PDC09 started and there are two sessions that all should attend.

“Build a .NET Business Application in 60 Minutes with xRM and SharePoint” in 502A on Thursday at 12:45 PM

“Managing the Solution Lifecycle for xRM Applications” in 515A on Tuesday at 12:30 PM

For those are not in PDC09, all keynotes will be streamed live and all sessions will be delivered on demand here.

In few days the official beta of Sharepoint 2010 will be released, but here you may get detailed information about all features. My best pick is the one describing how to execute code in Sandbox.

It is official, Apple’s Steve Jobs received a liver transplant.

Steve Jobs received a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee two months ago. Steve is recovering without implications and his prognosis is excelent.
You may read more details at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124581022674545337.html

Our best wishes to Steve to get well soon.

The new Apple iPhone 3GS is already on the shelf (http://www.apple.com/iphone/buy/), so it is time to drill down to its features.

Apple iPhone 3GS

Although it has the exact same design, the same size (4.5 x 2.4 x 0.48 inches) and almost the same weight (135 grams vs 133 grams) as iPhone 3G, it works (launching applications and rendering web pages) much faster and consumes less energy. There is a new processor, the ARM Cortex A8, running at 600 MHz, a PowerVR SGX graphics card (hardware 3d graphics support means better 3d games) and 256MB of RAM (http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/19/iphone-3g-s-gets-the-quick-and-dirty-tear-apart-treatment-alrea/).
The battery life is extended to 12 hours of talk time on 2G and 5 on 3G, with a up to 300 hour standby time. On the other hand you will get 5 hours of internet use (3G), 9 hours on wi-fi internet, 50 hours of audio and 10 hours of video playback.
Although it supports (as its predecessor) three band UMTS/HSDPA, four band GSM/EDGE, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, it is also supports the 7.2Mbps 3G standard, which means that you will get data faster to your iPhone. As you probably know the “S” stands for Speed, and there are some benchmarks against competitors (http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/20/iphone-3g-s-and-pre-head-to-head-benchmarks-iphone-barely-wins/) that confirms it almost clearly.
In addition, there is a new camera, with increased resolution to 3 megapixels, autofocus, auto exposure and auto white balance — and just as expected, now supports 30fps VGA video recording with editing features. You will find also special macro and low light modes, and photo&video geotagging functionality.
Closing let’s talk about new features, such as the Magnetometer, which works with a Compass application, third parties, and it is integrated into the new Google maps app, showing your orientation with a small semitransparent cone. In addition, you will get voice control functionality which means that you can call people just saying their names and some accessibility features, like zooming on text, inverting video, and voice over when you touch whatever text is on screen.

Microsoft released 10 new SharePoint Themes a few days ago. The themes are an improvement over the already existing ones but not really anything to be very exited about.

Here is the download link from MS: New MOSS Themes

A better way to get then (and the way MS should also have provided them) is through a single WSP. Daniel Brown did it for us! :

Google seem to have embraced the semantic trend that has been developing over the past few years, as it has incorporated into its search engine some initial semantic functionality.

This development will enable the market leading search engine to better understand associations and concepts related to a search, expanding the accuracy of results provided by the classic keyword approach.

For example, according to the blog post announcing this new feature, the search engine, upon encountering a query such as “principles of physics,” will now be able to calculate that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanics” are also related terms, and offer them as alternative search suggestions at the top or bottom of the page.

Google will be using a mixture of semantic algorithms and on the fly data mining – as Ori Allon, Technical Lead of the Google Search Quality Team (and blogger) has stated earlier this year in an interview – and will not use semantic technology more broadly just yet, not wanting to decrease its famous search performance. At Google they see semantic capabilities as a part of their search algorithm and not as a full replacement for their traditional keyword analysis.

This move was expected since Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt made a short reference to it during the announcement of Google’s fourth-quarter results : “Wouldn’t it be nice, if Google understood the meaning of your phrase, rather than just the words that are in the phrase? We have made a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out.”

Google was also under some pressure as many of its competitors already were working on semantic search engines to better serve users by understanding their queries and so undermining Google’s dominance of the Search Market. Microsoft acquired Powerset Inc in 2008 to gain access to the start-up vendor’s semantic search technology. Also in 2008, Yahoo announced plans to support Semantic Web standards as part of its new open search platform. Other vendors are already offering semantic capabilities in their search engines like Ask.com (or at least trying very hard to get it right).

International voice traffic is on the rise, according to market research companies such as TeleGeography. Cross-border voice traffic increased 14% in 2007 and 12% more in 2008. That amounts to an amazing 384 billion minutes of talk.

But despite all this traffic, voip in general and Skype more specifically have forced prices and margins down and so “old-school” telcos are registering more traffic, but cashing almost the same as they did the year before or maybe even a little less.

On the other hang Skype, only five years since launch is now the largest provider of international voice communications on the planet, controlling the 8% of all traffic of this kind. Free is always nice but even Skype’s paid-for ‘Skype Out’ service – which lets users make calls to standard telephones – is on the rise , generating 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008.

So since the competition in the telco market is becoming more intense on all fronts, old-school providers will have to learn new tricks to stay in the game.

The Internet Archive Organization is getting a new data centre which can house two petabytes of data for its ‘Wayback Machine’ and the announcement will come next week.

The digital library of Internet memories stores 85 billion archived versions of Web pages dating back to 1996 that amount to more than three petabytes of data. It is expected to continue to grow by 100TB of data per month now that it’s live.

According to a Sun event the Internet Archive has moved from a traditional Linux Server based datacenter to Solaris 10 with ZNF in a Sun modular datacenter design.

Wayback Machine

Sun Event

The UCS, according to Cisco, is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce TCO and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10GE unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.

It seems like the blade part of the offering is based on Intel motherboards and Xeon CPUs while virtualization is implemented either using VMware infrastructure or Microsoft Hyper-V technology. Microsoft is also a preferred management partner and SQL Server seems to have a role in the offering as well. All the new stuff is bundled with established Cisco switching and Fiber technology so that LAN and SAN traffic use a common 10GE Ethernet infrastructure.

UCS aims at decreasing data center costs by lowering energy consumption by through consolidation into fewer boxes that at the same time reduce cabling and cooling requirements. Unified management of the platform is bound to also bring IT Management costs down.

Cisco’s former partners and now soon to be rivals shouldn’t be too happy for the new contender in a market they consider their own and they watched their stock fall in the hours after the announcement.

Sounds like exiting times ahead since Cisco has some cash to spare and is in this game for the long run.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure “cloud” platform, still in pre-beta, had its first crash this past weekend. Azure stayed offline for almost 22 hours leaving a large number of deployments offline, and applications unreachable in “stopped” or “initializing” states.

It is not yet clear what caused the outage but in his post in the MSDN forums, Azure team member Steve Marx said he expected a root cause analysis would be conducted to “understand exactly what went wrong and what we need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Once we have that sorted out, I’ll put together a summary.”

Amazon Web Services had a similar insident earlier this year.

Steve Marx post