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"The zombie cookies will allow AOL to "acquire demographic data on users" while simultaneously using their own advertising network to track user browsing history, use pf apps on smartphones and their geo-location coordinates. Earlier this year, ProPublica released a report regarding the advertising company called Turn and their zombie cookies that are used by large tech firms to "come back to life" even after users have deleted them. In the ProPublica report, it was revealed that Turn is "taking advantage of a hidden undeletable number that Verizon uses to monitor customers' habits on their smartphones and tablets" by respawning those "tracking cookies that users have deleted." Called unique identifier headers (UIDHs), or perma-cookies, this sneaky monitoring of customers is used "to help marketers create more targeted ads based on their customers' unique browsing habits." In 2012, UIDHs were used by Verizon to provide a way for advertisers with "demographic and third-party interest-based segments" to help them deliver "relevant ads" based on mobile devices' unique identifiers. Shockingly, more than 100 million Verizon customers were affected by this snooping by the corporation, tracking individual customer usage and reporting the findings to the federal government and advertising corporations."

Excellent chart comparing the iPhone 4 to current Android 2.1 releases for Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.  Evo 4G wins big.  Check TipB.com for future comparisons. it always helps to have a datasheet on each phone and network's devices.  Luckily, TiPb.com has already put a comprehensive list together of the smartphones and their features:

Wow!  30GB free.  250 file formats with a "universal translation engine".  And HTML5. excerpt: "You can't have convergence unless you have the ability to translate files across different platforms and devices," Donald Leka, TransMedia's CEO, told Macworld. "There's a war between the big tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and these compatibility issues are not going to go away." Glide also lets you share any documents or media in your account with other users or the public. And with new desktop clients for Mac and PC that can sync a local folder up to your cloud storage space, Glide is taking on popular competitors like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Apple's own iDisk. Glide is free to use in desktop browsers and on the iPad, and free accounts get 30GB of space to start. Premium accounts offer 250GB of space for $50 per year.

The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a

A while back I included the following as one of the areas of interest of the PDF/D Consortium: Structured Documents and Single Sourcing: improving round-trips to document softwareWhat did I mean by Structured Documents? For years Solid Documents has been converting PDF files to Word documents with a focus on retaining format and layout to allow customers to repurpose the content. While this is a great solution for a large amount of customers, it is not the only type of reconstruction that is interesting. PDF is by nature a "document" format: the layout is in the form of pages. Content also needs to exist in alternate formats like a continuously flowing stream. Use cases for continuously flowing content include:conversion to HTML to reflow for form factors other than "pages"conversion to content management systems where structure is more important than layout and formattingconversion for alternate readers for people with disabilities (text to speech, etc)Reconstruction for these use cases focuses more on the structure of the document than on the layout and formatting. For example, we need to take unstructured PDF files and recognize columns, tables, lists, headers and footers, etc. This allows us to organize the content in a logical structure. Ultimately, we'll recognize topics and sections too so that we can produce logical hierarchies from plain old non-tagged PDF files. One great example of where conventional PDF pages are not the most appropriate way to read a document are on small screens of handheld devices. For example, the typical Blackberry has a 3"x2" screen with a resolution something like 320x240 pixels.

Pretty funny quote: "I think the future is going to WebKit". Brad Neuberg is leaving the gDOCS-Chrome JavaScritpt team to strat his own "HTML5" business. He's an expert on the SVG Web. About a year ago i read a lament from a web developer concluding that SVG was destined to be the Web docuemnt format, replacing HTML. Now i wonder if that guy was Neuberg? http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html Sent at 10:05 AM on MondayGary: Finally, the money shot: "Somebody will take some HTML5, and geolocation, and mobile applications, hook into Facebook perhaps, and they're going to do something unexpected." Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html#ixzz124U9xTZ3 Sent at 10:13 AM on MondayGary: I think Brad is right about the combination of location with the rest of the App Web. Olivia and i have had our EVO's for about two weeks now and it's amazing. She also has Citania's iPAD, also an amazing device. What stuns me about the Android EVO is how extraordinary the apps are that combine location with information specific to that location. Incredible. I don't know how i ever lived withou this. One things for sure, my desktop can't do this and neither can my notebook. Sent at 10:16 AM on MondayGary: There is another aspect i see that i guess could be called "location switiching". This is when you QR Scan QR barcode on something and the location of that objects life is at your fingertips. Everything from maps, street views, web sites, product history, artist/designer/developer and on and on. We went to the San Carlos Wine and Art Festival yesterday, where Laurel and San Carlos streets are closed off to traffic, and lined with food, wine and beer vendors of all sorts, artists and craftsmen, and even an antigue car show with ully restored automobiles and other vehicles. It was amazing. But then i started QR scanning! Wow. The Web merged with life like nothing i've ever imagined possible.The key was having the Internet in my pocket, and the Internet k

Great stats and charts!  Here comes the Android. excerpt: Google's Android operating system has plenty to celebrate this holiday season -- and now, a new trio of studies suggests the platform is poised for even more success in 2010. There's no question Android's been enjoying plenty of time in the spotlight since the launch of Motorola's Droid smartphone. But with dozens of new Android devices expected to debut in the coming months -- possibly even including the omnipotent "Google Phone" (have you seen the things that phone can do?) -- the biggest burst may still be ahead.

excerpt: "Once upon a time, Microsoft bestrode the software world like a ruthless cartoon villain, gobbling up rivals and defying pleas for restraint from regulators. But the once-impregnable giant has now been humbled: following an acrimonious 10-year anti-trust battle with European regulators, Microsoft on Wednesday finally agreed to open its Windows operating system to rival web browsers in Europe." Great opening line!  But they get the story wrong.  Woefully wrong!  Just the opposite is happening.  Microsoft has moved from the browser Web application to the Web itself.  It's the platform stupid!!! No one understands platform better than Microsoft.  Control the platform's base formats, protocols, interfaces and internal messaging system, and you control all applications, services and devices using that platform.   The problem for Microsoft has been that the Web is a platform used by all, but owned by none.  It's based on open standards that no one owns or controls.  So as the Web evolves into a universal platform for converged communications, content and collaborative computing, Microsoft was facing the one fate every monopolist fears - having to compete on a level playing field! While it took them well over ten years to come up with a counter strategy and effective implementation, Microsoft has finally achieved the impossible.   They have carved out a huge section of the Open Web for their proprietary and exclusive use.  

... The Internet Operating System is an Information Operating System ... Search is key to managing and working "information" ... Media Access ... Communications ... Identity and the Social Graph ... Payment ... Advertising ... Location ... Activity Streams - "Attention" ... Time  ... Image and Speech Recognition ... Government Data ... The Browser Where is the "operating system" in all this? Clearly, it is still evolving. Applications use a hodgepodge of services from multiple different providers to get the information they need. But how different is this from PC application development in the early 1980s, when every application provider wrote their own device drivers to support the hodgepodge of disks, ports, keyboards, and screens that comprised the still emerging personal computer ecosystem? Along came Microsoft with an offer that was difficult to refuse: We'll manage the drivers; all application developers have to do is write software that uses the Win32 APIs, and all of the complexity will be abstracted away. This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of "the Great Game", the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing.

First, what is a "cloud OS" and why should I want one? Actually, I don't even know if anyone calls it a "cloud OS", but I couldn't find a better generic term for something like ChromeOS. The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet, which is has been renamed "The Cloud" since that sounds cooler, and your laptop or whatever is basically just a window into that cloud. If your laptop is stolen or catches fire or something, it's not a big deal, because you can just buy another one and nothing has been lost (except your money). Many people characterize this approach as using a "dumb terminal", but that's wrong. Your local computer can still do all kinds of smart computation and data manipulation -- it's just no longer the single point of failure. To me, the defining characteristic of cloud based apps is "information without location". For example, in the bad old days, you would install a copy Outlook or other email software on your PC, it would download all of your email to your computer, and then the email would live on that computer until Outlook corrupted its PST file and everything was lost. If you accidentally left your computer at home, or it was stolen, then you simply couldn't get to your email. Information behaved much like a physical object -- it was always in one place. That's an unnecessary and annoying limitation. By moving my email into "the cloud", I can escape the limitations of physical location and am able to reach it from any number of computers, phones, televisions, or whatever else connects to the Internet. For performance and coverage reasons, those devices will usually cache some of my email, but the canonical version always lives online. The Gmail client on Android phones provides a great example of this. It stores copies of recent messages so that I can access them even when there is no Internet access, and also saves any recent changes (such as new messages or changes to read state), but as soon as possible it sends those chang

Viewing and printing of documents.  Support for PDF, RTF, RTFD, iWork, MSOffice (subject to iOS compatibility), Web archives, HTML, text, source code, and standard iOS multi media.  No discussion yet as tho whether or not Avatron can support Visual fixed/flow viewing of these supported formats. Some interesting support for mounting remote file servers - cloud storage systems like DropBox, Box.net , FTP and secure HTTPS. No WebDav.   Seems to be struggling to make that cross-over from iOS device to desktop to cloud-computing connectivity.

what does Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking. Such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering news to GigaOM readers, for we have been following these trends over the past year or two, but Meeker puts some pretty large numbers next to those trends, and looks at the shifts that will (or are likely to) take place in related industries such as communications hardware. She also compares where the rest of the developed world is in terms of mobile communications and social networking with Japan. Again, not a radically different approach to the one many tech forecasters take, but Meeker has the weight of some considerable research chops on her side. The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says - predicting that within the next five years "more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs." As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: "Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened."

Essentially, what CloudConnect does is to enable users to view documents that are stored in the cloud without having to upload them, while giving document providers complete control over the document. What this means is that no matter who views the document, it won't ever be uploaded on Adeptol servers. An additional feature is that document creators can create documents in any format they want and deliver them to users in the format that they can best view it in. New features include: ..... AJAX document viewer with support for more than 300 file formats ..... Mobile Viewer license that enables users to view documents on iPhone/iPad and Android with enhanced loading times .....Built in AES encryption that can be turned on at will. Encrypts not only document content but document URL too .... Advanced caching enabling users access static documents directly from the cache Adeptol viewing technology is based on the adoption of HTML 5 technology that enables viewing across a wide range of mobile devices including iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. 300+ file formats available in the viewer

Think mobile data demand is big today, with 94 million smartphone shipped this year and 5 billion mobile subscribers? Well, Cisco ( s csco) says it's going to get a lot bigger by 2015, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month. That's 75 exabytes annually by 2015 [MIGHT WANT TO THROW IN AND/OR LINK TO A DEFINITION OF EXABYTE]. Last year, I called it the mobilpocalypse, but this year, I'm going to say it's a looming tsunami, driven by everyone's favorite bandwidth hog, web video, and the proliferation of mobile devices. In short, we can blame this wave on Netflix on the iPad.

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Google's Honeycomb operating system is specifically optimized for large-screened tablets, but the first bits of the new platform are starting to now filter down into Android smartphones. The Android Developer Blog notes the release of an "Android Compatibility Package" that includes a new Fragments API for developers building software for Android 1.6 and up. Fragments are a key element for Honeycomb tablets such as Motorola's Xoom, as they allow for multiple windows of activity on the device display, which can greatly increase the usability of an app.

Tagged PDF, Scanning software that connects devices directly to the OfficeDrop Cloud, Sharing of folders and documents, attaching forms to documents, Intuit add-on, eMail addresses for folders, and, an automated mail system for sending out bills and payments.  Awesome!  Way beyond DropBox, but same idea ported over to Tagged PDF forms.

Google "Innovation Nation" Conference in Washington, DC had an interesting conversation thread; that the move to Cloud Computing embraces a move for individual productivity to group productivity.  Not sure i agree with that.  The Windows Desktop-WorkGroup Productivity environment has dominated business since 1992.  Maybe Google might instead focus on the limited access of desktop workgroups and the fact that productivity was horribly crippled by the the PC's lack of communication.  The Web/Cloud magically combines and integrates communication with content and computation.  This is what makes cloud collaboration a genuine leap in productivity - no matter what the discipline.  Here's a question for Google: What's the productivity difference between desktop collaboration and cloud-collaboration? excerpt:  The meeting is the staple of corporate life. The whole day revolves around when a meeting will be, who will be there and what needs to be discussed. Yet, is this rote practice may have become counter-productive in today's world of the always on, always connected workplace. Google's enterprise vision is to leverage mobility and the cloud to change the fundamental way people work. Workforce productivity used to be about how you can optimize individual output. Take all those individuals, put their output together and have a meeting to sort it all out. Google thinks that by putting all that functionality into a cloud environment, workers can use whatever device they want and always be working as a group towards on the mission. A faster, more secure, more cost efficient workplace will be the result. "The main message is that to be an effective [enterprise], we need to change from individual productivity to group productivity,"