Category: Tech news

OS X Mountain Lion, or version 10.8 as it’s known according to Apple’s numbering system, accounted for 32 percent of all web traffic measured by Net Applications, a firm that charts OS share and other web metrics. This marks the first time Mountain Lion has accounted for a majority share of web traffic from Apple computers, with Lion dropping down to 28 percent.

In November, Mountain Lion only just trailed Lion, with 29 percent of web traffic, vs. 30 percent for Lion. Snow Leopard use actually remained relatively steady between November and December, losing less than a percentage point and suggesting that most of the Mountain Lion upgraders are coming from Lion, and not jumping up two versions. Mountain Lion requires that Lion be installed in order to upgrade (unless you have a USB stick version of 10.8), so it makes sense that the pool of upgraders is coming from Lion, where there are relatively few barriers to upgrading (it’s handled directly through the Mac App Store).

Snow Leopard continues to be very tenacious, with a 29 percent share of Mac web traffic, which makes it the second-most frequently used version of OS X over even Lion. But Mountain Lion’s growth is still impressive, and it seems to be attracting users faster than Lion was ever able to. Lion took until May 2012 to overcome Snow Leopard in terms of share of web traffic as measured by Net Applications, meaning it required nearly 10 months to unseat Snow Leopard as the dominant Mac OS. By contrast, Mountain Lion took around five months to reach the top spot, or about half the time.

Speedy adoption of new OS X versions is key to keeping a solid software ecosystem in place, and lessening headaches for developers both internal and external. That makes this particular development promising news for Apple, especially now that they’re on an annual update cycle for OS X, which makes getting people on the newest version as quickly as possible even more crucial.

The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards will soon be upon us and (if you hadn’t noticed) we just announced our new host. The Daily Show’s John Oliver will take the stage at this year’s Crunchies Awards and we couldn’t be more excited. Not only is he hilarious, but he has been nominated for multiple prestigious awards and won the Emmy Award for Best Comedy Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series in 2009 and 2011. We told you this award show, coined the Oscars of tech, will not disappoint, and we meant it.

We’re incredibly lucky to have John Oliver host, but we also have plenty of surprises up our sleeves — expect to hear more about them in the weeks leading up to the show on January 31st at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

Tickets are already on sale and we are filling up fast. Since we have just released the full list of the finalists nominated, voting has begun. However, since we know not all of you will be able to purchase tickets, we wanted to give our loyal readers a chance to win some. Today, we are giving away two free tickets (valued at $120 each) to the Crunchies Awards — only one reader will win, but they’ll be able to bring a friend, colleague, date, or whomever they choose. The night will be filled with surprises, influential tech gurus, drinks, hors d’oeuvres, giveaways and much more.

Want a chance to come join us? All you have to do is follow the steps below!

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (making sure to include the #Crunchies hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite comedy show is

Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner January 6th at 7:30pm PT. Anyone is the world is eligible. Please note: this giveaway is for two tickets only and does not include airfare or hotel.

For the most part, the news about Windows 8 hasn’t been very positive for Microsoft, but the company today announced a major win. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) just signed a new three-year
licensing agreement with Microsoft reseller Insight Public Sector to bring Windows 8, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013 Enterprise to 75 percent of all DoD personnel. The DoD, Microsoft says, will “use Windows 8 to empower productivity from any location, and any supported device, while taking advantage of enhanced security.” It’s worth noting, of course, that the DoD was already a Microsoft customer.

Today’s announcement, says Microsoft, means the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will now have access to “the latest Microsoft technologies in support of top IT priorities around datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud computing and big data.” Microsoft also says that this is “the most comprehensive” agreement it has ever established with the DoD. The total worth of the deal is about $617 million, and the Army expects to save more than $70 million per year because of it.

“There’s a move afoot throughout the department to bring about efficiencies in the [information technology] world,” David L. DeVries, DOD deputy chief information officer, told American Forces Press Service. “We took a long, hard look at it … realizing that the Department of Defense relies upon the network and upon information technology to do its business.”

Microsoft will work closely with the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command and the Air Force Program Executive Office for Business and Enterprise Systems to achieve “Army Golden Master and Air Force Standard Desktop Configuration compliance for Windows 8.”

Tagstand, the Y Combinator-backed startup intent on taking NFC mainstream, is announcing a partnership with mobile accessories maker TYLT in advance of this year’s CES in Las Vegas. The deal involves three new products, manufactured by TYLT, which use Tagstand’s NFC technology: TUNZ, a portable Bluetooth speaker; CAPIO, a universal smartphone mount for the car; and TAGZ, which are the NFC stickers you can program and place anywhere.

The products are designed to work with Tagstand’s Android application, NFC Task Launcher, which previously was made to work with NFC tags, like those Tagstand offers in its tag store. Users configure their NFC tags to perform particular tasks when tapped – like automatically activating Bluetooth, launching their navigation app or music app on their phone, connect to Wi-Fi networks, change ringer volumes, check-in on social networks, and more. The Task Launcher app has now been downloaded over 250,000 times, according to Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar.

With the new products from TYLT, however, some of those use cases are now available built into the hardware devices themselves. For example, the CAPIO phone dock can now be configured to turn on your Bluetooth connection to sync with your car, launch your favorite mapping app or start playing music just by placing the phone in the mount.

The TUNZ speaker can be tapped to start playing music, and perform other tasks, like connecting to Wi-Fi, for example. So hopefully, a better alternative to the poorly received Nexus Q? (At least it looks like a speaker, not a ball.) The speaker includes a built-in noise canceling microphone that lets you switch from music to hands-free calling, and offers up to 20 hours of battery life. You can get 30 hours if you play the volume at half status, the company claims.

Although NFC doesn’t have widespread adoption in the U.S. at this point in terms of mobile payments – the technology it is often most associated with – Tagstand has been betting big that its integration into new Android phones will pave the way for startups that take advantage of the technology in other ways. TYLT is also investing in NFC, with plans to ship at least 100,000 NFC chips in six products in 2013. (In addition to the speaker and smartphone dock, they have four others on the roadmap. Some of the products were previously announced, but Tagstand’s partnership was not.)

Taggar adds that Tagstand’s NFC Task Launcher app has now seen over 10 million actions executed, which is up from the 1 million it was reporting back in June 2012. At the time, the company had just transitioned the app from a $2 paid version to a free offering, so the drop in price (to zero), has likely helped increase adoption.

As have Samsung’s spicy and snarky marketing of its own NFC implementation, S-Beam, I might add.

The new NFC-enabled products will debut at CES, and TUNZ will be available for purchase immediately. CAPIO and TAGZ will launch next month.

These apps will walk you through everything from iPad repairs to sailing knots to experiments for budding scientists.

Acer has released a Windows 8 laptop that doesn’t slide, spin, swivel, or otherwise transform into a slate. It’s a straight-up laptop — albeit one with a touchscreen.

GREE Ventures, the venture capital arm of social gaming company GREE, has made an undisclosed series A investment in leading Indonesian e-commerce fashion platform Berrybenka.com. The funds will be used to grow Berrybenka.com’s business in Indonesia, by expanding its product selection, scaling marketing and expanding logistics.

Berrybenka.com also announced that Jason Lamuda, co-founder of Groupon Disdus, will join the company as president director. In a press release, Lamuda said:

“I truly believe that fashion is one of the biggest market opportunities in the Indonesian e-Commerce landscape. When you look at more developed regions such as Europe, China, Japan and India, there always existed leading local fashion e-Commerce players. Similarly, we aspire to become the leading fashion e-Commerce player in Indonesia, built locally. We are proud to be able to promote and nurture local brands and designers who are looking to market their products throughout Indonesia.”

Founded in August, 2011, Berrybenka.com is an online platform that carries items from both Indonesian and international fashion brands. It previously raised its seed funding from East Ventures, an early stage investment fund based in Jakarta, Singapore and Tokyo.

Pluralsight, an online training resource targeting professional developers, is today announcing its first outside funding, courtesy of a $27.5 million investment from Insight Venture Partners. The additional capital will help Pluralsight fund the expansion of its course library and will be used for hiring.

Salt Lake City-based Pluralsight was founded back in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard (CEO), Fritz Onion (Editor in Chief), Keith Brown (CTO), and Bill Williams (who’s no longer there). The company got its start as a classroom training outfit that once involved sending out an instructor to a business or having employees attend a training event. Three years in, it shifted the business model from in-person training to online learning.

Today, Pluralsight offers over 400 web-based courses, beginning at $29 per month for individuals, who account for half of the company’s revenue stream. That monthly fee provides access to Pluralsight’s entire online library, and for a bit more – $49 per month – mobile access with offline viewing is provided. Business and enterprise plans are also available, with discounts for companies buying more than 25 licenses. Pluralsight has an extensive partnership with Microsoft, its biggest corporate customer, involving several different groups across Microsoft, including MSDN, DreamSpark, BizSpark, WebsiteSpark, asp.net, and Engineering Excellence.

The system is also frequently used by engineers at Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Bank of America, Dell, EMC, Walt Disney, and KPMG.

According to Skonnard, the new funding will be used to expand the catalog of course materials, with a specific focus on building up its Salesforce offerings, where it expects to offer 50 courses by year-end 2013, up from the few it has now. “Salesforce is a great example of a developer community that’s under-developed in our library today,” says Skonnard. He notes that Pluralsight is currently strong in Microsoft technologies, Java, Android and iOS, but Salesforce’s developer community will probably reach a million developers sometime in the next few months. “We started to take notice of them earlier [in 2012] as an emerging, high-revenue part of the market that we could invest in heavily,” he explains.

Pluralsight will also invest in developing courses for social platform technologies like Twitter and Facebook, as well as in Java, Android, Ruby, PHP, and Python, as well as cloud platforms like Amazon’s AWS, Google App Engine, Windows Azure and others.

On the surface, it looks like Pluralsight has a lot of competition in the heating-up online education market. This sector saw a number of notable investments in 2012, including Coursera’s $16 million raise in April, 2tor’s $26 million Series D, Minerva’s $25 million, Desire2Learn’s massive $80 million round in September, Udacity’s $15 million Series B in October, and Udemy’s $12 million Series B in December (also an Insight-led deal), to name a few. In addition, the “learn to code” niche itself offers a variety of resources, like Codecademy, Code School, Programr, Treehouse, and more, all aimed at those who are looking to develop programming skills.

But Pluralsight is a bit different than many of its code-training competitors. Instead of providing DIY courses for newbies, its focus is on the serious developer. The site even warns those unprepared for that level of training to “click the back button.” Skonnard tells us that he thinks the company’s real competitors are not the startups trying to bring university courses online, but rather those with similar catalogs who are targeting developers looking to expand their skills. He sees Treehouse and the Adobe-focused Lynda.com as being the top competitors on that front. He also wasn’t concerned with Insight’s new investment in Udemy, saying its model is very different from Pluralsight. “Anyone can go in there and write a course on anything, without having any credentials,” Skonnard explains. “Our business is 100 percent focused on content curation – that’s our value-add.”

Meanwhile, Codeacademy is only worrisome from the “PR perspective,” he adds, explaining that the site got a lot of attention, but it was still unclear if the model would work. “They’re doing a lot of good for the online education world, but they’re not producing paychecks for people,” Skonnard says. Pluralsight’s 100 authors, however, average $9,000-$10,000 in royalties per quarter, he notes. The average royalty payment is 20 percent, which the author receives in addition to the one-time, course-delivery fee. “This is where we win over [our competitors]. This is the reason we’re able to get the best people,” claims Skonnard.

“Our authors make a lot of money. Our top author is going to make over $500,000 to $600,000 this year,” he adds. “Our top 10 authors are averaging $40-50K per quarter – so anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 per year. “

The site has now attracted over 200,000 users from 100 countries worldwide, and sees significant traction in the U.S., UK, Scandinavian countries, India, Canada, and Australia.

The company just hired a director of sales for India, and will open its first office there in a week. Pluralsight has to now only had contract sales reps in the country, as well as reps in London and elsewhere in Europe. Its sales team is currently five field reps and five inside sales reps, but the latter will triple in early 2013. In total, Pluralsight expects to double its 22-person team over the next six months.

Apple filed a patent with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) last week for an active stylus. According to the filing, “the stylus includes an electrode at a tip of the stylus; and powered circuitry coupled to the electrode and configured for capacitively coupling the electrode with a capacitive touch sensor panel. The powered circuitry can further include drive circuitry configured to output a drive voltage at the electrode and/or sense circuitry configured to sense a voltage received at the electrode.” In other words, the design can improve stylus sensing on conductive displays without being more costly to manufacture.

As PatentlyApple notes, the patent wasn’t filed in Apple’s name, but by two employees of Apple, engineering manager Jonah Harley and hardware engineering manager David Simon, and the Cupertino-based company can take assignment for the patent before it is granted.

As everyone who follows Apple may remember, Steve Jobs famously dismissed the stylus when the first iPhone was revealed in 2007 (“Who wants a stylus. You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”) and Samsung received plenty of ridicule when its Galaxy Note/stylus bundle was first revealed, as detractors mockingly compared it to a Palm Pilot. But this latest patent filing certainly isn’t the first time that Apple patents have surfaced for styluses. And, of course, just because Apple files a patent doesn’t mean it actually plans to bring the design to fruition. But it’s another sign (along with the iPad mini and the iPhone 5) that Apple is keeping a keen eye on Samsung and other competitors as it continues to work on new products.

Google and LG’s Nexus 4 has been such a coveted item this past holiday season, that it’s been in and out of stock since its release in mid-November. Because Google doesn’t publicly comment on device sales, it’s been hard to understand exactly how much OEM partner LG produced for the device’s initial launch.

However, a little sleuthing by some Android enthusiasts and Nexus 4 owners suggests that LG produced about 400,000 devices going into the end of last year.

How did they do it? They’ve taken the IMEI numbers of their phones and backtracked the production number of their devices using an LG mobile link that’s usually used for finding new firmware. An IMEI number, or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity number, is usually printed on the battery compartment of the inside of the phone. It can be used to prevent stolen phones from accessing a network.

If you take this link and put your IMEI number at the very end, this LG site will spit back out the IMEI followed by a long string of characters that looks something like this: “LGE960 ACAGBK 212KPHG188745 20121206 GLOBAL/GLOBAL N N”

If you break this string apart, you get:
LGE960 = phone model
A = ?
CA = Country where the device was sold. (Others include ‘US’ for the U.S., ‘HK’ for Hong Kong, ‘AU’ for Australia and so on.)
G = Storage (G = 16GB, 8 = 8GB)
BK = Color
2 = ?
12 = Production Month (November)
K = Production Country (Korea)
PHG = ?
188745 = The line or production number, showing that phone was the 188,745th device made.
2012121206 = The production date in YYYYMMDD format

A number of Nexus 4 owners have been sharing and compiling the production numbers day by day (see below). It suggests that LG made about 70,000 devices in October, 90,000 in November and 210,000 in December. Google declined to comment on these numbers.

Still, they’re interesting for a couple reasons. It appears that Google and LG have been conservative with the Nexus 4 launch. LG has previously said that the Nexus 4 “had proven extremely popular, and as such retailers have been met with huge demand.” Google’s U.K. and Ireland managing director Dan Cobley likewise has said there have been communication problems on both ends with managing supply for the Nexus 4.

Keeping supplies tight have made the Nexus 4 debut a world apart from the launch of the original HTC-manufactured Nexus One back in 2010.

DEC
165000
264000
265133 14-th ADEUBK GERMANY
266133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
267133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
268133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
269133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
270133 15-th ASWSBK SWS Switzerland (looks like around 500 units)
271133 16-th AISRBK Israel
272133 15-th ADEUBK Germany
273133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
274133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
275133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
277133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
278133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
279133 16-th AMYSBK
280123 17-th AMYSBK
289000 18-th UK
300123 19-th ADEGBK
305112 19-th ACA8BK
306000 28-Oct (?) AUSGBK, 211KPPB306000 “csn” is also very different from the “surroundings”
306001 8-Oct AUSGBK 211KPHG306001 esnoutgodate=null >>Never shipped?
306009 4-th Dec AUSGBK 212KPHG306009 esnoutgodate=null
306010 19-th AUS8BK 212KPYR306010 esnoutgodate=null
306020 19-th AUS8BK esnoutgodate=null
314001 19-th AFRGBK
314002 19-th ADEGBK
314050 19-th ADEGBK
314123 19-th ADEGBK
315112 19-th ADE8BK
319123 20-th ADEGBK
320123 20-th ADEGBK
321123 20-th AAUGBK
325112 20-th AUSGBK
330123 20-th AUSGBK
340123 21-th ACAGBK
350123 22-th AUS8BK
360123 26-th AUSGBK
365123 27-th AUS8BK
370123 27-th AUSGBK
374110 28-th AUSGBK

When political blogger Andrew Sullivan announced this morning that he’s leaving The Daily Beast and launching an independent company called Dish Publishing, the most provocative bit of news was his intended business model. He doesn’t plan to run any ads, and instead to support the company entirely through subscription revenue.

“It’s been a pretty amazing day,” Sullivan told me. Six hours after he first made his announcement and put out his call for sign ups, he said. “We’re well into the six figures.” He described the system as a “leaky meter,” where readers can hit the “read on” button a limited number of times per month before they have to pay; it’s leaky in that readers can follow links from other sites without adding to the meter. A subscription costs at least $19.99 per year, but readers can pay as much as they want, and Sullivan estimated that about a third of the initial subscribers are paying more than the minimum.

As for why he’s taking such a dramatic stand against ads, Sullivan said that he’s watched the media industry over the past decade and found that the pursuit of ad revenue has led not just to blatant “whoring” for pageviews (for example “slideshows of topless celebrities”), but also exerted a more “subtly corrupting” influence by leading to the creation of special issues and the like, which he said are basically “gussied-up vehicles for advertising.”

“Both those avenues seem kind of desperate,” Sullivan said. “You find yourself trying to create pageviews that don’t really have any editorial basis.”

With this approach, on the other hand, Sullivan said he’s solely responsible to readers, and if he succeeds, it will be because he offered content that readers believed was worth supporting: “It really does leave it in the hands of the reader. We’re not going to get bailed out by [IAC/Daily Beast owner] Barry Diller or Credit Suisse or some ad network. They know that the readers are all we’ve got.”

Asked whether this approach can be replicated by other, less well-known bloggers, he said, “Well, we don’t know if it’s even going to work for us yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” After all, low six-figure revenue isn’t enough to sustain even a year of the Dish. At the same time, he said that smaller blogs that are “just one person blogging out of a room” will have lower costs.

“If you get rid of all the overhead … I think it is scalable with a smaller blog,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”

Sullivan plans to re-launch the blog and introduce the meter on February 1, using technology from a startup called Tinypass. Last fall, he said he talked to a number of different metering companies, but he found Tinypass most compatible with his vision.

Tinypass COO David Restrepo suggested that one reason Sullivan chose his company was its flexibility. Sullivan is one of the most high-profile bloggers to use the Tinypass service, Restrepo said (another big name is movie director Larry Clark), but the company didn’t have to build any custom products to support his needs — it’s designed to support a broad spectrum of paywall/meter/donation models.

Restrepo said that Sullivan is one of Tinypass’ first big customers in the U.S. Most of its business (the company said last fall that it’s working with more than 250 publishers) has been international thus far.

“It’s a big world, and in many countries the online advertising model even lags the advertising model for independent content in the United States,” he said.

Restrepo also predicted we’ll see more and more blogs asking for reader payments in the coming year (which, to be clear, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll take the no-advertising approach that Sullivan is espousing).

“We’re at the end of people saying, ‘Will people pay for content online?’” Restrepo said. “That’s history. We’ve reached the beginning of asking, ‘What exact model works for the sector or the business that I’m in?”

You can sign up for a “founding membership” in The Dish here.

In 2008 I was griping about 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Which is nothing. Today it’s up around 7,000, and I declared an email bankruptcy just a few months ago and started fresh.

Cue, a handy mobile app for organizing and searching your online data across a variety of services, released some fascinating anonymized user data this afternoon that confirms what we all know already. We’re getting a lot more emails and reading fewer and fewer of them.

The service lets users auth in to things like email, cloud storage, calendaring, etc., to deal with them all in one place. It gives them an unprecedented amount of data about users’ online activities.

Here’s what the aggregate data from a random selection of Cue users tells us about email habits:

– Average number of email words written per person in 2012: 41,368 (about the size of the Lord of the Flies novel)
– Average messages received in 2012: 5,579
– Average messages sent in 2012: 869

CEO Daniel Gross also tells me (not included on the chart) that users are becoming much slower in responding to emails. The average response time in 2012 was 2.5 days. In 2011 it was 2.2 days, nearly a 14% increase in response time. And if you don’t get a response within 24 hours you may have to wait a while. If a message gets a response there’s a 56% chance it’ll come within an hour, and a whopping 89% likelihood it will come within 24 hours. To get the average out to 2.5 days, the remaining responses come much, much later.

Tuesday is the busiest email day, although Wednesday is the most popular day for calendaring meetings. 11 am is the busiest email time of day.

There’s fun data included as well. accounts for over 50% of emoticon usage. only gets 4.89%. My personal favorite rings in at just 0.21%.

If a presidential nominee was mentioned last year in an email, it was “Obama” 68% of the time. Romney got just 32% of mentions. Dogs were the most popular animal at 38%, cats got just 32%. And if you click on the most common swearwords, you’ll see which one is most popular.

See all the data here.

One of the most powerful positions in the U.S. goverment may be up for grabs if Republicans follow through on a growing opposition to House Speaker John Boehner (CrunchGov Grade: B). Opposition for his re-election tomorrow from members of his own party began pouring in after an epic press conference where Republican Governor Chris Christie slammed Boehner for choosing not to ratify aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy. It’s anyone’s guess whether the handful of critics can muster a last-minute coup, but, fortunately for tech companies, most of his likely replacements are quite friendly to the industry.

It's not a rumor. Outgoing Rep. Jeff Landry just confirmed they have 17. Enough to unseat Boehner.

—
Matthew Boyle (@mboyle1) January 02, 2013

Eric Cantor

The first and most obvious pick is House Majority Eric Cantor (CrunchGov Grade: A). Cantor has been a forceful proponent of high-skilled immigration reform and was the nail in the coffin for the widely contested Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when he decided it would not come to a vote. He has also overseen the greatest expansion in transparency in Congressional history, including an agreement to place legislation online three days before a vote, as well as YouCut, which allows citizens to select federal programs to cut via SMS voting. Finally, the majority leader appears to have a good relationship with the president, so it could usher in a much-needed era of (relative) cooperation.

Paul Ryan

The Wisconsin congressman and former vice presidential candidate was an early favorite to replace Boehner in December, according to Fox News’ Laura Ingram. Ryan (CrunchGov Grade: B), like many of his libertarian colleagues, is a friend of tech through his opposition to regulation. He supported opening up crowdfunding for startups (JOBS Act), opposed SOPA, and supported high-skilled immigrants. However, he has some worrisome opposition to federal funding of science and an ambiguous relationship with net neutrality.

If Ryan were to get the position, it would signal a tectonic shift toward libertarianism. If you think the government moves slowly, even ideologically, then this pick isn’t as likely as Cantor.

Kevin McCarthy

The House Majority Whip has generally toed the line on big tech issues, including high-skilled immigration, SOPA, and crowdfunding. While rarely a figurehead for these issues, McCarthy (CrunchGov Grade: B) has shown a willingness to get more involved. I ran into the congressman and his geeky staff at Google’s swanky Republican National Convention . He’s pictured second to right in the Prom-esque photo with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

Since I have an opinion on the subject, I feel compelled to disclose: Cantor is my favorite of the pack. He’s the only candidate who scored one of CrunchGov’s few A’s for being both tech-policy friendly and admirably experimental with open government.

If I’ve left other more likely candidates out, please let me know in the comments. This is all last-minute and so everything is up in the air. The implications for tech policy and the future of open government could be substantial.

I’m an open-source fan and want more than anything for Linux to spread to the far reaches of every desk and kitchen table where enterprise grunts linger. But there is no chance that Ubuntu will make it in those places.

Even if the new Ubuntu Phone OS that Canonical launched today looks pretty, it still is late and oddly tied to the desktop. I would not even call it a mobile strategy. It’s a mobile/desktop strategy more than anything else.

The desktop is something that Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t want to give up. So much so that Shuttleworth has lacked the appetite for a mobile play, much less an enterprise-focused one. He wants nothing more than to see someone sitting next to him on the train working on his Ubuntu OS-powered device. His heart is in the consumer market.

In the meantime, the only traction Ubuntu has in the enterprise is on the server-side. And that’s not something you hear Mark talk about that much. He has the consumer on his mind. That said, Shuttleworth is making some promises for Ubuntu and the cloud. Here’s a bit from a post he penned Dec. 26:

It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost-effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce. Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community. Whatever your UI of choice, having the same core tools and libraries from your phone to your desktop to your server and your cloud instances makes life infinitely easier. Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.

The supposed benefit of the Ubuntu phone is that it’s a PC. That’s how Canonical marketed the introduction of Ubuntu for Android that it announced in 2012. Now comes much of the same for today’s news. That does not seem like a strong marketing play to me in this day and age. The desktop is not sexy anymore. And this year it will lose even more of its luster as the form factors for mobile make productivity apps more useful on a smartphone or tablet.

Ubuntu has also lost some of its appeal. Geeks once turned to Linux desktops to build apps. Now it’s the MacBook Pro or Air that you will see them use.

Of course proponents will say that the mobile market is still in its infancy and there is a need for an open OS. While I agree, I am not convinced that Ubuntu will become a winner on the scale of Android, its Linux counterpart.

Years will pass before Ubuntu sees developer traction for an Ubuntu phone. The device does not yet have a manufacturer or an operator. And the first device won’t hit the market until 2014. Further, Android apps can’t even run on the Ubuntu Phone OS.

Ubuntu’s community is not what it used to be, and I am not alone in saying that. It has no history in the mobile market and it won’t for quite some time. The brouhaha over Amazon.com search appearing in the “Dash”  of its Unity interface has not helped either. Nor has its practices for who it allows to develop certain features.

I know people who work for Canonical. They’re hard-working and passionate. But I am really curious to see how Ubuntu fares with its mobile strategy in the enterprise market.

I do also wonder about the future of Canonical. Its money comes primarily from the desktop Ubuntu OS.

Over the past few years, Al Jazeera has gained prominence and new audiences in the U.S. and around the world. Thanks to its coverage of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera became a powerful new outlet for news from the Middle East and other parts of the world. Even so, it had yet to reach cable audiences due to a reluctance on the part of big cable distributors to carry the network. That could change soon, thanks to a deal through which it would acquire Current TV — and more importantly, Current’s distribution network.

The New York Times reports that Qatar-financed news organization Al Jazeera is close to a deal for Current, which would make it available to a majority of cable viewers around the country. Current might not have gotten high ratings, but it had distribution, thanks to deals it had struck with several of the major cable companies. The network is available in 60 million out of about 100 million U.S. homes with cable, satellite, or IPTV service.

Al Jazeera, meanwhile, has had a difficult time getting distributors to add its new network to their lineups. Despite years of discussions with cable companies around the country, the international news agency is virtually non-existent in U.S. homes. While Al Jazeera has aggressively rolled out an online presence and video apps across multiple mobile phones, tablets, and connected streaming boxes, until now it has been unable to get traditional pay TV distribution. Outside of markets like New York and Washington, D.C., it simply hasn’t been available to cable viewers.

The solution? Acquire Current and use its existing distribution network instead.

According to the New York Times, after the purchase, Al Jazeera would likely rebrand the network and bring a new lineup of its own content in Current’s place. “Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring,” it reported, and would be replaced with programming produced both in the U.S. and internationally.

While that means Al Jazeera will finally have an outlet with regular TV viewers, it also likely means the end of the line for Current, which launched in 2005 as an alternative new documentary and news network. While it gained headlines after hiring Keith Olbermann and other left-leaning pundits for news talk programs, it wasn’t able to get the ratings required to keep it a viable alternative to CNN, MSNBC, or the other 24-hour news networks.

Update: The deal has been confirmed. Statement from Al Gore and Joel Hyatt:

“Current Media was built based on a few key goals: To give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling,” Gore and Hyatt said.

“Al-Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us.”

Also, Al Jazeera won’t be distributed to all 60 million of those cable households that Current had deals for. Already, Time Warner Cable has said that it won’t no longer carry Current in the wake of the deal being done.

Update 2: Reports are coming in that Time Warner Cable has already removed Current TV:

Wow Current TV has already been removed from Time Warner Cable. Replaced with this message: http://t.co/huOQgvp8

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Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) January 03, 2013