Updated April 14, 5:20 AM PDT to reflect official announcement.

This isn’t a new function of Salesforce.com. The company has offered integration with Microsoft’s Office and Outlook desktop applications for some time. But this is the company’s first foray into offering a more wide-ranging Web-based application package, cutting the ties to desktop applications.

Likewise, Google hasn’t ruled out working with other partners. “We’re committed to advancing the Web as the platform and partners are key to our growth, whether it’s a developer doing custom applications and gadgets, a company like Appirio making calendar sharing even easier, or Salesforce.com deeply integrating Google Apps into their CRM products,” said Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead, Google Enterprise.

There is a profit motive here, however. The company will offer a service called Salesforce for Google Apps Supported that will include telephone support for end users, unified billing and provisioning, and additional application programming interfaces for a fee of $10 per user, per month.

Salesforce.com won’t charge for the integration with Google Apps. Existing customers will get it for no additional charge. So far, 10 Salesforce.com customers have tested the integration in a beta test mode, said Swensrud.

It has hardly been a well-kept secret. Now, Salesforce.com and Google have made it official: they’re linking up to offer Salesforce’s CRM (customer relationship management) applications with integrated Google Apps.

(Credit:
Salesforce.com)

So will Salesforce.com make a similar deal with Microsoft for Office Live, the company’s online complement to Office, when that becomes a more capable alternative to desktop apps? “Salesforce.com is open to working with a myriad of office applications. What made this possible is that Salesforce and Google…both deliver native Web applications,” said Kraig Swensrud, vice president of Applications at Salesforce.com.

Salesforce customers will be able to access Gmail, Google Apps, Calendar, and Google Talk from within Salesforce.com CRM applications.

The companies on Monday announced that Salesforce.com’s customers now have the option of using versions of Google Apps, Gmail, Calendar, and Google Talk that are tightly linked to Salesforce.com (see Techmeme for more coverage).

“We’re looking to (Idea Exchange) for what people want us to build. People voted for Google Apps,” he said. Swensrud expects that a “huge” percentage of Salesforce.com’s customer base will be interested in the new feature.

What does that mean? An e-mail response from a customer can be appended to the customer information stored within Salesforce.com, meaning that all customer interaction can be accessed from a single place, for instance. That dynamic applies to Google Talk conversations and other applications, too.

Overall, researchers found that using a larger computer monitor at work could save 2.5 hours per day. However, that’s assuming employees are working 8 hours continuously, and not, say, taking a lunch break, or checking Facebook, or reading Digg.

Attention, employers: buying larger computer monitors for your workers might help them get more work done.

That’s according to a study done by researchers at the University of Utah. They tested how long it took people to edit documents and copy spreadsheet information over an 8-hour period, meant to represent a typical work day. Three different setups were used: a computer with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor, and one with two 20-inch monitors. (Note: The study was commissioned by NEC, which produces monitors, but the lead researcher said it didn’t matter what type of monitor was used.)

Sony didn’t hold back this morning, announcing a massive lineup of more than 25 new portable audio gadgets and accessories. The release includes a handful of new Walkmans and speakers, but is dominated by a slew of new headphones designed with portability in mind. Perhaps the most interesting of the bunch are the sport-style earphones, all of which are water-resistant and feature unique and varied form factors to ensure a secure fit during activity. For more information, check out our slide show, which offers details on 20 of Sony’s new audio accessories. (All of the products are expected to hit shelves at the end of March.)

Click the pic to launch the slide show.

To deliver reasonable processing power at low power the Voodoo Envy opted for the same special low-power processors used in the Air: the Intel SP7700 and SP7500.

Correction: The ThinkPad X300 uses an Intel SL7100 not an SP processor. It comes in the same small package as the SP processors but runs at a lower clock speed–1.2GHz–and uses less power: 12 watts versus the SP’s 20 watts.

(Credit:
Voodoo)

Notice any similarities between the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy and its thin rivals, the Apple MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300? Yes, they’re all very thin. But look inside and you’ll see more common features.

New versions of the SP “small form factor” processors are also expected later this year. Future versions of the Envy and Air will likely use these Montevina processors.

You won’t find these processors listed on Intel’s processor pricing page. They were designed originally for the MacBook Air and use a special 22mm x 22mm package and have a thermal envelope of only 20 watts at 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz. Typically, Intel processors running at those speeds have a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 35 watts.

This isn’t where the silicon similarities end. The Envy, like the Air and X300, uses Intel X3100 integrated graphics and offers either a 64GB solid state drive or 80GB hard disk drive (4200RPM), just like the Air.

Interestingly, these processors are older 65-nanometer “Merom” processors–not the newest 45-nanometer Penryn generation. But there are updates on the way, according to Intel. “You can expect to see later this year a 45nm small form factor Montevina,” an Intel representative said.

HP Voodoo Envy

“Montevina” Centrino 2 processors coming out later this year will include low-power models such as the SL9400 and SU9400, running at 1.86GHz and 1.4GHz with a TDP of 17W and 10W respectively. One processor, the SU3300, will have a TDP of 5.5W.

Fred Wilson, with Union Square Ventures, gave a keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo.

NEW YORK–”We are not an alley.”

Disclosure: Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures is an investor in Tumblr, which employs my significant other.

But the numbers, Wilson said, show a very different trend. In 1995, 230 early-stage companies in the Bay Area received venture backing, and only 30 did in New York. By the end of the year, 2008’s numbers should be 360 in the Bay Area and nearly 120 in New York. “We have grown here in New York by four times in 14 to 15 years, and Silicon Valley has grown by 1.5 times,” Wilson said. “We’ve gone from being one-eighth of the activity of Silicon Valley to one-third. In my mind that’s very significant.”

And the term “Silicon Alley,” he said, is one that the city should shake off. “We are one of the largest cities in the world,” Wilson said. “We are one of the largest Internet development communities in the world. Let’s bury the name Silicon Alley.”

The road ahead for tech innovation in New York is indeed bright, but along with the other industries the city fosters, there are difficult times and plenty of uncertainties ahead as well. And at the very least, keeping the tough times in mind, as well as the good ones, is just another safeguard against making sure that those “rock bottom” days of 2002 don’t return to the tech industry in full force.

Things started to turn around for New York in 2003. Nick Denton launched blog empire Gawker Media, and Delicious–which was sold to Yahoo after being funded by Wilson’s Union Square Ventures–was founded in a Manhattan apartment. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Web 2.0 Expo traditionally keeps its keynote addresses very short, so Wilson had only a half hour to fit in a decade and a half of New York’s digital history. Indeed, he admitted that his timeline would be incomplete. “There’s certainly no way that I was able to include every important person, every important company, and every important event,” he said.

New York’s technology community is still considered an afterthought in comparison to the Bay Area, and Wilson, though he has invested in companies like Delicious and Twitter over the years and runs one of the Web’s most influential venture capital blogs, isn’t yet in the league of true Valley legends like John Doerr.

Wilson’s address, overall, was an idealistic one–perhaps excessively so. No mention was made of the September 11th tragedy, which shook every industry in New York to its core, including technology, and no mention was made of the very recent Wall Street crisis that could result in a dramatic shift in fate for many tech start-ups. Judging by what Wilson said, the future is infinitely sunny.

The timeline went on: the rise of interactive ad agencies in 1995, along with the debut of The New York Times Web site, which first launched in conjunction with the visit of Pope John Paul II to New York; the debut in the mid-1990s of digital businesses like iVillage, The Knot, and Star Media; the sale of Total New York to AOL, and the IPO of DoubleClick in 1997–New York’s first tech company to go public.

Then, in 2000, the dot-com dream started to collapse. “The market broke in March and all these companies had huge burn rates, they could no longer finance themselves, and they went out of business one by one.” Still, Google opened its first New York office in an Upper West Side Starbucks that year. In 2006, as Wilson noted, it took over the historic Port Authority building in Chelsea. With 750 engineers, he said, “it’s the largest engineering operation they have outside of Silicon Valley.”

Fred Wilson is right. Let’s scrap the term “Silicon Alley.” But in doing so, let’s acknowledge that New York’s digital industry is New York itself, not a sort of frosted-glass microcosm insulated from the rest of the metropolis. The beauty of New York’s technology industry is that it’s so connected, running through the same veins as the most influential names in some of the world’s biggest industries; Wilson made a note of that at the end of his keynote, identifying New York’s tech community as “more creative, more artistic, more connected to media, advertising, (and) business.”

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

In 1996, Wilson started his first tech venture firm, Flatiron Partners. “We first were going to call ourselves Acme Ventures. We were going to use the Road Runner as our logo. That didn’t work out,” Wilson said with a laugh. “We started out with the Flatiron Building as our logo. We got sued. That’s a long story.”

On a less depressing note, what Wilson also didn’t mention was that New York City has elected a tech mogul as its mayor: Michael Bloomberg’s eponymous company revolutionized the world of finance, and Bloomberg has promised to foster digital culture further with an annual Internet Week New York festival and an official early-stage tech venture fund.

He then went through the heights of the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, when “all hell broke loose.” One of the companies he spotlighted was Kozmo, the delivery service that was arguably Gotham’s most famous dot-bomb. “To me, Kozmo was kind of a definitive company. We invested in it, we lost a lot of money, but it was a great company,” he said. “To this date, my kids ask me, ‘Explain to me why Kozmo’s not around?’”

The keynote took the audience back, in fact, to 1979, when New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program was first formed. “It started in an art school, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU,” Wilson said. “I think that still to this day defines a distinguishing characteristic of the New York Internet community.”

Wilson gave us the history. But when it comes to the future of technology in New York, I hope the conversation goes on. Despite the fact that the tech economy has held up in the wake of serious economic troubles so far, many people aren’t sure how much longer that will be the case. The health of the financial services industry has grown precipitously worse in a matter of days, and that’s a dark cloud looming over all of New York, not just Wall Street.

So said venture capitalist Fred Wilson of at the Web 2.0 Expo here in his keynote entitled “New York’s Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent.” A longtime leader in Gotham’s culture of digital innovation, Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, gave a short “history lesson” to the hordes of conference attendees, many of whom had come from hundreds of miles away.

if you haven’t been following the saga of Psystar, check out our coverage this week. In short, Psystar is selling home-built Open Computers with Mac OS X Leopard preinstalled, which is a violation of Apple’s licensing policy for Mac OS X.

Psystar's newest location near Miami International Airport.

(Credit: Anonymous ZDNet.com reader)

So we’ll see if those orders start to come through. I ordered a Leopard Open Computer on Wednesday, and my credit card was charged on Saturday. I still haven’t received a shipping notice yet.

But Psystar is back once again, with a new payment processor, according to the company’s Web site. And it’s promising that all Open Computers or OpenPro Computers ordered this month will soon be shipping.

Psystar finally managed to get its Internet store back up and running Saturday, and promised that all
Mac clones ordered to date will soon be on the way.

While we’re waiting, check out more photos of what is supposedly Psystar’s new building, obtained by my colleague Larry Dignan over at ZDNet. It would be nice if we can finally put the speculation about Psystar’s existence to rest next week, and get into the most interesting part of this saga: how does the company plan to fend off an expected legal challenge from Apple?

The company has been besieged with orders, attention, and skepticism this week after news of its existence spread far and wide. Most of the attention focused on the fact that Psystar changed its address no less than four times over the week, and that its payment processor pulled its services from the company after learning it was selling products, not just IT services.

For now, Miyamoto looks ahead to other projects for the
Wii, mentioning his desire to continue the Pikmin series.

Check out Kara Tsuboi’s report on WiiWare and Wii Fit:

CNET was more than happy to attend an exclusive roundtable Q&A regarding Wii Fit with Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto on Thursday afternoon at the Le Parker Meridien in New York. Miyamoto led the presentation with an in-depth look at the origin of Wii Fit and the challenges that came along in developing such an ambitious platform.

What separates Wii Fit from other “working-out-can-be-fun” concepts is that it creates a game around each person who plays it. Nintendo hopes that this personalized experience will attract people who would otherwise not be playing video games–and we think they’re on to something. By making Wii Fit an easy-to-use, practical, and accessible device, it can appeal to just about anyone who can stand on a scale. Wii Fit may not have you dropping pounds as fast as intense exercise and dieting would, but it can definitely make keeping track of your progress a whole lot easier and definitely more entertaining. Miyamoto explained that Wii Fit makes you more aware of your body, which is the first step toward improving your health. Wii Fit is already starting to pop up in gyms across Japan and we’d imagine a similar response here in the states.

Coming off the overwhelming success Wii Fit has already secured in Japan–more than 2 million units have been sold so far–Nintendo is ready to bring the balance board to North America. While Wii Fit has become somewhat of a family sensation in Japan, Miyamoto says he’s not sure how an American audience will receive the game. When we asked Miyamoto what he expected from American consumers, he noted that on average, American families are apart more often than those in Japan. A lot of families have parents who have separated or divorced, so it’s tougher to predict the role family will play in the American response to Wii Fit–and we couldn’t agree more. While there are sure to be families who will scoop the game up for its health-oriented encouragements, we think Wii Fit will also be a hit with individuals and those who live independently.

(Credit:
Jeff Bakalar/CNET Networks)

Interestingly enough, Wii Fit was conceived by Miyamoto in the process of his own personal awareness of his body weight. By graphing his weight over a period of time, he was able to see a visual representation of how it fluctuated. With his family encouraging him to keep in shape, Miyamoto did so by creating a personal game out of the whole thing–as a result, Wii Fit was born.

Wii Fit will go on sale May 19 in North America. Be sure to check CNET in the coming weeks for a full review.

Miyamoto then proceeded with a demonstration of the Yoga section of Wii Fit. He showed how the balance board helps you become aware of your own balance and posture by displaying it onscreen in a way that is easy to understand. Most people who get on the board for the first time are surprised at how uneven their stance is and are eager to try to improve their overall posture.
The game bundled with the balance board is split into two features; a weight and body mass index tracker, and a training section. Once you’ve created a profile (of course, you can use your Mii character), you take an initial balance test that will combine your age, BMI, and weight, and calculate your Wii Fit age. This number is used to track your progress and ultimately encourage you to get it lowered. Once you start completing the various strength training, aerobic, yoga, and balance games, you earn Fit Credits–the in-game currency that lets you unlock more challenges.

But where do we go from here? If Wii Fit is as successful in North America as it has been in Japan, there will be a seemingly endless amount of directions Nintendo can take with incorporating the balance board into other applications besides Wii Fit. Miyamoto explained that once there’s a solid install-base of Wii Fit users, Nintendo can entertain third-party game developer’s interest in creating games that take advantage of the hardware. This has already taken place in Japan with a skiing game from Namco Bandai. Miyamoto even flirted with the idea of incorporating connectivity with the Nintendo DS as a part of Wii Fit–we’re certainly hoping that will come to fruition. On whether we could see the balance board being used in first-party Nintendo games, Miyamoto said it’s possible that it could be included as an optional input device.

The Wii Fit balance board is quite an advanced piece of hardware. With four sensors in each of the corners on the board, the device has a large spectrum of data it can measure. Miyamoto explained that the board lets your body essentially become the joystick, something rarely attempted in video games.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the FCC investigation ensued over whether Comcast had violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he was “disappointed by Comcast’s decision to appeal.”

“We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the (FCC) found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules,” Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen said in a statement.

The company also announced it would set a data cap of 250GBs per month for its residential customers beginning on October 1.

Comcast is appealing a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that found the broadband provider had illegally blocked some customers’ Web traffic.

The appeal, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, challenges the FCC’s ruling on August 1 that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful–the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. The FCC issued a cease-and-desist order and required the company to disclose to subscribers in the future how it plans to manage traffic.

Since that ruling, Comcast announced plans to reduce Internet service to customers it deems to be using too much bandwidth. To keep service flowing to other customers, Comcast plans to impede Internet speeds to its heaviest users for up to 20 minutes, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services, told Bloomberg in an interview.

The very first Netbooks ran Linux operating systems, usually with a custom front-end to give users easy access to a Web browser and other frequently used apps. But as well-intentioned as that plan was, it wasn’t until PC makers added the already archaic Windows XP operating system that the Netbook craze took off.

While a non-Windows OS can easily front-load the most commonly used software (FireFox, Open Office, etc.), adding new programs can be a hassle for the uninitiated, and users can be disappointed to find their existing library of Windows software won’t work (to say nothing of trying to find and install an alternative). And if something like your Wi-Fi connection, for example, isn’t working for some reason, even a relative luddite can muddle through several obvious possible fixes in XP — try getting a PC novice to figure that out under an unfamiliar operating system.

HP's Mini 1000 Netbook.

It wasn’t that XP was the perfect solution for small screens and low-power CPUs — it’s that consumers searching for a simple, low-cost second or travel laptop value ease of use over almost anything else. XP benefits from looking and feeling familiar to most users.

In our initial tests, Windows 7 also shows great promise for Netbooks, and seems like a much more likely candidate for the future of Netbooks than anything else. Can a non-Windows OS win over Netbook users? Weigh in with your comments below.

To its credit, the phone version of Android (as used on the T-Mobile G1) is very user-friendly, and an Android computer OS would likely attempt to tackle many of these issues with a features such as a built-in app store.

The Wall Street Journal says:

We’ve seen several stories recently (including one by our own Maggie Reardon) about how HP and other companies are considering using an operating system based on Google’s Android platform for Netbook laptops, replacing the ubiquitous Windows XP. Examining the short history of the unexpectedly popular Netbook market, it seems unlikely that Android will be able to gain a foothold.