we believe the threat to competition will also increase.

Yahoo is contemplating another round of layoffs, according to a report in Silicon Alley Insider.

The deal is currently in the final stages of an investigation by the Department of Justice, which will indicate whether it will seek to block the partnership by filing a lawsuit, or allow it proceed with or without remedies.

Any carnage count would likely be less than 20 percent of the workforce, SIA notes, citing people familiar with the company’s financial health. According to the report:

While our Henry Blodget has called on Yahoo to can 3,018 people (that’s more than 20 percent of the workforce), the odds that Yahoo will make cuts on that scale are very low, we’re told by people familiar with the company’s thinking. But we’re also told that another round of layoffs are indeed on the drawing board, prompted by a grim financial forecast.

Updated at 2:21 p.m. PDT, with information on Yahoo’s stock performance and a letter sent by Sen. Herb Kohl to the head of the antitrust unit for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Kohl’s antitrust committee held a hearing in mid-July to examine the nonexclusive agreement, which calls for Google to place some of its ads on Yahoo search page results.

While the broader markets were also down on Thursday, Yahoo’s descent was particularly steeper toward the last hour of trading.

Yahoo’s stock is already under great pressure, closing Thursday at $15.58 a share, down 8.14 percent over the previous day’s close and dropping to a level that hasn’t been seen since August 2003.

Sen. Herb Kohl, chairman of the congressional subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, sent a letter Thursday to the head of the antitrust division for the U.S. Department of Justice, requesting a close examination of the controversial Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership be undertaken.