SFist Tech Roundup: That’ll Be All, Jeeves

What is the CTIA?
That would be the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. The more salient question, “Why do I care?” is tougher to answer. One reason is because they walk among you this week, converging upon the Moscone Center for their convention.

We in the labs can’t attend, unfortunately, as we’re too busy dealing with our recalcitrant Nintendog. But the fallout from the convention will be showing up in the next couple of round-ups. To start us off, Carlo Longino has an interesting take on mobile multimedia and the idea that on-demand radio from our cellphones, not bigger hard drives or flash drives for our MP3 players, is the new focus for portable music.

Why is Palm using Windows Mobile for their new Treo phone?
It’s complicated. Or at least, analysts would have you believe it’s complicated, and that the announcement of the new Treo is shocking news on the level of Mac’s switching to Intel. In fact, it’s a pretty straightforward progression, and one of the rare cases where the company line tells the whole story.

Palm’s initial success wasn’t just because the PDA market was a new one, as we over-simplified it in last week’s column. It was because they managed to sell the concept of the PDA as something useful to have, as opposed to just an expensive electronic address book, and they had the simplest, smallest, most efficient, and most attractive unit available. The PalmOS was designed specifically for the original PalmPilot, and it did its job better than the bulky Windows CE. While that convergence made Palm the best on the market at the time, it also put them in the position of being a designer of operating systems and handheld devices.

With the latest announcement, they’re acknowledging what customers have already made abundantly clear: the market is bigger than just business users, and people want cell phones, not standalone PDAs. They haven’t abandoned their OS (and they’d be foolish to), but they’ve at least finally acknowledged that the OS that worked so well for standalones may not be the ideal for multipurpose phone/PDA/music player devices.

Am I going to die?
Yes, eventually. But according to doomsayers in your Assembly and protection services, it could be sooner than later, in the event of another earthquake. The multitude of outdated and incompatible communications networks is the culprit, they claim.

Obviously, emergency services are a different category and priority of communications than personal cell phones and internet access. But if the situation is as dire as it’s made out to be, we have to wonder if the various commercial and Newsom-backed attempts at free wireless internet could be piggy-backed onto attempts at a more solid radio and communications infrastructure.

Why do we keep giving Apple so much money, when they just do us wrong?
Because everybody except certain Motorola officials knows that the stuff Apple puts out is so pretty. Seriously — would you just look at the nanos on that one.

But we still never learn our lesson. If it’s not the batteries failing on our now-old and sagging old-school iPods, or the batteries on our Powerbooks bursting into flames, it’s the iPod nano screen’s being too fragile for everyday use. It’s not that the thing is poorly made, it’s that it’s so beautiful we just can’t stop touching it! The accessory market for iPods is already as big as Belgium’s Gross National Product [Ed note: hyperbole not confirmed by any reputable source], so there’s no doubt we’ll see a surfeit of skins, screen protectors, and other add-ons. The only question is whether Apple has over-engineered the nano past being a truly functional product. And the answer, again, is: we don’t care — look at how small it is!

How can I make money fast working from home with no money down?
Have you heard the good news about podcasting? Sure, we all know about podcasting now, thanks to Bay Area Visionary Steve Jobs and Apple’s recent revamp of iTunes. But you can only really tell when an internet fad becomes reality when people stop asking what it is and start asking how to make money off of it. They’ve got their work cut out for them, as all the various blogs, forums, webcomics, fansites, and the like have been struggling for years to find the right mix between advertising, micropayments, donations, and corporate sponsorships.

And while mobile companies are talking about streaming content and content providers are wondering how to turn a profit, we notice that Jobs himself is in Paris, sticking it to The Man. He’s fighting against the greedy record companies to make sure that you can still download songs off of Elijah Wood’s celebrity playlist at 99 cents a pop. He’s also positioned his music player as the most visible and convenient way to get non-record industry content (e.g., podcasts) to your computer or cell phone. And if there is a way to make money off of homegrown content, being the provider is the way to do it. While we’re highly skeptical that podcasting income will ever be a huge profit source like iPods and iMacs, it could stand to buy Jobs a few more turtlenecks.

Who would win in a fight: Google or Yahoo?
Google, obviously. But Yahoo is saying that they don’t care because it’s a stupid fight anyway. (Even though they started it. I’m just sayin’.) The pissing contest in question is over search index size, with both starting out by saying that the number of sites indexed is important, but now saying that it’s the relevance of the results that’s most important. We say that it’s all nonsense, and what’s really important is having a lovable mascot on your search engine.

Where can I find a picture of Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba’s chests?
Dude, come on. You’ve got the web browser open already; it’s not like it’s that difficult. There’s only so much hand-holding we’re going to do, especially since we’re now wondering where that hand’s been.