Microsoft continues to fill out its cross platform application offerings, adding OneNote Mobile for Android (2.3 or higher) to the list of iPhone, iPad, and Android apps already available from a number of Microsoft products, including Bing and Hotmail.

The app brings the note taking abilities of OneNote, along with the cloud storage features of SkyDrive, to allow you to take, edit, and or store notes on your Android device.  The OneNote blog has more, including an annotated screenshot:

… and a feature summary:

OneNote Mobile for Android includes the following features:

• Text formatting, images, and bulleted lists
• To-do lists with clickable checkboxes
• Quick photo capture with your phone’s camera
• Quick access to recent notes
• Store and access multiple OneNote notebooks
• Sync to your free SkyDrive account for access anywhere
• Offline access to your notes
• Option to sync notebooks only over a Wi-Fi connection
• Built-in spelling checker
• Support for external hyperlinks
• Table editing

Along with the official announcement on the OneNote blog, the team at SkyDrive also posted on accessing SkyDrive through Android, either via this new OneNote app (for OneNote files), or via a number of 3rd party apps that utilize the SkyDrive APIs:

If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

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Microsoft has announced that it has bought an equity stake in 24/7 Inc as well as a partnership with the company to help develop future customer service software products. Read more…

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The father of the LED is now looking to revolutionize the industry he helped create. Soraa, a Silicon Valley startup co-founded by Shuji Nakamura — who created the blue laser and the white LED — officially unveiled the technology behind its LED innovation on Tuesday. The company, which is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, has developed a new way to manufacturer an LED light that produces a light that is brighter, has a better quality, is more energy efficient, and saves more money than its competitors on the market.

The first light Soraa is launching is a lamp to replace a halogen bulb (called an MR16), which are commonly used in places like recessed ceiling lights and spot lights on products in stores and venues. These aren’t lamps for the everyday home owner, and Soraa is targeting commercial and industrial building owners first, before it moves to the residential market.

During an interview with Soraa CEO Eric Kim at Soraa’s factory, Kim explained to me that “light is not a commodity,” as he showed me the light from the Soraa lamp in comparison to a variety of LED competitors including giants like Philips that also make halogen replacement LEDs. Indeed in the various tests the bright white light displayed a far better quality, consistency, color and angle than the comparison light.

That type of quality would be pretty cool on its own. But Soraa’s LED light is also highly energy efficient. It uses about 75 percent less energy than incandescent and halogen bulbs, and lasts 25 times longer than halogen bulbs. For a company that’s buying lighting for a commercial building, a Soraa light can deliver a year pay back period in energy savings, said Kim.

How does it work?

Soraa’s secret sauce lies in the startup’s early bet on using the semiconductor gallium nitride for the substrate part of the light. LEDs are usually made by putting gallium nitride onto sapphire of silicon carbide substrates. But Soraa’s light places gallium nitride onto a gallium nitride substrate, enabling the core of the light itself to create better uniformity. Soraa says the combo is more cost effective and can produce more light per lamp than the traditional methods.

While the tech sounds like a perfect thing to license to the big players, Soraa is making the big bet that it can be a vertically-integrated LED manufacturer, making the substrate, chip, packaging and entire light solution. That’s always a slight risk, because that can be capital intensive, but on the other hand, the payoff and potential are a lot higher when you own the whole value chain.

Soraa is currently moving into volume commercial production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Kim tells me at the company’s current fab, it will be able to turn into a $ 400 million revenue per year company.

Soraa, which was founded in 2008, is backed by Khosla Ventures, NEA and NGEN Partners and has raised over $ 100 million in funding.

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Metro style apps in Windows 8 have all the performance benefits of IE10 when showing Web content. In Metro style apps, Web content is always JIT compiled and hardware-accelerated. Other platforms do not provide the same level of performance in apps. For example, Cocoa apps on iOS offer significantly worse JavaScript performance (via the UIWebView control) than the same content running in Safari. These Cocoa apps do not enjoy JIT compilation, and these apps cannot show and use Web content the same way the browser on the system can:

Testing configuration: http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html.
iPad: 1st Gen, iOS 5.0.1.
Windows 8: Developer Preview, Dell Optiplex 745, 64-bit OS.
Kindle Fire v1.

Why is this important?

Many applications embed HTML to provide a richer and always up to date experience for consumers. For example, the developer of a restaurant guide app might want to include a live map showing the locations of the list of restaurants the user is choosing from. If you write an app on iOS, common actions like panning and zooming the map will run twice as slow in an app compared with Safari.

Anyone writing a Metro style app for Windows 8 can easily include Web content in their app. In an HTML or XAML app, just include an <iframe> element or a WebView control to get the full benefit of IE 10 performance. To see a sample HTML app that demonstrates this, check out the “Building Your First Metro Style App Using Javascript” hands-on lab at http://www.buildwindows.com/Labs.

Figure 1: HTML Content from Bing Maps in an HTML Metro Style App

With Metro style apps, it’s easy to integrate many existing Web services seamlessly into your app. It’s also possible to build new services for your app that let you deliver dynamic HTML content without having to update your application.

When you include Web content in your Metro style app, your app gets all the performance benefits of IE10 automatically without any additional or special work. JavaScript code continues to run fast with JIT compilation, and your app will automatically use GPU to accelerate HTML graphics.

—Andy Zeigler, Senior Program Manager, Internet Explorer

IEBlog

Could the app economy be the cure for the United States’ employment doldrums? A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007.

In the report by technology trade group TechNet, Michael Mandel of the South Mountain Economics, who conducted the research, found that 311,000 app-related jobs have been generated and another 155,000 jobs have also been indirectly created from the app boom. The figures are estimates and are based on calculations on the existing market for app-related jobs. Mandel warns that the figures could represent “jobs not lost” rather than net jobs gained.

But if the latter is true, it starts to paint a broader picture of the economic benefit from apps, which have only really been around in force for the last four years. We’ve already talked about some of the revenue brought in by apps and where it’s forecast to hit. Gartner said last year it expected mobile app stores to generate $ 15 billion in revenue in 2011. But it’s interesting to see how many actual jobs might be at work in this emerging economy. App jobs can be found in big software and gaming companies like Electronic Arts and Zynga to small one person start-ups working out of a home. Big companies are also devoting more and more resources to apps, and as apps help companies grow, it fuels the need for more jobs in human resources, sales, marketing and other non-technical positions. There’s also an emerging app development services economy growing out of the app boom.

The app economy has been a major engine for job growth in an otherwise sluggish labor market, said Mandel. And it’s likely to keep growing as wireless and social platforms expand.

Mandel arrived at his estimates by looking at the number of unique “help wanted” ads for apps in the the Conference Board HWOL database. He then factored in the historical rate in the computer and mathematics industry for employment ads compared to existing jobs. And then he applied a multiplier to estimate the number of indirect jobs created by apps.

The highest number of app positions in a metro area were created in the New York-New Jersey-Long Island area (9.2 percent), followed by San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (8.5 percent),  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (6.3 percent) and the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (5.7 percent) area. Overall, California generated the most app jobs by far with 23.8 percent of all jobs, followed by New York (6.9 percent) and Washington (6.4 percent).

These are still early days and that’s why Mandel was forced to come up with his own estimates, because there is no good tracking done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But I think we’re likely to see a lot more growth, especially as smartphone and tablet penetration increases.

As I wrote earlier, consumers are increasingly favoring apps over a browser in part because it’s a pretty streamlined experience that is dedicated to one purpose. Over time, we will likely see the growth in app jobs level off as more companies look to leverage the web and build more cross-platform HTML5 web apps. But for now, there’s still a lot of interest in native apps that are built atop popular platforms. And that means this is where to find a lot of new jobs.

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Even as some news outlets like Associated Press hire social-media editors to try and figure out how to make use of tools like Twitter for journalistic purposes, others seem to be intent on locking these tools down and removing as much of the social aspects from them as possible. According to a report in The Guardian, broadcaster Sky News has come out with a new policy that bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account. As with so many other similar social-media policies, this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.

Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worse

This is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.

Since then, AP has hired Eric Carvin to be the service’s social-media editor (Carvin is the brother of National Public Radio’s Twitter phenom Andy Carvin, who turned his Twitter account into a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions). At a recent social-media event in New York, Eric told me that he was trying hard to convince the wire service that the benefits of social tools like Twitter outweigh the disadvantages. But as with so many traditional media outlets, both AP and Sky chose to focus their policies on what their staff shouldn’t do, instead of concentrating on what they should do.

As we’ve pointed out before, these kinds of rules seem to be aimed at trying to remove the human being from the process, something that may work in traditional forms of media, but fails miserably when using social tools like Twitter. The whole point of using them is to be social, and that means expressing human emotions and possibly even opinions in some cases. The best social-media policies — like the exceptionally minimalist version that Media News CEO John Paton came up with — simply ask reporters and editors to be themselves, but to think about what they post before doing so, and to use common sense.

Why remove the social from social media?

Sky News says in the email it sent to employees that the guidelines were necessary to ensure that “there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information.” And obviously, a news service doesn’t want dozens of reporters tweeting rumors and innuendo about major breaking stories, or tipping competitors off to a scoop. But banning staff from retweeting anyone outside the Sky News operation makes no sense whatsoever, as Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics notes — Sky reporters should be seen as the key sources for information, regardless of where it comes from.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter was the first to broach the rumor — on Twitter — that the terrorist leader had been killed, when he retweeted a post from the former chief of staff for Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld. Some wondered whether Stelter would get in trouble from the Times for retweeting something that hadn’t been confirmed, and for posting it before his own newspaper. But as far as I know, there were no repercussions — and Stelter’s tweet in turn was retweeted thousands of times, and likely broke the news to many.

That’s what Twitter can accomplish if you use it properly, instead of seeing nothing but threats and potential negative repercussions. Like other media outlets that have tried the same approach, Sky News risks removing all the benefits of a powerful media tool by treating its staff as though they were disobedient children.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users and Rosaura Ochoa

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The Windows 8 blog has posted up a new entry that describes how Microsoft is trying to gain better battery life for PCs by making Windows 8 applications more energy efficient. Read more…

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In its ongoing fight to launch its nationwide LTE service, LightSquared on Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to impose the first-ever standards on GPS device design, claiming such requirements would allow GPS and its 4G network to co-exist peacefully in the satellite bands. While LightSquared would appear to be taking the middle path, the proposal smacks of a political stunt.

Even if the FCC agreed to establish such standards, the rulemaking process and implementing those design requirements would take years, while leaving millions of interference-prone devices in the market that would need to replaced or retrofitted. Meanwhile LightSquared isn’t changing its launch plans and intends to roll out its LTE network this year — if it can get FCC approval.

LightSquared maintains that GPS device makers like Garmin and Trimble Navigation designed their receivers sloppily so that they reach outside of the GPS bands into LightSquared’s frequencies. That’s ultimately the source of the widely reported interference problems navigation and location devices experience when they get to close the carrier’s LTE transmitters. LightSquared correctly points out that the commercial GPS industry has never had to build their devices to particular standards and has, instead, been piggybacking off the government-built and maintained GPS satellite network since its inception.

But GPS and satellite networks co-existed peacefully in the L-band for years since satellite signals are too weak to overpower any GPS receiver listening in on its frequencies. What’s changed is how LightSquared wants to use its satellite spectrum: a high-powered terrestrial LTE transmitter would overwhelm a low-power GPS device in its vicinity, if it weren’t designed to shield out any foreign signals.

LightSquared is right in principle. If the FCC is serious about finding new spectrum for mobile broadband it has to protect license holders. In order to prep the L-band for 4G, the government needs to create and enforce standards on the GPS devices to prevent them from stepping outside of their bands.

But in this case, LightSquared is using principle as cudgel to beat back the commercial GPS lobby so it can deploy its LTE network before it runs out of funding. Drawing attention to receiver design paints the GPS industry as the bad guy and makes LightSquared out to be the victim of its selfishness and neglect. That’s a perception LightSquared would love to amplify as Congress focuses its attention on the controversy.

Interference in the L-band is a big issue that will take years to fix. On the one hand, LightSquared is making the perfectly reasonable argument that the problem can be solved through government-imposed standards. But in the next breath, it seems to be denying that the problem exists at all, demanding permission to launch its network regardless of what chaos ensues with GPS. The would-be carrier probably doesn’t care one whit if such standards are ever adopted. In fact, LightSquared is asking the FCC rule that GPS receivers aren’t entitled to protection from interference, which would make standards moot. LightSquared just wants to get its network built as quickly as and by any means possible.

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Many people wondered why Android’s built-in browser is not called Chrome. One of the reasons is that Android’s browser doesn’t have many of the features of the desktop browser: data sync (bookmark sync is available in Android 4.0), extensions, themes, apps. Another reason is that Android’s browser is updated less frequently than the Chrome browser because it’s included in the operating system. Most OEMs ship their own browsers, so not many people use the stock Android browsers.

Now Chrome is available for Android 4.0 and it won’t replace the standard browser on your device. “Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices,” explains Google.

Chrome for Android brings a new gesture for navigating to the next tab (flick instead of Ctrl+Tab), support for page prerendering (used by Google Search to fetch the top result), incognito mode, link preview and data sync for bookmarks, typed URLs and browser sessions. That means you can open a few tabs in the desktop Chrome, close your computer and continue reading the same pages on your Android phone or tablet. In addition to these features, Chrome for Android “brings support for many of the latest HTML5 features to the Android platform: hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets”. There’s also support for remote debugging.

“Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web,” mentions Google.

At the moment, Chrome for Android doesn’t sandbox tabs and there’s no support for Safe Browsing, but these features could be added in the feature.

You can only try Chrome for Android if your phone runs Android 4.0 (you’re using Galaxy Nexus or a different phone with a custom ROM). Another limitation is that Chrome for Android is only available if you’re in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, but I’m sure you can use Market Enabler or the .apk linked here to bypass this restriction.

Google Operating System

Microsoft has teamed up with CEOP and InSafe to release a custom version of Internet Explorer 9 to protect children from the dangers of the Internet, and to raise awareness for Safer Internet day. Read more…

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