Author: Serkadis

We will be appearing on the MSMobiles podcast in 10 minutes. Interested listeners can tune into the live stream here.

The podcast is now over. Thanks everyone for listening.  The podcast can be downloaded here.

Filed under: iPhone

This is the third in a series of letters from you, the TUAW reader, to Apple detailing what you want to see in the next iPhone. In the first letter, you told Apple what you want to from the next OS. In the second, you told them what you’d love in the next hardware. This final letter is all about Apple’s built-in apps and how you think they can be improved.

Even with rumors swirling that iPhone OS 4.0 will be previewed on Wednesday (along with some tablet thingy), chances are the OS won’t be finalized until early summer, so there’s still plenty of time for Apple to take your suggestions.In past letters I broke down what readers requested by percentages. Because of the sheer number of requests for app improvements, in this letter I just compiled feature requests by app. So, without further ado, here is your letter to Apple:

Dear Apple,

Who know what you have up your sleeves for Wednesday. Is it “only” a tablet, or will you be showing us a peak at the next iPhone OS? If so, here is some of what we hope to see:

CALCULATOR: Yeah, what more can we really need, right? We’ve got one suggestion for you: some think graphing options ala Grapher app for Mac OS X would be nice.

CALENDAR: Out of all the Apple-branded iPhone apps, this one (along with Mail) is one that can use the most work. Our wants:
o. Landscape calendar.
o. Week view.
o. Selectable calendar display. Right now, you can either view one calendar, or all the calendars. If we have 4 calendars synced, we would like the ability to display contents from either one, two, three or all of the calendars.
o. Tasks support!
o. A way to set the “normal” day hours like in iCal…those hours when we’re usually asleep or “off duty” can then be dimmed.
o. The ability to dial phone numbers or add attendees from inside Calendar.
o. Birthday calendar sync.
o. “Go to specific date” button. Pressing backward/forward to view past/future events is somewhat tedious.
o. In Month view, double-tapping on a day will allow us to edit/add events on that day. Likewise, a double tap on empty space in the Day view will add an event in that specific time. The Event Name and Location entry field will then automatically open.
o. Alarm/badge reminders option for events. In fact, we’d like better notification options on the home screen overall.

CAMERA: Most of us think the software here is pretty solid, but we would like to see a few things:
o. A “self-portrait” mode that turns the whole screen into a button for easier shutter access.
o. Timer mode.
o. Image controls: White balance, scene modes, etc.
o. Digital zoom.
o. A movable shutter button. In its current, fixed position it’s awkward for people with bigger hands. What would be awesome is if the user could drag the button around and position it where it works best for him or her (kind of like how you can drag toolbar icons around in apps).

CLOCK:
o. Give us the ability to play a song or entire playlist as the alarm tone.
o. As you’ll see in other app suggestions, we love dynamic icons (like iCal’s, where it displays the day and date). Show the actual time on the clock icon.
o. And please, let us set the length of the snooze alarm.

COMPASS: Some of us feel this app is kind of pointless. Many think it should be integrated into the Maps app (see below). Other believe it could become a very powerful travel tool. Image you are wandering around a foreign city. You’ve designated a certain corner of a street as “the meeting place.” Your group splits up, but because you’ve hit a “remember location” button in the Compass app, you can easily navigate your way back. This is especially useful for smaller cities… if many streets aren’t sign-posted it makes Maps much more difficult to use.

An improved Compass app would also help us find where we’ve parked our car in that mall parking garage (there the Maps app can’t help at all). This can be done offline (without using Google Maps) only with the compass and the GPS, or online (using Google maps, compass and the GPS).

CONTACTS:
o. Coverflow landscape view. We could swipe through our beautiful friends and tap their pictures to call.
o. Social network integration to grab latest contact details & pics from networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, and LinkedIn.
o. Ability to create groups on the iPhone.
o. Thumbnail pictures next to the names in the contacts menu.

iPod: We covered our wishes to be able to turn off landscape mode system-wide in the first letter, but we’ll repeat it here (because it’s annoying to have landscape mode pop on and off while we’re jogging). Here’s what else we think can make the iPod app better:
o. Sort songs in a playlist by name, artists, album, and date added.
o. Ability to erase single songs.
o. Using the Remote app is a much more pleasant experience than using the iPod app. Why? Because of the playlist icons. Please duplicate that here.
o. Does shuffle ever seem not quite random enough to you? It does to us.
o. Voice control improvement. “play/pause”, “back”, and “next.”
o. The ability to edit playlists.

MAIL: Like Calendar, we feel Mail can use a lot of improvement. So here goes:
o. Unified inbox! We aren’t the first to mention this, and quite frankly we’ll be shocked if this isn’t in the next version.
o. Junk mail filtering.
o. Rules! It’s annoying to see fifty messages in your iPhone inbox when, if we were at our Macs, we would see forty-five of those already separated into their rule folders.
o. Multiple signatures, because we have some pretty annoying witty quotes we want to share with some people.
o. Ability to create a to-do from a message.
o. Ability to flag a message.
o. Let us bounce a message back.
o. UI tweak: When composing an email the cancel button should change to say “close” once the user has entered information. Right now, you have to remember that hitting “cancel” is going to prompt you to save. Simple change for a poor UI word choice.
o. There needs to be a way to switch from inbox to inbox without going back up the chain. The standard iPhone UI black buttons representing different inboxes at the bottom of the screen could do this.

MAPS:
o. Integration with our Google Map profiles, My Maps, etc…
o. Turn-by-turn GPS!
o. Add a mini compass in the corner of the app (thus perhaps eliminating the need for the current Compass app?).
o. Save maps directly to the iPhone so when we’re out of cell and Wi-Fi range, we can still use the map we saved.
o. Landscape mode.
o. The ability to save routes.
o. The ability to export routes to email.
o. Street view with augmented reality option.

MESSAGES:
o. Group Texting. Sure it’s nice to type out a name and add them, but when we want to text a group of people, we don’t want to have to pick them one at a time…. we want to either be able to select a WHOLE contact “group”, or select them as we scroll through.
o. Give us different vibration settings for different types of messages. For example, two pulses means new text; one new email; a long beat means voicemail. Something like this would be helpful for when the phone is in our pocket during a meeting or while driving.
o. Quick reply texts! (see video above)
o. The ability to save sound clips we receive.
o. New colors for the SMS boxes during chat.
o. Delivery reports.
o. Add character count to SMS edit box.

NOTES:
o. Let us choose the font and font size!
o. MobileMe sync! It’s a pain to have to plug in via USB for them to sync.
o. Sorting options (date, tags, alphabetically).
o. Check boxes so we can use it for grocery lists, etc.
o. Voice recording in directly in notes.

PHONE: Yeah, some of us actually use our iPhones to make calls. We’d like:
o. The ability to forward voicemail.
o. The ability to delete one call entry at a time in our recent call log. This potentially could save you from issues with the significant other.
o. Ability to display contact pics added via Address Book in full screen, during an incoming call.

PHOTOS:
o. Ability to arrange photos into albums. Add passcode lock to albums that have sensitive photos.
o. Faces & places view.
o. Create email-able post cards.
o. Sorting options (date, faces, tags, places, albums).
o. Basic editing (cropping, etc).

SAFARI:
o. In Safari, when several pages are open, when you switch to one of the pages it reloads automatically rather than showing the cached version. This is slow and consumes more battery. Please give us a choice of turning this off.
o. It would be great to have the ability to view MobileMe webmail via Safari for those times when a fellow Machead wants to check his email on our iPhone.
o. Top Sites! It would free up home screen space if we could have easy visual access to our favorite sites directly in Safari.
o. Private browsing.
o. Search directly in a web page.

STOCKS:
o. Again, a dynamic icon would be cool. It could change according to a user-selectable market or particular stock. Green badge up, red badge down.

VOICE MEMOS:
o. Let a single click of the headphone’s handsfree button be “pause recording” and a double click be “start recording.” Also, there is currently no way to resume a recording if the screen is locked.

WEATHER: One of the only iPhone apps that’s not been updated since iPhone OS 1.0! Here’s what to do:
o. More than any other, this app needs a dynamic icon.
o. Turn the app to landscape mode to see an hourly breakdown of the weather.
o. Add a current location screen to the app, utilizing GPS, so no matter where we are instead of rolling down the window and sticking our hand out, we can reach into our pockets to see if it’s raining.

YOUTUBE:
o. Ability to play our YouTube playlists.
o. Allow commenting on videos from inside the app.
o. Enable search for peoples’ channels.

So there you have it, Apple: three long letters about what we would love to see in the next iPhone and its OS. We know you’re listening, and even though we know you would never admit to being influenced by this feedback, the people have spoken and we think you’ll agree some of the ideas are pretty darn good. Whether you take them or leave them is up to you. Just know that despite our myriad suggestions, one thing is still certain on our end: we love our iPhones and we can’t wait to see what the next version brings!

The loyal readers and iPhone owners of TUAW.

TUAW Readers: Thank you so much for your contributions. In total, I received over 3200 emails from you. I included as many of your suggestions as time, space, and feasibility allowed. If you guys want to see any of the lesser-suggested ideas that didn’t make it into the letters, let me know in the comments and perhaps I’ll compile them in a follow-up article!

Maps and Notes mockup by reader Michael W.

TUAWDear Apple: What we want to see in iPhone 4.0, part 3 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here are some thoughts from Goldman’s David Kostin as we head into the meatiest week of earnings, and following a sharp decline in the market.

The bottom line: decent earnings reports can’t trump fears about tightening, particularly out of China.

Anyway, given the fact that Bernanke is looking like a weakened lame duck, and everyone is freaking out about China, we maintin our argument that Bernanke has already been replaced on the world stage by the head of the PBOC, Zhou Xiaochuan.

——

Macro headwinds trump bottom-up earnings results. The first major
week of S&P 500 earnings was overshadowed by China policy tightening,
which had been broadly anticipated but with little sense for timing, and a
surprise return of regulatory complications for the Healthcare and
Financials sectors. The combination of these two forces resulted in a
difficult week for risky assets and our sector recommendations, which favor
the globally-exposed cyclical parts of the market. Much has been written by
our Global ECS and Financials research colleagues on these two topics, and
we are in general agreement that it is too soon to change any of our core
views meaningfully. We therefore maintain our cyclical and BRICs
exposures and our Neutral recommendation on the Financials sector. In this
week’s essay, we highlight a number of the key issues that have emerged
from the 4Q 2009 S&P 500 earnings season that may have been lost in the
shuffle.

To date, 92 stocks representing 26% of S&P 500 equity cap announced
4Q earnings results. EPS results have been fairly strong with 49% of
companies beating consensus estimates by at least one standard
deviation. There are more positive surprises than the average over the past
23 quarters (42%) but fewer beats than last quarter (53%).

Two weeks into earnings season, heavy representation by the
Financials sector skews earnings results. Financials companies represent
32% of reported stocks. For the banks that have reported, we saw a decline
in charge-offs, non-performing loans, and NPA formation in 4Q09 as
compared to 3Q09. Pre-provision earnings results have been less
impressive. For reporting banks, pre-provision earnings have fallen 7%
quarter/quarter on the back of weaker capital markets revenues. Net interest
margins have proven to be a source of upside for regional banks, but not
for the large cap banks. See 4Q so far: A credit-fueled beta rally (January 20,
2010) by the Goldman Sachs Banks team for more detail.

Top-line surprises for this quarter are trending above average for the
first time since 2Q 2008, another positive indicator. With 16% of S&P 500
ex-Financials and Utilities stocks reported, 43% of firms beat consensus
sales expectations by one standard deviation versus the 40% average of the
past 23 quarters.  Negative surprises are lower too (7% vs. 11% average).
18 companies have positively surprised by one standard deviation or more
on both the top- and bottom-line, but there is a heavy sector bias. As in
previous quarters, nearly half of the “revenue beaters” are Information
Technology stocks.

Next week is the biggest earnings week of this season. 136 stocks are
scheduled to report results accounting for 33% of S&P 500 equity
capitalization. Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) announce 4Q results on Tuesday
and Thursday, respectively. These two stocks account for 82% of Telecom
market cap. 52% of the Health Care sector will report next week, led by
Pharmaceuticals stocks Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Abbott Labs (ABT).
EPS guidance by company management shows hesitation to deviate
much from consensus expectations. 26 stocks provided guidance for FY
2010 EPS around their 4Q report.  On average, the midpoint of company
guidance is only 1% above the median consensus estimate.
Eleven companies raised or initiated dividends since the start of the year. 
Carnival Corp (CCL), which discontinued its dividend in late 2008, initiated a
$0.10 quarterly dividend.

We have passed the trough of the current earnings cycle which
occurred in 3Q 2009. S&P 500 operating EPS on a trailing four-quarter
basis ended 3Q 2009 totaled $39.61, down 57% from the peak of $91
reached in 2Q 2007. For the four quarters ended 4Q 2009 we expect
operating EPS for the S&P 500 will total $57, reflecting $17 per share in 4Q
2009 or a 44% improvement on a sequential basis from the low in 3Q as
operating losses from 4Q 2008 roll off the LTM EPS aggregate.
We expect the bottom of the sales cycle will occur this quarter. We
expect S&P 500 4Q 2009 sales (excluding Financials and Utilities) will
trough on a trailing four-quarter basis, roughly 17% below the 3Q 2008 peak.
Trailing four-quarter net margins should expand on a sequential basis
for the first time since 3Q 2008. We forecast S&P 500 net margins of 7.7%
in 4Q, resulting in a net margin of 6.8% for 2009.

S&P 500 earned $39.70 per share YTD through 3Q; we expect $17 per
share in 4Q 2009. Our EPS forecast includes approximately $2 per share in
provisions and write-downs for Financials. Looking forward, our top-down
2010 EPS forecast is $2 below bottom-up consensus estimates ($76 vs. $78).
Please see our 4Q 2009 earnings preview note published earlier this week
for a deeper dive on our expectations for this earnings season (see US
Equity Views: 4Q Earnings preview: earnings rise, sales trough, margins
expand, from January 19, 2010

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• January 12, 2010: THE DAY BERNANKE GOT REPLACED
• Bank Of China Lending Freeze Ignites U.S. Dollar Rally, Slamming Shanghai
• Why Shanghai Real Estate Is The Most Obvious Bubble Ever

WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.

WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.

Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there.

I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. While I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, according to these statistics we’re well above the average. In the overall ranking, we even made the top 50, ahead of sites like the Apple Store, MySpace, ESPN.com and NYTimes.com (take that, New York Times, we haz bigger WooRankz!).

Apparently, we need to work on our headings, immage attribution tags, meta description and keywords, XML sitemap(s) and other aspects like Web standards compliance. We score pretty well on content (number of indexed pages), off-site SEO (particularly on the social media level) and website usability and load time.

Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge, so I’ll be curious to know in a couple of months how WooRank will try to entice people to pay for more detailed information and improvement tips.

WooRank was built by fellow Belgians, namely digital marketer Jean Derély of BetaGroup and the founders of interactive agency 1MD.be. Since soft-launching the service a couple of days ago, 27,000 reports have already been generated by some 7,500 visitors.

For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump.

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Phew. For a second there it seemed like a single election in Massachusetts the the potential to not only topple the direction of The White House and Congress, but take down the Federal Reserve (and possibly) its independence as well.

For now, despite the shifting political winds and the stomach-churning three day drop in the market, it looks as though Ben Bernanke will pass the Senate with at least 60 votes.

At InTrade, where Bernanke’s reconfirmation odds had fallen into the low 60s, his odds are back in the 90s, as the New York Times reports that the voters are there.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• PLUNGE: Bernanke Heads Into Weekend With A 65% Re-Appointment Chance On InTrade
• The Anti-Bernanke Politicians Are Hypocrites
• Show Geithner And Bernanke The Door

We’ve been briefed on what appears to be T-Mobile’s game plan regarding Sidekick devices.

The information comes from a new tipster so we haven’t independently confirmed it. With that said, we have been told that with the rumored T-Mobile myTouch Slide coming up, T-Mobile will slowly be phasing out all Sidekick sales. Whether this means the Sidekick line will permanently disappear remains to be seen, but we wouldn’t put past Danger/Microsoft to replace them with the infamous ”Project Pink” devices.

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	T-Mobile USA	Europe
Operating System	Windows Mobile 6.5	Windows Mobile 6.5
Processor	Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon	Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon
Internal Memory	ROM 1GB; RAM 576MB	ROM 512 MB; RAM 448 MB

As most HTC HD2 owners know, the device is extremely short of internal storage, despite the 512 MB Flash ROM.  This is not helped by Marketplace, which insists on installing to internal memory.

It seems T-Mobile US owners will not have to suffer these HTC foibles, as their device will have a whole 512 MB extra Flash storage.  They will also have a whole 128 MB extra RAM.

While the reason for these discrepancies are not clear, one strong suspicion may be that the T-Mobile version of the device is the only one destined for a Windows Mobile 7 upgrade.  According to the leaked Chassis 1 specs the minimum internal storage for a Windows Mobile 7 handset is 1 GB, a bar which the European version of the handset certainly does not reach.

To add insult to injury the T-Mobile version will also come with a 16 GB memory card, versus the useless 2 GB card that came with the European version.

Read the T-Mobile US HTC HD2 specs here.

Do our readers think only the T-Mobile version, which will be launched after MWC, will be the only one getting Windows Mobile 7?  Let us know below.

The Afghans had to pay out $2.5 billion in bribes over the past 12 months – equivalent to 23 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP, writes Nick Fielding citing “Corruption in Afghanistan” report, published by the UN.

Filed under: TUAW Business, Podcasts, One More Thing

Last week’s show featured our own Kelly G. in her first hosting opportunity, and a hearty helping of tablet tea-leaf reading. You can download the show on iTunes or direct from Talkshoe.

Tonight, we have a special guest, and a great opportunity for our listeners to ask their questions about the imminent Macworld Conference & Expo, which starts the 2nd week in February. Paul Kent, IDG’s general manager for Macworld Expo, will be joining us to talk about the way the show has evolved since last year’s announcement of Apple’s departure, and what attendees, instructors and exhibitors can expect when they get there. We’ll be taking your chat questions and calls, so c’mon out and call in!

To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the “TalkShoe Web” button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantange of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *-8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk with you then!

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/macinate/ / CC BY 2.0

TUAWTalkcast 10pm ET: Special guest Paul Kent talks Macworld Expo originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dina says that it is so far a successful season start for the Kazakh tennis players with their solid performance in Perth during the Hopman Cup.

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Julia Mahlejd writes about a complex attack on the market area near the Afghan Ministry of Justice, presidential palace and Serena Hotel in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

Filed under: Coupe, Performance, Auctions, Chevrolet

There were plenty of charity cars up for auction at Barrett-Jackson the last few days, but perhaps the one that benefited the most worthy cause was donated by GM. They brought out a 427 Limited Edition Corvette Z06 worth more than $80,000 to Scottsdale and promised to donate the entire proceeds of the sale to the American Red Cross to help those who were affected by the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Fortunately, the bidders in attendance hadn’t exhausted all of their funds by the time the car crossed the block, and a generous buyer put down a $200,000 offer for the car. You can visit www.redcross.org or text HAITI to 90999 to donate yourself, and although you won’t go home with a new Corvette, you’ll be helping out a very worthy cause.

Photos by Drew Phillips / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading Barrett-Jackson 2010: Limited Edition Corvette Z06 raises $200,000 to benefit Haiti

Barrett-Jackson 2010: Limited Edition Corvette Z06 raises $200,000 to benefit Haiti originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday a trend began to emerge. Status updates on facebook started to appear asking the question “Who is Ellie Light?”

These cryptic updates caused predictable curiosity and subsequent searching –driving trends on Google and Yahoo to help expose Ellie Light for what would have gone unnoticed in pre-internet vigilance times…

Explanation from Newsbusters:

“In January, an anonymous person supposedly named “Ellie Light” launched a massive PR campaign on behalf of President Barack Obama.

The goal appears to have been to infiltrate as many newspapers as possible to spread pro-Obama propaganda — as if the press needed the help.

Light’s plan was simple enough: write a compelling letter to the editor, pretend to be a concerned reader in the region, and persuade the paper to print her liberal blather.

For three weeks, editors of mainstream newspapers big and small allowed Light to spread Democrat talking points under the guise of small-town grassroots without anyone bothering to double check her story. Read the whole story

Anyone with a facebook page- write “Who is Ellie Light?” as your status update…then sit back and smile contently as all your friends Google it and unwittingly help spread the word 🙂

(Another good article about Ellie Light)

Update: Another one has popped up: Who Is Mark Spivey?

Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other.  But technologically, they’re light-years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento’s workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State’s infrastructure and public services, and the Valley’s workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight.

Witness the problems that the state experienced last November when it couldn’t issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers had to wait for up to two months to receive their checks, because the Employment Development Department couldn’t make timely changes to its computer systems. Like most of the State’s systems, these were built in the ’70s and ’80s in now antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.

This is the tip of the iceberg. California has roughly 130 agencies and departments. Each has its own IT staff and its own systems. Each collects its own information and maintains its own databases. These systems are not usually integrated with each other. When they do share data, it is usually through file transfer in batch mode. This is a nightmare for citizens and businesses. Take the simple task of changing a business address. The business owner has to inform multiple agencies, such as Employment Development Department, Board of Equalization, Franchise Tax Board, Secretary of State, and various licensing and certification departments. Believe it or not, the State has more than 40 separate computer applications to collect the same personal and demographic information about citizens. Even for mundane things like email, the State maintains more than 100 separate systems.

California isn’t alone in having such legacy systems and challenges. Its systems are probably better than those of any other State, and it is making the investments in reducing costs and improving infrastructure.  Most large corporations run their operations on systems that were built decades ago.  This is a ticking time-bomb for industry as well as for government.

There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. Enterprise systems require large-scale transaction-processing capabilities, have stringent security requirements, and need to have high availability. But that is not different from what Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga require.

Even fledgling startups in the Valley are building systems that make some enterprise systems seem like child’s play. For example, Real Time Matrix has built a facility to create Twitter groups. This requires sophisticated real-time analytics and integration with multiple sources such as Twitter, blogs, and live feeds in order to process information “as it happens”.  The Web systems that Real Time Matrix has built process tens of thousands of transactions per second and rebroadcast the results to numerous and varied clients accurately and in real time.

At a talk I gave at California’s Executive Institute on Jan 21, I discussed these issues with the 200 IT managers in attendance; with State CIO, Teri Takai; and with CTO, P.K. Agarwal. Most were in agreement that new thinking was needed. IT managers seemed eager to be using the same technologies as their Silicon Valley brethren. Takai and Agarwal described how feverishly they are working to consolidate and integrate departments and move their systems into a more modern era. They are also working on streamlining the procurement processes for funding IT projects. Not long ago, it used to take an average of three years to obtain approval for a project. Today, they can do this in a year (that’s a lifetime in Silicon Valley, but considered fast in the government world). They claim they saved the State $400 million through all these efforts. Despite this, Takai and Agarwal have big challenges: they need to figure out how to make a dinosaur fly. Perhaps what is needed is to let the dinosaurs become extinct and be replaced by swift birds and mammals.

What I suggest that the State do as a top priority is to engage Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to rebuild its systems infrastructure. These entrepreneurs can create new systems for a fraction of the cost of patching up old systems. Take the system that processes unemployment checks. The State has budgeted $50 million to upgrade it. At the end of the day, it will simply have a more maintainable COBOL system if it does business the old way. Instead of the big state contractors who typically bid on and win such contracts, the State should reach out to the Valley’s entrepreneurs to rebuild this. Give them the detailed specifications and let them compete for this business (this requires streamlining the bidding process even further – even VC’s don’t take a year to make decisions). I’ll bet that the Valley’s entrepreneurs could build this system from scratch in less than a year for less than $5 million. That’s right: for less than a tenth of the cost. You can build sophisticated systems in the Web world for a tiny fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required for maintaining those old monsters. The new systems will be far easier to use, and cost relatively nothing to maintain. And we’d be boosting the local economy rather than the coffers of big state contractors with strong political connections.

I know that some systems are really complex and intertwined with others and can’t be fixed or replaced easily. The vast majority, however, aren’t like this. Most systems simply perform reporting and analysis – and these can be rebuilt in months, not years. I know because I started my career writing COBOL/CICS transaction-processing systems. Later I developed software to automate the process of developing large enterprise systems and co-founded a company to market it. My second startup built technology to automate the process of modernizing legacy systems. I’ve seen the technology world evolve and develop and know that what I am suggesting isn’t rocket science.

What is needed is to turn the Valley’s entrepreneurs loose on these problems and let them do their magic. The net benefit to California could be enormous. The modern world now runs on Web-based technology. So can California — and it can reduce its costs in the process. Sacramento has the advantage of having the world’s top-gun techies just a short drive away. They’re itching to help (and they can use the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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As a transplanted Brit in America, I’m having something of a hard time getting my head around this whole Late Night debacle.

Unlike most American television, late night talk shows – the Conans, the Lettermans, the Carsons (he’s the one who’s dead, right?) – never really made it out to the rest of the world.

The first, and biggest, reason for this is that the shows tend to be vehicles for movie stars to promote their latest project: movies that probably have different release dates outside the US. Watching Ben Stiller talk about a movie that we won’t be able to see for six months isn’t so much entertaining as annoying.

The second reason is that, to my eye and ear at least, most of the shows are astonishingly unfunny. I mean, really. The men are paid millions – tens of millions – of dollars and given armies of writers to be hilarious and yet they still have to hire a sidekick to laugh at their punchlines. Hell, one of them – is it Leno? – even has a drum rimshot to telegraph when we’re supposed to laugh. It’s about as pathetic as me hiring some guy to add a ‘LOL’ comment to all of my posts on TechCrunch. Which come to think of it isn’t a bad idea.

I’m sure I’m missing the joke somewhere, but I suspect the real reason these shows are so popular to you Americans is that they’re institutions. And what was it Groucho Marx asked? “Who wants to live in an institution?”

Amiright folks? Badoom-tish!

But still, I live in America now, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the most important cultural rift in the country’s history since the great Cheersquake of ‘83. In particular I’d be doing the world a disservice if I didn’t respond to the growing number of apparently sane commentators who are urging Conan O’Brien to take his act online.

Nick Summers at Newsweek began the Siren call:

“The new comedy prestige─to be the material that dominates Twitter’s trending topics list, to create the clips embedded on a million blogs─has nothing to do with airing on a certain network at a certain time.” 

Nick Bilton at the New York Times joined in:

“Mr. O’Brien’s youthful supporters won’t crowd around the television at a specific time, instead they go to YouTube and Gawker to watch their late-night television, and share their own commentary around each clip. So here’s my advice to Mr. O’Brien: After he leaves NBC and spends a few months healing his wounds and pulling the troops back together, he should come back and make the Internet his time slot.”

But it wasn’t just people called Nick. Jim Louderback from Revision3 went as far making Conan a formal – if attention-seeking – offer: “I’m willing to give him a substantial ownership stake in Revision3, if he makes the jump here.”

In his open letter, Louderback adds that “the [online] space has seen a 35% average increase in advertising spending in 2009.  (Just think how many cigars that would buy for Triumph The Comic Insult Dog).” Bilton meanwhile accepts that “the expenses associated with producing a high-quality show needed to attract celebrity guests quickly add up show” but points to Seth McFarlane as a star who has managed to convince advertisers to move their dollars online.

The size of the potential online audience excites Louderback too: “Conan’s voice – and own special brand of entertainment – deserve to be viewed not just by the 300 million people in the US, but by the 6 billion people around the world,” he says, confident that the Chinese and the Iranians are just crying out to be entertained by an American and his masturbating bear. As Bilson says: “It’s clear we are approaching a fork in the road, and the road sign for the next generation clearly points to the Web. For Mr. O’Brien’s core audience, the time slot is being replaced by a URL.”

These are arguments we’ve heard many times before. Television is a sinking ship! The Internet is the future, and smart talent will jump aboard and reap the spoils. We’ve heard it for newspapers – journalists should create blogs and become their own bosses; print is dead! – we’ve heard it for books – the Kindle means anyone can distribute their own writing;  publishing is dead! and we’ve heard it for music – bands should release their tracks online for free and make money from live gigs; record labels are dead! And always the same arguments: audiences and advertising money will follow talent, without need for intermediaries. It’s just a matter of time before stars like Conan realise this and then the rest will follow!

It’s a great message; it’s just a shame that it’s also – and obviously – total horseshit.

Let’s start by putting to rest the myth that audience follows talent. Howard Stern’s move from nationally syndicated radio to Sirius satellite might have made him a fortune, but it also lost him a huge chunk of his audience and almost all of his pop cultural influence. Likewise, the vast majority of high-profile bloggers who were given book deals have failed to earn back their advances through sales, despite publishers being certain that their millions of online readers would translate into book buyers. Those journalists who quit newspapers to go solo have struggled to pull in readers. And the idea that Conan’s audience will follow him online is equally ridiculous.

The truth is, audiences aren’t loyal to a particular star: they’re loyal to a medium, and often within that medium they’re even loyal to a slot. Conan knows this which is why when he was offered a later slot for his show – 12:05am, with Leno being moved later to replace him – he refused. “Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter,” he said. “But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.”

The other reason he refused is that he understands that in the media the most important thing someone can have is not money or viewers or readers or listeners… but prestige: that X factor that makes people know you’re a star.

Getting prestige isn’t easy – and that’s the point. We live in a world that’s full of people who want our attention and we can’t possibly filter all of them ourselves, so we accept that we need certain media gatekeepers to do the filtering for us. NBC is one of those gatekeepers: the Tonight Show spot is the very expensive jewel in their crown – a crown that can only be worn by one person. By choosing Conan to be that person, NBC immediately signals that he’s worthy of our attention. He’s a rising star. He has prestige. As a result, he gets paid a fortune and attracts a large fan base, not just on television but on the Internet and on any other medium he appears.

It’s the same signal that’s sent out whenever a blogger gets a book deal, or an unsigned singer becomes signed to a major label or a local journalist is hired to write for the New York Times. We know that publishers don’t give book deals to everyone, the Times (really) can’t afford to recruit bad writers and record labels don’t hire people who can’t sing. So by being accepted by one of those gatekeepers, an author, or singer or journalist is granted prestige. They are a star.

But the tricky thing about prestige is that it only works in one direction. Moving from obscurity to a prestigious job, or moving from a prestigious job to an even more prestigious job tells everyone that your star is in the ascendancy, that they should keep watching. But the moment you move even one step in the other direction – say by going back a less coveted time slot, or by switching to a less prestigious medium – it’s all over. All of your hard-earned prestige can vanish in months or even weeks.

And that’s why Conan would be insane to leave behind television and move exclusively online. The Internet might have huge audiences and growing ad spending but it has zero prestige. Its greatest selling point is that it isn’t a gatekeeper; everyone is welcome. Anyone with a webcam, some cats and a Roomba can get a million viewers and anyone willing to spend a ton of money can produce a show that looks as good as the Tonight Show. And yet no matter how much money they throw at their video, or how many YouTube views it gets – no matter how Internet famous they become – they’re never going to be a star; not like Conan is a star.

Likewise, by turning his back on the prestige that he has from television, and moving online, Conan’s star – and his associated ability to command large audiences and even larger paychecks – would fade in a matter of months. We might all claim now to be ‘With Coco‘ but before long our attention would drift away to whoever the gatekeepers decide is worthy of it next.

And when that happens, Conan becomes just another ginger cat on a Roomba.

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Peter Marton reviews the book “My life with the Taliban” by Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan and the Afghan Emirate’s face to the world in 2000-2001.