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I think I figured out what the “S” stands for in the iPhone 4S. Now, to be clear, I love my new iPhone 4S. I talk to it even when there isn’t a human on the other end of the line. Sometimes it talks back. But one thing that literally sucks about my iPhone 4S is its battery life. And I’m not the only one complaining.

Today, my iPhone died after about 8 hours—not even enough to get me through a full day without recharging (and this is typical). This was not 8 hours of constant use (unless you count the constant pinging of notifications, which may be the culprit). It was 8 hours total from the time I unplugged it in the morning and took it with me until the screen went black at around 4 PM. According to the specs, the iPhone 4S is supposed to get 200 hours of standby time, 8 hours of talk time, and “up to 6 hours” of Internet use on 3g. During the day, I made half a dozen calls less than 5 minutes each, used the Internet for an hour on the train (email, Twitter, light Web browsing), and then maybe another 90 minutes throughout the day.

So that comes to a total of 2.5 hours of Internet usage and 30 minutes of phone calls. The rest, in my mind, is all standby. Except maybe it isn’t since the phone is constantly bleeping with notifications and emails. And that may very well be the problem. There are many theories out there, but the ones which ring true to me are that notifications and location-based apps are the big battery drains.

The iPhone 4S has a really great new notification center where you can see recent notifications from all your apps with an always0available pull-down screen. I have about a dozen apps that feed into that notification center, including Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Skype, Google+, Foursquare Instagram and text messages. I have an equal number with location-based services turned on. Sure, I could turn these off and I probably will. But what’s the point of having a state of the art mobile computer in your pocket if you have to disable its best features?

No, what I’d like instead is for Apple to fix this mess. I don’t know how, perhaps through an update or new rules imposed on app developers. Maybe limit the number of times an app can ask for a location update when it is dormant. Or if notifications are the problem, make it easier to manage which notification you get by app. I don’t need to know every time somebody likes one of my Instagram photos or tries to add me as a friend on Facebook or Foursquare. I could cut out more than half of my notifications—and maybe a big chunk of the battery drain—if there were better granular controls to mute the noise. Better yet if there is a technical solution Apple can impose and I don’t have to do anything.

Battery life is one of those things you don’t notice until you don’t have it anymore. And I’m noticing it big time.

• IPHONE 4S
• APPLE

The iPhone 4 will be offered in the US by ATT, Verizon, and Sprint.

Product specs:

Dual-core A5 CPU, said to be “2x as fast at CPU tasks”
Dual-core graphics, up to “7x faster than the previous iPhone”
Battery life estimates: 8 hours talk time on 3G, 14 hours on 2G. 6 hours of browsing on 3G, 9 on Wi-Fi. 10 hours of video playback, 40 hours of music.
Theoretical download speeds of 14.4Mbps (as opposed to 7.2 on the iPhone 4.)
World Phone…

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Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.

Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with…

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ViKi, an international video site for world TV series and movies translated in 100+ languages by its community, has raised $20 million in new funding from SK Planet, BBC Worldwide, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others. This brings ViKi’s total funding to $25 million.

For background, ViKi is an open-source-like solution for video, and acquires the rights to TV shows and movies. The site then puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community subtitles the content using ViKi’s software.

The site has gained considerable traction in the past year. Currently, ViKi is seeing 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million total visits in the past month, which is four times the traffic that ViKi has seen from last year.

To date, 150 million words have been subtitled in 160 languages by the ViKi community, and the site features 5,000-plus hours of content. And in terms of content, ViKi is working on adding more premium content, including new licensing deals with BBC Worldwide, NBCU and AE. ViKi also just launched and international TV series on Netflix  with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu.

The company just debuted an iPhone app (with in-stream ads), and will contain TV series, movies, and entertainment news from around the world, with subtitles created by fans. The app currently includes movies from Japan, India’s Bollywood, Egypt, Indonesian and TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK (e.g. Hotel Babylon Mistresses from the BBC).

ViKi is also partnering up with Samsung Southeast Asia to develop an Android app for the company’s tablets. The app will be launching later this year in Southeast Asia. The partnership is expected to expand to other regions early next year.

What’s interesting about ViKi is that the model allows content owners to open up to new international markets. Clearly content partners like the BBC and top-tier investors are betting that ViKi is the future channel for international distribution and translation.

Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the current landscape of the cloud for the first time since the public back-and-forth between himself and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. For those unfamiliar, earlier this month, Ellison cancelled Benioff’s keynote talk at The Oracle OpenWorld Conference. Benioff wasn’t particularly psyched about the move, and gave a fiery talk from the St. Regis Hotel across the street instead.

Benioff took a few shots at Oracle during his talk, telling listeners to “beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. Obviously, you can guess who was the proponent of this “false cloud”. It rhymes with Boracle.

Naturally, Ellison wasn’t going to take that sitting down, and fired back at Benioff, calling Salesforce “the roach motel of cloud services”. Ouch.

Interestingly, when Tim O’Reilly (who interviewed Benioff onstage today) played a little word association with Benioff and mentioned the name “Oracle”, the Salesforce CEO had nothing negative to say; instead, he said that Oracle was a great company and had a “great strategy”.

While Benioff’s tone has definitely tempered somewhat since OpenWorld in relation to Ellison and Oracle, it has not changed in terms of what the CEO sees as the future of his company and the future of the enterprise industry as a whole. Enterprise has to be, needs to be: Social.

What do I mean by that? Well, unsurprising for anyone who is familiar with Salesforce, Benioff has a big old man crush on Facebook.

“I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision of what the consumer operating system is”, he said. “Everything I want, I’m beginning to see on Facebook”.

The CEO was speaking largely in relation to Spotify, which he says has become his favorite music service, a quicker transition than he’s made to any other platform in the recent future. Having the Facebook UI built into Spotify is incredible, he said, allowing friends and colleagues to what he’s listening to in realtime — was inspiring to him.

“I’d like to be doing as many amazing things as Facebook is”, Benioff said, continuing on to say that Facebook is essentially driving the direction in which the entire industry is going, especially that of enterprise, which Benioff has been selling for some time now. Case in point: Here is a guest post from March 2010, in which Benioff argued that enterprise software should be more like … you guessed it … Facebook.

Benioff is quick to say that the social revolution is coming to enterprise software, that it is inevitable, and that those who don’t get on board are going to fall by the wayside. It is of utmost importance for enterprises (and let’s be honest, every company out there) to listen to their customers. And, as Benioff perceptively surmised, their customers — across the board — are on social networks, which is exactly where they should be interacting with them.

Again, the Salesforce CEO referenced the Arab Spring movement in the Middle East, in which Facebook and Twitter played such an integral role in allowing protestors (and one in all) to communicate with the outside world — and each other.

After these social networks enabled this kind of imperative and essential communication, signs like “Thank you, Facebook” were to be seen across the Middle East. As Benioff sarcastically pointed out today, “We didn’t see signs that said, ‘Thank you, Microsoft,’” Benioff said.

Benioff and O’Reilly both agreed that the cloud, mobility, and the shift to social have been fundamentally changing the Web, and that the same can be said for enterprise as well. In terms of social, Benioff said that the affects of the social media revolution have allowed people to interact and converse with brands and companies in realtime — at a pace unprecedented when looking back as little as five years ago. Thus, it is imperative for enterprise companies to be aware of brand impression, brand share, what people are saying about their company in realtime — because it can have a profound affect on your bottom line.

The most recent example? Netflix. Benioff said that the on-demand video network had a “pristine brand”, but when they made the loud price change to their customers’ accounts, splitting DVD and streaming, 27,000 negative comments popped up on their blog post, and Netflix’s market cap declined precipitously.

“There’s a pretty big connection there”, Benioff said. Enterprise needs to be more aware of what their customers are saying, and the key is tapping into social networks, because that’s where they are.

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

• SALESFORCE
• MARC BENIOFF

Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.

Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange directory of on-demand applications, and its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API for extending Salesforce.

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Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is regarded as the leader of what he has termed “The End of Software,” the now-proven belief that multi-tenant, on-demand applications democratize information by delivering immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs.

Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that…

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