James Joaquin, Xmarks’ CEO:

We’re revisiting the idea of Xmarks as a premium service. We’ve set up a Pledgebank page where you can sign up if you’re willing to pay at least $10 a year for Xmarks. No credit card is required, but please only pledge if you are genuinely willing and able to pay.

[…]

Hopefully you can see that, for us and our investors, we were aiming for a different business, and staffing at a different level, than what it is likely appropriate for a freemium model. For a new company taking a fresh start with Xmarks, a freemium model could be really compelling. The overwhelming positive user support from all of you, combined with strong interest by companies looking to take over Xmarks, means that the service might just find a ninth life. Please stay tuned.

Joaquin claims in the post that Xmarks cost over $2 million annually to run, and has already had $9 million invested. Declaring the end of your company, just to share the actual numbers days later sure seems like a strange way to sorta imply your company could be for sale. Weak.

Jesus Diaz:

There’s a massive tropical storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.

In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.

[…]

Back in the 1990s, a water main broke open, completely flooding the station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. They had to send scuba divers to fix it, and use a diesel-powered train car to take the water out. It took an entire week to drain the station, extracting 2,700 gallons per minute. That’s more than 27 million gallons.

Holy crap.

Axiis has posted a brilliant chart showing browser market share, by year, since 2002.

Sadly, it’s done in Flash and doesn’t list MobileSafari as a separate browser.

[via John Lloyd]

Editor’s Note: These are in no particular order.

Phone & Tablet Data Sharing

Thus far, the tablet and the smartphone have lived separate, isolated lives, unaware of the other. RIM seems to be changing that, allowing the tablet to double as a large, external display for the phone. Which is cool. It reminds me of the Palm Foleo, although the PlayBook looks like it actually makes sense, since it’s an actual stand-alone product.

It is also nice the PlayBook can hop onto the phone’s 3G connection.

The Interface & Apps

Honestly, it looks like they are ripping off WebOS. Which isn’t a bad thing to steal. The whole thing looks very fluid, no doubt due to the fact the PlayBook is powered by a dual-core 1GHz processor.

The photo and music apps look sharp. The gaming capabilities of the PlayBook look real sharp, but don’t seem to fit in with the “professional” image RIM tries to portray.

Allowing HTML/CSS apps to “hook into” the system for info makes PlayBook apps pretty similar to WebOS apps, at least structurally. The alternative of Adobe Air apps in theory makes sense (as developers can run a similar app across multiple platforms), but the reality is that cross-platform applications suck on all platforms. For RIM’s sake, I hope they can get this right.

Release Date & Pricing

“Early 2011” means this thing will be competing more with the second generation iPad than the current model. RIM is starting from behind on this.

RIM did not announce a price yesterday. While I understand why companies don’t announce pricing very far in advance, it is frustrating. Apple does it, why can’t others?

The Enterprise

Without a doubt, RIM is pitching this tablet as the device for professionals that can be used in the enterprise. Looking at the smartphone market, it’s obvious that Apple is making in-roads here. Can RIM beat the iPad? Starting a year behind makes that difficult, but many corporate IT departments aren’t hip to Apple products, and may see the PlayBook as a compromise for the executives and business people who want a tablet. While I don’t think it will do well outside of the enterprise, it may indeed do quite well within it, at least where the iPad hasn’t been yet.

The Xmarks blog:

By Spring 2010, with money running tight and options fading, we started searching for potential buyers of the company. Over the past three months, we have been remarkably close to striking a deal, only to have the potential buyer get cold feet. We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Our plan is to keep the service running for another 90+ days, after which the plug will be pulled.

As a Safari user with two Macs, the service made my life just a little bit easier. I will miss it.

Update: The ever-wonderful Dropbox can sync Safari data. See how to set this up here.