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In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is wary of building a baseball diamond on his farm, which is already near foreclosure. But a voice tells him, “If you build it, they will come.”

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Bill Laing told me that he understands his company faces an uphill battle in trying to win over customers that have been using VMware and Xen, in some cases for many years.

As expected, Microsoft announced on Thursday that it has finished work on Hyper-V. For now, Microsoft is making Hyper-V available for download via its Web site, though it plans on July 8 to make it an option via Windows Update. By releasing it now, the company is following through on its pledge to ship the virtualization hypervisor within 180 days of the release of Windows Server 2008.

“I think it will take longer to rip and replace, but that’s certainly our ambition,” Laing said.

Microsoft has the same vision for its virtualization technology. Several years in the making, Microsoft’s Hyper-V officially entered on Thursday a field dominated by VMware and other competitors, including the open-source Xen product.

Over time, Laing said he wants Microsoft find its way into data centers that already use VMware.

“I think we’ll do best initially in ‘green field’ opportunities,” Laing said. “Small business, I think, is a completely green field. In the enterprise, where customers haven’t deployed (another virtualization technology), I think we’ll do well.”

At this point, it’s tempting to bitch about bottom-dwelling parasites exploiting the labor of others. But what’s the point? That boat has long sailed. In fact, Pearson correctly noted that “content proliferating” is taking place so quickly that any attempt by publishers to rein in the practice would be akin to playing Whac-A-Mole.

•  Auto–nearly 7x

Amazing what you can find searching the Internet.

“The study tracked online content from more than 100 publishers in a broad range of categories, including entertainment, sports, technology, politics, health, travel and automotive, scanning for proliferation across 30 billion Web pages during the month of September. The results indicate that the average publisher is missing out on more than $150K per year driven by the audience viewing their articles on other sites.”

•  Movie reviews–nearly 5x

In the meantime, what to do? Publishers face the reality that their content is going to wind up generating significant dollars on other Web sites–all without permission. The challenge will be to figure out a syndication deal that works for all concerned. In this matter, debating right from wrong, I’m afraid, simply is a waste of time.

•  Entertainment–nearly 4x

Par for the course these days.

In fact, a new report by Attributor finds that online content ripoffs are rife.

An article that I had authored on CNET more than a year ago turned up as the lead item on a Web site that–until then–I never knew existed. What’s more, the site had reproduced the entire text–sans byline or attribution.

Publishers can debate the ethics of unauthorized repurposing at at the next Web 2.0 conference. But if Attributor’s methodology is sound, the takeaway is that there’s a bigger audience viewing your content off your site than on it.

(Credit:
CNET News)

•  Sports, Technology–more than 2x

That’s a lot of money. Indeed, Rich Pearson, Attributor’s vice president of marketing, said a typical piece of content repurposed without permission was likely to be viewed 1.5 times more than it was on the original site. Here’s the category breakdown:

•  Politics–nearly 1.5x

•  Advice, Environment, Health–nearly 2x

•  Travel–more than 5x

Blodget makes a few other significant points: Both products are natural monopolies; both are incredibly profitable, with operating margins topping 75 percent, and Google search is growing a lot faster than Windows.

This storm has been gathering for years. In 2005, we wrote a piece at News.com about Google’s longterm threat to Microsoft. The impetus was a major management shuffle at MSN, but we had fun pulling out some old Microsoft memos about now-defunct Netscape in the early days of the World Wide Web. My favorite was a note written in 1995 by Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka describing a “nightmare” scenario for his company.

More than a few bright minds inside Microsoft saw the threat years before it became a reality. The funny part is, they’re still trying to figure out what to do about it.

It’s always stunning that big companies can see a threat to their business years before it happens, and then fail to do something about it. (But then I suppose Clayton Christiansen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma for a reason.) Digital Equipment saw client/server computing on the horizon, and laughed it off. Sun Microsystems saw the threat from servers running x86 chips and Linux software long before it became a problem, but dithered for years before doing something about it. The list goes on.

“The Web…exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival–and even surpass–Microsoft’s Windows,” Slivka wrote.

As Blodget notes, there are caveats: The unofficial Office monopoly should give Microsoft breathing room for a few more years. But even that could be threatened as Google’s more-affordable Web applications improve.

Google is no longer in Steve Ballmer's rear mirror. It's right next to him.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t just do Windows. The company has plenty of other, incredibly successful products, ranging from the Office suite to the
Xbox 360 gaming console. But the mantra at Microsoft has always been that everything begins with Windows. When Windows has a real rival, Microsoft has real problems.

Microsoft didn’t pay too much attention to the warning. Ten years later, another internal memo put a name to that nightmare–Google. Now Blodget has advanced that nightmare scenario a few more steps with his analysis.

So why did Microsoft try so hard to buy Yahoo? Simply put, Google is Microsoft’s nightmare come true, and the Windows maker needed Yahoo to better compete with that growing search beast in Silicon Valley.

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has posted Tuesday a good look at how Microsoft’s Windows and Google’s search will stack up by 2009. The results aren’t necessarily surprising, but they’re certainly interesting to see in print: By this time next year, Blodget predicts, Google search will pass Windows in total revenue.

According to Nielsen’s numbers, the SMS campaign tactic reached 2.9 million people. However, Keynote Systems, which measures and monitors e-business performance, estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of people who signed up to receive the text either received it late or not at all.

However, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Obama had actually chosen his former archrival, Hillary Clinton, to be his vice presidential candidate. And Bill Richardson. And Kathleen Sebelius. And four other Democrats, too.

Politics go tech
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Barack Obama announced that he had selected Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate. Obama was expected to announce his selection via text messages and e-mails to supporters on Saturday. While supporters who signed up for the announcement still received them, the Associated Press reported the selection of Biden late Friday.

In April, the judge seemed to agree with the defendants’ arguments that the RIAA’s “making available” position “amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized.” However, the RIAA accused Howell of uninstalling Kazaa and reformatting his hard drive after being served with the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Google brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple’s Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline. Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn’t connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

In another feature, known as InPrivate, Microsoft allows the user to suspend caching functions while you surf. The scenarios for using InPrivate include when you’re using someone else’s computer, for instance, when you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise, or when you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person to know which Web site you visited.

However, a copyright attorney said Viacom can still prevail provided that it proves YouTube is a business built on pirated material and that parent company Google has knowledge of the unauthorized clips on the site.

IE 8 adds a Security pull-down menu between Page and Tools on the main toolbar. In addition to blocking phishing sites, IE 8 now highlights the main domain of any Web site you visit. IE 8 also contains a cross-site scripting filter, one of the first in a mainstream browser. Cross-site scripting allows an attacker to execute script on users’ browsers without them knowing.

That’s according to a set of articles that appeared on the paper’s Web site early Saturday. The articles were published in error, of course, and they disappeared from the newspaper’s Web site a few hours later. While they were live, the list of prepared-in-advance headlines said Obama had variously chosen Biden, Clinton, Evan Bayh, Chet Edwards, Sebelius, Tim Kaine, and Richardson.

Ubiquity grew out of Firefox’s new Smart Location Bar, or “awesome bar,” which helps resolve incomplete URL entries into browser address bars. Ubiquity doesn’t replace the awesome bar, but a separate command line is generated by typing Ctrl-Space for Windows or Command-Space for Macs.

The browser battles are heating up, with Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple all releasing offerings to entice Web surfers into their respective camps.

Perspectives also protects against attacks that exploit a recently exposed flaw in the DNS (Domain Name System), which translates Web addresses into numerical IP addresses.

Also of note
Hundreds of flights were delayed in cities across the country due to a computer failure in the Federal Aviation Administration’s system for processing flight plans…An electronic gaffe at news outlet Bloomberg mistakenly sent an incomplete obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the wire on Wednesday afternoon…Amazon.com is buying Shelfari, the social-networking site for book lovers.

Another closely watched copyright infringement case seems to have been resolved over charges of evidence tampering by the defendant. Judge Neil Wake reportedly ruled that Jeffery Howell, a defendant in Atlantic v. Howell, had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions.”

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Ubiquity is a command-line interface that enables users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, or Twitter.

What’s different about Io and Viacom is that Io didn’t notify Veoh of the copyright infringement on the site before filing suit. In contrast, Viacom sent more than 100,000 “take-down notices” to YouTube prior to filing its $1 billion copyright complaint.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders. Biden, whose antiprivacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP, ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide.

Copyrights in court
Video-sharing site Veoh defeated a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in 2006 by the Io Group, an adult entertainment company. Veoh defended its actions by citing provisions within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that call for a party to remove copyrighted material from its Web site, when notified by the copyright holder.

Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8, bringing it up to par with alternative browsers such as Opera, Apple’s
Safari, and Mozilla’s
Firefox in terms of security and features.

A U.S. District Court judge found that Veoh was not liable for hosting copyrighted videos that its users uploaded to its site because the company used an automated process to post videos and did not play an active role in getting the material onto its site. The court also found that Veoh removed the material when informed by the copyright holder, putting it in compliance with a “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA law.

The unprecedented decision is definitely favorable to Google, YouTube, and all user-generated sites, but it doesn’t mean that Google will necessarily prevail in the $1 billion copyright suit filed against it by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures.

Technology companies were at the Democratic convention in Denver this week to highlight more than just their new products–they’re pushing an agenda as well. The Consumer Electronics Association, a lobbying firm that represents 2,200 technology companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Hitachi, brought its 28-state “America Wins with Trade” bus tour to Denver this week to convince Democrats that free trade benefits the tech industry, as well as consumers. Groups with opposing views are taking a high profile at the convention, however, and the conflicting interests in the party are apparent from its mixed messages on trade.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have released an extension for Firefox 3 that can protect wireless network users from so-called man-in-the-middle attacks. The software, dubbed “Perspectives,” is available for download for free.

The free Firefox plug-in enables the creation of “user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs,” according to a post on Mozilla’s site. “In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.”

A quick glance at EA’s upcoming lineup of games tells you everything you need to know about consolidation. Aside from Spore, it’s dominated by sequels and titles that will do little but provide the same basic experience we’ve come to expect from today’s games.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

But alas, that won’t happen. Market research and sales figures dictate more sequels and first-person shooters because those sell and most companies believe that there’s no reason to risk developing an innovative title that may or may not appeal to consumers when the guaranteed money is in light updates to known titles.

But consolidation has a larger, more important affect on gaming: it turns developers into game lovers that just want to create new and unique titles to developers that are run by suits and care only about the profit potential of each title.

Some tout this acquisition as the next logical step for a video game industry that’s becoming more consolidated. Others say that EA’s takeover of Take-Two could actually increase the value of games and create a company that will offer some of the most impressive titles we have ever seen, thanks to the combined efforts of developers.

In fact, consolidation has spawned an industry that’s dominated by sequel after sequel and enough first-person shooters and sports games that barely differ from year to year, that when unique and innovative titles comes along like Spore, the entire industry jumps for joy.

Consolidation in the video game industry could ruin its ability to offer innovation and compelling titles. Of course, the developers claim that consolidation will give companies the ability to offer more compelling titles, but I just don’t see it.

I understand that selling games is a business and unless developers make money, they won’t stay open for long. But I also understand that innovation is the brainchild of a developer’s desire to do something unique out of love for what they do. And if the hype surrounding Spore and LittleBigPlanet are any indication of the community’s desire for innovative titles, I think more developers would be best-served offering those kind of titles.

That sentiment may ring true in some cases, and every now and then, there’s a flash of something unique, but if this acquisition becomes a reality and EA swallows up one of the biggest developers in the industry, it spells trouble for gamers and the industry itself.

Take-Two hasn’t been so delighted about EA’s acquisition attempts. The company has let the offer deadlines slip countless times–the last happened just nine days ago–but it still can’t quite shake EA. And this time around, the companies have signed a confidentiality agreement that would ensure both sides don’t go public with the closed-door proceedings.

Since the age of consolidation hit the video game industry, it has changed drastically. Granted, sales are higher than they ever have been and more people are playing video games than ever before, but the video games themselves have lost much of their appeal.

The video game industry is abuzz over the possibility of Take-Two Interactive and Electronic Arts joining hands and become the world’s most powerful video game developer. According to EA, such a move will improve its lineup of games and help consolidate its presence in the industry.

And if EA and Take-Two–two of the biggest culprits of derivative gaming– combine to form one major developer, this will only get worse.

Companies still must follow certain rules, the details of which have not yet been posted to the SEC’s Web site. But SEC Chairman Chris Cox seems inclined to make them reasonable. An excerpt from his remarks compiled by IRWebReport.com:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, and at least a decade since the first blogs appeared. But until now, publicly traded companies have not been able to use the Web or blogs to meet the Feds’ disclosure requirements.

The Internet has changed a lot since 2000, which was the last time the commission provided comprehensive guidance on this topic; the use of the Internet and electronic media. Back then the idea of the Web as a social network was still being developed and Web sites such as MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook didn’t even exist. The idea of creating a social network where shareholders could meet and exchange views was barely imaginable. Blogs hadn’t really entered the public lexicon. And syndication technologies such as Atom and RSS were still in development.

This is a victory for Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who had been pressing the SEC to do just this. Schwartz wrote a letter to Cox in March 2007 saying there were ways to rewrite what’s called Regulation FD–which dates back to 2000–to make it work for the Web. He was right.

The use of electronic media is arguably superior to providing company information the old way. It’s a better way to provide information to most investors since today it can be presented in interactive format that allows each individual to click through or drill down to the level of detail that’s appropriate to him or her.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week finally woke up to the fact that the Internet already has become an alternative to the traditional press release, and announced that a company’s Web site can qualify for an alternative “channel of distribution.”

Although the final rules aren’t out, there are some intriguing hints about what they might include. One SEC statement says that “information appearing on company Web sites does not need to satisfy a printer-friendly standard or be in a format comparable to paper-based information, unless the commission’s rules explicitly require it.” Translated: that could mean video and audio releases are acceptable as well.

It also announced that investor General Motors’ director of Global Energy Systems, Andreas M. Lippert, has joined Mascoma’s scientific board. GM invested in Mascoma’s $61 million series C round in May of this year, along with refiner Marathon Oil.

Mascoma’s goal is to streamline the process by genetically engineering a microorganism that can metabolize cellulose and produce ethanol in a single step. That will cut out the need for adding costly enzymes, its scientists say.

The company has a pilot plant that uses wood chips to make ethanol in Rome, New York. Five to 20 metric tons of wood chips or other feedstock yield 100,000 to 500,000 gallons of ethanol per year.

“This is within sight. We know how to do the genetic engineering–they are actively working towards that now. So there is some technical development that’s needed but it’s not a miracle we’re waiting for,” Lippert said.

Lippert says that its investment in Mascoma and another ethanol company Coskata are meant to accelerate development of cost-effective cellulosic ethanol.

He said Mascoma’s consolidated bioprocessing technology is an attempt at a breakthrough, compared to other processes. But it’s not purely theoretical.

There are about 1,700 E85 stations in the U.S. right now, only about 1 percent of the total. To absorb that anticipated boost in ethanol, Mascoma and GM are assuming that there will be construction of more E85 stations and flex-fuel vehicles that can run on gas or E85.

Click on the image to see a photo gallery of Mascoma’s lab. This image shows how a micro-organism is attracted to cellulose. Mascoma is genetically engineering an organism to metabolize cellulose and make ethanol.

At its core is a staff of brainy Phds with expertise in microbial technology and cellulosic ethanol. But rather than design pharmaceuticals or crop seeds, Mascoma scientists are researching ways to make a cheaper fuel.

Lynd said the company does not expect problems to arise from its genetically modified organisms. He said that any effects could be tested and that it will be used in a controlled environment.

Scientists scour the earth for naturally occurring bacteria and other microorganisms and bring them to their lab. There, Mascoma employees try to isolate certain characteristics, such as rapidly metabolizing cellulose.

Making of a supermicrobe

On Friday, Mascoma, which was founded by Dartmouth College professors, hosted a tour of its labs, housed in the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center (up the road from Mascoma Lake).

(Credit:
Mascoma)

There are many techniques for making cellulosic ethanol, including gasification or multi-step processes that use enzymes and yeasts. But Mascoma is among only a handful pursuing its particular microbial technology path, its scientists say.

Its part of an industry-wide race to make ethanol from non-food sources, such as wood chips and grasses, at commercial scale.

LEBANON, N.H.–Mascoma is a biotech firm engineering its way into the energy business.

Ethanol being produced now is blended with gasoline at 10 percent concentration. But for cellulosic ethanol to make a bigger impact on gasoline consumption, there needs to be a build-out of fueling stations for E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol, Lippert said.

If done right, cellulosic ethanol promises to be far better than the current feedstock–corn–from a commercial and environmental standpoint.

Lippert said GM expects that industrial-scale cellulosic ethanol will begin flowing around 2011. Government mandates are set so that corn ethanol will level off around 2015 to be replaced by “advanced” biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol.

“There are big hills and little hills,” said Lee Lynd, Mascoma’s co-founder and chief science officer. “In the scheme of things, this is a little hill.”

Then they genetically combine those traits in a single microorganism to convert pretreated plant matter into ethanol.

A commercial-scale plant in Michigan using wood chips as a feedstock is scheduled to be operating in 2012. Eventually, it hopes to make ethanol at $1.50 a gallon, according to company executives.

Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it’s not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.

You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping “Demo.”

At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.

Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and
iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online.

If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I’m not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.

“Just putting money on the table removes the conditions of trust,” Lessig said. “Money destroys the opportunity for trust. Eighty-eight percent of the people in my district believe they have their votes bought.”

On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.

But the other big difference between the 19th century’s politics and today’s is what’s making possible Lessig’s mission at Change Congress: Daniel Webster’s America didn’t have Wikipedia, WordPress, or Twitter. (It would’ve been kind of cool, though: “Wig shopping with @henryclay, then out to eat. WTF is with these tea prices?”) The Web’s tools have made it possible for far more information to make it into the hands of ordinary citizens, and those citizens in turn can use the Web to band together and work toward democratic action.

“Every fourth year we wake up. There’s this explosion of democratic energy and then we fall back asleep,” he said. “We have this radical exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash. This is our Thursday night out.”

NEW YORK–Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.

Change Congress, which he founded with Joe Trippi, the Web czar for Howard Dean’s ultimately unsuccessful but sea-changing presidential campaign, is “a kind of Google mash-up in the context of politics.” Pulling together and organizing grassroots anti-corruption and activism efforts from across the Web, the ambitious effort is a “bipartisan reform movement to leverage the reform work of others.”

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig co-founded the project Change Congress.

He brought up a number of examples: Perks from the sugar industry caused the Food Nutrition Board to establish guidelines that determined a “balanced diet” to be 25 percent sugar. When he was vice president of the U.S., Al Gore couldn’t have his way with Internet deregulation because Congress was concerned that money from the telecommunications industry would stop flowing, said Lessig, who considered a run for Congress himself. And then there’s the big one: global warming, and the “junk science” research put forth at the behest of the oil industry.

“Even though today the individuals are better than the individuals who populated our government in the past, the problem of this corruption is much worse,” Lessig explained. “And it’s much worse because government today is much more significant. It’s first more critical to core national problems…and second, it’s more pervasive. The government’s fingers are everywhere.”

But there are two big differences between that vintage sleaze and the corruption in government today, Lessig insisted. The first is that because of the government’s reach and its potential to affect everyday American life, keeping it clean is a more serious priority.

(Credit:
Lawrence Lessig )

He left his role as founder and CEO of copyright reform advocacy group Creative Commons in April to focus on Change Congress.

“Bribery wasn’t even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind of corruption,” Lessig explained. “Up to 25 percent of the voters literally sold their votes. I’m not talking about a golden past.”

But what’s really holding us back, Lessig said, is the notion that we only have to get excited about politics every four years. The political blog phenomenon, for all the press it’s gotten, is still a hotbed for small cliques of policy junkies three-fourths of the time. Change Congress, Lessig explained, will be a round-the-clock operation that doesn’t only pick up when people are headed to the polls.

Skype is also getting a feature that will allow users to access WiFi hotspots on the Boingo network for 19 cents a minute. The funds will be deducted from users’ Skype accounts. Boingo has about 85,000 hot spots worldwide, a Boingo rep told me. TMobile, the primary Wi-Fi provider at U.S. airports, is on the Boingo network.

Skype co-founder Nicklas Zennstrom also started a Wi-Fi network called Fon, but Skype 2.8 doesn’t yet integrate with that system.

The Wi-Fi access feature makes Skype a more useful product for people who use the VoIP app from their Mac laptops, and the per-minute payment scheme makes sense for highly mobile users for whom buying access by the hour or month would leave a lot of unused credits behind.

Screen sharing is useful in business settings (I get a lot of demos over apps like Webex, for example), but it has personal applications as well: People could share photographs, and presumably videos as well, using the feature.

Also, regarding Boingo: That company announced a new Apple product: A connector app for the
iPhone and
iPod Touch. For $7.95 a month, users of those devices can access the entire Boingo Wi-Fi network. For U.S.-based iPhone users on the AT&T network, this is not such a great product since AT&T-provided Wi-Fi is now free for them, but international users and travelers, and iPod Touch users (perhaps those who use TruPhone for VOIP calls) may find it a good deal.

Disruptive Telephony covered other new features in Skype 2.8, including a new way to update your Skype “mood” and to follow users in a Twitter-like fashion, bigger Avatar images, and a new way to manage and prioritize chat windows.

Skype 2.8 for
Mac will ship on Tuesday, with new features including screen sharing and an integrated Wi-Fi hot spot connector.

Available only for Mac OS X at first, the new version will add screen-sharing capabilities to the app’s voice, video, and chat communications features. Skype spokespeople told me that users will be able to run all four channels at once with acceptable performance.