So, yesterday Apple hit a grand slam home run yesterday with its announcement of the iPhone SDK. Guy Kawasaki hit a home run with his interview of Steve Ballmer. “Don’t go monkey boy on me.” Steve Gillmor had a News Gang Live yesterday to talk about both of these things.

I’ve been busy with my Qik channel. Got an interview with the Internet Explorer executives where we talked about its moves into Web standards. Also, met up with Concept Share’s co-founders who showed me a new version of its really cool service that lets you work remotely with graphic designers.

Now I’m on my way to SXSW.

Google just came out with a new sync system for Google Calendar. That’s pretty good. It will sync your calendar in Outlook up with your online calendar on Google.

But if you have Plaxo I don’t see what this brings you. Plaxo syncs with more systems, not just Outlook and Google (I use Plaxo on my Mac too, so my iPhone’s calendar is always sync’ed up with my Google Calendar and Outlook.

What do you think? Why aren’t you syncing your calendars?

I just had dinner with a bunch of Italy’s top tech bloggers and technologists and Marc Canter. Plus I’ve been talking with people all day long. Microsoft hit major Internet home runs today with its announcements, based on what I’m hearing from formerly-skeptical developers.

I haven’t heard this level of excitement about Microsoft’s Internet Strategy in years.

While Dean Hachamovitch, head of the Internet Explorer team, and Scott Guthrie, head of Internet development tools teams, were out front parading a dizzying array of new technology, I got a few interviews today and one name kept coming up:

Ray Ozzie.

So, what is resonating with developers today at Microsoft’s Mix Conference?

1. Internet Explorer’s new pro-standards role. Do not underestimate how big a deal this is in winning the hearts and minds of developers. Read the 578 comments on this post that talks about IE 8’s new standards-based defaults. 578 comments. Almost all of them positive toward Microsoft. Damn, I remember the days when it would be 578 anti-Microsoft comments on that blog.
2. Microsoft’s demos. It took me two hours to get from the front door of the Venetian to the Mix registration desk. Usually that would be a 10-minute walk and that would include five minutes of gambling at one of the tables. Why did it take so long? Because I was stopped every few feet by a Mix attendee (or, in one case, Dan Farber) where the conversation went something like this: “did you see the Olympic video demo? Holy s**t is that cool.” Or, “did you see the Hard Rock demo? Did you see that it’s live now and you can go play with it?” Even TechCrunch is fawning over that one.
3. New features in Internet Explorer. Especially something called “Web Slices” which lets you track just something specific on a Web page. For instance, the status message on Facebook. Also something called “Activities” which the IE blog says makes it so “a user can select text on a web page and map it, blog it, look for it, or just act on it without having to copy it, open a new tab, navigate to another site, and paste. We made the OpenService Format specification available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.”

I got some videos with my cell phone that back up all this.

For instance, here’s an interview with Chris Saad. Don’t know him? He’s the one who is heading up the Dataportability.org. Also in that interview is Frank Arrigo, Microsoftie that I’ve known for years.

Here’s an interview with Eric Zocher while we talked in the BlogZone at Mix, who runs the Expression Team at Microsoft (the tools developers will use to build Silverlight experiences).

Here’s an interview with Scott Guthrie, who hosted many of the most popular keynote demos yesterday morning. Sorry for the noise, but we were in an extremely noisy room and I was recording him with a cell phone.

There’s a lot more on TechMeme here and here.

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft’s Internet strategies have turned a corner and now it’s time to go and visit Ray Ozzie’s team up in Redmond.

Another thing that’s clear? Microsoft’s PDC in September (its professional developer conference) is going to be one that’ll generate a lot of news.

Does this signal that Microsoft “gets” the Internet? Well, Microsoft sure made it clear today that you can’t count them out. I’m having to change a whole bunch of my beliefs of how the industry is going based on what I’ve seen and heard today. How about you?

RUMOR ALERT — I have not substantiated this with anyone at either Adobe or Apple, so might turn out to be totally false:

Today I got a note from someone I know who works closely with Adobe and Apple. He saw my “Apple stabs Adobe in the Back” post and wanted to give me some details about what’s going on between Adobe and Apple. He says that he’s seen Flash running on an iPhone in a lab and that it’s been running for quite a while and that it’s not a technical issue that caused Steve Jobs to go public about not putting Adobe’s Flash on the iPhone. He wrote “Geez - my Chumby with half the CPU horsepower can run Flash8/AS2.”

So, what’s the reason, according to my source?

Adobe is playing hardball with Apple over their PDF renderer. “Adobe wants Apple to use the Adobe PDF renderer.” His thesis? Steve Jobs is playing hard to get to get Adobe to give up this demand.

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not. But tomorrow’s SDK announcement with Apple is going to be very interesting to listen to.

On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone.

This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cell phone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone.

This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).

So, what is Steve thinking? He probably didn’t want to hand control of developers to another company, but Apple might also have had concerns about battery life or it just might not have been able to make Flash work well on the iPhone. I can’t believe that Apple couldn’t find a way to make these things work, though. Flash isn’t that heavyweight, it might have taken some committment on behalf of Apple to rewrite Flash to work and it sounds like Apple wants to go the way of SVG (it has long been rumored to be working on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, which is an open W3C standard) for the iPhone).

The inside story has yet to be told on this one. Not that Adobe is in a place to retaliate by only doing something like future versions of Photoshop or Illustrator on Windows or Linux (which would hurt Apple, but would hurt Adobe itself in its real war with Microsoft) but Adobe has got to be smarting from this decision this morning. After all it was Adobe that helped solidify the Macintosh’s role in the world with its desktop publishing, fonts, and Postscript technologies.

Does this put a death blow onto the Flash/Flex/AIR teams? No, but it certainly does cripple their chances against Microsoft’s Silverlight. I’ll be at Microsoft’s Mix conference later today to report on that angle.

UPDATE: Microsoft’s keynote this morning at its sold-out Mix conference will be webcast live, Neowin is reporting. I’m hearing there’s some news coming there, and also later in the afternoon.

I didn’t expect this.

Nokia is working with Microsoft on delivering Silverlight to Nokia phones.

The only thing that would be more shocking is if Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone were going with Silverlight instead of Flash.

DISCLAIMER: Please be patient, during launch we’ll probably have some technical difficulties — our engineers have been up all night optimizing databases and getting things turned on. If you’re not having a good experience, please check back later in the day.

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The first shows have just launched on FastCompany.tv:

1. FastCompany Live.
2. ScobleizerTV.

The first is a show done totally on cell phones. If you’ve been watching my Qik channel, you’ve been getting a preview.

The second is a new version of my show. This time done with high-end microphones and much better camera equipment. Oh, and a camera operator (that’d be my producer, Rocky Barbanica) instead of me trying to do everything.

CenterNetworks was the first site to write about our new network. Mashable followed quickly afterward.

The first four shows are ones we’re pretty proud of:

0. A welcome video that we filmed yesterday.
1. The Innovator. Interview with John Kao who taught business at Harvard University for 14 years and now consults with companies about how to get more innovative. BusinessWeek named his book one of the most important business books of 2007, too.
2. Getting Friendly with MySpace’s CEO. Chris DeWolfe invites us into his office to talk about MySpace and how it’ll keep Facebook from taking over its world.
3. First Look at Microsoft’s Stunning WorldWide Telescope. This is the thing that made me tear up when I saw it because it’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in years. We visit Curtis Wong’s office to get an in-depth look.
4. Meeting with Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist. Many of you know about Amazon’s Web Services, like S3 or EC2, but I wanted to introduce them to the broader Fast Company audience, so we visited Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle and talked with Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist, about the impact that they’ve had on business.

Some things that haven’t yet shipped that will soon:

1. Shel Israel’s program, Global Neighborhoods. We’re still working on that and will start that in a couple of weeks. He’s been to tons of companies including General Motors, Ford, Intel, and Seesmic and we’re working to build an interesting program for you that’ll focus on social media’s impact on culture and business.
2. My blog’s redesign. We’re working on that, but it might take a month more to get it complete and make sure it really works well before turning it on.
3. High-resolution videos. I want higher-resolution videos to be available (we’re shooting and editing most of our stuff in 720p HD, but only delivering smaller sizes right now — that’ll change thanks to our use of Twistage, which is a new company in San Francisco that’s providing the video backend and player technology we’re using).
4. RSS Feeds that work with iTunes. That’s the first thing to fix after the developers get some sleep (they were up most of Sunday night working on this).
4. A bunch of other stuff. I have a long list of things to add to the site. Schedules for our live videos and other stuff. Ways for you to upload your own videos to the site. And tons more.

I also wanted to thank our sponsor, Seagate. We’re not only using their hard drives to edit and store our videos on (and they are massive files) but they’ve put financial muscle behind the show so that we can not only pay our bills, but travel around the world — in April I’ll be visiting Amsterdam and Israel.

Some Q&As?

QUESTION: How is this different from the shows that you’ve done at Microsoft and PodTech?

ANSWER: Professional microphones. Heheh. Seriously, we just got some really nice new equipment. No more tapes! And we have Rocky doing two-camera shoots now. Look for the production values to continue going up (we had to use Rocky’s older equipment for some of the first shows).

We’ll also broaden the content. We’re working with the editors of Fast Company magazine to get content that’s not just about the tech industry. John Kao’s interview is a good example of the kinds of things we’d like to do in the future.

QUESTION: Where’s the tour of Microsoft Research that you were bragging about?

ANSWER: Coming in the next two weeks. We have a ton of stuff and we’ll run a new video every day or so.

QUESTION: What happened to Shel Israel’s show, why isn’t it up now?

ANSWER: We just ran out of time and wanted to make sure that we could deliver a great show. That’ll start soon.

QUESTION: Why do the RSS feeds suck?

ANSWER: They will be fixed soon so that they work on iPhones and have full-text.

QUESTION: Why does your blog still say you work for PodTech?

ANSWER: Because I was lazy. Actually, the truth is I forgot about it, and I don’t have control of my sidebar and I was hoping that the redesign of my blog would be ready. We’ll get that fixed soon.

QUESTION: Where’s the video downloads so I can put these things on my iPhone?

ANSWER: Those are coming soon, sorry for not having them ready yet.

QUESTION: Why watch this show instead of, say, Rocketboom, Geek Brief.TV, or Diggnation (three of my favorite online video shows)?

ANSWER: You should watch all of us! Seriously, we’ll focus on innovative entrepreneurs, business ideas, new businesses. How will we be different from CNBC? Depth. Most of the time when you see a company on TV the entrepreneurs can’t really give you a full-blown demo because they only get a few minutes. On the Internet we don’t have such pressures to make things short and exciting (a producer at CNBC, when I was on that during the Consumer Electronics Show, told me “we don’t care about gadgets.” On FastCompany.TV? We care).

QUESTION: Who do you most want to interview?

ANSWER: Steve Jobs, because then I’d be a hero to my 14-year-old son who loves Apple stuff.

But seriously, I like meeting people building new things that we didn’t expect. I hope to interview Google’s Android team soon, to get a look at what they are trying to do, for instance.

QUESTION: Will you be adding more shows?

ANSWER: Yes, but slowly. For a few reasons. First, we don’t have venture capital funding us, so we’ve got to make sure we can support new investment. Second, I want to make the quality of everything on the network higher than anything out there before we start expanding. But, yes, we want to start developing new shows, so please let us know if you have something in mind.

And please do let me know what you think, good or bad.

They nailed me. Funny!

Ahh, the TED Jealousy leaked out of the blogosphere yesterday. First there was a Twitter fight between Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO (who was at TED) and Mike Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder (who was not). Then a journalist from BusinessWeek, Sarah Lacy, beat up TED for not being inclusive.

I’ve been there. I used to get jealous when I got locked out of events. Heck, just go back a few days and read my post about living a FOOCamp life.

But yesterday I had revenge: I went to Bil.

And next week I’ll have revenge again: I’m going to BarCamp.

See, I don’t get why people complain about being locked out of events. TED is giving us all an opportunity: create our own experiences that are more interesting than those on the floor of TED *and* more open!

Yesterday one of the TED attendees started bragging about how great going to TED was.

I answered “sounds great, but yesterday I hung out with Annie Leibovitz instead.” That ended the bragging, although having Robin Williams in front of you does sound pretty damn cool.

Anyway, why are bloggers and journalists jealous? I think Mike Arrington had some deep transparency with this comment on this Twitter: “regarding TED attacks - I defame anything cool that ignores me, until it stops doing so. it’s worked so far.”

Seriously: bloggers and journalists live and die by having access to stories and storymakers. Anytime there’s a gathering of executives we know there are potential stories, so we want to go.

If locked out (TED doesn’t invite many journalists, only letting a handful in and those who go have to agree to a lot of rules) then bloggers and journalists start feeling jealous of those who do get to go. We’re a competitive bunch, because if someone else is getting the stories then those locked out feel beaten.

But that’s based on a false premise: that only rich and powerful people can create stories.

I’ve found that’s not true. Sarah and Mike, you could have come to Bil. Why didn’t you? There were lots of geeks showing off lots of toys. There were even speakers who have spoken at TED. More videos from yesterday here and here.

One thing, though, TED does have the best badges (video shows why).

So, Sarah and Mike, will you be at the Barcamp at SXSW? Or, you gonna keep complaining about events that lock people out?

Hey, maybe the three of us should do an event the way we think it should be done? Imagine if Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and TechCrunch collaborated on an event. Wouldn’t that turn up something interesting?

Ryan Stewart (who works at Adobe) wonders if Microsoft is bringing an offline version of Silverlight out this week at Mix.

I’m hearing that Google is about to ship something major offline too.

So, for the next month we might hear “go offline” from all three camps (Adobe already shot their big guns in this war at last week’s “Engage” event).

Microsoft should have the best offline technology, because it’s king of applications on your desktop, but I think that answers the wrong question.

I’m trying to get everything I do online because I want freedom from my computer.

What do I mean about that?

Well, what if my computer gets stolen? I don’t want any data on it.

What happens if Linux comes out with a Macintosh killer? Or if I decide to get a Windows computer again (I’m currently using a Dell Tablet PC because they sent me one to try out) I want to just load one thing: Firefox and go to work. Right now I’m switching between my Dell and my Mac without any problems at all because almost everything I do now is in the browser.

The thing about Microsoft is that they’ll do some killer offline technology but it won’t work on the Symbian cell phone or iPhones that I’m currently using. It won’t work on Android, which is the Google cell phone OS that’s soon to make an impact on the market. It won’t work on Linux (which is getting a LOT better on the desktop, so I might try that again this year). And it won’t work well on Firefox or Opera or other new, non-IE browsers. (Channel 9 doesn’t work well with Silverlight on my new Dell when I use Firefox 3.0beta3, while Flash and AIR work just fine).

So, I guess the question is: can Microsoft keep the world as it is (IE, one that mostly runs on Windows and Office) or will the world follow bleeding-edge users like me into a more online world?