“Live Search is on a fall/spring release cycle, and we will gradually roll out updates at these intervals to improve the experience for both advertisers and consumers,” the company said in a statement. “The recent updates you’ve noticed are part of the latest release, and we will continue to test and implement various features and functionality over the next couple of weeks.”

Microsoft has been a distant third in search, accounting for 9.4 percent of core U.S. search queries in February, according to ComScore. Google, held a 59.8 percent share, while Yahoo was second, with 21.3 percent.

The spring update is also expected to include new types of vertical search and improvements in overall relevance of search queries, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans. Specifically, Microsoft is expected to add to the shopping-specific search tools that debuted in its Fall 2007 release. Microsoft has also been working on a new look for its Live Search product, which went live this week.

Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall reiterated that’s Microsoft’s approach in a speech to investors on Tuesday. Hall echoed an oft-repeated line that search can be a lot better than 10 blue links, particularly if it is integrated into the task people are doing when they make the queries.

In his comments in Japan, Gates pointed out that although Google has a high market share in search, it is also the kind of area in which Microsoft can use marketing to get people to try out its products, in due course.

He also played up the notion that Microsoft is an important counterweight to Google’s position in the market saying, Microsoft wants to “make sure that state of the art does get advanced and advertisers have good choices in terms of what they are doing with their interactive advertising.”

“We will start to show you the next version of the search,” Chairman Bill Gates said in comments to reporters in Japan Wednesday, promising that Microsoft had some exciting things up its sleeve. The comments were included in a partial transcript provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft declined to offer detailed comments on what is due in the next iteration of its search product, which has been code-named “Rome.”

The company has struggled to make headway in search, particularly in the area of being the place that consumers go for general Web queries.

Microsoft hopes to back up its refrain that it has a plan to catch Google by showing off some improvements to its Live Search product at a company-sponsored advertising conference later this month.

“We think we can do a lot more to drive contextual search,” he said. “We see a lot of opportunity to push the envelope there.”

The cuts come as Qwest and other local phone companies are seeing thousands of customers abandon their old landlines for alternatives, like cell phones and voice over IP services from their cable operators.

The phone company negotiated the buyouts, which are expected to be completed by the end of the month, with the Communication Workers of America union. Qwest had been reducing its workforce through natural attrition, but the voluntary program was put into place to give some employees the option to retire early, which will speed up some departures.

Qwest provides local phone service in 14 states, mostly out West. The company has about 12.78 million landlines, a number that dropped 7.3 percent last year from the total in 2006, the AP reported.

On Tuesday, Qwest, the third-largest phone company in the U.S., said that it would cut “less than 2 percent” of its 36,843 workforce through a voluntary program. The cuts are targeted at roughly 700 technicians and other Qwest employees who work for the company’s traditional landline business, according to the Associated Press.

Qwest hasn’t said how much the job cuts will cost or how much they will save the company down the road.

He says he has heard from “multiple music industry sources” that there will be an Apple event held sometime during the week of September 7. Now, this isn’t a huge surprise since Apple has held an event announcing the latest upgrade to the
iPod and iTunes around this same time every year. But this year there are some interesting variables in play.

It’s happened every September for the past few years, and it appears it’s on track again: Apple is planning a keynote event rumored to take place the second week of September, according to AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka.

Of more interest perhaps is whether Apple will use this event to debut the oft-discussed and long-rumored Apple tablet. Different sources have pointed to a 10-inch touch-screen device that’s essentially a giant iPod Touch being available either this fall or in early 2010. It’s rumored to have a music element to it, through a new album format supposedly called “Cocktail,” making its introduction at a music-focused event seem plausible. The timing would also make sense if Apple wanted to establish some solid pre-holiday buzz before the annual winter shopping season.

It’s essentially guaranteed that Apple will announce upgrades across the iPod line, including the iPod Touch and Nano, and perhaps even kill off some older models.The iPod Touch is rumored to be getting a camera, digital compass, and microphone. Other clues have pointed to the Nano also getting equipped with a camera.

(Credit:
CNET)

Almost time for a tuneup for the iPod Touch?

So I’m sitting here trying to figure out how my wife knew something was going to happen. She couldn’t possibly have known. Wait, I know. She sabotaged the irrigation system just to appear prescient. Nah, that’s just crazy.

And how about intuition that people don’t pay attention to? I’m just shooting blind here, but I wonder if any of HP’s board directors flinched subconsciously at the choice of Carly Fiorina as CEO? I mean, she looked great on paper, but was there something intangible lurking beneath the surface that gave them pause?

According to the dictionary, intuition, as it applies here, means: “the power or faculty of attaining direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

You’d think someone would do a study on number of offspring versus IQ.

Last night, as the Bay Area cooled down from a three-day heat wave, my wife said, “It would sure be nice to get water in the pool in the next two weeks.”

Of course, those same scientists think that advanced medical techniques, technology and civilization have all but stopped evolution in its tracks. So give up on those sci-fi books that postulate huge-brained superhumans in the future. If anything, it’s more likely that we’re getting dumber.

As for me, I buy the survival mechanism thing. I also think intuition is related to feelings, perhaps on a subconscious level, as opposed to conscious reasoning. It might be more pronounced in people who are more empathetic or sympathetic, I’m not sure which. That shows how much I know about this stuff.

In my wife’s case, she seems to get these feelings every so often and they usually turn out be right. She says that when she met me 19 years ago her intuition was to run. Hard to be skeptical with hard evidence like that staring you right in the face.

“The pool guys are all here and we have no water.”

“Okay,” I replied, “I’m getting up.”

That got me thinking: Is there such a thing as intuition? And if so, what is it and how does it matter to you and me?

Could intuition have played a role in Mark Cuban selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion in stock and immediately hedging that stock against a market crash, all at the peak of the dot-com bubble? How many dozen entrepreneurs rode the market down?

Was it intuition that got Bill Gates to agree to come up with an operating system for IBM, even though Microsoft wasn’t in the OS business? Not to mention forgoing development fees in exchange for non-exclusivity and per-unit royalties. He couldn’t possibly have known how lucrative that arrangement would turn out to be.

And did a little voice in Jerry Yang’s head say, Don’t do it; you don’t have what it takes when the board offered him the CEO job? Did he ignore it, figuring, What the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?

If you’ve ever been involved in any sort of home construction, you know it always takes longer than the contractors say it will. For the past 10 weeks, the Tobaks have been doing a swimming pool project. So far, so good.

“Uh huh,” she said.

When you live in a rural mountainous area, this sort of thing happens from time to time. That means every few years.

As for me, my feelings are so bottled up I wouldn’t recognize intuition if Albert Einstein materialized in my living room and recited the theory of relativity.

I replied with a blank, bleary-eyed stare.

When I asked her about it, she said she’d just had a feeling.

No water meant the pool guys couldn’t do their thing. An hour later, the whole gang packed up and left.

Some scientists believe intuition is an evolutionary survival mechanism. If you were a caveman, for example, and you sensed danger, you would hide in a cave and avoid being eaten by some blood-crazed saber-toothed tiger, or something like that. Since you survived, you got to reproduce and pass your “intuition-sensing gene” onto your offspring, and so-forth.

“What do you mean?” I exclaimed, “You know the pool company is scheduled to come out tomorrow and fill it up on Tuesday. Two weeks? We’ll be swimming in two days!”

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what role intuition plays in our lives. But if you’re one of those people with a little voice in your head, I’d pay attention to it. Who knows, you may become the next Bill Gates … or avoid becoming the next Jerry Yang.

Apparently, a stuck check valve in our irrigation system had been dumping precious water faster than our well pump could pump it. Our holding tanks were dry.

The next morning, my wife pulled the pillow off my snoring head and announced, “We have no water.”

Still, it might explain women’s intuition, if indeed that theory - that woman are more in touch with their emotions than men - is still in vogue.

Texas Instruments has a new OMAP chip to set upon the world, and this time around it’s eyeing more than mobile phones.

The new chip, like the Nvidia APX 2500 also unveiled Monday, can record and playback 720p high-definition video. It uses ARM’s Cortex A8 core running at 800MHz and can be used with any modem. TI hopes to have samples out for customers to start testing in phone and MID designs by the end of the second quarter.

TI isn’t willing to give Intel any ground when it comes to portable handheld devices. Intel has already tried to gain ground against chipmakers like TI, Samsung Electronics, and Freescale Semiconductor with its XScale program. The XScale chip did fairly well as a standalone applications processor, but attempts by Intel to also get into the cellular modem business flopped, and the company offloaded the division in 2006 to Marvell Technology Group.

The new OMAP3440 made its debut in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2008. This is the latest in TI’s line of OMAP applications processors, which are the equivalent of the CPUs inside PCs.

Just as we were enjoying a reprieve from Apple trademark cases, a new one arose this week with the company challenging New York City’s trademark application for a logo it’s using in a new green living campaign.

There are many ways to slice–or draw–an apple, but the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker is once again claiming right to its own methodology.

(Credit: NYC.gov)

New York, in response, says the claim is without merit and that Apple is asking for overly broad protection, according to news reports. A spokeswoman for the city’s marketing arm said the logo was “meant to invoke thoughts of upstate New York’s bucolic rural areas, where apple orchards once delivered much of the nation’s crop,” according to the Associated Press. She added that the idea came from the city’s Big Apple nickname.

The city, however, has never obtained trademarks related to “The Big Apple” phrase, according to the AP. But with Apple’s three Manhattan retail stores and its trademark history, maybe the time is ripe for the city to do so.

An image from the GreeNYC Web site showing the logo Apple is disputing.

Apple says the emblem resembles its own signature logo, and will thus confuse people and “seriously injure the reputation which (Apple) has established for its goods and services,” according to the January filing with the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board obtained by Wired (PDF).

Shell and Iogen announce extended alliance to accelerate a next generation biofuel
Shell does appear to be serious about developing alternate sources of fuels. It ups its stake in Iogen to 50 percent.
Critics Claim WEEE Failed to Deliver in First Year in U.K. - GreenerComputing
The electronic waste directive is meant to increase recycling, but administrators have run into some hitches.

A prototype of Blue H's floating turbine.

Here’s a sampling of
green-tech news with quick commentary:

Maui algae operation will produce biodiesel for power plant - Pacific Business News (Honolulu)
A pollution-to-algae-to-biodiesel project in Hawaii gets a green light.
NREL and Optony Collaborate on Developing Cost-Competitive Approach for Solar Electricity - Press release

The project will combine thin-film solar cells with optics from a new company, Optony, to create a concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) device with potentially cheaper electricity.
Plan to bury climate-warming carbon unveiled - Reuters
EPA looks to create some environmental guidelines because geological sequestration of carbon dioxide is still unproven.

(Credit:
Blue H)

Undersea Volcanic Rocks Offer Vast Repository For Greenhouse Gas, Says Study - Science Daily
"Carbon burial" at a large scale–150 years worth–could happen in undersea volcanic rock, researchers say.
British company launches floating wind turbines off Italy - The Guardian
There are a number of floating wind turbines being developed, but Blue H says its test will be launched later this year.

First, the term doesn’t even make sense. If you’re buying any of the garbage marketed as “self help,” then by definition you’re not helping yourself. Maybe that’s just a semantic point, but I’ve got bigger issues than that.

It’s depressing how desperate we are for quick fixes. Here we are, the most civilized culture in history, and we really believe the answers to life’s complex problems can be found by reading a book, swallowing a pill, or talking to a psychic.

Guess what Google search gets more results than the 20.7 million for “pornography?”

What really gets to me is that our sophisticated IT infrastructure is apparently used by millions of unethical people and criminals to rip off those in need of help. Not to mention all the money-making, hair growing, pill popping spam and phishing schemes that bottleneck our networks and fill our inboxes.

Granted, some self help resources are legitimate, but I’m guessing they’re in the extreme minority.

There are a number of things about the self help industry that bother me.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that the Internet - this great technological achievement - is destined to be the biggest marketing and business cesspool in history. I guess everything good has a dark side.

Yes, I know, we live in a free society. The criminals are protected by free speech. And I’m certainly not an advocate of censoring the Web.

I’m going to e-mail one or two experts to see if I can get these questions answered, but in the meantime, feel free to speak up.

Will truly unlocked iPhones still be available in China? I put a lot of faith in the efforts of crackers to defeat whatever Apple comes up with, but I would personally be wary of getting an unlocked
iPhone that might not accept upgrades, mostly because iPhone software needs upgrades. For example, I’ve been baffled–while using friends’ phones–by the apparent impossibility of sending a vCard from one address book to another person using iPhone’s mail application.
If the China Mobile-Apple deal goes through, is it possible that “legitimate” iPhones will be locked to China Mobile and useless in other countries? Would top-market Chinese users, who are used to switching SIM cards at will and picking up multiple SIMs at home and in other countries (as well as in Hong Kong), stand for this? I don’t know the technology well enough to answer this one.
Does Apple sell unlocked iPhones anywhere on Earth? If so, I want one.
And since I’m not an expert in cell phone fees, but know AT&T has raised prices for iPhone 3G service plans (and presumably for the large cost in rolling out the 3G network), is it worth $400 to get out of its clutches over two years and take on a reasonable plan with another GSM carrier in the United States? If you divide $400 by 24 months, a person would only need to find a plan that is $17/month cheaper. That doesn’t seem absurd, given the $70/month plus SMS cost of the starting AT&T plan.
And here’s one for U.S. users. If you could buy a phone for much cheaper that was unlocked, but had to be semi-legally or illegally brought from China, would that scare off people concerned about product quality?

For $699, the new 16GB iPhone 3G will be available to non-AT&T customers in the United States. As I’ve reported, China Mobile and Apple are now in talks that are more likely to bear fruit. This post is based on a few questions I really can’t answer. Let’s have them.

Still, that’s some pretty big consequences for a feature that saves a few seconds’ time. Sure, those seconds add up over time. But I imagine the lawyer in question would give any amount of time to have that e-mail back.

Eli Lilly and its outside lawyers found out this the hard way this week when one of the esquires sent a note intended for a colleague to a New York Times writer with the same last name. (Note: I’m not certain which e-mail program the lawyer was using, and it’s supposition, though a seemingly safe bet, that some sort of autocomplete was to blame.)

A representative for Pepper Hamilton, the law firm whose barrister sent the note, was not immediately available for comment. But, in good news for the firm, an Eli Lilly representative told Portfolio that the firm is not immediately getting the boot.

Another suggestion comes from ClearContext VP Brad Meador, who recommends people tweak Outlook settings to delay sending e-mail for a matter of minutes. That way there’s a chance to catch a broad array of mistakes before they go out forever.

But with e-mail used to send everything from jokes, to family photos to corporate secrets, “most of the time” seems like far too low a bar.

• Select or clear the “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields” check box.

I’ve always been leery of Microsoft Outlook’s autocomplete feature. That’s the one that guesses who you want to send the e-mail to by looking at the first few letters you type.

Update: A Microsoft representative said the feature can be turned off. Here’s how:

• On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.

Then again, in a world where businesses and governments are increasingly secretive, maybe the typo has become the greatest opportunity for openness and democracy. On second thought, leave it in there.

I try to always give my address bar a second look before hitting send, but once or twice have found my note to a colleague going to an outside contact with a similar name. Maybe Microsoft should get rid of the feature.

• Under the Tools menu, click Options.

It’s right most of the time.