Opera Software The Opera browser for the iPhone is based on the desktop version of the software.

Opera Software on Tuesday announced that it is submitting its Opera Mini Web browser to Apple for use on the iPhone.

The Norwegian company boasts that Opera is the most-used browser on mobile devices; it offers a version of the software for Windows Mobile phones, Google Android and the Nintendo DS game system.

The Opera team said they are confident their new browser will be approved for the iPhone, but the final say is still up to the gatekeepers at Apple who are known to block applications in the iTunes store for any number of random reasons.

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The tech reporters and editors of The Times found themselves immersed in retail, fashion, real estate and, as always, assessing the power of the Internet.

Apple Closing Gap on App Store Inadequacies — iphoneera.squarespace.com
Jenna Wortham says: Apps can now be given through iTunes.

Soft in the Middle — The New Yorker
Claire Cain Miller says: Why the high price of the iPad could be a gamble.

EBay, NRF to take on organized retail crime — Reuters UK
Claire Cain Miller says: Can eBay stop people who steal stuff from stores and sell it online?

Polyvore, a fashion Web site for the masses — The New Yorker
Claire Cain Miller says: Democratizing fashion, and soon e-commerce, on Polyvore.

Local Blog Network Gothamist Being Bought by Cablevision’s Rainbow Media — paidContent.org
David Gallagher says: PaidContent reports that Cablevision is getting into the local-blog game, buying Gothamist. Read more…

6:08 p.m. | Updated Adding more excerpts from interview.

China’s censorship of the Internet may be blunt, but Google has found negotiations with the Chinese government in recent weeks to be subtle and uncertain.

Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters Sergey Brin said there had been little clarity in recent negotiations with the Chinese government.

That was the message from a brief interview in New York on Monday with Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, shortly after the company announced that it was moving its Chinese Internet search engine to Hong Kong.

The former British colony has been part of China since 1997, but operates under a “one country, two systems” philosophy. The mainland authorities do not censor political news and searches on the Web in Hong Kong.

The shift of its Chinese service to Hong Kong, Mr. Brin said, was not given a clear-cut stamp of approval by Beijing. But he said there was a “back and forth” with the Chinese government on what to do. “There was a sense that Hong Kong was the right step,” Mr. Brin said.

But he added: “There’s a lot of lack of clarity. Our hope is that the newly begun Hong Kong service will continue to be available in mainland China.” Read more…

It seems safe to describe Andrew Hessel as an unbridled optimist. After all, he’s selling $20 shares in a journey toward a personalized cure for breast cancer, which he says could be feasible in the next few years.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Andrew Hessel described the Pink Army Cooperative as the first “biotech company that is owned by the people.”

Mr. Hessel serves as the managing director of the Pink Army Cooperative. This Canadian organization has set out to lower the cost of cancer treatments while also making them more effective by embracing a new wave of synthetic biology technology (a field that was recently the subject of a piece in The New York Times Magazine).

In particular, the group hopes to build a relatively cheap virus in its labs that could be tweaked on an individual basis to hunt down and kill breast cancer cells.

While plenty of start-ups are chasing this same challenging goal, Mr. Hessel has set up the first “biotech company that is owned by the people,” as he puts it.

A payment of 20 Canadian dollars (about $20 in the United States at current exchange rates) will buy you a spot in this cooperative. That fee entitles you to have access to the cancer cure created by the cooperative — if the organization can solve a host of massive technological, legal and economic issues first, of course. Breast cancer patients receiving the cure would also have to pay extra money for tests and treatment. Read more…

Nick Bilton/The New York Times Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” is the creator of the message board 4Chan.

In 2003, while still in high school, Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan. The site includes content that many people find offensive. Nevertheless, or maybe because of it, the site has millions of users and has been responsible for many of the strange memes that have propagated on the Internet, including LOLcats.

The 4chan site is a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language. As Gawker’s Nick Douglas described in 2008, areas of the Web site involve people hoping to “shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other.” One of the largest Web forums in the United States, the site continues to influence mainstream culture. Here is an edited and condensed version of my chat with Mr. Poole:

Nick Bilton: You go by the name “Moot.” Why?
Christopher Poole: As a teenager, I used to use the nickname “Moo” as a moniker online, and then I turned into “Moot” for fun, which I didn’t even realize was a real word at the time, and it just stuck with me.

How old were you when you started 4chan?
I was 15. I’m 22 now.

What were you trying to do when you started the Web site?
On my summer break, I discovered Japanese animation and I started watching a lot of anime on online forums. I soon discovered an image-board Web forum called 2chan, and I had never seen anything like it before. What really struck me about it was how fast it moved. Even back then you could sit and hit refresh on your browser and continue to see new content.

So then what happened?
The code for 2chan was publicly available, and I took it and translated it from Japanese to English using tools online, and I threw it up on the Web and sent it out to 20 people.

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Marten Mickos, the former chief executive of MySQL, will soon be named the chief executive of Eucalyptus, another open-source software maker.

A spokeswoman for Eucalyptus said an announcement about Mr. Mickos’s arrival as chief executive was expected next week.

Mr. Mickos helped steer MySQL through its $1 billion sale to Sun Microsystems, and then stayed on at Sun for a while to work on its open-source software projects. Last year, Mr. Mickos was named as an entrepreneur in residence at the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

But rather than starting his own company, Mr. Mickos has ended up taking over one that Benchmark has invested in: Eucalyptus.

The start-up has gained a lot of attention of late as one of the more innovative players in the cloud computing arena. It has software that helps companies set up internal cloud-computing-type systems and that helps transfer their applications from a local data center to a cloud center, like the EC2 system hosted by Amazon.com.

11:30 p.m. | Correction. A single issue of the VIVmag is $6.

VIVmag, an all-digital lifestyle magazine that is  available online, plans to introduce an interactive iPad version of its content when the device, from Apple, is released next month.

The videos above and below offer a preview of the kind of experience that readers, or rather viewers, can expect for some iPad versions of the digital magazines. Similar to the Wired video released last month, Viv and other magazines are getting ready to offer touch, video and a wave of other hands-on experiences.

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Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely — Wired.com
Nick Bilton says: In Austin, Tex., more than 100 Web-connected cars were disabled by a disgruntled 20-year-old hacker.

iGroups: Apple Files for Patent on New Social App — patentlyapple.com
Jenna Wortham says: According to a patent application, it looks like even Apple wants in on the location-based social networking game.

Amazon Introduces Kindle Software for Mac — phx.corporate-ir.net
Brad Stone says: The Macintosh joins the PC, iPhone, BlackBerry and the Kindle itself as places where you can now read an e-book from Amazon.

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Back in the Start-Up Business With Jumo.com — Fast Company
Nick Bilton says: A Facebook co-founder begins a new start-up to help people find nonprofits. Read more…

Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach A data visualization exploring the changes that take place on Wikipedia by a single software bot.

Gizmodo, the technology blog, has a fascinating series this week about memory. Titled Memory [Forever], the blog takes a look at the topic from multiple angles, including memory and our brains, how the Internet remembers and the memory inside computers.

The image above, from the series, is a result of a visualization using the the Web site Many Eyes, a product from the I.B.M. Watson Research Center in Cambridge. Each color illustrates a change to pages on the Web site Wikipedia. For this visualization, the I.B.M. researchers followed the changes by an individual software bot on the Web site.

After the jump is a list of some of the most interesting posts in the series:

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As I recently reported, location-based services are quickly becoming  the newest territory that companies are hoping to lay claim to.

Now it seems that even Apple is eager to get in on the game.

The PatentlyApple Web site uncovered a set of freshly published documents from the Patents and Trademark Office indicating that Apple is developing a new social networking application or service.

Apple’s iGroup will be a new service that will work on your iPhone and likely work with MobileMe. The idea is to allow groups of friends or colleagues attending such events as a concert, a tradeshow, business meeting, wedding or rally to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information or reactions to live events as they’re occurring.

In short, the Apple application would use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to allow a group of users in the same area to share information like contact information or chat about an event while it’s happening.

The patents don’t go so far as to give specific examples, but it’s not hard to imagine something like a group playing a game of fantasy football during halftime at a sporting event, using the tool as a channel to chat about a keynote speech during a conference or moviegoers answering trivia questions before a film premiere.

Read more…

Is there room for another socially oriented question-and-answer service on the Web?

That’s actually a question I just posted on one such service, Formspring.me, to Ade Olonoh, its co-founder and chief executive.

If you haven’t yet heard of it, Formspring.me is a fast-growing forum for people to ask and answer personal questions. Users register an account on the site, link it to their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or other accounts, then ask and answer questions and can publish those answers to the major social networks.

The formula has turned out to be somewhat infectious. The site, introduced over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, has received 50 million unique visitors over the last 30 days, according to the company. Three hundred million questions have been answered on the service since its introduction, and the site has drawn such attention in social media circles that it was actually the subject of a fast-spreading hoax on Twitter earlier this month during the South by Southwest conference.

Riding the momentum, the six-employee, Indianapolis start-up has just raised $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors, and it is planning to move to San Francisco this month. Investors include Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and individual investors like the Digg founder Kevin Rose and the former Facebook executive Dave Morin. Read more…

5:24 p.m. | Updated Adding document from Viacom discussing possible purchase of YouTube.

Thousands of pages of court filings that are part of Viacom’s copyright infringement suit against Google, the owner of YouTube, were unsealed on Thursday. The filings are the first significant revelations in the three-year-old lawsuit, which Viacom filed when tensions between YouTube and Hollywood were at their peak.

Here’s our article about the filings. Below are two briefs from Viacom and one from Google, along with a July 2006 internal PowerPoint presentation from Viacom, revealed in the discovery process, in which an argument for buying YouTube is laid out. Read more…

randomdorm.com

Taking a dizzying spin through the video chat service Chatroulette can be highly entertaining — you might stumble onto a celebrity or an impromptu performance by a pianist.

But there’s always the chance of encountering something unsavory on the service, which randomly matches strangers for video interaction.

One entrepreneur is hoping to limit the chances of that — at least for the collegiate set — with a new Web site called RandomDorm.

RandomDorm takes the thrilling serendipity of being paired with an anonymous stranger in a video chat room and limits it to college campuses. Participants need a college e-mail address to access the Web service. Alternatively, they can sign in using Facebook as long as the primary e-mail address tied to that account ends with an .edu.

Tying the users to a specific identity will in theory make them more accountable, although it’s unclear whether RandomDorm’s limited pool will increase the chances of seeing someone chugging beers online or performing more extreme college antics.

“The good thing about Chatroulette is that it has a low barrier to entry. Anyone can hop on and be instantly connected to someone in the world,” said Josh Weinstein, creator of RandomDorm. “We hope to emulate that simplicity and ensure a degree of community and security.” Read more…

HTC, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, is stepping forward and publicly addressing allegations made by Apple that it infringed on 20 patents related to the iPhone.

The company had been quiet, up until now, about two lawsuits filed by Apple earlier this month that claimed HTC phones running Google’s Android operating system violated Apple’s intellectual property, including patents related to the iPhone’s touch-screen interface.

HTC had expressed surprise, and little else, on the day the lawsuits were filed.

But in an interview, Jason Mackenzie, vice president of HTC America, said that “HTC disagrees strongly with Apple’s actions and we plan to use all the legal tools we have at our disposal to defend ourselves, as well as to set the record straight.”

The company, whose American division is  in Bellevue, Wash., stopped short of discussing its legal strategy. But it said that its previous smartphones, which predate the iPhone, used elements of the technologies that Apple says it owns.

“We were working on our first touch-screen smartphone in 1999,” Mr. Mackenzie said. “That eventually came to market in 2002 as the XDA phone in Europe, and the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone in the U.S. Since that time we launched over 50 smartphones, and are fortunate to have relationships with most of the carriers in the U.S. We have been recognized as an innovator by our carrier partners.” Read more…