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(Credit:
Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Company representatives have still not responded to inquires about how Baby Shaker made it into the App Store in the first place. In the past, Apple has shown no hesitation in rejecting iPhone applications that it felt contained offensive language or objectionable content.

Apple appears to have pulled Baby Shaker from the App Store.

The application still shows up in the App Store search, but upon clicking on the title, an error message appears. Baby Shaker, a game in which the user is invited to silence a baby’s cries by violently shaking an
iPhone, appeared on the App Store Monday despite Apple’s policy of banning “offensive” iPhone applications.

Apple has removed the Baby Shaker application from the App Store, just hours after it was discovered.

Twinkle’s other fantastic feature, which I demo in the video below, is the built-in photo integration that uses the iPhone’s camera to take pictures you can attach to your Tweets. The only catch is that you’ve got to be using Twinkle to see the photos. It’s fantastically simple, and something I think will make its way into Twitter applications for other handsets.

You might be wondering how this would be useful for anyone besides potential stalkers. The answer is that if you’re in a Twitter-rich city, drilling down to 1- to 5-mile radius around you will let you know all sorts of things going on in your area as they’re happening.

We’ve featured disaster preparedness tools using Twitter several times before, but Twinkle puts it together in a portable, user-friendly package. I fully expect it to be released as a standalone application in the iPhone App Store in a few months when Apple updates the firmware.

Do you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch?

( polls)

Related:
Twitter + Maps = Global stream of consciousness

Got a jailbroken
iPhone? Then you’ve got to download a fantastic app called Twinkle that’s doing some amazing things to make Twitter even more useful for people while they’re out and about. Besides being a delightfully simple Twitter client (see also: ThinCloud and Hahlo), Twilight’s killer app is its location tool, which taps into the LocateMe feature introduced in iPhone firmware version 1.1.3. Using this, it can narrow down not only where you are (to be included in your Tweets), but it also lets you see who’s around you anywhere from 1 to 252,000 miles away using local cell phone towers or your Wi-Fi connection.

Pretty prescient.

Sun also paid about $1 billion to buy MySQL in January. A spokeswoman said Sun will publish final numbers on October 30, when the company holds its quarterly earnings call.

But that was a veritable eternity ago. With the market’s sudden meltdown in the last month, corporate spending–at least on Sun’s products and service–has been hit especially hard. So it was that Sun warned this afternoon of a wider loss on lower revenue. The company said that it’s going to lose 25 cents to 35 cents a share.

Based on a combination of factors, including the current economic environment, Sun’s operating results, and a sustained decline in Sun’s market valuation, the company has concluded that it is likely that the fair value of one or more of its reporting units has been reduced below its carrying value. As a result, Sun is currently conducting an interim goodwill impairment analysis to determine the required amount of the non-cash impairment charge, if any. As of September 28, 2008, prior to the impact of this potential non-cash impairment charge, Sun’s total goodwill balance was $3.2 billion of which $1.8 billion relates to reporting units that may be impaired.

“Buying a company that is primarily tape technology today doesn’t look like an exciting play for a forward-thinking company like Sun….It appears like they have some strategic stuff in mind in the long run, but I don’t think that this acquisition is being justified on yet-to-be-announced technology. In the short run (the logic) is an open question.”

At the time of the StorageTek acquisition, a Forrester analyst by the name of Frank Gillett had this to say:

What really stands out in the warning is the paragraph devoted to a discussion of what largely was the StorageTek business. To wit:

That figure includes a $60 million restructuring charge but not the potential goodwill impairment. Sales are expected to come in between $2.95 billion to $3.05 billion, as compared to $3.21 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2008.

In June 2005, long before most people ever heard of subprime, LIBOR, or credit default swaps, Sun Microsystems thought it was a grand idea to buy StorageTek for the princely sum of $4.1 billion. At the time, the thinking at Sun was to become more of a one-stop shop for its corporate clientele. On paper, at least, it sounded like a plausible idea.

Jim Breyer

Considering who he is replacing, Breyer’s appointment is useful in looking at where Dell is heading. Breyer’s solid credentials as a Silicon Valley money man, where he’s invested in 30 Web start-ups, will likely bring a fresh perspective to Dell’s board. Lafley and Miles–longtime leaders of Procter & Gamble and Philip Morris, respectively–are representative of the traditional business world establishment, but Dell has signaled that it’s willing to try new strategies in order to get the company back on track.

Jim Breyer, a partner at venture capitalist firm Accel Partners, was named to Dell’s board of directors Monday.

Breyer, 47, will join the board immediately and will be up for official election at the company’s annual meeting in July. He will fill one of two slots left vacant by the impending departures of A.G. Lafley and Michael Miles, two directors who announced earlier this year they would not seek re-election.

Breyer is on the board of three companies, Wal-Mart, Facebook, and Marvel Entertainment, which conveniently intersect with areas of Dell’s business the company wants broaden and improve. As part of its makeover of its consumer business, Dell has embraced retail as a key driver of sales. It’s also looking to compete with Apple’s hipness factor, and plugging into popular culture and social media as a way of communicating with consumers could help the company in these goals.

(Credit:
Accel Partners)

“I told him, ‘I can’t believe that of all people you are choking under pressure,’” Liman told the audience.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t. He told the audience he believes it’s just a matter of time before a star filmmaker bubbles up from YouTube, iFilm, or one of the other online video sites.

“Movies can get away without great writing because they are all about the spectacle,” Liman told the audience. “But with TV and the Web it’s all about great writing…Look at the (NBC Universal TV show) The Office. It looks like Swingers and for that I was using used-film stock. People don’t care. If they love the characters they will cone back. Look at Seinfeld…Why couldn’t Seinfeld come from someone with a digital camera shooting for the Web?”

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News.com)

Swingers, starring actors Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, launched the then-unknown Liman’s career. The 1996 film, about a group of unemployed actors trying to make it big in Hollywood, was made for $250,000 and grossed $6.5 million worldwide. Had the Internet been more of an entertainment force then, perhaps Liman would have made his mark online first. He said the Web is tailor made for helping talented filmmakers with limited funds build a reputation.

Liman praised digital cameras and other technologies for helping to improve filmmaking, but he reminded the audience that a good story is still key.

To illustrate his point, he recalled a commercial he was shooting for Nike in the late 1990s starring golfer Tiger Woods. Liman noticed Woods bouncing a ball on the edge of a club during breaks from shooting. Liman grabbed a shoulder-held camera and, away from the crew, asked Woods to bounce the balls while being filmed. Liman began to lose his patience when Woods blew the shot several times.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News.com)

The Internet simply hasn’t produced any truly compelling stories, Liman, director of such hits as The Bourne Identity and Swingers, told an audience of several hundred Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 conference here.

Liman (right) speaks to a fan at NAB 2008.

“The reality is that the quality content isn’t there yet,” Liman said in an interview following the speech. “It’s no different than going to Sundance (Film Festival) this year and people saying, ‘The great independent film wasn’t there this year.’ That doesn’t mean it won’t be there next year. Given the direction the Internet’s going– with more and more people working in that arena–you’re going to see an Internet equivalent of Swingers.”

LAS VEGAS–Director Doug Liman pulled no punches when sizing up the quality of storytelling on the Web.

Director Doug Liman tells an audience at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 conference that he expects to see an Internet equivalent of Swingers.

Woods glared and then bounced the ball while transferring the club through his legs behind his back and finished by smacking the ball in mid air. The shot, which became a classic, was natural, unrehearsed, and driven by imagination rather than millions of studio dollars, Liman said.

Liman, who said he might have gone into technology if he hadn’t stumbled onto a movie camera at the age of 8, encouraged Web videographers in the audience by noting that “sometimes greatness comes from not having resources.”

But this is an important capability that Apple needs to get up and running as soon as possible. Granted, iPhone development doesn’t seem to be hamstrung by the lack of background processing to date, but given the choice, I’m sure developers could employ that technology to great effect.

Apple has missed a self-imposed deadline for bringing background-processing capabilities–of sorts–to the
iPhone.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

Dan Moren at Macworld makes the point that Apple perhaps decided that given all the problems associated with the 2.0 software update, fixing those bugs with the 2.1 release took precedence over rolling out the notification service. That certainly makes sense, and given Apple’s overtures to iPhone developers this week, perhaps the rollout is around the corner.

When Apple revealed that iPhone applications would not be allowed to run in the background during its March iPhone SDK event, developers, as they are wont to do, grumbled about the slight. So in June 2008 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple promised to give developers a workaround that involved using Apple’s own servers to notify iPhone users running one application when fresh data was available for another application not in use.

However, as Macworld notes, Apple had promised to deliver that capability by September. It’s now October. With one major iPhone update out of the way in the form of 2.1, and with 2.2 expected to focus more on cosmetic changes, it doesn’t seem that Apple is planning to introduce this service any time soon.

In June, Apple's Scott Forstall promises background notification services would arrive in September.

The HomeGrid Forum says it hopes to have products using the standard by next year.

Leading chip and consumer electronics companies say they are pursuing powerline networking on the road to the completely connected digital home.

Intel, Texas Instruments, Infineon, and Panasonic said Tuesday that they are working on a home-networking standard that uses electrical and phone lines and coaxial cable that consumers already have wired into their homes, according to a Reuters report.

The technology industry has yet to settle on a definitive home-networking standard and powerline is just one of the competing ideas, along with Wi-Fi, DLNA, Bluetooth, and others, although Wi-Fi is the best established of the group.

The four are the largest members of what they are calling the HomeGrid Forum. The group says it plans to work closely with the International Telecommunications Union to promote the standard the ITU is already developing, called ITU-T G.hn. The standard enables electronic devices and PCs to be linked up to share data and content, like movies, pictures, and more.

My (once) beautiful iMac.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

Almost at wit’s end, I tried one more utility that I had heard great things about: the Mac app DiskWarrior. I bought the software and, $108 (after tax) later, it was installed on my iMac.

DiskWarrior immediately found “Macintosh HD”–the name for my drive’s OS X partition–and gave me the option to repair it. DiskWarrior found dozens of issues with the hard drive. It reported that some of the files on the drive were corrupted and inaccessible. That stunk, but it was better than nothing, right?

I was at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City last summer debating purchasing a Time Capsule. I decided against it, reasoning that its $299 price tag was too high. Had I only known then that I would end up paying more than $350 for solutions to restore my lost hard drive, I wouldn’t have hesitated to buy it.

After placing my internal hard drive in the enclosure, I plugged it into my iMac via USB. I waited (and waited and waited) for the hard drive to pop up in Finder. Eventually, it did. Unfortunately, only my Windows partition was accessible. My OS X files were gone.

I screwed up and it cost me money. Don’t let this happen to you. Make sure you back up your files. Mozy and Carbonite, two great online backup services, cost just $54.95 per year. An external hard drive can be as cheap as $100. DVD media is even cheaper. Don’t be forced to spend too much money on restore services that might not work. It’s much quicker and affordable to back up all your data before disaster strikes.

During this crazy week of trying to restore my hard drive, I learned two valuable lessons: No backup solution is too expensive. And it’s better to restore (from backup) than recover (using a tool like DiskWarrior).

Once DiskWarrior was finished repairing my drive, I was able to access many of my old files. Some of my music was gone, half of my documents were corrupted, and I wasn’t able to transfer many applications. But the really important stuff was salvaged.

Lesson learned

DiskWarrior’s setup, repair, and recovery was simply fantastic. I recommend it to anyone in times of trouble.

First, I bought a hard drive enclosure to convert my internal disk to an external hard drive. I bought an Antec enclosure for about $70 at Best Buy. It’s a simple black box that connects to your computer via USB. It wasn’t the most expensive enclosure on the shelf, but it did the trick.

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET)

After I installed the new hard drive (a 500GB 3.5-inch internal Seagate hard drive costing $99), to replace the computer’s nonfunctioning drive, I put my iMac back together and fired it up. I popped my
Leopard install disc into the DVD slot, formatted the new hard drive, and installed the operating system. Within about 30 minutes, my iMac was back to life. I was ready to determine what happened to my old drive.

Earlier this week, I showed you how to take apart your iMac and replace your hard drive. But I ended that with a promise to tell you the rest of the story. Here it is:

I needed to find those files. I first tried the Windows app SpinRite from the Gibson Research Corporation. Granted, the software works best on a drive that’s formatted with a Windows file system, but the latest version of the application, 6.0, works just fine with HFS Plus, the Mac OS X file system. I connected my old hard drive to a Windows PC and ran the software on the drive. Failure. It wasn’t able to access anything from my OS X partition. I’d wasted $89.

Now, excuse me while I configure my Time Capsule.

Before my hard drive failed, I didn’t have a backup service running. I hadn’t backed up any files through Time Machine for more than 400 days. The only backup I could find on a DVD was from 2007. I didn’t use any online backup services, like Carbonite or Mozy. And I didn’t have a Time Capsule or external hard drive running.

“I’m well versed enough in the search business at yahoo to say it’s absolutely critical to Yahoo. It’s critical to our customers and partners that they have a combined search and display experience on the Internet. I haven’t changed my position on that. Relative to anything else with Microsoft, I’m not going to comment,” she said.

Yahoo's revenue is under pressure.

“Pulling back on brand advertising is a short-term solution that leads to long-term brand erosion,” she said, and those with premium brands won’t resort to just bidding for search keywords to preserve their brand.

Revenue per search dropped along with the economy. “It’s like online window shopping. People are grazing around, they’re just not clicking through to buy,” Bartz said.

Even as Google expands into telephone services, Web browsers, mobile phone operating systems, general-purpose cloud computing infrastructure, and any number of other projects, Bartz is keeping Yahoo focused on its core assets: a number of high-traffic Web properties.

And Bartz cautioned that the revamp isn’t going to be complete soon.

“To fully globalize all our platform is probably a couple-year program,” Bartz said. “You can’t underestimate the past focus the company had on the U.S. market…The international properties almost had to fend for themselves.”

“We have good engineers but have to hire more and get them focused on the right stuff. It’s probably the most important thing Yahoo’s going to do to really become a big strong growing international company,” Bartz said during a conference call to discuss the company’s lackluster first-quarter results.

Venting frustration
During the call, Bartz generally stuck to her script, reining her characteristically salty language. But some of her frustration with Yahoo’s sluggish pace shone through at the end of the hour-long call.

So new Chief Executive Carol Bartz promised Tuesday as she announced first-quarter financial results and described the impression she’s now begun trying to make on the Internet pioneer. Instead of an across-the-board cut, Yahoo’s layoff of about 675 people is intended to enable new hiring and investments in the company’s bigger Internet properties.

The company was hurt by a variety of factors. Revenue from graphical “display” ads on Yahoo sites dropped 13 percent worldwide to $371 million, while revenue from search advertising dropped 3 percent to $399 million. Affiliate marketing revenue, a search-related category, declined 16 percent to $511 million.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Yahoo’s 5 percent layoff is going to be different this time.

As an example, Bartz pointed to a revamped Yahoo Music site that opens up to content from YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and other sites and lets Yahoo members share their music-related activity with their friends. That revamp wasn’t possible internationally, she said.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Patience, patience
Patience could be hard to come by. Yahoo’s first-quarter revenue, excluding commissions paid to partners, declined 14 percent from $1.352 billion to $1.156 billion.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Bartz also specifically touted one hybrid project, Yahoo’s plan to bring branded display ads to search results, which today feature only text ads.

In the long run, though, Bartz remains a believer in traditional display ads.

The choice shows Bartz isn’t taking a quick-fix approach to Yahoo’s problems. First comes engineering, then comes a better experience for Yahoo users, and only then comes the financial return. “All that investment will pay off, I believe, with more innovation, faster and better user engagement, and the stuff we need to be a hot site. If we’re a hot site, the advertisers will follow,” she said.

Projects like the Yahoo Open Strategy have been more than a year in the making and only are arriving gradually. Yahoo is a big property, and changes necessarily come slowly as the company tries to figure out what works and doesn’t as it tows its massive user base toward new technology, but meanwhile, rival Google touts its experimental “launch early, launch often” philosophy.

Yahoo’s engineering focus “was sort of scattered to the winds. There were engineers in almost every country, and way too many product people. We had one product management person for every three engineers,” Bartz said. “We had a lot of people running around but nobody fucking doing anything!”

Specifically, she said the company will hire engineers to bring Yahoo’s major properties onto a unified global platform rather than its current variety of different systems for different countries. Today’s scattered technology infrastructure has prevented Yahoo from adapting quickly and adding new features, especially outside the United States, she said.

Bartz specifically pointed to Yahoo’s home page, sports, news, finances, mail, search, mobile, and entertainment sites as the companies focus, saying the company will deliver a “wow experience for our users.”

But online search remains key to Yahoo’s future, Bartz said, though she declined to say whether it’s necessary for the company to be a primary player or whether it would work if it’s using another company’s search results. Microsoft and Yahoo held many discussions in 2008 about such a partnership, with Microsoft taking over the business one option, and such talks appear to be on again according to All Things D and the Wall Street Journal.

The company did not say how it plans to handle Windows duties, other than that Bill Veghte, who heads the business side of things, and Steve Sinofsky, who runs engineering operations, would report to Ballmer. Microsoft said Johnson’s other immediate directs will also now report directly to Ballmer.

“Kevin has built a supremely talented organization and laid the foundation for the future success of Windows and our Online Services Business. This new structure will give us more agility and focus in two very competitive arenas,” Ballmer said. “It has been a pleasure to work with Kevin, and we wish him well in the future.”

Johnson was appointed group vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide sales, marketing and services in 2003 after success leading the North and Latin America sales team. Before joining Microsoft, Johnson worked in systems integration and consulting business unit at IBM, and as a software developer in the petroleum and financial services industries.

In conjunction with Johnson’s departure, Microsoft plans to split its Windows and Online Services division into two separate units, as they had been up until a couple of years ago. Microsoft is searching both inside and outside the company for a new online services chief, it said. (Ballmer announced the changes to Microsoft employees in a memo that also detailed Ballmer’s strategies for competing with Apple, Google, and Yahoo.)

Juniper did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. But on Thursday, the company released a statement, confirming that Johnson will become CEO, effective in September.

Johnson, who joined Microsoft in 1992, was named co-president of the Windows and online division as part of a sweeping reorganization of the company in 2005. When Jim Allchin, the other co-president retired a year later, Johnson assumed sole control.

CNET News’ Steven Musil contributed to this report.

In a statement announcing Johnson’s departure, Ballmer praised Johnson’s contribution to the company.

After the first round of Microsoft’s as-yet failed bid for Yahoo, Johnson in a memo to the troops tried to downplay the failure, saying part of the reason Microsoft abandoned its offer to buy Yahoo was that it viewed speed as of the essence if it were to buy the company.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Last month, Johnson heated up the Microhoo drama when the Financial Times Deutschland reported that he said software giant would be interested in bidding on a Yahoo under new management. However, according to a Microsoft representative, Johnson did not suggest such a scenario.

As chief of Windows and Windows Live, Johnson was spearheading Microsoft’s revamped online search and advertising strategy, which is considered key if Microsoft is to catch Google in the online search arena. He outlined the new strategy in a memo to his team in May while Microsoft was actively pursuing Yahoo. The takeover of Yahoo was expected to be a big boost to that effort.

Updated at 6:45 a.m. July 24: Juniper Networks confirms it has hired Kevin Johnson as its new CEO.

Kevin Johnson

REDMOND, Wash.–Kevin Johnson, Microsoft’s online and Windows chief and a key figure in the company’s failed Yahoo takeover effort, is leaving the company to become chief executive officer at Juniper Networks, Microsoft confirmed Wednesday.

No immediate successor has been named for Johnson, who as president of Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division had reported directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.