Google has made great strides in creating applications that live on the Web, but the chief problem with that concept is that if your browser crashes (a not-infrequent occurance), you risk losing your work. It looks like Chrome will address this issue by minimizing memory leaks and allowing users to kill processes that hog memory via a task manager.

Of course, the project will be open source. I wasn’t able to find a release date for the beta, but if you know anything, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Google released Chrome about a day after I put this up. Walt Mossberg has the definitive review.

Most people use these to transfer files home from work and back again, but the USB drive can also be used to run small open source applications from PortableApps.com. These programs can be used as a digital Swiss Army Knife and can come in extremely handy, especially for work computers that don’t allow you to install software. My favorites have helped me out many, many times, and include:

GIMP Portable – GIMP is an open source graphics/photo editor, similar in many ways to Photoshop. While it isn’t quite as slick as its inspiration, it works great for resizing and cropping images, and if you take the time to learn it you’ll discover it’s extremely powerful in its own right.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition – When I browse the Internet, I typically have about 8-10 tabs open in Firefox. In fact, browsing without tabs drives me nuts. If your work computer has an old version of IE, this portable version of Firefox can be a godsend.

PDFTK Builder Portable – One of the strengths of the PDF format is that documents look the same across systems and platforms and they can’t be easily edited by others. One of the downsides is that they can’t be easily edited by you, unless you have Adobe Acrobat. Fortunately this program is around to help you split up and recombine pages from PDF files. This is one of those programs that you might not realize you need until you actually need it, and by that time it can help you avoid some very frustrating situations.

Each of these programs are small in size, so you can fit several of them on any modern USB drive. They’re a great way to put an extra drive to use, and in the right circumstances can honestly save the day.

As good a game as the Instinct talks, it won’t matter for two reasons. First, Apple has won the PR war. It’s become the Kleenex or the Xerox of touch-screen smartphones. Any phone with similar features will be compared to the iPhone, and knockoffs, no matter how well made, will still be seen as knockoffs, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s like the Gamera to the iPhone’s Godzilla. Yeah, they’re both giant, bipedal reptiles that emit flames and trash cities, but if you were to describe Gamera to people on the street, they’d say, “Oh, he’s like Godzilla?” (Answer: Pretty much, but he’s a turtle.)

How did Apple capture the hearts and minds of so many with the iPhone? They made an awesome product and it was the first of its kind. As we know, first counts for a lot in marketing. A whole lot.

Second, Apple has made a habit of unveiling updated products that blow the doors off of the competition – and when the competition comes close to catching up, Steve Jobs yawns, calls for a keynote, and unveils new versions that leave competitors scrambling to incorporate similar features into their products. They’ve been so consistent that people are willing to wait out competing products with (temporarily) superior features in order to get their hands on Apple’s latest and greatest a short time later.

It’s a simple mission that may be difficult to implement, but will always lead to success: Be first or be dramatically better than the others right off the bat, and then never let up on the competition. In doing so, you’ll own your niche, and that’s where the money is.

Look at a company like Palm. They created the PDA space with the Palm Pilot, and were primed to take the smartphone market with the Treo. Unfortunately the software couldn’t keep up with the evolution of the hardware, other products like Windows Mobile and BlackBerry passed them up, and even Palm loyalists decided they simply couldn’t wait for Palm to release a product that compared to what else was out there. Palm sold its software division to a Chinese company and now puts out Treos that run Microsoft Software and use BlackBerry Connect. Although they created their niche, they didn’t work to keep it filled, and other companies were happy to fill it for them.

I wouldn’t worry about a similar fate befalling Apple anytime soon.

It’s worth noting that iTunes got around this point, to an extent, for a long time by providing a seamless user experience. And because iPods are far and away the best selling digital audio players, iPod owners didn’t really care that their iTunes-purchased music would only play on an iPod. Nonetheless, even Apple now offers DRM-free tracks from several labels, as do several other retailers.

Sony BMG appears to be missing the point of downloaded music entirely with their latest initiative, however. Yes, they are offering DRM-free tracks. But you have to go to a retail store to buy a card which will then let you go home and download your chosen album. Frankly, I’m baffled. It requires all of the trouble of going to a store to buy a CD, but without the satisfaction of owning a physical object.

And the music industry has the gall to complain about bleeding money.

UPDATE (1/11/07): I’m glad to learn that this isn’t the *only* way Sony BMG will be selling DRM-free music. They are also making their “entire catalog available” on Amazon’s MP3 digital music store.

I remember the first entry on the list, JenniCam, being quite controversial back in the late 90s – a fact that seems quaint in light of what’s available online today. Still, it’s an interesting look back on how online video has evolved over the last decade.

In the 90′s it seemed like everyone had a personal home page with pictures, interests and links to other pages they liked. The social network has largely replaced the home page, and many people maintain blogs and accounts with any of the countless Web 2.0 services that compete for our attention.

I would really like to figure out how to include all of this information on one page, with each aspect featuring its own RSS feed. Facebook has come the closest to this idea since it opened up its API, but users there are still stuck, in many ways, within a walled garden. Web widgets are also progressing in this direction, but don’t offer the essential ability to customize.

Looks like I have some research to do.

While the record industry blames the Internet, let’s remember the music trends that precipitated the industry’s fall. Boy bands? Bubblegum pop? Nu Metal?! I don’t think anyone thought these were artists with substance and staying power. I remember more than a few “modern rock” radio stations that couldn’t survive when the bottom fell out of that one – Now they’re either country, classic rock or “Jack” stations, which don’t adhere to any particular format. At the time, of course, there was nothing a good “Hit Me Baby One More Time” or “Nookie” couldn’t do for you:

Just a few years ago, many industry executives thought their problems could be solved by bigger hits. “There wasn’t anything a good hit couldn’t fix for these guys,” says a source who worked closely with top executives earlier this decade. “They felt like things were bad and getting worse, but I’m not sure they had the bandwidth to figure out how to fix it. Now, very few of those people are still heads of the companies.”

The industry went for the easy fix, but it’s risky to live and die by the blockbuster. This business model is quite different than the industry of several decades ago, where artists were allowed to grow and stay with the label even with modest-selling albums.

As the article points out, thirst for music has not waned. Touring bands are raking in record money, as are digital download services like iTunes. Nearly every band gives a few songs away for free on their Web pages or on sites like MySpace, which certainly isn’t hurting for users. So while plenty of artists are circumventing the traditional path to success of “getting discovered” and being signed to a major label, the labels continue to suffer. Unfortunately for them, their bone-headed business decisions, contempt for their consumers and the inability to change in the face of new technology has them teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

This send-up of Microsoft’s Surface (courtesy of SarcasticGamer.com) kind of made me realize how silly this concept really is…

Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey, criticised the experiment at the heart of Panorama’s claims because the measurements of signal power had not been made at equal distances from the mobile phone mast and the Wi-Fi laptop. A spokesman for the programme told the Guardian that the “three times higher” comparison was based on measurements taken one metre away from the laptop and 100 metres away from the phone mast, although material sent to journalists promoting the programme did not make this clear. Dr Regan said: “It’s a basic fundamental of science measurement, that if you are trying to compare things you have to take into account the so-called inverse square law.” To make a fair comparison between two radiation sources the measurements should be taken at the same distance away. The levels measured by the Panorama investigation were 600 times lower than levels considered dangerous by the government. “It does sound like a scare story to me,” said Dr Regan.

The article also states, “…a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes.” With the amount of time people spend talking on their mobile phones, Wi-Fi hotspots should be the least of their worries.