IT Buoy

There’s been more innovation in the Internet search business in the past year than the prior three years, as Microsoft challenged its dominant rival Google in the market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. Bloomberg News Steve Ballmer earlier this month Ballmer said the boost in innovation has occurred because of “old-fashioned competition” in the search market, renewed last June when Microsoft introduced its Bing search engine. Ballmer said Microsoft is seeking to improve its roughly 11% market share in the U.S. search market. Ballmer made the comments in a speech to computer science students at the University of Washington, where he spent most of his time emphasizing how seriously Microsoft is taking “cloud computing,” a trend towards online applications. “For the cloud, we’re all in,” he said. The Microsoft CEO praised one prominent example of a cloud computing application made by a competitor, Apple’s iPhone App Store, on which that company has done a “very nice job,” Ballmer said.

Major League Baseball’s excellent At Bat iPhone app is back for another season, this time at its most expensive price ever: $14.99. And so far, the app is tearing up the charts, despite its price tag. At Bat 2010 is already the no. 8 most popular paid app on iTunes. Read the rest of this story

Traveling all the time but the work never slows?

Here’s a weird video of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone trying to promote Twitter in 2006. He’s trying to be funny, acting like some sort of crazy professor. The thing is, he does a horrible jobs explaining Twitter, which at the time was spelled Twttr. Back then, vowels were the enemy. We would have no idea what the heck Twttr was from watching this video. via Mashable Read the rest of this story

Amazon has stepped away from the brink of an all-out war with publishers that began on Friday. The Kindle maker had stopped selling books from major publisher Macmillan after a dispute over how to price e-books. The fight generated up a huge debate among Kindle owners, authors and readers about the right price for e-books – and whether Amazon was abandoning loyal Kindle owners, who can’t easily buy e-books from other sources. It generated its own two Twitter hashtags: #amazonfail and #macmillanfail . Then on Sunday afternoon, Amazon posted an explanation of its moves to its discussion boards. Amazon admitted its move to discontinue the book sales was temporary – but didn’t give a date for when they’d be back. Here’s the full statement: “Dear Customers: Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases. We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles.