Over the weekend, Hulu demanded that a newly launched video discovery startup called Rippol stop embedding all its shows. Hulu told Rippol that it can link to its full library, but not embed the videos. Rippol tells us it will comply, and replace the Hulu embeds where it can from network sites like NBC.com and Fox.com.

Rippol competitor Yidio also tells us Hulu commanded it to stop embedding, and video search site CastTV says it has also recently changed to make users click through to watch Hulu. Meanwhile, video guide Clicker declined to comment, but we’ve seen that over the last two months it’s swapped out Hulu embeds for TV network embeds as well. Continue reading the full post at NewTeeVee.

Verizon made a six-hour marketing push in my building’s lobby to inform residents about its broadband and TV services, as well as the cost and speed difference between its service and that of incumbent provider Time Warner Cable.

Verizon brought out a wall display unit, as well as Subway subs, cookies and water to attract a crowd in the lobby of my 1,200-unit building. But it wasn’t just cookies that the company used to bring attention to its services; Verizon is offering up some pretty dramatic deals to get people signed up as well.

The company quoted me a price of $116 per month for a triple-play bundle that includes more than 300 HD video channels and DVR; broadband Internet for 35Mbps upstream and 20Mbps downstream; and phone service with unlimited local and long-distance calling in the U.S., Canada, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But that’s not all. Mike, the Verizon rep I spoke with, said he could cut $20 from the quoted price for 12 months, making monthly pricing $96 for the first year. In addition to that, the company offered a $150 Target gift card on the spot to residents who signed up for the service today and a $150 “cash back” Visa card that representatives say will be mailed out 60 days after service starts.

I followed up with Time Warner Cable to see how its prices compared. For $99 a month, the cable provider offers a similar triple-play bundle, with a comparable pay TV subscription and phone service. But the Time Warner Cable broadband package that is part of that deal is much slower than Verizon’s, with a maximum download speed of 15Mbps and a max upload of just 768kbps. (In my speed test last week, I found my service to be running closer to 9Mbps down and 500kbps up.)

My phone rep at Time Warner Cable — whose name was Brett, and who claimed to be a former Verizon refugee — noted that, unlike Verizon, Time Warner Cable had no contracts or cancellation fees for its services. In contrast, Verizon has a $179 cancellation fee for those who decide that FiOS is not for them before the first year of their contract is up.

Brett also warned me that while I would spend a comparable amount on the broadband package itself, my cost of using FiOS would also include the price of having an ONT installed in my apartment and drawing power. He estimated that the ONT by itself could increase my electric bill by $15 to $20 per month, which would offset much of my savings from a lower initial pricing, as well as some of the “cash back” incentives that FiOS was offering.

In the end, I decided to sign up for FiOS. While I’m not a heavy cable TV watcher, the boost in broadband speed and unlimited calling on Verizon’s phone service seemed a fair enough trade-off for the $70 more that I will spend per month over my current broadband-only bill. Given the amount of video streaming and data transfers that I do, the increase in data speed seems worth it.

Plus, as Mike said when I told him I was a reporter interested in writing a story about broadband competition,”Then you should totally get FiOS. It’ll help you write your stories a lot faster.”

Oh Mike, if only that were the case.

Aircell, an Illinois-based startup, now offers its ground-to-air Wi-Fi service on 623 aircraft through partners including American Airlines, Delta, United and Air Canada. The company said its business is nearing 100,000 users per week and is on track to surpass the 2 million-user mark in January.

That sounds impressive, but it’s a tiny fraction of the number of users who fly every month. More than 65 million passengers took to the skies in the U.S. in August alone, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Also, Aircell’s data refers to sessions, not unique users, and the company doesn’t disclose paid sessions vs. free promotional sessions, as Wi-Fi Net News reported last week. Portfolio.com recently illustrated how those free promotional offerings are easily available as airlines try to entice passengers to try in-flight Wi-Fi for the first time.

Meanwhile, rival startup Row 44 has installed its system on only five planes — four Southwest Airline jets and one from Alaska Airlines — and, like Aircell, isn’t sharing usage data. Southwest has committed to rolling out the service on its entire fleet of 540 jets early next year. But whether Row 44 can raise the $125 million or so that will be necessary to fill Southwest’s order is far from certain, as Portfolio.com notes.

Air travelers are an especially affluent lot, as a JiWire study showed last week, making them an attractive target for Wi-Fi marketing. Perhaps if airlines can’t convince passengers to shell out for access, they can find ad partners to fund their services.

• Daily – $15 for 75MB (20 cents a MB)
• Weekly – $30 for 250MB (12 cents a MB)
• Monthly – $50 for 500MB (10 cents a MB)

Customers get a SIM card specifically for the plan and can activate it and replenish it with megabytes online. AT&T will send customers a text and email message after either 30 minutes or 20 percent of allotted data usage remains in their session. At that point, consumers have the option to purchase more time or allow the session to expire. I just wish AT&T and Verizon would stop hemming the megabytes in with a time limit, or folks could buy an unlimited chunk of bytes without having to worry about when their minutes expire. That would speed mobile broadband adoption and make it far more flexible.

Heroku is adding about 1,000 apps to its platform every week and sales are growing at a rapid clip, Sebastian told me. But he declined to share any revenue specifics, despite my repeated requests, which tells me that they’re still a ways off from being meaningful. Indeed, the company’s low-cost platform first needs to scale. Sebastian, however, remains confident: “We see a lot of new apps go live with small app development and testing…but in couple of months people shift to premium models.” The 2-year-old company was incubated inside YCombinator and raised about $3 million in funding from RedPoint Ventures and certain individuals in May 2008.

According to some developers who are currently using Heroku, the service hits a sweet spot of “managed application hosting at a reasonable price point (and with free small-scale deployment).” Add to that its ease of use, and the gushing of such developers over the service makes complete sense. It helps that Heroku has been listening so intently to the developer community and has subsequently been rolling out some of their most-requested features. For smaller developers, the low entry price is definitely a differentiator. But while the company has targeted its service to the developers of Facebook and iPhone apps, it’s slowly seen interest emerge from larger enterprises. “We are seeing a transition from being a prototype platform to being a platform for serious business apps,” said Sebastian.

Heroku’s platform is based entirely on Amazon Web Services such as EC2 and S3, which allows the company to lower its initial capital outlay while at the same time enabling it to scale as needed, depending on its end customers. As Derrick Harris previously noted, Heroku’s platform-as-a-service offering makes deploying web applications “a trivial process, where developers can forgo the busy work of configuring app servers and databases, and of allocating resources to each component.”

Heroku’s recent growth spurt mirrors that of cloud computing services, especially those in the U.S., many of which Derrick wrote about in a recent note for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). I’ve been hearing similar stories as to the robust demand taking place across the cloud ecosystem. In the meantime, AT&T last week started offering a cloud compute service and Microsoft is getting ready to launch its much-awaited Azure cloud offering early next year.

Go Green. Whether you’re buying for yourself or getting a jump on holiday shopping, why not go green? See Earth2Tech’s “10 Green Tech Gift Ideas for Black Friday,” which includes technology that can help you reduce your home energy consumption to digital goods that also cut carbon emissions.

Web Worker Shopping. WebWorkerDaily’s “Finding Web Worker Gear Deals on Black Friday” rounds up bargains on external storage devices, monitors, Flash memory, digital media, keyboards and mice, printers and much more. Among them are an OfficeJet HP printer for half off (shown) and ultra-low-priced wireless routers for your Wi-Fi set-up.

Apple Gets in the Spirit. As TheAppleBlog’s post “Apple’s Black Friday Tease” notes, the company has confirmed that this Friday will be a “special Apple one-day shopping event,” with deals available online. While Apple is mum as to which products will be on sale, The Boy Genius Report suggests that iPods will be up to 30 percent off, and Macs will be 25 percent off. All shipping will be free on Black Friday.

But surely, these communal, relevant, timely interactions can be made more so — whether by making connections with friends in advance, filtering out off-topic messages, or syncing to whatever device you’re on at the time. And a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup called Hot Potato is trying to do just that. We’d heard a bit about what the company was doing through the grapevine, knew it was started by some Major League Baseball Advanced Media alums and funded by RRE, First Round, Betaworks, SV Angel, Allen Morgan and other angels.

Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer came out to San Francisco on Friday to launch the company, and we interviewed him while he was here (see video embedded above). Honestly, there’s not a lot there in the product yet, and the Hot Potato iPhone app still hasn’t made it through Apple’s birthing process — but it’s interesting to see how the company is treating just about anything in life (car shopping, a WiFi-enabled plane flight) like a big-time event. In the video, Shaffer talks about how the service works, how he plans to monetize it, what platforms are up next, and what kind of usage he expects.

For me, Hot Potato will have to prove its value for smaller and more private use cases vs. Facebook, but I’m already sold on major public news, concert and sports events — especially the startup’s promise to filter thousands of updates into just the ones most relevant to me.

The full launch follows a string of LinkedIn deals to integrate with IBM, Research In Motion, Microsoft Outlook and Twitter. Promised early platform developers include TweetDeck, Posterous, Box.net and Ribbit. (More details on the company’s blog.)

With far too many platforms begging for developers’ services today, why should they head to LinkedIn? “Obviously LinkedIn is a pretty unique platform, but these are fundamentally standard REST APIs,” said Adam Nash, LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products. “More than 50 million people have used LinkedIn to build their professional presence online, and they want to use it everywhere.” He promised that the LinkedIn platform would ensure the same privacy protections as the company’s site.

As for the delay, Nash said, “We wanted to spend time to understand how people wanted to use the platform and use the technology to scale.” Translation: Better late than never!

Ciena reported fiscal 2008 sales of $902.4 million (it’s fiscal year ends Oct. 31). Sales for the first three quarters of fiscal 2009 were hit hard by the macroeconomic decline that began in September of 2008, and have totaled $476.3 million. The Nortel assets generated $1.36 billion in revenue for the Canadian company in 2008 and $556 million in the first six months of 2009, so Ciena is taking on a huge integration with this deal, which could more than double its sales and total employees (it’s expected to make job offers to at least 2,000 Nortel employees).

A motion to approve Ciena as the acquirer will be heard by bankruptcy courts in the U.S. and Canada on Dec. 2. Ironically, it was Nortel’s failure to sell its metro Ethernet business in September of last year that marked the beginning of the end for the venerable Canadian telecommunications firm.

To be sure, Cutts’ comments don’t offer any details, and it is not even clear if Google will go down that route. (Matt, can you offer clarifications please?) Still, some are worried that Google is going to turn PageRank into a country club for the rich, and penalize smaller sites because they don’t have high-end hosting facilities. Of course, there is the uneven distribution of backbone connectivity. Many parts of the world are not as well-connected as, say, Asia or the United States, so does that mean this new approach to PageRank could penalize sites hosted in places that don’t have abundant connectivity?

Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite, a web site traffic monitoring service, thinks such a move could have a serious impact on many web sites. “The potential changes at Google mean there will be a REAL business impact for poor web site performance, and conversely, in Google’s words, a bonus for good performance,” he writes on the company blog. “Online organizations will need to look closely at themselves and the other parties that participate in the Web application delivery supply chain to understand and manage this new development in 2010.”

On a personal level, I believe that a faster web is good for everyone. At some point in our web journeys we have all cursed slow-loading sites, a problem that is only going to increase as the web becomes more intricately intertwined, in the process becoming a patchwork quilt of diverse services. Performance hiccups at one service can send out ripples of disruption.

Increasingly popular widgets can slow down the performance of even the best web offerings, thus lowering the overall experience. The increased interdependency of various services can often cause disruption. Hours after the news of Michael Jackson’s death spread on the web, many news sites became inaccessible and suffered slowdowns. Those sites didn’t crash but instead were hampered because they were pulling data from ad servers that weren’t prepared for the onslaught of traffic. On our own sites, we have seen things break down when one of our partners suffers an outage or has performance problems.

As a consumer of information, I would say Google giving preference to faster sites doesn’t seem like a bad idea. As a publisher, the high cost of speeding up my web offerings might hurt in the short term, but ultimately it means a better experience for my readers — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Photo of Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2009 courtesy of PlanetC1 via Flickr

* HTC has taken an early lead, thanks to availability of three different devices.
* Motorola Droid launched on November 6 already represented 24 percent of all Android requests in AdMob’s network worldwide even though the device is available only in the US.
* Worldwide requests from Android devices increased 5.8 times since April 2009 in the AdMob network.
* In the US, Android has 20 percent share of smartphone traffic versus 7 percent in April 2009.
* The Motorola CLIQ generated 6% of Android traffic worldwide as on November 18th 2009.
* Worldwide requests from RIM devices increased 44 percent over the last six months in the AdMob network.

Just to be sure, AdMob does include data about iPhone in its report. the iPhone and iPod Touch collectively accounted for about 33 percent of total requests up 6.9 percent for the month. In US, the total share of Apple is about 35 percent, up 7.5 percent for the month.

Why such a visceral reaction? Perhaps because I grew up with the old AOL (all caps) and am mad at change — a malady normally associated with aging. Jokes aside, the new logo fails to capture what is going to be a smaller, nimbler AOL, one that is represented by a collection of smaller, iconic brands such as Engadget and Joystiq. AOL should ask for its money back!

Traffic is growing much faster than the 50 percent year-to-year rate found by studies such as the Minnesota Internet Traffic Study; yet the “exaflood” of video traffic hasn’t drowned the Internet because network operators have found more efficient paths. The dramatic shift in traffic patterns has to do with the rise of what Arbor calls “the Hyper Giants,” 30 large companies that contribute 30 percent of Internet traffic. Thanks to YouTube, Google alone is responsible for 7 percent of all the traffic on today’s Internet, which puts it in the privileged position of prioritizing its VoIP and video calling services over YouTube without FCC permission.

The onslaught of video is also changing the nature of peering agreements. Traditionally, peering and so-called transit were very distinct from a revenue perspective: Peering agreements were “settlement free” arrangements in which packets changed hands between networks of roughly equal size and scope, but money didn’t. Fee-based network interconnects were confined to “transit agreements” in which a large network operator connected a small player to the entire Internet for a fee; peering is also strictly a “one network to one other network” arrangement. The new wrinkle is “paid peering” agreements in which a large operator permits direct connection for a small fee. Paid peering replaces transit fees that run $2-9 per Mbps with direct connection at $1-3, and enhances service, according to an article on Bill Norton’s “Ask Dr. Peering” web site which explains the value of Comcast’s paid peering and its potential collision with net neutrality regulations:

Paid peering provides better performance than transit, since the traffic takes a less circuitous route. Paid peering allows Google competitors to more easily compete with Google on performance and price without having to reach Google scale.

But paid peering may be forbidden by Question 106 of the FCC’s proposed Open Internet rules because it’s essentially two-tiered network access, Norton points out.

Paid peering illustrates how hard it is to write an anti-discrimination rule for the Internet that doesn’t have harmful side effects for all but the largest content networks. Paid peering is a better level of access to an ISP’s customers for a fee, but the fee is less than the price of generic access to the ISP via a transit network. The practice of paid peering also reduces the load on the Internet core, so what’s not to like? Paid peering agreements should be offered for sale on a non-discriminatory basis, but they certainly shouldn’t be banned.

Video is rising on the Internet, with more of it coming from legal sources such as content delivery networks and less from piracy-oriented systems like eDonkey and BitTorrent. Regulators need to look before they leap into wholesale bans on practices like paid peering that enable the Internet to carry increasing volumes of traffic. The FCC’s last net neutrality order (issued against Comcast in 2008) was an unintentional gift to purveyors of pirated content because it banned P2P throttling; going forward, the FCC should be at least as kind to network operators coping with the rise of video traffic by creative means.

Richard Bennett is a research fellow with the ITIF with 30 years of network architecture experience.

“We are looking to hire engineers,” he said. “Especially those who want to live in Estonia.” In addition, the company is planning to ramp up its Stockholm (Sweden) office. “We are going to be ramping our presence in the Bay Area as well,” Silverman said. Skype currently has 700 employees and wants to hire engineers and product managers who have help Skype expand as it seeks to transform itself from just a voice-based service to a multi-feature real-time communications platform.

“While Europe is going to remain our base, California is going to be a big presence for us,” Silverman said. Skype recently added SIP Guru Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist and he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had built-up a substantial team in the Bay Area over past few months as it was trying to built a route-around the JoltID’s technology. With that need gone, the company now has enough engineering talent to start transforming itself into a platform.

“We want Skype to be embedded in more and more devices and we want to offer our APIs for developers to embed into their applications,” Silverman said. That is going to be a tough sell considering the company’s history of throwing its developers under the bus, the most recent example being the Skype Extras disaster. Silverman was candid enough to admit that the Skype Extras program wasn’t working. “APIs were hard and the extras-software uptake was low and it is important for us to have a great platform that is built for success,” he said. “So starting off a bad platform wasn’t a good idea.”

When I pressed Silverman on the embedded ambitions, he outlined a future where Skype would be embedded in connected game consoles, televisions and video phones. Skype could be embedded into different software offerings as well. The company wants to be a big player in the enterprise as well, but knows that it can’t do it all by itself. “We need to open up our platform in order to expand it,” he said, “Our aspiration is ubiquity.”

Silverman declined to offer any specific dates (and details) on when Skype will make launch a platform for others to leverage. One thing is for sure, Skype can pose a serious challenge to some of the upstarts such as Ribbit, TringMe and Twilio who are all trying to make it easy for application developers to embed voice-related functionality into their offerings. Skype’s ubiquity – over 500 million subscribers – makes it a fearsome agent of change in the Internet-based communications arena. (Related Post: How Skype can quickly and easily become a social network (and clean Facebook’s clock.))

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Silverman about the next generation of Skype architecture and he said the company was working on it. “It will work with SIP, it will have P2P but we won’t come to it with a religion,” he said. And that includes offering Skype via a browser and making it even more savvy about video conferencing.

Photo of Josh Silverman courtesy of Phil Wolf via Flickr. Skype desktop photo courtesy of IPVEO.

• Google Lively was a web-based virtual environment that allowed as many as 20 people to sit in a virtual room and chat with each other. The offering debuted in July 2008 only to have Google pull the plug a mere four months later.
• Google Print Ads was dropped earlier this year after the company’s vision of bringing web-like automation to the world of traditional media failed to materialize. The effort went belly-up just three weeks before the death of Google Audio Ads, which ended a three-year run in February after the company failed to gain traction in the radio ad game.
• Google Answers spent a year in beta before a full-blown launch in May 2003, but the effort to create a fee-based knowledge market never gained much traction outside a small base of users and the service was dropped in late 2006.
• The social networking site Orkut launched early in 2004 as an independent project of noted Google developer Orkut Büyükkökten and has caught fire in Brazil, a market that accounts for roughly 50 percent of its membership. The site reportedly claims roughly 100 million users, which is impressive, but Google can’t be happy that its effort is virtually unknown in Europe and North America while Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others have gained such impressive traction.
• Google Catalog Search debuted in 2001 as a way for consumers to go online to check out their favorite print catalogs that had been scanned and uploaded. Of course, retailers were already taking their inventories online themselves, and the effort was put to rest earlier this year.
• Google Health was released as a beta test in May 2008, but the service has yet to find much of an audience among insurers or the general public. Which may have something to do with the combination of the words “health” and “beta test.”
• The location-based service Dodgeball was shut down in 2009 after Google had acquired it four years earlier, and while Google continues to operate Jaiku – a social networking service it picked up in 2007 — the company has effectively abandoned the project. The technologies and expertise from both startups is being incorporated into other Google businesses and projects, however.

No company bats 1.000, of course, and a company as experimental and entrepreneurial as Google is bound to have its share of failures. As the blogosphere gushes over Chrome, though, Google’s stumbles help provide some perspective. Are there any other names that should be on this list?

Even if it’s not the most robust of recoveries, it’ll do. So why are tech companies suddenly slashing jobs again?

The past couple of months have brought a renewed surge in job cuts at technology companies, including many that were undergoing second or third rounds of layoffs. Take AOL: It laid off 700 workers in early 2009. Earlier this month it cut another 100, followed by news this week that additional 1,000 would go. Those layoffs may cut operating costs, but they’re not exactly a cheap undertaking. AOL said that, all told, it will incur $283 million in restructuring charges.

With AOL’s latest round, I count 17,400 jobs that tech companies — since late October alone — have said they’ll eliminate or have done so already. There are undoubtedly many more that haven’t been officially announced. The pace is significantly slower than in January and February, when 30,000 or more job cuts were announced in a single week. But it also represents a marked increase over the spring and summer, when the bloodflow slowed to a relative trickle.

What’s driving the recent increase in job cuts? A few things. Companies are drawing up budgets for 2010, and it’s common for them to eliminate some positions in November and December (however heartless this seems from a human standpoint). But the cuts often extend into the new year, which suggests the bloodletting could continue for a couple of more months.

Different companies have different reasons for the restructurings. M&A activity has also been on the rise in the tech industry, and integrating two separate operations into one often means some workers must go. Adobe reduced its head count by 9 percent in conjunction with its $1.8 billion acquisition of web analytics firm Omniture, for example.

Other companies are cutting because, despite a sense of relief that the worst economic pain is behind us, much uncertainty lies ahead. Applied Materials said it would cut between 1,300 and 1,500 positions, even though it reported an increase in sales and orders. When facing uncertainty, cutting costs has a strategic appeal: It shields you from sluggish demand, and keeps profits — and the stock price — high in the meantime.

Still others are being buffeted by rapid changes in their core markets and are paying the price for failing to keep up, such as Microsoft, which announced 5,000 job cuts in January and recently eliminated another 800. Microsoft is not only seeing netbook sales put downward pressure profit margins of its PC operating software, but Windows Mobile is facing daunting competition from Android and others.

Some of the biggest rounds of layoffs have come from other companies having trouble coping with evolving markets: Nokia, struggling for a foothold in the thriving smartphone market, is shedding as many as 5,700 jobs. Sprint, facing disappointing sales of the Palm Pre, will cut up to 2,500. And AOL has been floundering in its search for a role on the web for years.

Not all tech companies will be cutting positions. A recent survey by Robert Half Technology, an employment consulting firm, found that 43 percent of CIOs interviewed see retaining workers as their top staffing priority. And companies that follow one round of layoffs with another may regret it in the end. Too many layoffs send a bad message to customers and partners, while chasing away the top talent. That can cause even more problems, and more layoffs, instead of a real recovery.

The sole aim of the group, which was unveiled this week, is to help make it easier to put Android on ARM-based devices, of which smartbooks are the emerging choice. The group of 35 companies will pool resources and make them available for developers to get Android systems going with the ARM chipset, which is particularly well-suited for the consumer electronics market.

In the meantime, the Verizon Droid, produced by Motorola, is the hottest Android phone on the market. But early adopters of the Droid were reporting that the auto-focus feature on the device’s powerful camera wasn’t working properly, resulting in lots of fuzzy images. This week, however, many Droid owners found the focusing difficulties to be a thing of the past, prompting suspicions that Verizon had pushed a secret fix over-the-air to the phones. There seemed to be no other explanation for how such a serious bug could suddenly disappear.

In fact, the auto-focus code that Android 2.0 uses reportedly has a bug that makes for fuzzy photos in 24.5-day cycles. The camera works poorly for 24.5 days, then works properly for the next 24.5 days. This is based on the improper use of a timestamp by the focusing code, a strange cause to be sure. Hopefully Verizon will have the formal fix for this bug before the 24.5-day “good” working cycle ends.

Speaking at a panel held Wednesday night in Austin, Texas, several folks from the large server shops and a distinguished engineer who runs a data center for IBM spoke about the challenges of keeping power consumption down in a world where computing demand is going up. (For a truly in-depth look at this topic, check out our GigaOM Pro report — subscription required.) The panel went beyond just power and cooling (thank goodness) to focus on how companies are increasingly viewing power consumption in the data center as a whole, rather than merely as the sum of of the data center’s processors.

IBM’s Scott Winters said he saved 30 percent on his energy costs over three years while increasing his computing abilities by 50 percent and his storage by 150 percent. He did this in two primary ways: by virtualizing his data center and creating a pool of shared resources that are used on demand, and by paying attention to software he has running that tells him what’s happening on his servers.

“My data center was whispering secrets, and now I have a way to understand them,” Winters said. He said his IBM software and linking that software to the physical infrastructure helped him reach such an understanding, especially in regard to managing power consumption. It’s a strategy that HP has embraced with its products; there are also several startups pushing data center sensor networks that allow the data center’s server hardware and its physical infrastructure like the chillers and air conditioners to communicate.

But as the facilities and IT infrastructure merge (the jobs of the facilities manager and the IT manager are also on a path to merge, according to members of the panel) standards are needed. The folks building the physical infrastructure typically use proprietary software in their products and sensors and getting that sensor network to talk to your servers can require a big programming effort. Once folks can manage their physical infrastructure and their hardware, the next step is to tie the physical and hardware layers to the application layer. That’s a big dream, and we’re still far off. But given the demand for computing and constraints on providing the power to meet that demand, it’s an issue that panels like the one Wednesday night will help solve.

• PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions
• Concentric: Hosted IT Services
• Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup
• SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions.
• Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform
• PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money

TwitterJobSearch searches Twitter for posts on who is hiring. The posted jobs range from full-time to part-time work-at-home to one-off hired gun positions. Many of the positions listed are tech jobs, and the number of posts is at critical mass, with Twitter being the social phenomenon that it is. More than 410,000 new jobs were posted to TwitterJobSearch in the last 30 days. Use this syntax to, say, find web development jobs in San Francisco: “web developer San Francisco.”

oDesk is one of the largest online staffing marketplaces for people with tech skills. Developers, designers and many other tech types can post their resumes, examples of projects they’ve completed, and more, and get bids and offers from employers around the world for full- and part-time jobs. Find out more in WebWorkerDaily’s interview with oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Do you have IT skills? ComputerJobs.com has listings from all over the U.S. if you do.

Elance is a very popular job bidding site for developers and programmers, and for people with other types of tech skills. Copywriters, illustrators and those with lots of other non-tech skills may also want to fill out a profile there. Check out more here.

Rent-a-Coder offers a very diverse collection of software development and programming jobs from employers all around the world. You can get very temporary jobs or full-time gigs.

Want a tech job search site with a name you can take very literally? Try FindaTechJob.com. It lists lots of positions for programmers and web developers, among others. You can also connect your programming skills up with businesses at ScriptLance.

For web projects in particular, put in bids showing off your skills out at Webmaster Projects.

Open Source Skills?
With record funding rolling in for commercial open-source companies and more foundations overseeing projects, there are more paying jobs in the open source software world than ever. Open source skills can also differentiate you from the tech worker pack, and many other tech workers don’t think of the world of open source as having commercial arms.

Several of the prominent open-source software foundations can help open sourcers find work. You might start by looking into the Apache Software Foundation , which oversees many open source projects, and the Drupal Foundation’s list of available jobs.

Don’t forget about the ongoing jobs available at prominent open source companies, as well as those that make extensive use of open source. Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can also find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

SmartData Enterprises specializes in placing outsourced open source workers on projects. You can work remotely on projects taking place all around the world, for pay.

For many useful tips on how to effectively use social networks to land a job, see WebWorkerDaily’s popular resource collection — and make sure to stay organized.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS. There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them.

Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of next year.” But note the date: 1999, not 2009. Indeed, Ellison was championing thin clients — computers with few local hardware resources that would get applications and data out on a network — back in the late 1990s.

It was an idea that was subsequently tried many times, and failed. Yet fast-forward to today, and Google’s Chrome OS is placing the very same bet. As company officials noted yesterday: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.” Chrome OS netbooks will be thin clients.

All data in the cloud? Many of the smartest people predicting the future of cloud computing are noting that companies want to deploy hybrid public and private cloud applications, namely because they don’t want to have all of their data on a remote network, with little control over it and the potential for lock-in and losses. However, Google’s Chrome OS is a bet that consumer and business netbook buyers will be perfectly happy to trust everything to the cloud. There won’t even be hard disks on Chrome OS netbooks — only solid-state drives. Will users accept such an absolutist model?

Poof goes the OS. Chrome OS is architecturally very different from other operating systems, bypassing many types of boot processes and others in order to optimize performance. Additionally, however, the OS will actually reimage itself if malware is detected. If Google pulls this off, Chrome OS systems may be free of the guaranteed performance decay that Windows systems tend to have over time. Still, users may be wary about an operating system that’s ready to exit stage left at any given moment.

Drivers? Support? Fuhgeddaboudit. Have you ever called Google for Google Docs support? I haven’t either, even though I use the applications. When you release an operating system, though, if it reaches a large audience, that audience is going to want support. Just ask Microsoft, which spent years trying to effectively support and patch Windows Vista.

In addition to excellent support, which I don’t think of as Google’s specialty, users of Chrome OS are going to want their netbooks to work seamlessly and instantly with their printers, digital cameras, smartphones and more. Chrome OS isn’t being built from scratch. It’s Linux-based (the Ubuntu team at Canonical has been helping it take shape), so Google can get a headstart by incorporating existing driver libraries and the like. But Microsoft spent years trying to catch up to Apple in terms of automatic hardware detection and installation with its Plug-and-Play initiative, and Apple users will tell you that it never quite succeeded. Is Google about to find out what a huge headache it can be to support an operating system? History argues that will be the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chrome OS will be one of the most interesting tech stories to watch next year. In many ways, though, it’s a Hail Mary.

And because Aircell currently only has regulatory approval and the antenna coverage that enables airlines to offer Wi-Fi in the U.S., Air Canada passengers can only get their Wi-Fi fix when flying over U.S. soil. Perhaps that accounts for the slight discount on Air Canada’s prices for Wi-Fi when compared to American’s charge of $12.95 for in-flight access.