Alex Wilhelm, co-founder of TechGeist, is now writing for a top 100 technology blog, TheNextWeb. He was a core part of our team and wrote many of the posts you all read, severely cutting down on the content that made us a relevant and resourceful tech blog. We are happy to see him move on to bigger and better things and we are extremely glad that TechGeist has given him the platform to do so.

As for the rest of the team members, Michael Klurfeld is currently undecided about where he is going from TechGeist but we are sure his unique view-point on law and tech will find a home worthy of his writing.

As for me, I will be writing for Pages Are Social, a blog focused on businesses integrating social media tools. Also, expect various guest posts from me around the tech web.

As for the archives of TechGeist, it costs very little to keep the site up and running and we intend on keeping the site live. We are aware that many people are searching directly on our site for various start-ups we have written about and other relative posts.

Thank you readers for supporting us, we couldn’t have been happier with where TechGeist has lead us today.

The Story

Congress is telling the FCC to investigate how Google Voice may be violating government telecom policies. This comes after AT&T’s publicly-voiced concern that Google, in running its voice service, is not completely neutral with the calls it allows users to make. Google Voice will not allow users to call some rural areas because the connection fees are too high for Google to allow all calls and to maintain the service as free.

Someone Doesn’t Know What Google Voice Is

This is just further proof that Congress is in bed with far too many lobbyists.

The only way one could argue that Google has to abide by policies designed for telecoms would be to very foolishly think that Google Voice is a telecom. Google Voice does not even work without an existing phone line. Users do not pay Google to make calls using the Voice service.

As it does not make any sense for Congress to waist its time doing something so inane, the most likely course events is that AT&T sent lobbyists to Congress to get the government on its side. If any sector of business has enough money, it can convince the government to do a whole lot of stuff for it. In this case, AT&T figures that it looks so bad over the whole Google Voice on iPhone debacle that it needs something to make Google look bad.

AT&T’s possible endgame in all this could be to try and get regulation which would force the end of Google Voice. If Google had to abide by the same principles of neutrality as the phone companies in running its free, non-telecom service, Voice would have to close up shop. Without charging users a whole lot of money, Google could not feasibly allow people to make any telephone calls they want.

If you are running Snow Leapord on your Mac right now, back up your data. Do it right now, at least get the backup started before you finish this post. That is of course, if you want to hold onto your data. There are numberous rumors swirling about Mac users running the latest Mac OSX build having a mysterious and horrible experience, involving a mysterious guest account and a empty hard drive. 9to5Mac sums it well:

“There’s been a series of complaints across the last month of incidents in which users start their Macs up as normal only to find they’ve logged in as ‘Guests’ on their machine – with all the files and data held on their Mac in their own user account seemingly deleted.”

My Vista box that I am typing this on is requesting a snickering comment about how Macs “just work.” Sadly, I cannot oblige it, the Mac is still “working,” just not in a very useful fashion. All snark aside, this is a very real issue for Mac users. Get your data saved, and we’ll bring you more as it comes in.

The Story

Aardvark, a startup which runs a pretty awesome question and answer service, will be opening up its database of compiled question and answers to the public. According to Max Ventilla, CEO of Vark,

Next Wednesday, October 14, Aardvark is going to make Social Search available on the Web at www.vark.com.

The new website will be open to the public, so for the first time, anyone in the world will be able to tap into the wisdom of their social networks just by visitingwww.vark.com.

Aardvark is a service which allows users to ask questions and answers via instant message, email, and forms on the vark.com website. When a user signs up, he fills out topics about which he wants to answer questions. So if you go to the site and register yourself as someone who knows stuff about cooking, you’ll receive questions about cooking, among other things. When you in turn ask a question, Aardvark will direct it to a user who’s knowledgeable on the topic, who will then respond to your inquiry.

The Questions War Has Begun

As many people who punch questions into Google are aware, Yahoo Answers is a pretty good resource of information. Need help with your math homework? If the problem is simple enough, chances are that there’s an answer out there. This makes Yahoo Answers the real competition against which Aardvark’s search feature will be competing.

If I were a gambling man, I’d place my money on Aardvark. The reason for this is because Vark compiles answers far more effectively. With Yahoo Answers, users punch in a question and wait for a reply. This is all done from a web interface. By contrast, Vark works web, IM, email, and even through an iPhone application. This leads to a lot more answers to questions.

The real trump card for both Aardvark and Yahoo Answers is how Google ranks each one. Right now, the Yahoo Answers page for a whole lot of questions is at the top of Google. But when Aardvark allows the public to view answers acquired via its service, we’re going to see the page rank of the vark.com domain shoot up. That’s just a function of how much data there is on those servers. This is not to say that Aardvark will be an overnight household name, but in the course of three years or so, a whole lot of the English-speaking world is going to be hitting up vark.com for answers.

You have to understand why this is so significant to me. You see, I used to love e-mail. If I had it my way, everything I do would be through e-mail. So what about Wave has changed my love for e-mail?

Speed

It wasn’t until I started using Wave that I realized how slow e-mail really was. A few days after using Wave, Alex and I had a discussion that involved forwarding some e-mails. At times, I had to wait up to a minute to get an e-mail from the moment that Alex said, “sent” via IM. While this was accepted before Google Wave, I can no longer stand by idly.

Google Wave on the other hand is quick and I am just not talking about the fact you can see the person you are conversing with type character by character, I am talking about the ease of adding/copying waves. Want someone to join in/keep up on the conversation? Drag n’ Drop them in. Don’t want to include them in the conversation? Simply copy the wave over. It takes a matter of seconds to include someone in on a conversation.

Cluster of WTF

We all know forwarded emails can be a horrendous mess, especially long ones with multiple people involved. At times, I am not even sure if it worth my while reading half the forwarded e-mails I get. But with Wave, it is amazingly easy to follow the conversation due to the ability to simply drag and drop people into waves and/or copying waves that do not lose their threads.

Random Stuff

Drag and Drop – I share a lot of images (mainly screenshots). It is amazing how much time you save not having to look for the attachment then waiting for it to load.

The “Vote” Widget – I am not sure what else to call it, but often times with TechGeist we send e-mails out with various ideas and we all respond yes or no. This little widget just makes my life and the rest of the team’s life easier.

Sadly…

There is no way I can ditch e-mail no matter how much I hate it. It is too permeable and it will be years before Google Wave the service and Wave the protocol will see any significant traction with mainstream users. Until then, I will wait patiently knowing that one day this will rock everyone’s world.

The Story

In the ongoing case of Viacom Vs. YouTube, Google, some new and potentially very deadly evidence has just come to light. According to internal emails from YouTube, not only did the company know about the plethora of copyrighted material on the site, but some of its employees may have been the uploaders.

If YouTube did have knowledge of the copyrighted material and did not act promptly to remove it, then it may be liable under the DMCA. Last month, Veoh won a case against Universal Music Group when a judge ruled that despite the large amounts of illegal material on the Veoh site, the company acted as it was supposed to and removed material that was prohibitively copyrighted. Thus Veoh was ruled to be protected by safe harbor.

Damning For YouTube

My legal opinion: YouTube is in a whole lot of trouble. Unless the judge decides something really strange and off-kilter, Google is going to have to pay out a hefty fine or reach some sort of settlement. Viacom could easily argue that YouTube used its content without permission to attract users to the early versions of the site.

There are some who think Viacom could argue that YouTube should have been acting more promptly to take down copyrighted material as so much of it was often on the front page of the site. But that assumes that YouTube essentially has staff babysitting the site. The whole point of the safe harbor portion of the DMCA is to make it so websites don’t have to spend tons of money policing what third-parties do. But that’s insignificant compared to the emails that came to light.

Autodesk,  after a long wrangling legal battle has lost its suit that indeed software is not truly sold, but is in fact licensed. The ruling comes after a long legal dispute over whether a man could resell legal copies of Autodesk software. Yes say the courts, no says Autodesk. The man in the middle seemingly forgotten, is now again free to make a few dollars doing whatever it was that had been up to.

The ruling states that “The Autodesk License is a hodgepodge of terms that, standing alone, support both a transfer of ownership and a mere license,” meaning that no one short of a lawyer could understand it, let alone apply it. That this had to go to court is a definitive slap in the face of DCMA rulings in general, this one being specifically odious.

What We Think:

When I buy a copy of Sim City 2000, I can sell it to my friend. As much as the software companies would love to have it be illegal for me to transfer ownership of my property, when indeed I buy it, I do buy something other than a permission to use. Companies can easily get around this by running all their software as a hosted solution in the cloud. If you don’t want to do that, then you will deal with physical copies of your software, quick to go out of date.

The ruling here is clear, unless you make it plain that 100% you are merely giving one person a license, and not a product, they are more than free to resell their property to anyone else that they wish. If only Autodesk had saved all the time and money on the suit, and used that to make their software, even better.

The Story

The European Union has decided to do a trial run of Microsoft’s browser ballot system. As we previously reported, the EU said that Microsoft could not include Internet Explorer with Windows 7 as this would constitute bundling and violate antitrust regulations. Microsoft then proposed a menu upon the initial boot of Windows 7 where users would select which browser they wanted. Well, the EU had doubts that this would solve any problems, so presumably this test is to find out whether or not the system works.

The browser ballot is in lieu of Microsoft’s far cattier solution, which was to not include any browser with Windows 7.

Why So Serious?

The EU is far more worried about Microsoft than makes any real sense. Despite the fact that Internet Explorer came with every Windows machine, Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe. So while what Microsoft did was arguably bundling, the company’s actions did nothing to save market share. The only reason IE 6 is still the most popular browser in the world is because a lot of big companies which run Windows use ancient sites which only work with the antiquated browser.

Even More Of An Antitrust Violation

My real problem with the EU’s chosen course of action is that all it does is give users a choice of five popular browsers. If you work on a browser that isn’t Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, you’re as good as done. Back when Internet Explorer was the only thing you could get out of the box, the first course of action was to fire up the browser so that you could download and install a browser you actually wanted. While most people point their address bars over to Firefox.com, some went online and did research. These people are going to be far less likely to investigate all the different browsers around, which further relegates any browser that isn’t one of these five to the annals of failure.

The Story:

According to a new wave of rumors, Foxconn has been tapped to build the Apple tablet, which might be coming in Q1, 2010. Initial shipments are stated to be in the 300,000 to 400,000 unit range, with HP coming behind with a similar device in Q2. The device is said to be focused on long battery life, and a focus on easy internet access. Rumors aside, we still know nothing.

Why I Don’t Care:

Really people. This has to stop. Every time someone lies to a person of the press does not mean that we need to write 100 posts about nothing. Every time we do this, we get it wrong. Hell, even the vaunted Kevin Rose indeed gets his rumors wrong most of the time. Please go create an Apple forum for such babble, and talk over there. The rest of the internet is bored by you.

The Story

AT&T announced that it has “taken the steps necessary so that Apple can enable VoIP applications on iPhone to run on AT&T’s wireless network.” This came after the release of a Vonage iPhone application, which allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G if they have a Vonage account. This means that Apple has approved an application which, unlike Apple’s previous claims, actually replaces the iPhone’s basic phone functionality (which is what Apple said was the reason behind their blocking of the Google Voice application).

Remember, this new decision doesn’t just  apply to Vonage but to every VoIP application. The Skype blog had some happy remarks as we can probably expect to be Skyping on the go in the very near future.

AT&T’s Beefed Up Network

I know a lot of people are going to say that AT&T should have done this from the start, but really they needed to do a whole lot of network maintenance first. Given the state of the company’s networks for the past few years, it would have been a huge mistake to allow users to Skype all over the place. In New York, the AT&T network becomes unusable every day at around 2:18 pm in certain neighborhoods. That would only be exacerbated by VoIP apps.

Now let’s get back to what AT&T did to wrong. Instead of having a bad network, they should have gone out and spent money to upgrade infrastructure from the start. Build more towers so that people can actually use the data network they’re paying so much money for. If that’s prohibitively expensive, then I want to see evidence to this effect. AT&T has tried to spin both customers and the government before All. If they make a claim, they damn well better provide proof.